by Warren Adler
The sun was momentarily blinding, and they were herded by rough hands into a huddled, squatting mass before the bloated man, who sat watching them through glazed eyes. The edge of his tongue darted nervously at the edges of his thick lips as his eyes turned on Si.
“I knew you would find her,” Zakki said, the sweat cascading over his cheeks in long oily blobs. He looked sick, spent, near death himself.
“Farrah’s children,” Zakki said, spitting into the ground. He surveyed the group huddled around Isis. “Farouk’s filthy brood.” Isis, in a movement that seemed to symbolize her contempt, bared a heavy milk-filled breast and placed its nipple in the baby’s mouth.
Si, squatting next to Isis, watched as the three, thick-featured dark men stood arrogantly around the motley group, their impatient authority inscribed in glazed eager eyes. He looked across the wide expanse of umber earth, still confused as to why he had not run. To where, he thought suddenly, as if that might satisfy his disappointment in himself.
Then his eyes suddenly shifted, affording a view of a wide pie-shaped chunk of green field in which, at that moment, a black spot, like some restless fly, was moving. Samya! He had not yet come to grips with his own fear, but her emergence shocked him into the inevitable reality of their impending slaughter.
“You can’t do this,” he shouted at their captors, shattering the tableau as the sweating Zakki confronted the waiting helplessness of his victims. He said the words in a high-pitched shriek, hoping they might carry to the advancing figure of Samya, whose pace accelerated as she grew closer.
From where she approached, he knew she could not see the Mercedes. Si tore his eyes away, knowing their direction would give her away. Please, Samya, he begged her in his heart. Save yourself. There was nothing he could do.
The three oldest boys sat cross-legged in the dust, the oldest glum but still defiant, obviously misunderstanding his vulnerability. As Zakki’s face beamed down at him, he spat insolently, observing the bubble of his dust-laden spit, while his eyes rose to meet Zakki’s look with contempt.
“Strip them,” Zakki ordered, the action clearly defined for the brutish men, who grabbed the boys and tore their clothes away, revealing slender, reedlike white bodies, unburnished by the sun. The oldest struggled against the man and it took two to hold him. Observing her children in this moment of terror, Isis began a piercing ululating endless shriek, whipping through the shimmering air like a tornado.
Si caught the glint of metal stakes. One of the men was hammering them into the ground with the butt of his weapon. Zakki watched, his eyes deadened by the monotonous efficiency. The oldest boy was pushed to the ground, belly down, his face pressed into the ground. He spat the dust from his air passages, as his legs and arms were tied to each stake, leaving him spread-eagled, his fledgling testicles hanging from his middle like two wrinkled, overripe plums.
Watching the boy, squirming and grunting helplessly on the ground, Si could not find his voice, and his limbs felt heavy and inert, rooted to the ground. The staking process was repeated on the other two boys, the three of them resisting the tethers in an undulating dance macabre.
Si felt the transference of helplessness, although his mind struggled to codify the events. A shaft of light pierced the veil of his confusion and, seeing the moving steel in Zakki’s puffy fingers, the knowledge of this terrible obsessive retribution transmitted itself instantly. He knew now what Isis had done.
Almost at the exact moment of this understanding, the black-clad figure of Samya intruded, amplifying his horror, magnetizing his eyes. She was moving in a crouch, oblivious to their having spotted her. A burst of gunfire, like some hideous counterpoint to Isis’s frenetic ululation, split the air, freezing the advancing black image.
Si stood up, shouting, “Go back, Samya. Go back.”
The figure hesitated, seemed to heed the warning, started to move away. Another burst of gunfire rang out, halting the receding image, which disappeared from sight in the bean plants of the green field.
The volcano of his anger erupted, destroying logic, concentrating every morsel of fettered energy in his body, which became a weapon as it shot forward to grasp the soft throat of the clammy Zakki. Operating as a separate intelligence, his hand clutched the soft knife hand, which released the handle instantly, as if he had simply surrendered and willingly handed it over. From behind, one hand grasped a handful of pinched flesh from Zakki’s belly, the other the knife handle, the point of the blade held to the throat, the skin dented to the brink of its tenuous point of entry at the jugular vein.
All sound ceased. Even the nursing child had stopped the smacking, greedy gulps of sustenance. Si felt the sweat of Zakki’s body oozing like mucilage from the pores of his yellowed flesh. Even the dark men had frozen, the muzzles of their weapons pointed unsurely toward the shield of Zakki’s body.
“Tell them to put their guns down,” Si said. His voice uttered the words with cool, almost disembodied indifference as the point of the knife moved a millimeter more into the soft flesh.
“It doesn’t matter,” Zakki whispered. The heart in his bloated body seemed to fibrillate, and he felt the man’s strength ebb, the will disintegrate.
Without a definitive order from Zakki, the men moved in choreographed unison, pointing the muzzles of their weapons at Isis’s temple, then moving them, roaming over the children like camera sentries. He had to impress upon himself that it was indeed him, Si, involved in the scene, not a screen image of himself playacting some fictitious danger.
He felt Zakki’s flesh puddled in his hand, while his sweat-rimmed eyes groped for some logic in this moonscape of horror. He saw the writhing, staked young bodies, the twins huddled and trembling, their faces hidden in Isis’s lap, the baby pressed in the billowy white, lightly veined blob of breast, the dark hard-faced ice-blooded thugs.
Beyond mere vision, he absorbed the image of Ezzat, his blood-sodden body crumpled like a marionette on the umber ground. And Samya! A vibrating sob escaped from someplace deep in his chest, like a harsh pleading protest against this personal holocaust. Outside himself, he watched the scene helplessly, unable to find the will to design some response beyond this melodrama of violence so foreign to his life’s experience.
Isis suddenly stood up. The twins continued to clutch her black skirts. She moved toward Zakki, the emerald eyes like dead green beads, lips clamping all sounds shut, the flesh paling under its bronze patina. The fat man’s body stirred beneath his grip, but Si’s arm held his neck rigid. Zakki’s breath came in quick gasps as he tried, it seemed, to shrink inside his vast cocoon of flesh. The three men tensed, waiting for some sign from Zakki.
“If they touch her, I will kill you,” Si said. He saw Zakki’s wrist flex in a staying motion that kept the men frozen.
Isis came close, as if she were stepping into some invisible spotlight. Zakki lifted his eyes, locked onto hers, the communication between them silent, intense. Si could sense their kinship of hate, a life flow so tangible that it seemed to electrify the overheated air. In Isis’s glazed eyes, he saw his mother’s mysterious kayf, that look beyond life, observing suddenly what had eluded him, at first, the real connective link, unexplainable, the immutable alliance of blood.
Her lips poised as if to speak. Instead, the ululation began again, shrill, piercing, transmitting the anguish and pain of any dying life form able to protest in the face of impending death. The cry rose and became unbearable to hear as it belched out of her mouth like a sheet of hot blue flame. He felt Zakki squirming under his grasp, oblivious to the knifepoint that had broken the skin’s surface, showing a single bubble of oozing red blood. Si would have gladly shoved the knife forward if it could cut off that sound.
But something else was happening in the midst of this cacophony, something that had been lost in the onslaught of visual and auditory imagery. She had been holding the child still attached to her breast, one browned ha
nd supporting its small pink rounded buttocks. With her other hand, she held the back of the child’s head, pressing it against her breast. The small frame quivered and struggled, its little feet kicking helplessly, its hands tearing at the material of the black malaya. My God, Si screamed within himself, she is killing the baby.
“Isis. Please,” he shouted.
But the ululating wail drowned out his shout. He wanted to drop the knife and reach out to snatch the baby from her grasp, torn now between impossible alternatives. The dark men stood watching, mesmerized, their eyes fixed on Zakki, poised to obey.
She stood there, defiant, standing on the outer rim of the human abyss, as the baby struggled and pawed at her, fighting for its life.
“You can’t do this,” Si screamed at her, but again his voice was lost in the eerie sound. Inexplicably, as if his own godlike role of potential death-giver bonded a relationship with Zakki, he hissed his plea into his ear.
“You must make her stop.”
He saw the fat man’s wrist flick and the three men act in unison, grabbing the baby, who had begun to turn blue, and wresting it from her grasp. One man held the gasping baby, with surprising and experienced gentleness, while the two others struggled with Isis.
As if the act signaled its own special alliance, Si relieved his hold on Zakki’s neck and one of the men, as alert as a predatory bird, moved quickly to reach out and grab Si’s hands, twisting the knife from it. He heard it clatter to the ground and, with the sound, the total ebbing of his energy, as he grew limp and dropped to his knees.
The man who held the recovering child put it on the ground, where it squirmed on its back, its arms reaching out for the lost breast, oblivious that this life-giving flesh had just been designated the instrument of its death. The muzzle of his weapon was poised now at Si’s head. Isis’s clucking wail subsided into a whimper, and her emerald eyes reflected the hopeless resignation of defeat.
Si moved toward her, ignoring the gun muzzle, engulfing Isis in a brotherly embrace. As the men released her, she fell against him. He felt her body shiver with hysteria, her tears moistening his djellaba.
Behind him, he heard Zakki breathing in short gasps like a faulty bellows. Turning, he saw a moist, yellow face, puffing and gasping. The knife had again materialized in his hand. With the help of one of the men, he staggered to where the three young boys lay naked and spread-eagled, their exposed fair skin reddening in the relentless noonday sun.
Turning quickly again, Si buried Isis’s face against his chest. He felt her heart beating against his own.
“Forgive me,” he whispered. “What have we done to you?”
He had expected screams, but none came. Time was suspended. He sensed he had entered a vacuum of chronology. Behind him, he heard shuffling footsteps, then saw what was unmistakably Zakki’s shadow, hovering over them like an enveloping black cloud. When he turned, he was looking directly into Zakki’s face. Something had changed. A strangely different demeanor seemed sculpted out of the clay of the old features. An element had disappeared. Hatred!
It was gone now. In its place appeared only the ravaged mask of anguished resignation.
Zakki shook his head. Perhaps it was compassion or understanding, but what he saw in this new face was some primitive acknowledgment that it was possible to transcend vengeance.
Si watched him, sensing his struggle to find words to communicate this transformation. Their eyes searched each other. Was it compassion Si saw? Finally, Zakki could only nod and turn away.
“Thank you,” Si whispered. Zakki could not have heard. He watched him being helped into the car by the three men. He appeared ravaged. Spent. Isis, too, turned to watch the spectacle. Zakki slumped in the seat beside the driver, his eyes glazed, watching them.
He seemed exorcised of all evil, almost benign now, perhaps already turning inward to face the ultimate darkness. Was it possible, Si wondered, for evil, too, to burn out, to end? The sharp anger of the croaking engine startled him. He watched the greedy grasp of the tires’ treads as the car shot forward over the timeworn landscape.
Chapter Forty-Three
For a long time, the survivors remained paralyzed with disbelief. Zakki had cut the bonds of the three boys, covered their bodies again with their tattered djellabas.
The twins had taken refuge against their mother’s flanks, and a stunned and weary Isis recovered the baby and cradled it hungrily in her arms, kissing its face.
“Allah is just,” Isis said. The statement needed no reaction from the others, as they stirred and began moving.
Si held back, sitting in this blood-soaked arena, strewn with dead animals, a visual harbinger of what he might expect if he went to find Samya. The lower rims of his eyelids puddled with tears as he rose and walked toward the field where he had seen her fall. He walked slowly, haltingly, postponing the agony of discovery. Already, he could taste the bitter bile of his own guilt. He had brought this down on them. They were the victims of his own self-indulgence, his own egoism. Did he have to suck their blood to sustain his own life? Suddenly, he wanted to vomit, but could only gag and dry heave, picturing Samya’s pain-distorted death mask.
Along the edge of the field, sprawled in a bed of broad-leafed mature plants, he saw the blob of black. Starting to run toward it, his legs buckled and, he fell.
For a long moment, he could not summon the energy to rise from his knees. It was only when he thought he saw the black blob move that he stood up and ran toward it.
“Samya,” he shouted, sure that he had imagined it. “Samya.”
She was moving. He reached her as she rose, her face reflecting both bewilderment and relief. Assured that she was alive, he examined her clinically, noting that a bullet had apparently grazed her temple, a fraction from certain death, and its force had providentially knocked her unconscious. Beyond that, she seemed fine.
“Isis?” Samya whispered, her alertness returning as her face brightened under his gaze.
“Isis is fine,” he whispered, kissing her forehead.
“I am happy for you.”
“For me?”
He wondered what she meant.
“It’s you that is important to me,” he said.
She rubbed that spot that the bullet had grazed, then sat up and looked toward the mudbrick huts. Isis and her children kneeled around Ezzat’s body. They could hear her ululation of mourning, a plaintive, anguished cry of loss. She turned to him in confusion.
“I don’t understand it either, Samya,” he said, gathering her in his arms.
***
It was dark by the time they had put the place in some reasonable order. The dead donkeys and the dog were dragged over the parched earth some distance from the huts. By tomorrow, the oldest boy assured him, their bones would be picked clean by vultures and other small desert animals. The carcasses of the sheep and goats were hung from hooks in the animal shelter, and the body of Ezzat was sewn into a sheet and placed on boards in the main hut. They would, he knew, bury him tomorrow.
Samya helped Isis prepare the evening meal, and they squatted around a kerosene stove on which a pot of fava beans simmered in a watery mash. He watched Isis’s face in the muted fire’s light. She looked considerably older than her years. Deep lines were etched in her face, and she showed the fatigue of the grueling day.
“Will you be all right?” he asked gently. She looked up vaguely and shrugged. It seemed an alien idea. She would endure, he knew. She had always endured. Nearby, lying on a ragged carpet between the twins, the baby gurgled in its sleep.
“Do you ever think of her?” he asked, explaining, “Our mother.” When she did not respond, he whispered, “Do you forgive her?” He wanted to have this forgiveness, if offered, extended also to him. He felt Samya watching him.
“Forgive?” She repeated the word and he knew she could barely understand its meaning. She was as far re
moved from such concepts as if she had lived on another planet.
All those symbols and values by which he lived seemed meaningless in this place. You are the granddaughter of the last dynasty of Egypt, he wanted to remind her. But that, too, seemed meaningless and inert.
Beyond now, for them, was nothing. No past. No future. The rhythm of life remained unperturbed. The world here was circumscribed and finite with no possibilities beyond birth and death, planting and harvest, the inevitability of good and evil, and its frail division. He felt the ultimate intruder. The gap between them was aeons of space and time. It was a relationship of blood. Simply that. There was no meaning beyond that, he knew now, a mere coincidence.
Then Isis rose, lifted the baby, woke the twins, and they moved drowsily into the main hut. The boys rubbed their eyes and followed, after first shutting off the kerosene fire.
Si lay down on the ragged carpet just vacated by the children, and Samya joined him. She laid her head in the crook of his arm and embraced his chest.
“I should never have disturbed them,” Si said. “I did them no good.” He knew she was listening, but she didn’t respond, and he caressed her hair.
“As soon as it’s light,” he whispered, “let’s get away from here. You and me.” His tongue grew heavy. “I have my place.”
“Where?” she asked, her body tensing.
“With you,” he said, feeling her body relax, “and yours with me.” It occurred to him then that the only real place was here, rooted to the land. Out there was only wandering, a perpetual search in the mysterious jungle of the world. Perhaps love was also a place, he thought. Only time would give him that answer. Then he grew drowsy and fell asleep.
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