‘That’s disgusting!’
‘To an outsider, yes. But they’ve learned over the centuries that the strength of the tribe is what counts.’
‘And your father was made of the right stuff?’
‘I suppose he was, or he’d never have been given a Hazmiyya. In Hawazim tradition, a girl’s first cousin has the right to marry her, and Maryam’s cousin stuck to his right. Then my father invoked an ancient custom — nifaas — a sort of duel to see who could survive the longest in the desert without food and water. Mukhtar agreed that it was his right by desert law. The cousin came back after a week. My father staggered in half dead three days later. That’s why they called him Abu Sibaahi — “The Father of the Desert Rat”. There was no opposition from Mukhtar after that.’
‘He sounds like a fair man.’
‘I think he is. But how he’s involved in this business of the ushabtis, I just can’t say.’ I paused and listened. The fire had gone out, but the booming of the wind had begun to die away. I looked up to see the stars twinkling more clearly. ‘I thought so,’ I said.
‘It was a false alarm. The storm’s passed over. Maybe it’ll hit tomorrow or the day after.’
We crawled into our sleeping-bags and lay back, our heads close together, staring at the stars.
‘Must be wonderful to belong somewhere,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t know. Hammoudi was right when he said I wasn’t one of them or one of us. I’m an inbetweener. What about you?’
‘My mother was Egyptian, like yours.’
‘Was?’
‘Yes, she died when I was young too. I had two elder sisters. My father is Greek — a drunken bully. He had a good business selling imported furniture, but he let it all go and we almost starved. He’d take his frustration out on us — used to beat us with his belt. But that was only part of it. He first raped me when I was twelve. He’d already been doing it to my sisters for years. We daren’t tell anyone, we were so ashamed. We even thought that it was our fault for being what we were. We lived in this filthy flat in Alexandria. We had to cook for him, and if he didn’t like what we’d cooked, he would use it as an excuse to thrash us with his belt. After he’d beaten us all, he’d usually drag one of us into his room and rape her.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Believe me, the times when we were all together were the best. My sisters both got out of the house and attached themselves to men. For me, the abuse went on for four years. Four years of living purgatory — nobody helped, nobody cared. I could have been a good student at school, but I couldn’t concentrate, knowing what I had to go back to every night. I covered up the bruises by wearing a burqa — a face veil — some of the girls thought it was odd, because they knew I wasn’t a Muslim. I was always very neat and clean about my dress, so that no one would guess what was really going on. Anyway, I knew it couldn’t continue like that. I was going out of my mind — literally going mad. By this time he was getting drunk out of his head almost every night —and in a way that was good because when he was really drunk he just fell asleep in his chair without doing anything to me.
Anyway, one night I thought he’d fallen asleep in the chair and I was sneaking off to bed, thinking I’d managed to avoid it for another night when he suddenly opened his eyes and caught me by the wrist. He laughed — actually laughed. “Thought you’d got away with it did you, little bitch!” I realised he’d done it on purpose — pretended to be asleep to torture me! Bastard! I think it was that — the deliberate cruelty — that sent me over the top. There was a heavy old shovel standing by the fireplace — I don’t know how it got there. Anyway, when he laughed with his stinking araq breath, I saw red. I picked it up and bashed his head with it over and over and over. Even when he’d fallen down and was lying on the floor, I bashed him again and again, until he was lying in a pool of blood. I thought I’d killed him — I hadn’t but I wish I had. I just took the little money I’d saved, and whatever he had in his pockets, and got the bus to Cairo.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘How could any man do that to his own daughter?’
‘My uncle took me in — he was a good man, a tailor in Khan al-Khalili. It was him who introduced me to Nikolai, who was looking for an assistant. At first I thought Nikolai might be the same way as my father, but I soon discovered he had no bad intentions. He educated me — sent me to Ain Shams University to study art, literature, languages: I can speak English and French as well as Arabic and Greek. Nikolai taught me everything. Perhaps he wasn’t the most honest man alive, but he was a real father to me.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘I don’t know. But I learned one lesson from my real father — that whatever happens I can handle myself. I’ll never let anyone abuse me again.’
She looked so defiant that I couldn’t help putting my arm around her. Despite her tense muscles, she didn’t resist. I was half-expecting a rebuff, but suddenly I felt her body relax. For a moment we looked at each other, and I saw starlight reflected in her eyes. I bent my head, pulled her close, and kissed her softly. She responded, pressing her lips against mine. The kiss seemed to last for ever, and we were lost in it, lost to the desert, the stars and the universe, present only in that single endless moment of conjunction — until Elena pulled away and brought us sharply back to real time once again.
31
Someone was calling me urgently back from the dark fathoms of sleep, and I awoke with a start to find Elena shaking me. ‘Jamie,’ she hissed, ‘there’s someone out there.’ I rolled out of my sleeping-bag and scanned the desert night. Somewhere north of us, not far off it seemed, was a bubble of light. At first glance it looked stationary — low intensity light, like the beam of a torch. We lay on our stomachs, watching. Minutes ticked by and the light remained in the same position, motionless. ‘It’s a man with a flashlight,’ Elena said, ‘standing still.’
Then, as we watched, the light leapt forward and underwent binary fission, splitting into two, then four, then — after more minutes — into six, eight and finally twelve. Twelve dots of light streaming towards us out of the darkness. Suddenly the dots themselves were each cleft into two. ‘They’re headlights,’ I said. ‘Twelve cars.’
‘The police,’ Elena gasped. ‘They’re coming straight at us.’
‘It’s impossible,’ I said. ‘It’s a trick of the light. They’re still miles away. Listen — you can’t even hear the engines yet.’
It was a good ten minutes before we heard the growl of motors and the grating of gears, and then the vehicles roared out of the darkness like a squadron of dragons with fiery eyes. For a moment the headbeams blinded us, and we hugged the desert surface, convinced that they were about to run straight over us. When I looked up I realised that this was another illusion. In fact, they were slipping past us in file perhaps four hundred yards to our right, the engine-sounds changing tone, dopplering as they moved away. For a long time we watched their tail-lights fading and coalescing in the darkness. ‘Christ,’ Elena said at last. ‘Do you think they were looking for us?’
‘The Mukhabaraat can’t be that stupid. It’d be like looking for a grain of sand on a beach. The only people who use this route are smugglers — running hashish from the borders of Sudan.’
‘But Jamie, those vehicles were heading south — towards the Sudanese border.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
Neither of us felt like sleep after that. The appearance of the cars had shattered the comforting feeling that no one knew where we were hidden — safe in the folds of the night. Elena began to shiver and I realised suddenly how cold it was. The air had a raw sting to it, the sharpness of a knife. We wrapped ourselves in our sleeping-bags and I lit the stove for coffee with freezing fingers. ‘It’s six hours to sunrise,’ I said, ‘I reckon we’re already near Farafra. In ten hours we could make Kharja oasis.’
‘But can we do it in the dark? I wouldn’t want to plunge over a cliff.’
‘The desert is dead flat as far as
Kharja — no sand, no big stones. I came this way plenty of times when I was a boy. You never forget. If we start now you’ll see Kharja by midday.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Well, it’s not two palms and a pond — that’s how most people think of an oasis. It’s fifty miles long with scores of villages, millions of palms, lakes, thousands of feddans of farmland, scrub-land and acacia forest. It’s like a big green island in a sea of nothingness.’
‘Beautiful?’
‘Yes. But not as beautiful as the desert.’
The Honda hummed hypnotically away as the night and stars passed by. Orion came up, with Sirius sparkling brightly beside. Slowly the cloak of darkness buckled and warped and a crimson fireglow spread along the eastern horizon. Moment by moment the blackness was shorn off by a kaleidoscope of colours — deep rose pink burning out to volcanic yellow, tangerine, ultramarine, turquoise, royal blue, streaked with a rippling blanket of cloud the colour and texture of sand-dunes. As the sun drew higher its top half was obliterated by wreaths of dust, giving it the appearance of a golden boat in a child’s drawing. For a moment you could almost believe that it was the barque of the mighty Ra, emerging victorious once again from his nocturnal battle. My arms were aching and my body shaking with cold after six hours’ driving, and I stopped the bike for a few minutes to get the blood moving and to admire the sunrise, while Elena broke out the stove and laid out the coffee things. I watched as she tossed her luxuriant black hair out of her eyes, occasionally stopping just to stare at the vastness of the desert — the infinity of powder-blue and black stone that lay beyond our streaks of shadow, stretching to every horizon, unbroken but for ghostly crags of hills in the far distance. In all that expanse we were the only living, moving objects, lost in the bigness of it like microdots. ‘It’s like we suddenly landed on another planet,’ she said. ‘Where’s the rest of the human race?’
‘This is the emptiest place on earth,’ I said. ‘No one lives here but the Hawazim — and there aren’t many of them. I once travelled here for a month and never saw a single soul — that’s how empty it is.’
She set a mess-tin of water on the stove and stood straight, her eyes following me as I stamped my feet and slapped my arms across my body, trying to warm myself up. ‘You look...somehow...bigger,’ she said after a while. ‘As if you’d grown into a giant in the night.’
I chortled. ‘That’s what the desert does to you. It’s so huge that you feel like an ant in it, but its emptiness makes every object look as if you’re seeing it through a magnifying glass.’
‘A paradox.’
‘Paradoxes. Illusions. This place invented them.’
By the time we’d drunk our coffee the sun was a tight firebrand leached of its soft goldness, and the horizons were already shimmering with heat-haze. I scanned the landscape with Rabjohn’s binoculars until I made out two cairns of black stones close together, about two miles away — the only sign of human existence in the void. When we pulled up near them on the bike minutes later, I found what I had been looking for — a serpent of grooves oscillating away into the distance — a roadway cut into the desert floor by the feet of millions of camels over hundreds of years. ‘It’s the camel-road,’ I told Elena. ‘The Hawazim used to bring camels this way for sale in Cairo, before others started shipping them from Daraw by truck. This is the way caravans used to come up from the Sudan, or across the Sahara from as far away as Morocco. The caravaneers piled rocks into cairns to mark the way — when you get two cairns together at the side of the grooves like this, we call them “Gateways”…’
‘Gateways into what?’
‘Gateways into nowhere — on one level it’s a kind of Hawazim joke. On another the gates are entrances into another universe, a different space-time dimension. That’s not how a Hazmi would describe it, of course, but that’s the way he thinks of the desert. To him every rock and dune is alive — not alive quite in the way animals and plants are alive, perhaps — but alive in the sense that they’re part of a whole, constantly evolving, cosmos. It runs parallel with ancient Egyptian beliefs — they saw their tombs as gate-ways too — the Book of the Dead is full of references to gates the dead soul had to pass through, each guarded by a fierce deity.’
‘How come these tracks have remained visible so long?’
‘That’s because of the surface — in stony desert like this your passage lives after you for ever. You can still find Roman chariot-tracks in places.’
‘Really? Is the camel-road still used?’
‘Rarely now. But it’ll take us just where we want to go.’
For the whole morning we followed the camel-grooves across a volcanic black wasteland so flat and featureless it seemed that we were not moving at all but simply staying in the same place while the sun described a slow parabola above us. Apart from the camel-grooves with their occasional cairns and nests of ancient sun-bleached bones, there was no sign of life. The blue sky was without blemish. Apart from ourselves, the only thing moving was the heat-haze, and the occasional flicker of reflected light out of the desert, winking at us provocatively like a demonic eye. Occasionally we crossed playas — ovals of earth where water had lain in the past — which glistened with the liquid light of snow-white salt crystals. Every kilometre seemed to take us farther and farther into a wilderness beyond the bounds of the known world. At ten, we sighted the wind-moulded buttress of Guss Abu Sa’id mountain, a giant’s fortress lurking in the haze, and I steered the bike to the west, leaving the camel-grooves and skirting the side of the mountain. Abu Sai’d passed behind us, melting back into the shimmer and we joined the camel-road again as it swept round east towards Kharja. By late afternoon we sighted the smoky line of palm-groves spreading through the desert. It was past noon when we came in among the sand-belt that surrounded the oasis like a defensive wall, and there, in the hollow of a crescent dune lay the stone rim of a well. I recognised it at once from my childhood as Bir Abu 1-Hissein — the Well of the Fox — an appropriate name, for the sand around it was littered with the burrows of fennec foxes. I stopped the bike near the well and we stepped off it and stretched our legs. High above us, on the dune-crest, sand-devils were at work in a series of smoking vortices. The crests were constantly on the move, while the parent-plinths — which made up the bulk of the dune — remained stationary for centuries. In fact these dunes were exactly as I remembered them from childhood. At the base of the slip-face — the side of the dune away from the prevailing wind — there was a colony of plants, hardy colocynth melons whose dry husks rattled in the breeze. An old leather well-bucket and rope had been stashed nearby under an overhanging rock, and I picked it up. ‘Let’s see if the water still tastes the same,’ I said.
I stood on the lip of the well and began to swing the bucket. Suddenly Elena screeched, ‘Jamie!’ and I turned to see a tribesman poised not more than ten feet away pointing an old service-rifle in our direction, peering at us intently. He was a bit older than me, dressed in a russet-coloured jibba, gathered in at the waist by .a cartridge belt heavy with bullets, and he was as lean as a pikestaff — his body looked as if it had been honed down by ghibli winds into an irreducible core. His feet were hard as horn from a lifetime of walking on sand, and his sleeve was rumpled by the shape of the khanjar which lay concealed beneath it. The man wore a silver earring on his right ear, but no headcloth, and his hair was an unkempt mop, his bearded face a series of grooves and dark angles like blades of carven stone. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. One fixed us fiercely over the rifle-sights, the other lolled waywardly to the side, giving the impression it was looking at something neither of us could see. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you know this well belongs to the Hawazim?’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘You may be Water-Bailiff of the tribe, Mansur, but since when do you deny water to thirsty travellers?’
He looked at me as if I’d punched him, his loose eye blinking wildly. ‘How d’you know my name?’ he demanded.
<
br /> I unbuckled my motor-cycle helmet and took it off. ‘Is this how you greet your cousin?’ I said.
Mansur let his rifle drop and his one good eye gaped. ‘Omar!’ he cried, ‘Omar is it you? You’ve been away too long.’ He ran and threw his arms around me, giving me the triple nose-kiss of the Bedouin. He slapped my shoulder violently, shaking my hand: ‘Omar! Omar!’ he roared. ‘Welcome back. Thank God for your safe return. God be praised! Upon you be no evil! May the Divine Spirit grant you long life.’
‘No evil! May the Divine Spirit grant long life to you and yours.’
‘Mukhtar said you’d come.’
‘How is my uncle?’
‘He’s well, God be praised — you’d hardly guess he’s an old man. He can still shoot and ride and walk like a youngster. But there’s been a tragedy in the family this year and it’s weighed him down. Aziz, my nephew — Bakri’s son — died of some terrible illness, may the mercy of God be upon him. It hit Mukhtar very hard.’
He turned to greet Elena who had also removed her helmet, shaking hands with her more formally. ‘Peace be on you,’ he said.
‘And on you. Do you always sneak up on people so silently?’ Mansur grinned, letting his face relax and his blank eye roll until his features assumed their most humorous aspect. His good eye twinkled. ‘God knows there are strange folk about,’ he said, ‘and the strangest ones of all turn out to be your own cousins!’
‘Mansur’s the Water-Bailiff,’ I explained. ‘He’s responsible for all the water used by his tribe.’
Mansur smiled again with pleasure, ‘I’ve got a new son now, Omar — Zayid — born last summer — the thanks be to the Divine Spirit.’
‘Praise be to God. I hope he grows into a fighter like his father.’
‘With God’s will, less a fighter, more a Shiner,’ Mansur said, laughing. ‘We’ve got plenty brawn, it’s brains like yours we need.’ I grinned at the compliment.
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