He pushed him toward the desert, saying, “We’ll go through the desert of al-Darasa so that we won’t pass Idris’ house.”
They advanced deeper into the desert, Qadri stumbling as he was forced along by his father’s iron grip on his shoulder. Adham took long steps and asked, in a voice like an old man’s, “Tell me. Did you hit him? What did you hit him with? How was he when you left him?”
Qadri did not answer. His father’s hand was like iron, but he did not feel it. His pain was intense but he said nothing. He wished that the sun had never risen.
“Have a heart, Qadri—say something. What do you know about heart? I condemned myself to torment the day you were born. For twenty years I’ve been haunted by curses, and here I am begging for mercy from someone who doesn’t know what it is.”
Qadri began to cry, until his shoulder began to shake under Adham’s unyielding grip, and kept on crying until Adham saw how agonized he felt, but Adham said, “Is that your answer? Why, Qadri? Why? What got into you? Confess now, in the dark, before you see yourself in daylight.”
“I hope day never comes,” exclaimed Qadri.
“We are a family of darkness, we will never see daylight! I thought evil lived in Idris’ house, but here it is in our own blood. Idris cackles and gets drunk and disgraces himself, but we kill one another. God! Did you kill your brother?”
“Never!”
“Then where is he?”
“I didn’t mean to kill him!”
“But he’s dead!” shouted Adham.
Qadri sobbed, and his father’s grip tightened on his shoulder. So Humam had been murdered—the flower of all his work, his grandfather’s pet—as if he had never been. Without this tearing pain, I would never have believed it.
They came to the big boulder.
“Where did you leave him, murderer?” asked Adham in a heavy voice.
Qadri headed toward the spot where he had dug his brother’s grave and stood there, between the boulder and the mountain.
“Where is your brother?” Adham asked. “I don’t see anything.”
“I buried him here,” said Qadri almost inaudibly.
“You buried him?!” screamed Adham. He drew a box of matches from his pocket, struck one and studied the grave by its light until he saw a disturbed patch of earth and the path of the corpse that ended there. Adham moaned in pain and began to scoop away dirt with his trembling hands. He worked grimly until his fingers encountered Humam’s head. He dug his hands under Humam’s armpits and gently pulled the corpse out of the dirt. He knelt beside it and laid his hands on Humam’s head, his eyes closed, like a statue of hopelessless and defeat. He sighed deeply.
“Forty years of my life seem like feeble nonsense when I look at your corpse, my son.”
Suddenly he stood and stared at Qadri, standing on the other side of the corpse, and felt a blind rage for several moments before speaking. “Humam will go back home carried on your back,” he said heavily.
Qadri started in terror and drew back, but the man swiftly stepped around the corpse and grabbed him by the shoulder, screaming, “Carry your brother!”
“I can’t,” wailed Qadri.
“You were able to kill him.”
“Father, I can’t.”
“Don’t call me Father! Anyone who kills his own brother has no father, no mother and no brother!”
“I can’t.”
Adham’s grip closed more tightly on him. “It’s the killer’s job to carry his victim.”
Qadri tried to squirm out of his grasp but Adham would not let him, and in his shocked condition could not stop hitting Qadri in the face, though the boy did not flinch or cry out from the pain. Then the man stopped hitting him and said, “Don’t waste time—your mother is waiting.”
Qadri trembled when he remembered his mother, and pleaded, “Just let me disappear.”
Adham pushed him toward the body. “Get going. We’ll carry him together.”
Adham turned to the corpse and put his hands under Humam’s armpits, and Qadri bent and put his hands under the ankles. They lifted the body together and moved slowly toward the desert of al-Darasa. Adham was so sunk in pain and shock that he had no sense of physical pain, or of any other feeling. Qadri still suffered from the throbbing of his heart and the shaking of his limbs. His nostrils were filled with a piercing, earthy smell, while the touch of the corpse spread from his hands to every part of his own body. The darkness was opaque, though the horizon twinkled with the lights of companionable neighborhoods. Qadri felt his despair cutting off what breath he had left, and he stopped.
“I’ll carry the body alone,” he told his father. He placed one arm under the back and the other under the knees, and walked in front of Adham.