by Parker Bilal
‘If you wanted to start a new life down here with Dena, why destroy your uncle’s company?’
‘It wouldn’t have destroyed the company. You know what this country is like. These people take care of their own. There would be a scandal and maybe a couple of people would get fined, or even go to prison, maybe even my uncle. But then who would he get to take care of things while he was gone? You see? I was thinking that then he might really need my help.’
‘All of this is assuming no one found out you had helped Meera.’
‘Yes, well, let’s just say things didn’t work out the way I expected.’ Ramy stared down at the Beretta. He turned it over in his hand as if wondering who had put it there. Makana considered trying to take the automatic away, but decided wrestling with a loaded gun was a bad idea.
‘Rocky wanted me back. He said we were fated to be together, that I could never really get rid of him.’
An involuntary sound of disgust escaped Dena. She put a hand to her mouth, but Ramy gave no indication he had heard. If he had, he was beyond caring.
‘It was all part of the game. He didn’t really care about me. What he wanted was to know that he had me in his control.’
‘You could have resisted,’ insisted Dena. ‘You could have stayed away from him.’
Ramy didn’t even look at her. His voice was dead. ‘I went to see him. He showed me around. He had a stable of young boys, kids he had picked up off the street. Every now and then he lost control and one of them would die. He didn’t care. There were plenty more out there, he said. He locked them up on his roof like animals, living in their own filth, until they were willing to do anything to get out. It brought it all back. The pain and humiliation. The shame of it all.’ Ramy’s chest heaved as he tried to draw breath. ‘I remembered how scared I had once been. Rocky was laughing. I don’t know what came over me. I just thought this has to end. I thought I could take him by surprise. It was stupid. He is strong, and very fast.’ Ramy’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘He beat me, and he held me down and he touched me that way. He said, you’ll always belong to me. After this nobody is ever going to want you. And then he poured acid on my face.’
The story seemed to have left him drained. Ramy’s head hung down. His body racked with silent sobs. Somewhere in the distance Makana could hear an owl. Dena tried to console him, but Ramy pushed her away. ‘Before this,’ he gestured at his face, ‘I thought there was a chance of starting a new life. But now . . . what does it matter?’
‘But it does matter. I don’t care how you look,’ insisted Dena.
‘Well, I do!’ he yelled. Then he grabbed hold of her hair and pulled her towards him roughly, pressing her against the burned side of his face. ‘How long would it take for you to find this disgusting? Six months? A year? Two years?’
‘No, no!’ she sobbed. ‘I love you.’
Ramy flung her away. ‘You should go now,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m very tired.’
‘Yes,’ Dena agreed, wiping the tears from her face. ‘Maybe we should go.’ She got to her feet quietly. ‘I’ll come back in the morning, before we leave. I’ll bring you something to eat.’
Ramy said nothing. Makana had more questions but he could see that he would get no more out of Ramy tonight. He followed Dena down the stairs towards the entrance and out to the beach. A cool breeze was blowing along the river’s edge. In the distance the low curve of the felucca could be made out, with Adam outlined beside it, looking out for them.
‘It’s so sad. I wish there was something I could do,’ Dena sniffed.
Makana paused to glance back at the house. The faint glow of light fluttering from within made him uneasy. Ramy had spent his whole life living in fear and when he finally tried to stand up for himself he had paid a terrible price. He had wanted to help Meera, and he had failed at that too. So he fled the city, his face disfigured, and ran to the one person he thought would be able to give him back his dignity. But even that wasn’t enough. Makana had come to a halt now. He had turned and started back towards the house when he heard the shot. Then he was running with Dena screaming behind him.
Ramy was slumped against the wall with the ugly, twisted side of his face turned towards the light, his expression one of surprise, his white shirt was spattered with blood and his brains were spattered over the wall behind him. The Beretta was still smoking in his hand.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was dawn by the time Adam delivered him back to the Nile Star. Dena had stayed behind to deal with the police, but they had agreed that Makana would not be included in the story. The gun was not registered to anyone, so where it had come from would remain a mystery. Too exhausted to sleep, Makana went up on deck to watch the town come to life. He leaned on the railings and smoked a cigarette while taking in the view.
The Aswan skyline was once dominated by King Farouk’s old palace, jutting out over the water, which had been transformed into the luxurious Cataract Hotel and frequented by all manner of royalty and celebrity. Nowadays it was superseded by the grim tower of the Oberoi on Elephantine Island. Twelve concrete pylons rising 30 metres into the air to support a restaurant suspended in mid-air. From a distance it resembled an industrial complex in the shape of a cobra, the ancient royal symbol of Upper Egypt. But it lacked any trace of charm and elegance. The artists of old must have been rolling about in their caskets in indignation. A white rag floated gracefully down overhead and became a heron.
‘A sad business.’
Makana looked round to see Adam, his overalls covered in an unusual amount of oil. He had just come from the engine room and carried a monkey wrench and an oily rag. Without a word Makana offered him a cigarette. He tucked the wrench into a pocket and wiped his brow with his greasy forearm.
‘He wasn’t a bad kid. He worked hard and everyone liked him.’ Adam sniffed and rolled the cigarette between his fingers leaving black fingerprints on the white paper. ‘It’s a shame for the girl, though. She was in love with that boy, would have done anything for him.’ He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blew on the tip until it glowed. ‘Things have been bad here for a long time. People are worried this is going to finish off the company.’
‘You remember I asked you about Wadi Nikeiba?’
‘The monastery?’ Adam frowned. ‘Sure.’
‘You said they were running a brothel out there.’
Adam gave a dismissive shrug. ‘You know how people are. One story leads into another.’
‘Do you think you could find your way out there?’
‘I suppose so. I’d need to get hold of a car first.’
‘But you can do that, right?’
‘I suppose so.’ Adam puffed on his cigarette and studied the rivets on the deck. ‘Of course, a car is not an easy thing to lay your hands on.’
Makana reached into his pocket for some of Faragalla’s money and counted out some notes into the grubby hand. ‘I’m sure an old sailor like yourself can get hold of just about anything he sets his mind on.’
‘You might just be right about that,’ Adam grinned toothlessly.
By noon they had a car. An old Peugeot 504 estate. Five doors and enough room in it to comfortably seat a football team. It might once have been blue but was now a rainbow-coloured history of replacement parts. One door was ruby, the other was ochre, the front wing a battered white. The bulk of it was a faded sky-blue, rubbed clear through to shining steel here and there. The bonnet was military green. Just by looking at it you might be forgiven for wondering if it was capable of moving one more metre, but mechanically it seemed sound. Adam sat grinning behind the wheel. The car belonged to a brother-in-law, he said, who used to drive it as a taxi until his leg was amputated last winter. Smoking. Diabetes. A litany of complaints that kept Adam muttering and rolling his head at the foolishness of man and the cruelty of fate. Such cars were worth their weight in gold according to him and were exchanged for astronomical sums. They were just waiting for the right time to sell. Better not wait too long
, thought Makana to himself as he climbed in. The passenger-seat door was held closed with a loop of frayed nylon cord. The rear end seemed to be jacked unnaturally high up in the air and the tyres were smooth enough to write on. To Makana, it resembled a coffin on wheels. The air was warm and once they had managed to negotiate their way through the town’s traffic they hit the open road. The green strip of irrigated fields and trees running along opposite banks of the river gave way to dusty emptiness. The open windows blew gusts of hot dry air into Makana’s face as he rested his arm on the juddering door, careful not to lean too much of his weight on it.
According to the map in the front of the book, Wadi Nibeika was approximately 20 kilometres away from Aswan to the south-east. They followed a grey ridge that swerved into the distance like the tail fin of an enormous fish whipping through the brown desert. They turned off the narrow strip of road, stones rattling against the underside of the car like a riotous gang of mad drummers. Through a rusty hole between his feet Makana watched the track rolling by beneath him. What did he expect to find? He couldn’t say, though he had the feeling that he needed to know this monastery. The big car rocked about on the uneven road as if it was skating on marbles. The dust rolled in through the open windows in waves, so that soon the interior was choking in the stuff and the car and the two occupants looked as though they might have been carved out of the same grey stone of the hills.
The track wound its way slowly up a short ridge, at the top of which the Peugeot stalled and for a few harrowing moments they skittered backwards on bald tyres while Adam struggled to restart the engine. The car coughed respectably and then burst into life. The gearstick was ground into place and they finally crawled over the top to begin the long slide downwards. Here the road was long and straight, broken only by a few gentle curves. It wound its way along the flat bottom of the valley. Tucked into a far corner, shaped like the cupped palm of a hand, lay the whitewashed rectangular walls of the monastery. It swam towards them like something from another age as the car gained speed and tore up a flailing sheet of dust in their wake.
Long before they arrived it became clear that the monastery had been abandoned years ago. There were no vehicles, no people, no signs of life. The walls, on closer inspection, were neglected and cracked. Pigeons flew in and out of a window with a lone wooden shutter that flapped back and forth on its hinges. The big car juddered to a halt just outside the high front gates which stood open, giving way to complete silence that was disturbed only by the hum of the wind and the scratch of sand grains against the metal. A part of the wall had collapsed into a heap of bricks and plaster. The main front gate was closed but a smaller door set into it stood open.
The two men got out of the car and walked through the entrance to find a set of low-roofed, white buildings, now in a state of some disrepair. A path wound its way up towards the hill behind the monastery. As they walked up the shallow slope Makana paused here and there to peer into a building alongside. In places the doors had been locked. The ground was littered with debris, dead branches and leaves from the palm trees, wooden slats from the window shutters, doors, broken bricks, timber, and all of it peppered with a liberal scattering of goat droppings. There was an empty shell of a church with a cracked and blackened dome. Further up the incline were workshops and storage rooms, rough constructions made of adobe bricks and crooked timbers. Makana’s eye followed the line of the hill as it rose up to end in the dark mouth of a large cave. He thought he could make out a figure standing in the entrance.
‘Can you see someone up there?’ he asked, shading his eyes with one hand.
Adam squinted. ‘Got to be a crazy man if he’s living out here alone.’
Who else would live in a cave in the desert but a madman? Makana wasn’t sure his eyes were not deceiving him until the wavering figure began to descend. A prophet, perhaps, out here to commune with the Almighty, or a lunatic? Makana lit a cigarette and waited. A couple of minutes later the small, compact figure was striding towards him. Tufts of white hair stuck out from behind his ears, his beard sweeping down from his chin to his chest. The top of his head was bald and mottled. Thick leather sandals and a grubby cassock completed the outfit.
‘You cannot stay here. We do not allow it.’
‘We’re not planning to stay,’ Makana said, wondering who ‘we’ was. Were there others up there in the cave? A tribe of madmen?
‘Then what is your business?’
He was so short his head only came up to Makana’s chest but he still cut a ferocious figure. Makana noticed that Adam had taken a couple of steps backwards just in case. He held up the book from the cabin.
‘Father Macarius suggested I come by to take a look.’
‘Macarius?’ The little man stared at the book, his lips moving silently. His chin lifted and dipped. ‘The monastery is closed to visitors.’
‘I understand there used to be an orphanage here, Father . . . ?’
‘Girgis. Yes, but that closed years ago.’ The white beard whipped up into his face as the wind changed direction. ‘That was the end of it.’
‘The orphanage?’
‘Yes. What did you think I was talking about?’ He frowned. ‘Why have you come here?’
It was a question to which Makana could not readily answer.
‘I’m curious to know why the monastery was closed.’
‘What possible interest could you have in that?’ The face cracked like dry pergament.
‘One of the boys who was here. I’m interested in one of the boys.’
‘A journalist, are you? Here to spin your web of deceit.’
‘I’m not a journalist. Father, someone died last night. Do you remember a boy named Ramy who was here at the orphanage?’
His jaw worked silently for a moment. ‘I remember a lot of people. I forget their names. We had about thirty-seven boys at one time. How did you say he died?’
‘He took his own life.’
The priest winced as though someone had stepped on his toe. ‘Maybe I remember him. He was never a particularly happy child.’
‘From what he told me that was hardly surprising.’
The white beard twitched as Father Girgis lifted his chin. ‘That’s all ancient history. Why should you be interested in that now?’
‘I thought all human life was sacred.’
A long silence followed disturbed only by Adam clearing his throat, worried perhaps about getting the car back to his legless brother-in-law.
‘When we first came here there was nothing much more than that cave up there,’ Father Girgis pointed. ‘Legend had it that a prophet, Saint Nikeiba, once lived in that cave. He had visions of an angel bearing six wings.’
‘The Seraph.’
‘Yes, the Seraph.’ The pale eyes rolled up towards Makana. ‘Macarius told you?’
‘He told me that this was a very special place.’
‘It was,’ sighed Father Girgis. ‘We built it together. We worked side by side. After the scandal it fell into disrepair. The government took the children away.’
‘What exactly happened?’
Father Girgis gestured for them to walk. ‘Let me give you a tour. You know that we are restoring the place finally.’
Again, Makana wondered about this use of the plural. He looked over the little man’s head in case a small army of helpers appeared from the cave.
‘You had both Christian and Muslim boys here?’
‘It’s not up to us to distinguish between God’s children.’ Father Girgis paused to point out the kiln, the mill where they ground the flour they grew. ‘It was a terrible time.’ Father Girgis lowered his face and stroked his beard. ‘We put our faith in the young, for what else is there? We have to believe that they will carry on after us.’ Father Girgis stroked his beard as if he thought it might fly away. ‘It’s a terrible world we live in.’ As Makana reached for a cigarette, the priest stuck out a hand. Makana shook one out for him and produced his lighter. The priest closed his eyes as h
e sucked the smoke into his lungs. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, opening his eyes. ‘People say memories are only in the head, but some are awakening at this very moment in my body.’
They stood and gazed down over the valley below. The heat was diminishing and colour was gradually returning to the grey landscape. As the sun began to drop, the hills seemed to expand as the shadows deepened, becoming blue tinged with purple.
‘Why did they close you down?’
‘They said there was a monster in our midst.’
‘A monster?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Father Girgis savoured his cigarette, which had already been smoked down to the butt. The priest’s eyes flickered towards Makana. ‘Has he killed again?’
‘I think so, Father.’
High above in the warm air over the Wadi a buzzard circled in slow, lazy turns. It might have been the wavering light, or a trick of his imagination, but Makana thought he saw a flicker of bitterness in the other man’s eyes.
‘He ruined us. He turned our dreams to dust.’ Father Girgis abruptly began walking down the path, his hands clasped behind his back. Makana had no choice but to follow along. ‘It seemed like nothing at first. An unfortunate incident. A lamb went missing and was found torn to pieces in the desert.’ Father Girgis spoke in the animated fashion of one who after years of sleeping in a cave had finally awoken. ‘We wondered what kind of animal could have done something like that. Jackals? Packs of wild dogs, perhaps? It was dismissed. We forgot about it for a time, but then other things happened.’
‘What other things?’
‘A cat was nailed to a door, badly mutilated and barely alive. It was horrible. There was a sense that something like pure evil had taken root among us. We were afraid for the boys. Then our worst nightmare was realised. One of the boys went missing.’ Father Girgis paused, his eyes focussed on the distant landscape. ‘We searched everywhere for him. All day, all night, search parties combed the hills around here, convinced he had had an accident. When we found him it was clear that he had been tortured. Beaten viciously and . . . abused.’