3

IN A WIDE STREET NEAR Insal’s home, heaps of refuse rose up in piles to form a clutch of pyramids, the product of the trash collectors’ months-long strike. At first, a little mound took shape in the middle of the road, and then everyone who threw out their garbage would launch it to the top of the mound, and the mound grew taller until it had become a great hill as high as the Giza pyramids.

Then a second pyramid appeared, and a third, and a fourth, and then there were seven pyramids stacked down the road’s center, and it was dubbed Pyramids Street. And for some reason, people forgot that it had been they who had built them.

A man was walking there, trailed by two girls, one eleven, the other a child of four. The man had come from nearby, from beneath the overpass on the main road where he slept each night, while the girls had come as fugitives from an insane father. They remembered little, had no need for memory in the first place, for what was to come would be sufficient to leave the most terrible impression on the older girl. She knew that what was to come was terrible and knew, too, that there was no escaping it, and she surrendered to this knowledge absolutely. This sense of inevitability was her only comfort.

The man started rummaging through a little heap of garbage down a side street. The great pyramids were no good for picking. He did this every day, extracting whatever he could eat from the smaller piles. Whatever was not yet rotten—its stink gone and the mold just beginning to spread—he would eat before it turned completely, before it fell apart or changed color. He’d pick out an apple to sniff, to detect the underlying hint of mold before the rot claimed the whole fruit. If he saw a scrap of decomposing bread, a piece of fruit putrefying at the edges, he’d bite off the decayed part, spit it out, and eat the rest. The garbage man.

The older girl mastered her natural delicacy and started picking through another pile. A minute in, she found a whole loaf, still fresh and supple. From his pile, the garbage man took a stale loaf, which he placed in his plastic bag to be sprinkled with water. Then the little girl found the remains of a chicken, white flesh still sticking to the breastbone. She lifted the morsel to show it to her older companion and they both smiled, but the garbage man could find nothing but his bone-dry bread. He watched them enviously, then realized that they were encroaching on his territory, that they would be sharing his pickings. Other stomachs would be digesting his food.

He spoke harsh words to them and waved his arm angrily, but they didn’t flee. Moving quickly, the older girl picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at him. It missed his face and he advanced on them with his massive frame, striking the girl a single blow that laid her out unconscious. The little girl stared at her and didn’t understand.

People were beside themselves with panic back then, making the rounds of the bakeries and markets while young men stood out in the street armed with staves, every man suspecting his neighbor, suspecting his brother, then embracing him once more, apologizing and confessing his error. The wound had opened, they were saying, and the pus was seeping out; they were in a time of trial by error, but were determined to see it through to the end. No going back today. No retreating whence we’ve come. We shall never be unjust again. And with every ignorant breath, their hope redoubled.

Neither regret nor rage surfaced in the garbage man’s expression. His face was rigid. It hadn’t moved for years. Even when he begged for food, it didn’t shift. He would try instead to soften the tone of his voice, adding gentle groans and sighs, sometimes whistling, and these sound effects did indeed make him more appealing. The face, though, remained immobile.

Many years back, the garbage man had lost the use of his right eye, and its white orb acted like a magnet on the eyes of others. The bread that was always in his hand—a whole loaf or scraps, the thing he found in greatest abundance and his most prized possession—made people, wretched as they were, contemplate his dreadful condition.

The garbage man made sure to eat whatever he found on the spot. He’d eat fragments of fruit and vegetable peelings, would crunch bones between his back teeth and suck out the marrow he adored, however cold and stiff it was. But bread he treated differently. Bread he liked to keep with him, then search for a source of water to wet the loaf and eat it. He liked it soft. The garbage man kept a number of loaves stowed in his pocket, beneath his shirt, in the plastic bag by his bed; whenever he got hungry, he would take one out and start to chew it. The garbage man got hungry in his sleep. He’d wake, throat dry, down two swigs from the bottle at his side without sitting up, then take out a loaf, wet it with a few drops, tear at it until he was full, and go back to sleep. He always made sure the loaf and bottle were beside him before he slept.

The garbage man was a repellent pest. He’d tour the buildings, whose occupants he knew by name, calling out to them and sticking honorifics before each one. If he didn’t know a name, he’d call, “Dear friend!” buttering up the people seated slumped in their apartments, and they’d throw down coins and scraps of bread. Others would stick their heads from windows and shout, “Go away!” The garbage man made a racket when he raised his voice, shouting out a different name every three seconds, and for anyone in earshot it was a nightmare. But this boisterous routine was only a fallback: the garbage man only begged for food when he could find nothing in the trash. The people here were stingy. They ate everything. They ate the flesh, and the skin, and the bones, the rind and core of their fruit. All he could find was onion skins and the soil-matted hanks of their roots. Onion skin scratched his throat when he swallowed it. And now the two girls had shown up. There was not enough bread to share.

Insal passed the garbage man. He was moving along, swaying ecstatically. “Dear friend! A fine day to you!” he called out. Just that, mechanically repeated five or six times. Insal ignored him and noticed the two girls crying on a sidewalk nearby. The older girl had come to and was weeping softly, and the little girl wept to see her cry.

Insal thought to himself that killing these girls, and Zahra, and the garbage man would not make the world a better place, but it would bring relief to many.

Completely out of the blue, the garbage man strode up to the girl he’d slapped and began patting her shoulder. She was too weak to resist.

The garbage man wasted no time. He took the girls back to the place where he slept, his little home beneath the overpass. In a spacious, low-roofed area under the on-ramp, the garbage man had erected cracked wooden boards, making walls to shelter him from the wind—a cramped space hidden behind a heap of black trash bags, which protected him from the prying eyes of passersby and the police. He lay down. Four square meters. The space contained a small pillow, newspapers piled everywhere, and a small, colorless mattress. There was a powerful stench of rot, the sound of cars overhead on the overpass, and from beneath his fetid body, the moans of the older girl. The garbage man had never slept with a child before. Had never experienced such softness and delicacy. He wasn’t accustomed to have the woman under him give such gentle, muffled sobs.

The older girl was weeping bitterly. The pain was unendurable, but she didn’t cry out, just moaned, afraid of waking her little sister, who lay asleep in one corner of the tiny hut. The garbage man thought: If she didn’t want me, she’d fight back. She’d scratch my face and hit me, but she wants it. And when he lifted his face and gazed into hers, her tears and fearful expression amazed him. He slowed, then stopped, watching the calm come to her face, then resumed his thrusting with sudden violence, reveling in the pain and muffled cries. Eagerly, he carried on.

Outside, people were caught up in the world’s illusion. They were being killed in every street and alley, and the snipers were working diligently at their task. Insal was lying in bed, trying to sleep, but he would only manage a single hour before dawn came.

Zahra was yet to adjust to the apartment. Her frequent weeping made Leila tense, but there was nothing for it but to put up with the fatherless girl. And slowly she recovered from her illness, an illness that had muted the shock of her father’s disappearance and the sudden materialization of this family she knew nothing about.

Leila created her own torment. She pursued the visions that had begun the first time that she’d seen Zahra. She imagined her own child living far away from her in an orphanage, her boy amid a mob of street kids, the most handsome and polite. Then out on the street: trotting barefoot with torn clothes, clutching a plastic bag, and inhaling the viscous glue within. Or living with a relative who persecuted and terrorized him, who spread a sheet on the bare ground for his bed, who got angry at him, say, and made him sleep without any supper. All these tragic fates had passed through her mind before her child ever came into the world. There, in her womb, the fetus hung suspended between life and death. A new soul was taking shape, awaiting the perfect moment to occupy the tiny body and settle there until it saw the light.

And Leila was constantly afraid. For Insal, searching the hospital morgues for the body of a man he didn’t know and had never seen before; and of him, of his ongoing neglect, his perpetual abstraction, forever distracted from her by things that were quite unimportant (even the search for the body didn’t matter), though the situation didn’t allow her to object. And for the girl, too, who asked tearfully after her absent father. She had no idea how to rid herself of these fears.

Zahra was moving about the house, chattering to herself and her missing father as she went, describing what she saw and repeating his name over and over, telling him about the size of the chair, the color of the curtain, the unforgiving hardness of the door. She inspected the carpet, lay down, and sank into sleep.

Zahra hated the smell of the apartment, and Insal’s smell, and Leila’s. But the smell of Leila’s unborn child was nice. Zahra liked it a lot.

Leila had received her husband frantically when he had returned. She had asked him about his trip to the hospital, about what he’d seen there and about Zahra’s father. Had he found him?

Insal had been in no condition to confront Leila with everything he’d witnessed, and nor, for that matter had Leila been in any state to listen to descriptions of corpses, but she had to know about Zahra’s coming trip to the morgue. He had given an abbreviated version of what had happened and had tried explaining how important it was that Zahra come with him. He had predicted that Leila would take fright at his words, so her response was unexpected when it came.

But no mother carrying her child inside her can ever be wholly sad.

That night Leila embraced Zahra as the child slept—there was no avoiding it—and the smell of her alarm trickled into the girl’s nostrils. At the very same instant, the same alarm made its way to the fetus resting inside her. Zahra sensed the grief in the two bodies and woke up. Leila hugged her.

Insal lay motionless. He had not told Leila about what had happened to him: running from the sniper’s bullets, the people swarming around him, wandering the street for an hour through a maze of ricocheting rounds. He had not told her about the morgue attendant and the bodies.

On his return to the apartment, weighed down by his body, Insal had walked straight to the bedroom, surrounded by a halo of odors, a vast number sufficient to confuse anybody—so what chance had little Zahra to tell them all apart? The smells of the corpses’ indifference, of their joy at deliverance and their regret at departure, then smells from all the people Insal had touched that day: panic, hope, and fear. Smells that Zahra had never come across before, that she’d never inhaled. But one in particular stood out. The smell of a stranger, perhaps? No, this was the scent of someone she knew well, of someone Insal had met. Very familiar but somehow changed.

Zahra had been between sleep and wakefulness when she heard Insal come home. She could make out a lot of talk, but didn’t understand what he meant by the words ‘morgue’ or ‘hospital’ and didn’t grasp that she would be accompanying him tomorrow to see what was in that morgue. Perhaps if she’d understood what Insal was saying, she would have known that her search would one day be over.

Now Leila slept, pressing Zahra to her, her little face to her chest, her feet tucked between the older woman’s thighs. That night, Leila held two souls. Insal, meanwhile, could not sleep, and gazed at Leila’s face and at Zahra’s body, her head flipping from side to side every few minutes.

Late into the night, Zahra’s hand touched his cheek. She felt the short, groomed hair of his beard against her palm. She was half-asleep but let her hand run over his cheeks, and eyes, and nose, then did it a second time, and a third, brushing over every inch of his face. Then at last she surrendered, and her arm flopped to her side.

*

Battles raged outside. Many were killed and a great number were wounded, most of whom died shortly afterward. Anyone abroad in any of the public squares would have seen one or more bodies lying on the ground, patches of dried blood beneath them—and had he tried to move them, or even paused beside them, he would have been killed on the spot. The dead were traps.

The dogs roamed everywhere, muzzles raised to the wind, searching for the scent of the dead. When one of them caught a trace of it nearby, he would track it until he reached the body, then howl—calling his pack and the dog man, who came along, pulling his gray cart, to lay the body inside it with the others—and then move off, answering another howl that rang from the next street along.