by Warren Adler
Chapter Forty-One
Ezzat watched the figure as it emerged from the copse of palms that edged the field, stepping into the brown dust. Lifting his field glasses, he surveyed the bronzed face, sun-darkened, not the natural dark skin of this racial noman’s-land.
It was a habit now, this reflex of surveillance, that made it impossible to be open-handed with strangers. In the man’s carriage, in the high cheeks and strong brow of his face, he tugged at his memory for some shred of recognition. As always when a stranger approached, he took a quick inventory of the family. Isis would be squatting in her usual spot in the shaded eaves of the animal house, nursing their youngest, while the twins, brown and naked, tugged at her garment, tormented by being usurped by this new arrival. The three oldest, all boys, would be in the fields harvesting the fava beans.
Allah had, indeed, been bountiful, he mused, alerted by a sudden hesitancy in the stranger’s movements. Who was he? What did he want?
It had been years now since the steps of a stranger could stir the intensity of the old fear. That, he thought, had passed into oblivion, as the stamp of the fellaheen etched themselves on the fabric of their lives. As he had suspected, it had come naturally to Isis. For him, the best he could manage was to construct a warm cocoon around his educated, denatured interior, sometimes unable to resist the urge to poke around the old relics of ancient times. Once or twice, he had even ventured to Luxor, unable to thwart the lure of that old urge to plumb the crust of history.
Occasionally, Isis would rise from some terrible shred of dream, a convoluted rearrangement of her earlier living nightmare of abandonment and violence, but even that did not disturb the quiet harmony of this adopted life. And other things had occurred to ruffle the tranquility of the early fellaheen years. Knowing he could read, the boys had begun to bring old newspapers from town, tourist cast-offs in Arabic and English, which he steadfastly refused to read to them, although he could not resist them for himself.
Also, television had come, marching to the tune of government edicts that established television centers in the villages. Kom Ombo had one, and it was with difficulty that he had restricted Isis and the children from visitations, compromising finally on a monthly ritual. They were exposed to American programs of police violence, which, except for the images aping humans, were worlds beyond Isis’s and the children’s sense of reality.
The edict, Ezzat believed, was one more clue to the coming putrefaction, an attempt to, once again, break the eternal cycle of the fellaheen. Nasser had done his work, giving the fellaheen the land they worked, a gift, really, although it changed nothing. Now Sadat was attempting to link this land with the star of technology. More futility lay ahead. More pain. The fellaheen had endured the five thousand years of Egyptian history. They would endure another five thousand, long after the relics of these new monuments to new gods had been buried in the sands of time.
The figure drew closer, and Ezzat put down his field glasses and walked slowly out of the hut toward the stranger, his eyes squinting to focus on his approaching face. The man waved, a traditional sign of peace, but it struck him as contrived, furtive, as if the man needed the assurance of this effort to continue his advance. Ezzat goaded his tired body forward. He did not want the man to move closer.
“Salaam alaikum,” the man said, halting tentatively a few yards away.
“Salaam alaikum,” Ezzat whispered hoarsely, struck by the vague and persistent familiarity. He had resisted the ancient traditions of honorable hospitality, knowing it had characterized him as mean-minded and eccentric. But it had also protected them.
“What do you want?” Ezzat asked cautiously. He noted that the man’s manner and voice confirmed the youthful image he had seen in the field glasses. As the young man came toward him, Ezzat squatted to receive him, preferring the barren, sun-drenched emptiness of the parched earth to the darker shadows of his hut’s interior.
“I am looking for someone,” the young man said, squatting beside him as a measure of respect. He had taken a position where the sun bleached the air between them with its brightness and Ezzat’s dull eyes had to squint their curiosity. The young man’s accent was unmistakably foreign, another harbinger of danger. And, there was something else, but the slant of the sun made it illusive, unable to confirm.
“Are you Dr. Ezzat, the archaeologist?”
The young man had lowered his voice. It passed the distance between them as a low whisper, but it had the timbre of crackling thunder, and Ezzat forced himself up abruptly, ignoring the uncertainty of his aging joints. He had long dreaded this moment, although even when he did summon up the possibility, logic told him that the link to Isis might never have been established.
“There is no such person here,” he mumbled, turning his back on the startled young man and proceeding toward the mudbrick huts. He had, he realized, lost all subtlety in dealing with people, and it annoyed him now to think that he had been too precipitous. But he could not bring himself to confront the young man.
Behind him, he could hear the crunch of the young man’s sandals on the hard ground. Abruptly, Ezzat stopped and turned.
The young man, he suspected, would not be easily deterred. He searched his tired mind for some plan to deflect the intruder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You have come to the wrong place.”
The young man looked down and kicked the hard ground with his sandals, then turned to survey the little patch of buildings. Ezzat could sense his uncertainty and his own fears calmed. For a moment, the old fright receded as the young man continued to hesitate.
“Perhaps I have made a mistake,” he said.
Ezzat reined his curiosity. An echo of Herra’s words bounded through the cavern of years, “They will turn heaven and earth to find her. They are very clever.” Years ago, he had exhausted the vein of speculation on how they might come, in what form of Trojan horse. A sweet-tongued inquiry, a harsh invasion, an elaborate subterfuge.
Through the years, he had shown his face, had been recognized, but the connection with Isis seemed safe in the primal ooze of the fellaheen’s world.
“I have never heard such a name,” Ezzat said, pouring fuel now on the young man’s uncertainty, sensing the mounting hesitation, finding his own courage. “I am sorry,” he said gently, lifting his gaze on to the man’s face.
The sun’s arc had altered its reflection and what he saw left him speechless with foreboding. The resemblance was an acute attack on the core of their security. Could they have been that clever? The resemblance was uncanny. Watching him were Isis’s eyes, unmistakable in their special hue and peculiar innocence. Like Farrah’s and, in retributive mockery, like his oldest son, the errant seed.
“No,” he said, abruptly. “You have definitely come to the wrong place.”
“I have come so damned far,” he said with a sigh, his face reflecting the hazard of a long journey, the connective link a positive confirmation of the long-smoldering pervasive fear. Ezzat felt the tentacles of some inner holding power. He fought to mask his terror, sure that he was confronting the ultimate subterfuge.
“You see, I’m looking…” the young man began, his words a clarion of danger.
“You must be mistaken,” Ezzat said, turning his back and moving swiftly toward the shelter of their now threatened life, determined not to listen.
It was then that one of the twins stumbled precariously from the rear of the animal shelter, his unsure three-year-old step careening him forward on the slightly sloped ground, a foreshadowing of Isis’s protective motherly presence.
Ezzat watched, terrified, since the child had also arrested the young man’s interest. Ezzat froze. They watched as the child stumbled and fell, then squealed, more in confusion than pain. The young man moved swiftly toward the child. At that moment, he saw the floating form of Isis, moving gracefully as the black malaya caught the breeze of her movement. He saw the
m move in tandem toward the fallen child, stooping, in an astonishing symmetrical configuration, looking up suddenly, confronting the unmistakable stamp of blood relationship.
The unfamiliar grumble of a car’s engine ripped at his attention, the audibility confirming the descending presence of the incarnate predatory terror.
Chapter Forty-Two
She had looked back at him with a mingled flash of recognition and indifference, more concerned about the sunbrowned naked child who nestled now in her bosom. Her fingers, strong and blunt with blackish half-moons under the fingernails, were a laborer’s, but her wrists were narrow and the soft flesh above them smooth and white, protected by the black material from the sun’s devastation.
Everything visible of her flesh was deeply sun-browned, the eyes gleaming like emeralds in soft silk jewel pads. She watched him with suspicion and hostility, frightened by this unexpected mirror image she saw in his face.
“Isis,” he whispered, the one word stifled, gargling in his windpipe, like a cry from a bottomless pit. But her gaze had moved upward over his shoulder, following the sound of the car’s engine. He stood up swiftly, like a lifted marionette, and saw the swirl of dust in the narrow road as the big four-wheeled beast lumbered determinedly over the donkey-cart ruts, its snout pointed relentlessly in their direction.
For a long moment, the three adults and the tightly clutched child stood mesmerized by what appeared in this setting as an apparition of some alien force. Moving forward, the car made angry, grunting noises as its tires clawed at the uncertain earth.
“Them,” Si said, the terror gripping him, arrested by the knifed stare of the old man’s hate as it descended on him, accusatory and raging.
“You brought them here,” the old man said. “Brought Zakki.”
At the word, Isis sucked in her breath and, covering the child with her hands as if to protect him, ran toward the mudbrick shambles, emitting a shrieking tongue-vibrating ululation, the traditional eerie wail of both mourning and defiance.
Ezzat seemed pinned to the ground like a specimen butterfly, and Si had to drag him, stupefied with fear, toward the huts. Actually, Si knew, he should be heading for the fields. A flash of images saw him in a crouched military run along the palm copse, like some actor in an old war movie. Instead, he moved with Ezzat toward the dubious protection of the huts.
Rounding the ramshackle wall, which shielded them from the road and the oncoming juggernaut, he watched as Isis gathered her brood, which included all visible living things, beast and human, into the dank turd-piled animal shelter. She crowded them into it as if were the entrance to Noah’s Ark, two dull-eyed gray donkeys, three mud-spattered black wool sheep, a mangy rust-colored dog, a shaggy, muttering cud-chewing dignified goat, all followed by a moving cloud of buzzing flies. Three older boys had also suddenly materialized, dressed in filthy pajama-striped djellabas, summoned from the bean-harvesting chores by their mother’s eerie ululation.
An ill-fitting half door was clamped shut in some ridiculous pose of protection. Yet, inside, a pall of silence descended as if the fear had been transmitted by the common language of terror, clubbing the entire ménage into silence.
As the door of the shelter closed, Ezzat shook off Si’s gripping hand with surprising strength, moving across the expanse of open ground in the direction of the approaching car. By then, it had avoided the unpassable section of the road and was proceeding along the rim of the field, mowing down the mature plants in its path. Si stayed out of sight behind the wall of the animal shelter, crouching to observe the scene through a gap in the crumbling mudwork.
He knew, even then, that he could still head out unseen over the parched desert wasteland. But the thought left him with an excruciating pang of betrayal. He cursed himself, eyes welling with tears of frustration. Swallowing, he tasted a metallic bile, bitter and nausea provoking, reflecting his mood of despair and frustration. So he had found Isis. What difference could that make to anyone, especially his mother, whose maggot-ridden body could only be mocking him now?
What he had felt when he saw Isis was, remarkably, nothing at all, except a fleeting stab of recognition. There was no sentiment in it, no nostalgia, no hint of a summoned cataclysmic event or an epiphany of awareness.
What cause had he pursued that drove him across the world in search of some vague blood connection? In fact, her visage, and the environment in which he found her, was so depressingly different than what had charged him forward that he felt denuded of purpose, disillusioned, disappointed. No sense of victory or achievement or of high realized purpose masked the bleak reality.
The glorious Isis was merely a primitive peasant woman.
He was afflicted with an overwhelming sense of embarrassment. If he had found her under different circumstances and brought her back to Brooklyn, even in Brooklyn, with its own social stigmas and disappointments, he would be embarrassed to acknowledge the relationship. Perhaps, even their mother would feel the same way.
The car, a large black Mercedes, moved to the field’s edge, the tires gripping the harder earth as it rolled toward the old man, who, like a madman, was flaying his arms and moving directly into the path of the oncoming car. Suddenly, the brakes squeaked to a jarring halt, and three dark men brandishing automatic weapons got out and surrounded him.
Si could hear the panicked singsong of the old man’s entreaties. It was a pitiful, fruitless performance.
In the front seat of the car, beside the driver, he saw the grotesque, bloated image of a man who, he was certain, was Zakki. Logic again told him to run, but he seemed rooted to the ground, bludgeoned into inaction by a pervasive sense of detachment. What had he to do with all this?
It was only when the shots rang out, a long tattoo exploding in the dry air, that the instinct for personal survival gripped his consciousness. Yet he continued to crouch, immovable, gaping at the tableau of death. The shots, carrying the message of pent-up rage, exploded into the supine figure of Ezzat, giving the corpse an afterlife of twitching limbs and tiny fountain bursts of blood. The sound, like a thrown switch, triggered a disparate chorus in the animal shelter, mingling the screams of frightened animals and humans. Above it, rose Isis’s vibrating tongue-clucking ululation.
Si started to run, but his legs felt like rubber and he fell, then rose, and, for some absurd reason, headed instead for the animal shelter, fumbling with the roped latch and throwing himself into the foul interior.
His sudden entrance froze the sounds for a moment. But they began again as the animals stamped and struggled against each other, coats lacquered the pungent ooze of fear. Squatting against the far wall, Isis sat surrounded by her panicked, trembling children. The twins lay burrowed in her arms, while her hands clutched her infant, lodged against her bosom, as if she were trying to insert it between the mounds of her protective flesh.
The three older boys huddled together, terrorized, uncertain about Si’s presence. The heated air in the enclosure was a gaseous inferno, and the life forms, people, animals, insects, seemed rooted in some primeval stench.
He could not understand why he was here. His feelings now seemed inert. Will Allah take care of this, he suddenly thought, his body racked with a hideous giggle, which ceased abruptly as he saw the shaft of outside light lengthen as the unoiled hinges squeaked and the door opened.
Dark faces peered inside, waiting for their pupils to focus, the barrels of their weapons glistening, the muzzles still smoking from earlier messages of death. The men crouched, peering through the bars of the animals’ restless legs at the huddled group against the wall. The goat was closest to the door, and they pulled sharply on its tether to move him from their path.
Si watched as the sweating men cajoled the animal out into the sunlight. When he was free of the entrance, they calmly spattered him with bullets. The poor animal dropped with a thud, with little time to be startled by this uncommon death.
Through the entrance, Si could see the metal skin of the Mercedes coated with dry dust, the front door open, revealing the seated figure of a grotesquely fat man, his pallor as yellow as mustard, the skin moist with unhealthy sweat. He was certain this was Zakki. Zakki, the tormentor. The man’s swollen eyelids blanched in the sunlight, moving with tremors of excitement as the men, with feverish efficiency, poked at the animals with their gun barrels.
The woman’s wails had become a whimper. The clucking ceased. Only the painful braying of the persecuted animals rent the air. They moved the donkeys out next, and the bullet bursts could be heard thudding into their carcasses as they fell to the ground with a slow-motion crumbling of their front legs. Rivulets of ocher blood began to form on the earth. The sheep, with some instinctive presence, tried to make a run for it. Two were cut down in flight almost as an amusement, with long bursts of gunfire, but one, the mangiest of the pack, was still to be seen scurrying in the distance.
Zakki presided over the animal massacre with an expectation that was pervasive as his eyes squinted into the darkness of the animal shelter. When the way was cleared, the men entered, three huge, dark forms filling the tight space with the omnipotence of authority, as faceless as anyone who had the dispensation of God in a trigger finger. The mangy dog, who had somehow been overlooked, snapped at one of the men, who quickly stitched off its head with an even line of gunfire, his features alight with the killer’s pride of accuracy.
“Don’t kill them,” Zakki ordered from his perch on the seat of the open car, his voice oddly tremulous and weak. Hitching the weapons over their shoulders, the men’s meaty, dark hands grabbed the three boys, the oldest about twelve, the youngest no more than ten, and dragged them out to the cluttered and blood-soaked arena of death.
Stooping over the anguished, squatting form of Isis, Si helped lift her. He managed to unlock the twins from her grasp, the baby’s arms flayed at her breasts as its hungry lips searched the black expanse for its nipple of nourishment. Outside, she tore away from his grasp, her face cast in a hard mask of defiance.