by Parker Bilal
‘Why have I not heard anything about this?’
A smile broadened on Sami’s face. ‘Finally, you are beginning to see the light. This is the future of journalism. There is very little in the mainstream media on this.’
‘But these aren’t newspapers, or agencies.’
‘These are what you call weblogs. Anyone can go online and set one up. It’s a new form of journalism. Basically people gather information and post it for the world to see.’
‘What’s the difference between that and making it up?’
Sami gave Makana an exasperated look. ‘This is about consensus. If enough people report something then it will eventually be corroborated. The big agencies feed people what they think they want to hear. Right now, nobody is interested in this stuff. Ten years from now we’ll see. People want to tell their own stories. The media is all about protecting corporate interests.’
‘I thought that was the state.’
‘In this country they protect the state, but out there in the great democracies of the world they protect corporate power. Government is subordinate to those interests, so it’s much the same thing under a different name.’
‘Did you find anything out about the other thing I asked you for?’
‘The woman you mentioned? Yes.’ Sami flipped through a spiral notebook, pages flying back and forth until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here it is. The organisation exists. Rania even said she had heard they do good work. They get money from Holland and a couple of Nordic countries. They defend women. What are you looking for?’
‘I’m not sure. Nothing in particular, really,’ Makana said. ‘I just wanted to be sure.’
‘I couldn’t really find much on this Zahra Sharif. She is a bit of a mystery, but then,’ Sami shrugged, ‘we all are, aren’t we?’
‘Forget it,’ said Makana. ‘It was just a thought. How about something to eat?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’ Sami reached for his telephone and began calling a take-out place that delivered. Makana walked out into the open air and lit a cigarette. The lights across the river glittered in the water below him. What was it that made him feel so uneasy? Makana had the sense that he was on the trail of something much bigger than he had bargained for. He wasn’t sure he could see where the edges were and he didn’t like that.
II
Siwa Oasis
Chapter Ten
At eight the next morning Makana boarded a West Delta bus in Abdelmoneim Riyad Square. He found a seat which he reserved with his holdall and then waited in the road, smoking, for the moment of departure. His fellow passengers appeared to have come bearing all their worldly possessions. Television sets the size of dining tables, shapeless nylon bags that could have concealed a small camel, carton boxes strung together with complex Chinese knots, along with sacks and plastic suitcases bound with tied leather belts with broken buckles. There was something touching and medieval about it. Less of an excursion than an exodus, as if passengers were trying to squeeze the entire city into the luggage hold beneath the bus. Makana had come prepared for any eventuality which meant that he was quite surprised when the driver got in behind the wheel and the bus left on time. There were no delays either. They stopped just once along the way and for five minutes only to allow people to use the restrooms and for the smokers to alleviate their suffering. Smoking was not permitted on board.
The trip gave Makana plenty of time to think about the case. He stared out of the window at the stark emptiness of the landscape, the desolate struggle against oblivion. The image of the badly burnt body inside the oxygen tent still haunted him. It had tapped straight into his concerns about his own daughter and his imaginings of what kind of a vulnerable situation Nasra might be in. The truth was, he concluded, as the lush turquoise of the Mediterranean flooded into view, that he would not rest until he found his daughter, now that he was convinced she was alive.
They turned west along the coast and the road ran past the high walls of compounds that contained blocks of holiday apartments. Like onshore reefs left high and dry in a sea of white sand, they varied in quality and age; some were decaying comfortably into middle age while others stood out in their bright decadence, shining symbols of rising inequality in the country. Beyond lay the sea, a miracle after the dun-coloured landscape, or so it seemed.
Evening was falling as they arrived in Mersah Matruh and Makana found a room overlooking a deserted square through which lone taxi cabs roamed hopelessly seeking fares. In the summer this place was teeming with holidaymakers, but at this time of year it was deserted. From the window of his room he saw lights which turned out to be a restaurant, although he was the only one interested in eating. A handful of solitary men were following a football match on a television set perched on top of a refrigerator. El Ahly and Assiut were playing, the middle-aged waiter informed him, a gold tooth winking in the neon light. He seemed to think this might be of interest. When Makana asked him about buses to Siwa he said there was one every two hours. Or maybe some of them weren’t buses but shared taxis. ‘What can you do?’ He shrugged, as if the world had a habit of delivering disappointments. Even with the match on, the place seemed barely alive. The food was a disappointment but Makana was too hungry to care. After that he walked a bit to stretch his legs. Taxis juddered alongside him and the drivers peered up at him, imploring him to take them somewhere.
At the bus station the next morning Makana’s curiosity was drawn by a couple dressed in modern city clothes. The woman disappeared behind the shelter of a shack offering snacks and soft drinks. The man held a bag from which he produced a garment that he passed round the side to the woman. When she eventually emerged the colourful clothes she had been wearing had vanished from sight. Even her face was hidden. Covered from head to toe in black she picked her way through the debris of discarded bottles and strips of plastic bags, the broken rubble and patches of black where engine oil had seeped into the sand. She walked with remarkable grace, he thought, like a peacock strolling through the grounds of a marble palace, to take her place among the people waiting for the bus.
Alexander the Great was said to have travelled this same route, following a flock of birds that led him to the oasis. The desert had once swallowed Cambyses and his entire army whole. The road followed the old caravan tracks. Nowadays it took four hours. By camel the journey would have taken nine days. Several of Makana’s fellow passengers were Bedouins on their way out to work on the oil and gas rigs. They asked the driver to pull over before stepping down. Then, looking round them to get their bearings – there was nothing to see – they covered their faces from the wind and sand with their scarves and set off towards the empty horizon.
Hot air blew in through the windows and rest was made impossible by a non-stop sequence of videos playing on the overhead monitor. A talk show in which a smooth, well-dressed man counselled the young audience in the delicate matter of love in an Islamic climate. Men and women sat on opposite sides of the studio. They were dressed in jeans and T-shirts advertising rock bands. Some of the women had their hair uncovered but most didn’t. The host consulted a laptop which provided handy statistics about happiness. It was a combination of a game show and a lecture. Young women listened raptly as he told them that they had three important duties in life: loving their husbands, raising children and improving themselves.
The bus rattled its way up a low ridge, with a painful grating of gears being ground down as they swayed through a narrow, rocky pass. For a moment or two, as the driver wrestled the gearstick into place, they were afforded a view of what lay beyond. Behind them the desert stretched out in unbroken dull monotony, flat brown and devoid of anything to distract the eye. Ahead the road sank gently down into the bowl of the oasis where a rich green sea of palm fronds bobbed in the warm air, fringed by the blue-grey pool of the lakes that kept the desert at bay.
As Makana stepped down from the bus and dug his way through the crowd of travellers, excited relatives and hills of luggage,
a plump boy, his trouser cuffs dragging in the dust, sauntered up. From his right hand dangled a knotted length of frayed rope attached to a metal tube.
‘Hotel, effendi?’ A knock-kneed bag of skin and bones nuzzled the ground beside him. It seemed as good a place to start as any. The buggy creaked and the wheels were lopsided, but the boy grabbed his holdall enthusiastically, fending off the competition with a deft crack of the whip. The donkey had grey scabs on its back where sores had healed over. It hardly looked strong enough to stand, let alone pull two grown men. Bulbul, as he said people called him, was not actually a man, of course, but a boy of around fifteen. Physically, however, he was heavier than a lot of men. He wasn’t fat so much as well padded. His body seemed to be held together in a rough kind of way by his clothes. A striped polo shirt with a rip under one arm and trousers that were coming apart at the seams. The hems dragged behind him in the dirt like reversed duck feet.
‘Here for tourism, effendi? Ahlan wasahlan. People come from all over the world and I show them around. No one knows Siwa like Bulbul.’
The sides of the little two-wheeled trap were plastered with stickers donated by grateful visitors: Boston Red Sox – Orlando FL, the Sunshine State – Cleveland Cavaliers. Others spoke of Milano, Barcelona and Zamalek. Football the language of international understanding.
‘Visit Cleopatra’s Eye, Jebel Mawtah, the mountain of death, ruins, Alexander’s tomb?’
‘Perhaps a hotel to begin with.’
‘High, low, medium? You look like a well-travelled man, sir. I know just the place for you.’
The exhausted donkey looked as though it might collapse at any moment, but he whipped it into a tired frenzy and they clip-clopped along the road. Sitting beside the boy, Makana was regretting his choice. Heads turned as if he were on public display. The hotel was a stone’s throw from the bus station but the enterprising Bulbul had taken him by the scenic route. They turned and rode up and down and round for what seemed like ages but could only have been about ten minutes. The donkey was also clearly accustomed to this tour and after a promising beginning slowed his pace to almost a halt, head nodding up and down. Perhaps he was aware that once he started talking Bulbul’s attention lapsed.
‘The brother has come from far away? Ma’sha Allah, welcome, sir. Food, lodging, sightseeing, all of these things. Bulbul knows best.’
On the main square stood a large house with high walls over which luxuriant fig trees and regal palms poked up. The boy reached underneath his seat for a small stone which he tossed casually at the green gate. It struck the metal with a resounding clang. Bulbul gave no explanation, simply clicked his tongue and flicked the reins as they trotted on.
A painting of Field Marshal Rommel hung in the gloomy lobby of The Desert Fox Hotel. Makana wondered if anyone knew who he actually was, or if the identity of the Afrikakorps leader had simply become mislaid in the corridors of time. An idle foreign curiosity. The man who appeared behind the reception desk was a sad figure in need of a haircut and a shave. His shirt was buttoned wrongly, leaving a string of uneven gaps down his chest. He eyed Makana warily, as if he could pick and choose his customers.
‘The brother is here on business?’
‘Family. I’m looking for relatives on my wife’s side. It’s a matter of inheritance. Does the name Musab Khayr mean anything?’
‘No.’ The man scratched his chest through a gap in his shirt. ‘You should try the police.’
‘I’ll do that.’
The green walls of the room were speckled with red flecks which, on closer inspection, turned out to be squashed flies and mosquitos. They were spread across every available surface, walls, grimy window, wardrobe and bathroom mirror. Even the light switch had a couple. Makana lay down and shut his eyes to be woken instantly by a spine-twisting shriek as the muezzin in the mosque next door called people to evening prayer. The amplification distorted the sound to the point where it was just an electronic wail, impossible to comprehend.
As he made his way downstairs, Makana scratched the back of his hands where the mosquitos had already struck. In the lobby a girl of about sixteen stood behind the desk. Down the street he found a brightly lit place cluttered with computers and telephone booths. The man who owned it was clad in a skull cap and gellabiya. Long-winded recitations from the Quran droned on over the sound system.
‘I need to use a telephone,’ said Makana. Listlessly, the man indicated one of the booths that had been clumsily assembled on the opposite wall. They were very basic structures that looked as though they had been hammered together by an enthusiastic chimpanzee. With no ceilings and no attempt to insulate them for soundproofing, which meant that the voices of every caller rose up into a cacophony, competing with one another in the narrow space. The man in the next booth was actually yelling. Maybe they had a bad line, or else the person he was talking to was far away. People often had the impression they had to shout to make themselves heard over great distances. There were burn marks on the shelf on which the telephone stood where previous callers had rested their cigarettes. Names and numbers were scribbled on the wall in what resembled a logbook of longing and despair. Makana tried the number Zahra gave him and felt relieved when there was no answer. He had no idea what he would have said if she had picked up the phone and so declined to leave a message.
In a café down the road, he waited for what felt like hours before a simple omelette arrived swimming in so much oil that he had trouble swallowing it. The night air was clear and cool. The stars hung in the sky, but the silence was unnerving. The town seemed deserted after dark. Eventually he made his way back. In his room he fell asleep to the sound of a donkey wheezing over and over again in a wretched, strangled groan.
Chapter Eleven
Nagy, the hotel manager, was talking to a stuffed sack of a man in a police uniform when Makana came downstairs the next morning. They broke off when they caught sight of him. On closer inspection the policeman had the broad chest of a former weightlifter gone to seed, though his grip was still firm.
‘Mr Makana, welcome to Siwa. I am Sergeant Hamama, acting police chief for the town. Mr Nagy here tells me you are looking for someone.’
‘A relative on my wife’s side of the family.’ Makana wondered how long this story would hold. ‘Actually, I was planning to visit you first thing today.’
‘So, I have saved you the trouble.’
The sergeant was overweight and out of breath. He was also in bad need of a haircut. His grin revealed a missing eye tooth. The leather holster on his hip had been repaired by some local artesan. The wide stitching made it look like a traditional tribal garment of some kind.
‘We are famous for our hospitality,’ said the sergeant, hitching up his trousers that were in constant danger of falling down. ‘Perhaps I can help you with your enquiries.’
‘That would be very kind,’ said Makana, wondering where all this was leading.
Nagy followed them with a cold eye from behind the front desk as they walked out of the hotel and climbed into a battered dark-blue Chevrolet pickup with ‘Police’ in faded white letters on the side. The windscreen was divided by a forked crack and the doors screeched in protest at being opened and closed. As they rolled off down the street Makana was aware of the attention they drew. He wondered at the wisdom of being seen with the local police sergeant.
‘We are a very small town,’ Hamama began. ‘A very close community. Which means that people are protective. To someone from the outside that can seem a little daunting.’
Makana pulled out his cigarettes and offered them. Hamama clicked his tongue.
‘Thank you, but no thanks. We have clean air out here, I always say, why soil it?’
The pickup clattered along the stony road, past the pockmarked building that was the police station and along out through rows of palm trees. Hamama was chuckling to himself.
‘I’m sure that in the big city you have all kinds of marvellous systems to record births and deaths and all the
rest of it. Out here we have our own ways. Out beyond those trees is the desert and there are no rules out there. No government. A lot of people have no idea what year they were born, or what day of the month. How do you fit them into your system?’
They passed a cemetery. Uneven mounds of bare earth. Here and there a simple piece of wood or metal bearing the name of the deceased. Three women draped from head to foot in black walked by in the opposite direction. Their faces were covered by a sheet of cloth so you couldn’t even see their eyes.
‘Are you from here originally?’
‘Born and raised. Spent all of my life here, apart from the years I was in Mersa Matruh training to be a policeman.’
‘So, in a small town like this you must have a pretty good grasp of everybody.’
‘Well, pretty good, but this man is the next best thing to a computer. Amm Ahmed.’
‘Amm Ahmed?’
‘He’s lived longer than anyone and he remembers everything. You’ll see,’ Hamama smiled. The car rocked from side to side as they edged off the road onto a narrow track of deep ruts cutting through the dry mud. The house was so well hidden between the thick palm trees that Makana didn’t see it until they were almost touching it. The adobe walls were cracked and dried with age. They blended in perfectly with the trees that surrounded it.
It was hard to say how old Amm Ahmed actually was. Frail, with a tiny head covered in white bristles, he stood half in shadow just back from the doorway, as motionless as a tree himself.
‘We’ve come to consult you, Amm Ahmed,’ said Sergeant Hamama by way of an introduction. He stood bow-legged in front of his car and simply raised his voice. ‘This man is looking for people from his wife’s family.’ He looked Makana over.
‘What family is that?’ The old man seemed to be a little hard of hearing. Makana raised his voice. There were turtle doves cooing nearby, and somewhere in the distance he thought he could hear a man singing.
