The village did not turn me out. That would have required a decision, and decisions leave residue. Instead I was given a room the way you make room for weather. A blanket appeared on a rope bed. A boy set down bread and white cheese inside the door and left before I could spend any of my six words on him.
The khamsin arrived in the night, not as wind at first but as pressure. The air came in under the door the colour of weak tea and settled on everything, an invisible dust: the bread, the notebook, the backs of my hands, until the room and I were the same temperature and roughly the same substance. Outside, the palms made a sound like paper being sorted by somebody in a hurry.
I lay on the rope bed and took inventory of what I could still hear. The palms. A dog, far off, arguing with the wind until only the wind remained.
I listened to an irrigation pump coughing into life. It worked for about ten minutes, then it too went quiet.
And underneath all of it, with a fidelity that had no business surviving time and a hundred kilometres of desert, Aisha's voice saying the word Nadaha. I could still see the pencil touching down on the right-hand side of the page.
I report this without explaining it, because I have never managed to explain it. Everything else from that night in Zamalek had gone soft, the way memory softens under the slow friction of the present.
I could not have told you the bartender’s face, or what I drank, or the colour of the wall behind her. But her voice I had intact. The exact drop of it. The lean. She had leaned forward and lowered her voice, and I had thought at the time that she was performing the story. It did not occur to me until that night in the village that the story might have been performing her.
I got up and found my scraps of paper. The dust had been at them, or the sweat had finished what the dust started. “Shukran” was a smudge. “Kam” had dissolved into its own fold. “Fedemin”, the word that had carried me from the overpass at Mounib to this bed, was gone completely, as if the paper had decided I would not be needing directions anymore.
One scrap was still legible. The smallest one, folded the most times.
I did not sleep. I want to be exact about this: it was not that I could not sleep. Sleep had simply become one of the things, along with hunger and the return journey and the man I had been in Cairo, that no longer applied. I lay listening to the wind sorting its papers, calm in a way I had never been in my life, the way I imagine an emptied building is calm. Somewhere after three the pump started again, ran, stopped. Somewhere after four the dog conceded.
Then the wind changed direction, and I heard the water.
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