I picked up my book and left the shop. As I passed, I tried to see what Bliss was thinking, but he turned away. I tore through the streets like a child possessed.
Germaine couldn’t sit still. As soon as she’d served each customer, she would come into the back office to check on me, worried by how calm I seemed. From time to time, unable to stop herself, she would tiptoe up behind me and lean over my shoulder as I learned my recitation pieces by heart. She stroked my hair, then let her hand slide down to my forehead to take my temperature.
‘Are you sure you feel all right?’
I said nothing.
That last look on my father’s face as he stood, reeling from drink and shame, gnawed at my insides again like a tapeworm.
Night had fallen hours ago and still my uncle was not back. Outside, in the driving rain, a horse had collapsed in the street, upending the cart it had been pulling and spilling a load of coal across the road. The driver, cursing his horse and the weather, tried in vain to get the animal to its feet.
Germaine and I watched from the window as the horse lay in the street, its neck twisted, its mane rising and falling on the rising river of rainwater.
The carter went to fetch help, and found a group of men prepared to brave the storm. One of them crouched next to the horse.
‘The old nag is dead,’ he said in Arabic.
‘He can’t be, he just slipped.’
‘I’m telling you, he’s stone dead.’
The carter refused to believe the man and crouched down next to the animal, though he did not dare touch it.
‘I can’t believe it, he was fine earlier.’
‘Animals can’t tell you when they’re sick,’ said the first man. ‘You’ve probably been driving the horse too hard.’
Germaine took the crank handle to lower the security grille, handed me her umbrella, turned out the lights then urged me outside. She put the padlock on the shutter, took the umbrella from me and hugged me close to her as we dashed home.
My uncle did not arrive back until late that night. He was dripping wet. Germaine took his coat and his shoes in the hall.
‘Why isn’t he in bed?’ he said, jerking his chin at me.
Germaine shrugged as she climbed the stairs to the first floor. My uncle looked at me carefully, his wet hair glistening in the light but his expression solemn.
‘You should be in bed, you’ve got school tomorrow.’
Germaine reappeared with a dressing gown. My uncle put it on, slipped his feet into his slippers and came over to me.
‘Go on, son, go up to your room . . . for me.’
‘He knows about his father,’ Germaine said.
‘He knew before you did, but that’s no reason.’
‘He won’t get a wink of sleep until you tell him what you found out. This is about his father.’
Germaine’s remark irritated my uncle and he glared at her, but she did not turn away. She knew I was worried and felt that it was unfair to keep the truth from me.
My uncle put his hands on my shoulders.
‘We looked everywhere,’ he said. ‘We checked all the places he usually goes, but no one has seen him for a long time. Your mother doesn’t know where he is, she can’t understand why he would leave . . . We’ll keep looking for him. I’ve told Bliss to find three men I can trust to scour the city for him.’
‘I know where he is,’ I said. ‘He’s gone to make his fortune. He’ll come back in a shiny new car.’
My uncle glanced anxiously at Germaine, clearly afraid I was delirious, but she shook her head.
Up in my bedroom, I stared at the white expanse of ceiling, imagining it was a cinema screen, and pictured my father somewhere making his fortune, like in the movies Lucette’s father sometimes took us to see on Sunday afternoons. Germaine came up more than once to check on me and I pretended to be asleep. She came over to the bed, felt my forehead, adjusted my pillows, pulled the blankets up, then tiptoed out. The moment I heard the door shut, I threw off the covers and went back to staring at the ceiling. Spellbound as a little boy, I watched my father’s adventures.
The men my uncle sent out to find my father came back empty-handed. They checked the police stations, the hospitals, the brothels; they checked the rubbish tips and the souks; they questioned gravediggers and gangsters, drunks and horse traders. There was no word of my father.
Several weeks after his disappearance, I went to Jenane Jato without telling anyone. I knew my way around the city by now, and I wanted to go and see my sister without having to ask Germaine’s permission, without having my uncle take me there. When she saw me, my mother was angry. What I had done was stupid, she said, making me promise never to do it again. Jenane Jato was crawling with criminals. It was no place for a well-dressed boy; I might end up in a dark alley with my throat cut. I said I’d come to see if my father had come home. My mother told me I didn’t need to worry about my father any more, that Batoul had told her he was fine and well on his way to making a fortune. ‘When he comes back, he’ll stop off and pick you up from your uncle’s house and then come and collect your sister and me, and we’ll all drive off to a big house with gardens and fruit trees.’
Then she sent Badra’s eldest son to fetch Bliss so that he could walk me back to my uncle’s house.
This brusque dismissal by my mother troubled me for a long time. I felt as though I were to blame for all the misfortunes on earth.
7
FOR A whole month, I couldn’t fall asleep until I had watched my father’s adventures play out on the bedroom ceiling. I lay on my back, propped up on my pillows, and watched as a disjointed movie unfolded above my head. I imagined my father as a sultan surrounded by courtesans, as an outlaw plundering far-off lands, as a prospector discovering the biggest gold nugget of the century or a gangster in a three-piece suit, a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
Some nights, seized by a nameless fear, I imagined him drunk and unkempt, wandering through some squalid neighbourhood pursued by a pack of street urchins. When the fear took hold of me, it was as though my wrists were trapped in a vice, a vice exactly like the one that had almost forced my coins into my flesh the night I tried to make my father proud of me by giving him the money I had made selling goldfinches.
My father’s desertion stuck in my throat; I could neither swallow it nor spit it out. I felt I was to blame. My father would never have abandoned my mother and my sister if he hadn’t run into me that night. He would have gone home, slept it off and none of the neighbours would have suspected a thing. My father was a man of principles. He used to tell me that if a man should lose his money, his land, his friends, his fortune, even his bearings, there was always a possibility, however small, for him to get back on his feet again, but that if a man lost face, then all the rest was futile.
My father had lost face. Because I had seen him that night, seen him at his lowest ebb. This was what he could not bear. He had been determined to prove to me that he would not allow misfortune to break him. But the look I had seen on his face as he struggled to stand outside the bar in Choupot told me something different. There is a despair from which there is no way back; that was what I had seen in my father’s face.
I blamed myself for taking that particular street, for passing at precisely the moment when the barman tossed my father into the gutter and my world with him; I blamed myself for leaving Lucette so quickly, for spending too much time staring in shop windows . . .
At night, in the darkness, I brooded on my sadness, searching for something that might absolve me. I was so miserable that one night I went into the box room to look for the statue of the winged boy that had terrified me on my first night in my uncle’s house. I found it at the bottom of a musty crate full of bric-a-brac, dusted it off and set it on the mantelpiece opposite my bed. I stared at it intently, convinced that I would see its wings flap, its head turn towards me . . . Nothing. The winged boy stood on its pedestal, mute, unknowable, and just before dawn I put it back in its crate.