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Chapters (32)
  1. Cover
  2. PART ONE
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. PART TWO
  18. 1
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 4
  22. 5
  23. 6
  24. 7
  25. 8
  26. 9
  27. 10
  28. AFTERWORD
  29. 1
  30. 2
  31. 3
  32. 4

But in the moment, that morning, I wasn’t so philosophical. My neck was agony and I felt half-dead. Everything else was unchanged—the water, the grass, the still trees, the morning birds—and as I lay there I pictured Irene and Adam asleep in bed, and I knew that I would never see either of them again, and it seemed perfectly fair.

Wait. You thought I’d killed them, didn’t you? When I told you I’d buried bodies, you thought I meant it literally. Seif, you have to learn how to deal with metaphors. Their tangle is so much closer to the truth than our reality.

I looked down at the boy. Weren’t corpses meant to be open-eyed; like, death’s blank stare? So why did this one have its eyes shut? I felt the brief ghost of a hope that he wasn’t dead. I shook him, slapped him, thumped his chest. I parted his teeth and breathed down his throat. I did everything I had ever seen or heard or read about. How long was I at it? Ten seconds? An hour? Only the trees in their silent vigil know.

As I kneeled there, desperate, despairing, I heard a distant voice call out, then a distant scream. I got to my feet, knowing that I must run again. This time, even from my name. So I ran, and I never found out what happened to the boy, or to Irene and Adam. Soon after I left, there was a civil war in that country, an ethnic conflict, and not a stone or a soul was left untouched. Years later, I saw a photograph in a newspaper of what could easily have been the neighborhood where we’d lived, and I couldn’t help but think I could see the spot where our home had been, except it was just a heap of stones, piled up like on a grave. And I wondered: If life had punished me for stopping so long in this place, if it had torn down everything I’d built, what was that boy being punished for? Not for his insolence, surely: life doesn’t care about that. Who knows? Maybe for nothing more than sitting in the same place so often, down by the lake.

7

Image

PERMISSION

They didn’t wait long. They went with him to her burial, held back a few days, then shyly returned to his front door.