Effendi

CHAPTER 44 26th October

Hani dreamed of gardens. This wasn’t unusual, gardens figured heavily in her stories and in most of the computer games she liked. In fact, Rashid III took place entirely in a nest of walled gardens, complete with fountains, djinn, houris and tiny gazelle. Only her own computer was now dead and, anyway, she’d finished all the levels of Rashid III months ago. All levels/all difficulties/all characters. It hadn’t been a very hard game.

The software was cheap, though. And that was probably the reason Aunt Nafisa had let her have it.

When Hani woke, at the first call to prayer, she lay there under the covers, which she wasn’t meant to do, and thought about gardens. Then she thought about God. After that she thought about gardens and God. And then she got up, wrapped herself tightly in her dressing gown and went to find Raf.

“Jannah means garden or heaven,” Hani told herself as she opened her door. “And paradiso also means heaven. So paradiso means jannah. SS Jannah. And I’ve got a list of other clues.”

She was talking to herself because Ifritah wasn’t there. Raf had said Hani could come to the mansion with him and Khartoum but the grey cat had to stay with Donna at the madersa. That was because Ifritah was a wild cat and no one had taught her to do her business outside.

Hani had been planning to look up on the Web how to house-train a cat that was already mostly grown-up, but now she couldn’t do that either. So Ifritah had to stay where she was.

The man who stood guard outside Raf’s door was called Ahmed. Hani knew this because she’d asked him earlier. He was big and dark and sometimes he looked at her and shrugged to the others when he thought she wasn’t looking.

Ahmed said nothing, not even when Hani shined a torch in his face. Just raised his eyebrows and turned the handle for her. Hani realized what the raised eyebrows meant when she saw a lump in the bed next to Uncle Ashraf. The lump was sleeping, safely tucked under a sheet, but Hani could see Zara’s hair poking out at the top.

Hani tried very hard not to be shocked.

After a little while, she decided that she was shocked and went back to her room. Ahmed said nothing to Hani on her way out either. Instead of going back to bed Hani got dressed, wrote Zara a note that she left with Ahmed, then went down to the kitchens to find Khartoum.

The rest of the day, while Ashraf worked at the precinct and Zara walked, ghostlike and silent, through the formal gardens at the mansion, looking at statues without seeing them, Hani sat at a kitchen table with an Italian dictionary, three volumes of Dante and a notepad. After a while she decided it might be easier if she just concentrated on the pictures.

The volumes of the Divina Commedia came from the General’s study, as did the notepad and fountain pen. So too did a list of all the working computers in the city that still had functioning modems/lines/firewire. The list was handwritten, distressingly brief and the original was meant for Ashraf’s eyes only. Which was why Hani kept the copy she’d made in her pocket.

Ashraf came back as Tuesday evening began its slide into darkness, trailing his shadows behind him; although Hakim and Ahmed didn’t go with Raf when he walked out into the garden to talk to Zara. Whatever he said to her, they slept in different rooms that night.