And when I asked where we were going, she replied, ‘To Europe.’
She was not going to wait for my father any longer, in a city where she didn’t belong. She had sold the house and ordered the crates. There had always been a powerful magnetic attraction between my mother and the world of objects — over the course of time the house had filled up with the ten thousand things. During the weeks that followed I watched as our life disappeared into the crates, everything we had, every chair, every cushion, every Bedouin carpet. When I saw how her temple was desecrated by the mover, I didn’t know whether to feel relief or sorrow.
The walls bore the pale shadows of vanished cupboards and rugs. When the workmen suddenly appeared in my room, it was Eman who bore the message that I was to pack my little red suitcase. I was to fill it with clothes and the things I absolutely could not do without; there was no knowing when the crates would be reunited with us.
We left Alexandria early in the morning. The taxi raced across the crumbly asphalt to Cairo, what I remember is the right side of the road.
‘We have to go back!’ I shouted suddenly. ‘I forgot something!’
But all we could do was go on, the road back was sealed. She didn’t ask what I had forgotten. I asked when we would be coming back.
‘I don’t know, Ludwig. For the time being, we’re going away.’
Then I understood the meaning of parting, I cried without making a sound. Another boy would come to live in my house, he would be drawn blindly to the spot where I had buried the forgotten treasure, a plastic box containing yellowed dog’s teeth I had found beneath the bushes, and crystals I had collected from the streets. Eman claimed they were pieces of car windows, but I knew better — crystals, from the depths of the earth. The dog’s teeth were full of scratches and grooves, and covered in a dark brown patina. Teeth and crystal, that was what was left of me. We were moving quickly away from my treasure, and there was nothing I could do.
Our first stop was Holland. Waiting for us at the airport were my mother’s sister and her husband: Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard. They took us to the north of the country, a long trip by car; my mother and I sat in the back seat, the two people in the front didn’t say a word. My mother was wearing her sunglasses and seemed used to this silence.
‘The two of you would have been better off flying to Hamburg,’ my aunt said at one point. ‘Or to Bremen.’
‘No planes fly there from Egypt,’ my uncle said.
He spoke in a dialect unfamiliar to me. They lived in a rambling farmhouse beside a canal, not far from Bourtange, close to the German border. In Egypt I had seen the irrigation works maintained by farmers — canals, sluices, an increasingly intricate network of interlocking ditches, but never a canal like this one. Its straightness was intimidating.
It was summer, a few times I heard my aunt sigh goodness, it’s so hot. The heat to which I was accustomed was exceptional here. A few days after we arrived, my mother said she was going away for a little while. The evening before she left she came and sat on the edge of my bed. As she spoke, her eyes remained fixed on a point just above my head, on the light blue cornflowers on the wallpaper.
‘I thought maybe we could be at home here,’ she said. ‘My family close by, your uncle and aunt, but I was wrong. I can’t live here. There are a couple of places I need to take a look at, I’ll try to come back as quickly as possible, okay, sweetheart? Will you be nice to Uncle Gerard and Aunt Edith?’
And so I remained behind, for I don’t remember how long. Long, dry days flowed together endlessly. Motors pumped water out of the canal to quench the land. Teetering columns of dust above the flat fields bore up the azure-blue dome of sky.
In the villages I saw, the houses were all built of red bricks. It oppressed me, the darkness of it, the square staunchness — there was no resemblance at all to the orderless festering of the city where I was born.
At the kitchen table I tasted vanilla custard for the first time. Custard from the bottle, yellow and glutinous and almost as delicious as the pastries at Trianon. Uncle Gerard scrimped the last bits from the bottle with a thing he called a ‘bottle licker’. After meals Aunt Edith went to the kitchen and used a scraper to remove the final remains from the pans.
Uncle Gerard took an old scooter out of the shed, pumped up the tires and showed me how the thing was used. He was good to me, Uncle Gerard, not as strict as Aunt Edith, who gave me the feeling that I even breathed wrong. The scooter expanded my world. My forays along the straight canal became longer, I would get as far as the locks where children sometimes swam and dove from the wall into the water. From the shade of the poplars, I watched them. I didn’t approach them, they left me alone. They belonged together, there was no room for outsiders. I looked at the shimmering curtains of water when they did cannonballs, one of the boys was the king of the ‘atom bomb’, the column of water that shot up then was higher than ever — and that was how I became invisible of my own accord, a pale spot off beneath the poplars, dreaming away the summer there — I watched, I drank deeply of paradise there and even though I didn’t take part it still seems to me a flaw in the fabric of creation that one day you stop cycling to the locks, stop doing cannonballs in a pair of floppy swimming trunks, stop wrestling with the others and swimming underwater, smoothly and fluidly as sea lions, to give the girls a dunking — that you grow out of that, become too old for that, is something which I have always seen as a sign that the soul exists, and that it can be ruined.
And then, suddenly, the whole troupe comes to life, the disorderly pile of bikes is untangled, they take off.
‘Nice scooter you got there,’ one of them says in passing.
That really makes them laugh, and impresses on me that I am too big for it, for this scooter, just as they will soon be too big for the locks, for bare feet on pedals, for the sand between their toes.
At the table I say nothing about my daydreams. My face, my body exhale the light, the heat that my skin has breathed in during the day. I wonder whether Uncle Gerard, somewhere in one of his sheds, might have a bicycle that would fit me. I’ll ask him when she’s not around. I ask for more potatoes. Aunt Edith dishes two onto my plate.
Not long after dinner I put on my pajamas and watch TV in the front room. Then it’s time for me to go upstairs. The runner on the stairs muffles my footsteps.
‘Good night,’ says my aunt in the doorway.
The light worms its way in through the curtains, I toss off the sheet and walk to the window. It looks out on the canal, the poplars, on the farms and fields beyond. Uncle Gerard is watering the lawn in front of the house. When is my mother coming back? Since she left, no-one has said a word about her. I don’t know where she is; the thought that she won’t come back and that I will have to stay here forever carries me to the gates of panic. Shadows crawl over the road, nestle down between the trees and bushes, the water turns dark. She will come back, she would never leave me all alone. I’m in her thoughts the same way she is in mine, she will come to get me. I fall asleep only after I hear my uncle and aunt talking quietly on the landing, after I hear their bedroom door open, the discreet click of the key in the lock.
*
‘A bicycle?’
Uncle Gerard claws at the stubble on his chin.
‘No, boy, I don’t have one of those. Ours, but it’d be too big for you. Do you know how to ride a bike?’
I figured I did, that was just something you could do, wasn’t it? The kids at the locks rode bikes as though they’d been born on them.
‘When’s my mother coming back?’ I wanted to know.