Ahmed slumped against a lamppost. He couldn’t take another step. His eyes blurred with exhaustion.
His first thought had been to find Ibrahim’s relatives in Molenbeek—maybe they’d take him in for the night; perhaps Ibrahim would even still be there. But Molenbeek was on the other side of the city, and whichever way Ahmed tried to go, he’d found himself heading toward more police cars and sirens. The police, he realized, would be all over Molenbeek, searching for terrorists and asking to see people’s documents.
So he’d reversed his route, making a wide loop to avoid the School of Happiness and Max’s block before cutting back into Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. At least here, in the fancier neighborhood, there was less police activity. But he risked running into Fontaine; Ahmed had no idea how much of the commune he patrolled. He needed to get out of Brussels. But there were no buses or metros or trains running, and even if he managed to walk all the way out of the commune and into the countryside, he had no place to go. He had no money, and he couldn’t imagine anyone willing to take him in after the attack unless they wanted to harm him, like Ermir.
This was when he’d collapsed against the lamppost, too hopeless to keep trudging on. He just wanted to go back to the cellar and to Max. He knew Max would be worried. He hadn’t even said goodbye, except for his note. He’d told himself that there hadn’t been time, but the truth was that it had seemed too painful.
On the other side of the traffic circle, a pair of stone towers rose over a small square like the minarets of a mosque. They drew him across the deserted streets, and he stumbled through them and into the iron arms of a large gate.
He found himself in a park, in front of the dry basin of a fountain. Paths stretched in several directions, lit by ghostly white lights. Ahmed chose one and started walking, past a large stone crucifix soldered to a rock. It made him feel as if he were trespassing, but he reminded himself that the gate was open.
How strange the path was—cobbled in the center, but paved with large flat stones on either edge. Wooden benches lined the path at intervals, tempting Ahmed, but he didn’t sit down. To stop moving was to fall asleep, and he couldn’t risk someone finding him lying out in the open. As his head drooped, he noticed rows of small holes in some of the big flat stones. The holes were all the same size and ran in neat horizontal lines. They seemed like a code. He wondered what the patterns meant—why some of the stones had the holes and others didn’t. It was only as he passed under one of the ghostly white halogen lights that Ahmed noticed letters etched between the holes.
C-A-M-I-L-L-E, he read. Then on the next line, 1848–1877.
Ahmed jumped back. He was standing on a gravestone. The path was paved with gravestones. But he wasn’t in a cemetery, was he? He looked around—at the wide grassy lawn, at a basketball court. No, he was definitely in a park. But it was a park where every day people walked over gravestones. Strollers and dogs and children on bikes wore them down till the names disappeared and all that was left were the holes of the chisel, and eventually just smooth, blank stone.
Ahmed sank into a crouch, blinded by tears. He knew it was silly to cry. Life was always taking place over death. But those fading names were his mother and father. They were Jasmine and Nouri. He suddenly realized that the bomb had fallen a year ago tomorrow, March 23. Except it was probably after midnight, which meant it was already tomorrow. And here he was, on the anniversary of their deaths, walking over them, grinding them deeper into dust.
He staggered to his feet, not bothering to wipe the tears that cascaded down his cheeks, but letting them fall on Camille’s gravestone. School was gone. Max was gone. His family mattered to no one but himself. They were losers of history, names that would vanish and become anonymous numbers—one of ten thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, a million. He had become a ghost himself, wandering the night, trying not to frighten anyone. He no longer had the strength to build a new life for himself, especially here in Europe, where he wasn’t even wanted.
He looked up at the stars.
“You should have made the bomb fall at night, hitting us all!” he shouted in Arabic.
His voice echoed across the empty park. But he couldn’t even stand there, shaking his fist at Allah. He couldn’t even be that brave. His cowardly instinct to survive wouldn’t let him. At the sound of his own voice—the angry, young Muslim everyone feared—he took off down the gravestone path. He ran till he saw a large wooden globe set high on a mound with several tubes poking off it. A fence surrounded this curious octopus-like structure, and it was only as Ahmed scaled it that he realized it was part of a playground and that the tubes were slides.
Ahmed stormed the rubberized mound and scrambled into the wooden globe through a small opening in its side. It wasn’t much of a shelter—not with a draft of cool night air blowing through the opening—but at least no one could see him inside it. As long as he left by morning, when children and their parents would arrive, he was unlikely to be discovered.
He had found a way to stay hidden—at least till morning. But as he curled into a ball and rested his head on his school backpack, Ahmed felt no relief, only a hollow emptiness.