A sudden gust flew up and the leaves of a low branch brushed against Walid’s forehead. Walid turned to look and was surprised to see a delicate handkerchief hanging in the branches. It was embroidered with a design and in colours used by lovers, and flickered coyly in the wind. Walid forgot his anger at the wind and began to listen to a nervous voice inside. Did his mother tie a handkerchief to a tree branch every time she visited the grave? Or was it Sawsan who had decorated the tree above Ahmad’s head?
Wounded with doubt, he looked again at the grave. Did my father do that? Were he and Sawsan al-Ghandour in love? But he always used to say that my mother was the brightest flower of the Dahman girls. My mother, whose soul was torn into pieces the day he died and distributed to all the other mourners. It is horrible to think he might have been in love with someone else. True, my mother’s got a temper and a mouth as foul as a sailor’s. But she is beautiful and kindhearted. And to this day she still swears oaths on his life, as if he had never died.
Around him, the wind whispered like a faint moan from the beyond. Walid heard a voice repeating, ‘Think about your mother, Walid.’ Walid knew it was his father’s voice.
He recited the Fatiha and rushed out of the graveyard.
*
On his way back, Walid passed by Hafiz al-Batta’s shop. He bought some ballpoint pens, shampoo, toothpaste and socks — everything he would need in Cairo but knew he would not easily be able to find. He took all his purchases home and left them there, then went back out to say goodbye to his friends, starting with the three Muhammads, as he liked to call them: Muhammad, whose mother was Khadija, Muhammad al-Misriyya, whose mother was Egyptian, and Muhammad, whose family name was Samoura.
Muhammad Khadija lived right behind Walid’s house in a cluster of homes that also housed the families who had fled the village of Beit Daras in 1948. To get there, Walid had only to head west and quickly double back at the corner.
He knocked on the door three times. Muhammad’s mother, Khadija, called out to him from inside, ‘Come on in, Walid. It’s not like you’re a stranger.’
Walid pushed the door open and the rusty hinge began to squeal. He walked inside and called out a greeting that was interrupted by one from Umm Muhammad: ‘Welcome, welcome! Come in, Walid!’
Umm Muhammad turned and disappeared back into her kitchen, where she began to make tea for them.
Muhammad was about the same age as Walid. At first, it had been childhood games that brought the two boys together. Like his father, Hassuna Rayyan, Muhammad suffered from weak eyes — and now, like his old man, it was easy for him to remain, in good standing, a full member of the unemployed club. Muhammad had the same handsome wide eyes as his mother, only his were clouded over by the ash-grey hues of his father’s. At that time, all that kept Muhammad from being completely blind were the two speck-holes from which he peered onto a world he saw only in miniature.
Muhammad had never been able to enrol in school. Separated from an education by two small clouds of ash, he never learned to read or write. Those clouds hung in the sky over every school he approached. Muhammad’s father knocked again and again on the gates of various schools to let the boy in, but they never opened.
Years went by and Muhammad’s eyes narrowed and tightened until his sight began to sputter and choke. Finally one day they tasted their last gasp of light and stopped breathing. After that, Muhammad began to see things with his fingers instead. He began to recognize people by the sound of their voice and the noises they made. Walid was not imagining that when he approached — even when he did not make a sound — Muhammad would somehow sense his presence, perhaps by perceiving his scent from far off.
Khadija was teasing her son when Walid walked in. ‘When he lost his eyes, he grew the snout of a dog. He knows your scent, Walid.’
Muhammad stretched out both of his hands to shake both of Walid’s. They always used to greet each other this way, as if they were four and not two people. Muhammad replied, ‘The only scents I can smell from far away, Mama, are the scents of good people.’
Each of them took a sip of their mint tea. Then they gulped down their drinks, as if they were hurrying off to another appointment, took their leave and went out.
The two friends wandered through each alley as if they were surveyors sent to measure every corner of the neighbourhood. Walid began to fill the empty spaces with stories of his experiences in Cairo. He talked to his friend about Cairo’s dark-skinned girls with their bare legs and paper-thin skirts. Muhammad would listen entranced, filling in the details with the letters of the words.
Walid told him about his studies, about his failure to be admitted to the archaeology department at Cairo University, and how he’d been forced to enrol in history instead.
Ever since he was a child, Walid had been crazy about antiquities. He was in love with their mystery and the secrets they contained. He would often go to the Imam al-Shafi mosque in Gaza. He would pray as soon as he stepped foot inside, performing an extra prostration each time. Then he would sit like a pious devotee, studying the interior of the mosque, trying to glean the imprints of history from the ornaments on the ceiling and the surfaces of the pillars and walls.
Walid would tell his stories while Muhammad listened, spellbound. To signal his astonishment at what he heard, Muhammad would say nothing more than, ‘There is no god but God!’ To express his amazement, he would shout, ‘God is great!’
Walid told Muhammad stories about the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. He told him about his first visit to the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Cheops and how, upon entering, he had been forced to bend over as he scrambled along a low passageway lit by electric bulbs. He told him how his feet padded softly across a staircase of wood and rope.
Walid recounted the incident in a whisper, the words streaming breathlessly from his lips. Muhammad was right there, breathlessly scampering after him. There was Walid, pulling on the rope, just as Muhammad was reaching for it in his imagination, his feet stretching to feel for the stairs beneath them. And the two friends climbed up and up until they reached the end of the tunnel.
In that place, in the presence of the great Pharaoh whose embalmed life had been stolen by ancient thieves, the two friends stood up proudly and swaggered beneath the vaulted ceiling. For hours, they studied the granite sarcophagus. Together, they read the bas-reliefs and, using nothing but their intuition, began to translate the texts they found.
Walid told Muhammad about the hieroglyphs of the Pharaohs and about the many ancient words still employed by modern Egyptians. Muhammad would repeat after him, ‘Sah. Dah. Embo. Kaa. Kukh. Bah. Mmiim. Nnuun. Ti. Ti. Ti. Nef. Rah. Rah. Nef. Rah. Ti. Ti. Nefrahtiti. Nefrehtiti. Who’s Nefretiti, Walid?’
‘She was a queen. Nefertiti was the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaton. Her name means “the Beauty to Come.”’
‘You mean, she was good-looking?’
‘Something like that.’
Walid began to describe the Beauty to Come to his friend. With letters and words, he painted the most striking aspects of her physiognomy. Muhammad drank all this in and tucked it away in his memory. When Walid had finished telling the story of the beautiful queen, Muhammad leaned his head back and slightly to the left, as if he were searching for her in the shadows of his eyes. Then he broke into a beaming smile and shouted, ‘My God — she is so damn beautiful!’ His fingers began to draw precise sketches in the air. Before Walid’s eyes, the form of the queen began to take shape, the silhouette of a crystalline idea created in the hands of a sightless sculptor. The figure of the queen hung there in the air in front of them, and the details of her marble body began to quicken. As soon as Muhammad had formed her body with the clay of his mind, the beautiful queen began to parade right before their very eyes. As she had done at the bedside of the young king thousands of years before, she danced, offering up her nude ebony skin and fine Nubian features.