Egypt

9

When Kiya saw me standing there, her smile instantly died. She half-closed the door, murmuring, ‘No no no no no,’ over and over. When she stopped, I stood listening to the terrible silence on the other side of the door. I called her name quietly.

‘I can’t let you in. If I let you in, it’ll be true,’ she said, eventually. ‘Please go away.’

‘I can’t. I’ll wait here until you’re ready,’ I replied, through the door.

As I stood there, waiting quietly, the people going about their daily business in the street seemed small and irrelevant. How little they knew, I thought, of the darkness of death behind and beneath and inside everything in their lives. How little they understood their own mortality, as they went unknowingly through each day in the enchantment of new clothes, and appetites fulfilled, and amusing love affairs. They had forgotten that at any moment all we hold dear, all we take for granted, all we cherish and prize, can be torn away from us.

Eventually, the door opened silently. I sat with Kiya in the small room at the front of the house. Khety and I had rarely socialized together; and although I knew where he lived, I had never visited him at home. Now I saw this other side of his life: the ornaments and trinkets, the little divine statuettes, the average-quality furniture, the efforts to make the place look better than it was. A pair of his house sandals waited by the door for his return.

I told Kiya the simple facts. I heard myself swearing and promising I would track down Khety’s killer, and bring him to justice. But the words were meaningless to her. She just stared right through me. Nothing I could do would redeem what had been lost, for ever.

Suddenly her focus seemed to swim up from the black depths of despair.

‘You were his best friend. He was never as happy as when he was working with you.’

I had to turn my face away. Outside, the noises of the street continued. Somewhere a girl was singing lightly, casually, a phrase of a love song.

‘I have to ask you something: did he tell you where he was going last night?’ I said, despising myself.

She shook her head.

‘He never told me anything,’ she replied. ‘He thought it was better that way. It wasn’t. Not for me, anyway.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘This new child will never know his father,’ she said, as she looked down at her belly.

‘I will care for it as if it were my own,’ I said.

Kiya was rocking back and forth, as if trying to console the unborn child in her belly for the loss of its father. Then she suddenly looked up.

‘You argued with each other that night, didn’t you?’ There was still nothing accusing in her voice. Only sorrow.

I nodded, relieved to confess it. She looked at me with the strangest expression, a mixture of pity and disappointment; but before I could say more, suddenly the door opened, and their daughter appeared. Her cheerful, delicate face was quickly wide-eyed as she absorbed the strange atmosphere in the room. The sight of the child instantly released Kiya’s tears. She threw her arms open, and the child ran into them in confusion and distress, while her mother sobbed, grasping the little girl as tightly as she could.

I stood outside in the futile sunlight, feeling as empty as a clay vessel. I began walking without direction. Every street vendor’s cry and call of laughter, every snatch of birdsong, every friendly shout from neighbour to neighbour, reminded me I no longer belonged to the land of the living, but had become a shadow. I found myself eventually facing the glittering imperturbability of the Great River. I sat down and stared at its perpetual waters, green and brown. I gazed at the sun, shining as if nothing had happened. I thought of the God of the Nile, in his cavern, pouring out the waters of the Great River from his jugs. I thought of the long futility of the impossible days ahead. And I felt a new coldness take possession of me: a single-minded impulse, a purity of intention, like a blade of hatred. I would find Khety’s killer. And then I would kill him.