5

SO FAR, INSAL AND ZAHRA had visited three morgues. A morgue a day, each time poring through the registers—first the lists of the wounded and those in comas, then the books of the dead—then entering the morgue and searching among the bodies. Three morgues, and not a trace of Zahra’s father. Even the memory of his smell, which had brushed Zahra in the Qasr al-Aini morgue, was gone. The man had vanished.

If only Insal had known: that the dog man was burying the dead; that thirty-five corpses lay heaped in a room on the rooftop of the Mogamma in Tahrir Square; that three hundred and fifty-five bodies had been interred on the city’s outskirts.

The cramps gnawed at Leila’s belly. Too late, she realized that the baby was coming now, that she was miscarrying. She told herself that the four-month-old thing would be emerging alive, and that made her think of her milkless breasts, and she called her mother to ask her advice. Fluids and blood were flowing out of her. She couldn’t remember when the pains had begun. A shiver ran right through her body. Her soul was slowly being taken from her. She told her mother to call the pharmacy and order powdered milk for the child. While the milk was being delivered and the baby was emerging, the mother must come to the apartment and prepare for the birth. When she heard this, her mother gathered herself and told Leila not to worry. She played along, understanding that the miscarriage was in its final stages, but unable to account for Leila’s sudden detour into irrationality. Who would have imagined that a clear-headed woman her daughter’s age would act like this? Her mother put on her clothes and hurried downstairs.

Leila tried calling Insal. She wanted to let him know what was happening. The lines had been down for days, but she’d heard they’d been back up since yesterday. She tried calling his phone, and failed. She tried many times, and she failed each time, and when she gave up for good she sent him a short text message: I’m giving birth.

At that very moment, Insal was standing before the morgue’s door. Between the thick concrete walls and the inundation of attempted calls, the networks had all jammed solid. Insal’s phone was dead, and in his temporary absence his child was coming dead into the world.

The fetus slipped slowly from Leila’s body. She stared at her surroundings—the chair next to her, the bedside table, the ceiling, the curtains—then fixed her gaze on the empty place in the bed where Zahra had been sleeping just hours before. Leila went utterly still. By not moving, she thought she might be able to hold the fetus inside her. Maybe her movements were the reason she was losing it. But the fetus had slipped out, leaving a void in Leila’s soul.

The fetus lay on the bed below her. She nudged it with her finger. She touched its indeterminate limbs. She tried to guess its sex. She could only make out the legs and a narrow waist. At last, she understood it was stillborn.

Leaving it like that wouldn’t do, she thought, and she took a little towel, itself no bigger than a grown man’s hand, and wrapped the fetus up in it. To protect it. Its arm tangled with the arm of the Mickey Mouse printed on the towel. Mickey was leading him away to a make-believe world far from the present. Leila wished she could join them both wherever they were. She heard the clatter of her mother coming in through the front door, and Mickey’s make-believe world vanished. All fondness for the fetus vanished, and nothing remained but sorrow. She gathered up the wrapped scrap in the palm of her hand and inspected its reddened, bloody features, the tissues that had started to take shape months before.

As she covered the short distance from the front door to the bedroom, the mother called her daughter’s name. When Leila didn’t respond to her initial greeting, she shouted her name in fright and hurried forward in fretful silence. She came in as Leila was examining the fetus. Leila was thinking about her final duty: should she recite from the Quran? Say prayers over the dead? Had it died, or had it never lived at all? Would Insal have to get a certificate issued for a death or a birth? Can one pray covered in blood?

Her mother was as remorseless and angry as she ever got. She didn’t ask about the absent Insal. The question never occurred to her. She knew the answer. Insal wasn’t shouldering his responsibilities. He was busy with that girl and her missing father, and had no time to take care of Leila. She didn’t ask Leila how she felt. She knew how a woman feels just after she’s miscarried. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand a single word of reproach, that she wouldn’t speak for days, and that the shock was greater than Leila could have anticipated. Leila’s mother gazed at the dead fetus on the towel. She saw Mickey’s arm, his hand hidden in the white glove and, her mind completing the picture, his smiling face. Mickey’s face was hidden beneath the fetus.

All Leila had to do was wash. She must clean off the sweat and dried tears, and then dress in clean clothes. No, not the house-robe: she must put on a loose-fitting dress and come to her parents’ house. She wouldn’t live with Insal any more. Insal was finished the moment the fetus slipped out. Leila would have a new start, away from him. Leila looked at her mother and she was all hope. “Take me with you,” she said.

Leila got changed and her mother started to pack a little case with the necessities: medicines and a few clothes. She took Leila’s gold jewelry from the bedroom where she contemplated the fetus lying in the little towel. This was her revenge on Insal. Her grandson, sure—but her daughter mattered more. She left everything as it was and went to the kitchen to fetch a little dish. She lifted the fetus from the towel and placed it on the dish. The fetus looked extraordinarily tiny and frail against its colorful surface. Big-headed. Red. Only if you knew it was a fetus could you tell, otherwise you’d assume it was something else. Who would put a fetus in a dish as revenge against its father?

Insal’s fetus, lying motionless in a little dish on the dining table, was the most extreme revenge she could conceive of, and in years to come she’d boast to one and all that she had put his son on a plate, so that it would be the first thing he saw when he came through the door. She would declare that she had never regretted what she’d done, no matter how long ago it had all been. “Insal did wrong,” she would say, “and he had to be punished.”

The pair of them left the house, Leila thinking nothing. Many strings had been severed in an instant. The fetus was no longer her son. Insal was not her caring husband. This was not her home any more. Her mother hugged her, clasping her tighter with every step to help her walk, restoring her rights of ownership, and transmitting to her the great energy of her hatred. Insal doesn’t deserve to be living with you. Insal will wear himself out trailing after you, and he’ll never see hide nor hair of you again. Insal’s insane, and he lost his kid because he neglected you. And Leila wondered if this was unfair to Insal. But the hatred stopped her mouth.

The apartment was deserted.

Insal turned the key and pushed the door open. He let Zahra down off his arm and she walked forward a few paces, then caught the metallic smell filling the apartment, the strong reek of blood she’d identified just days before. Striding to the bedroom, Insal called Leila’s name, while Zahra clambered onto one of the chairs around the dining table and stood up to find herself facing the little dish. There was no one in the bedroom, and as Insal came back out he saw Zahra attempting to touch the fetus with her little fingers. Her forefinger came away with a fleck of the soft matter and she lifted it to her mouth to taste the musty liquid. Insal stopped dead. Tried to understand what this was. When Zahra said, “Is this dates?” he grabbed the dish and brought it up to his face. What was this tender red lump lying there in the dish? He wanted to know. And even before he’d fully grasped what had happened, he knew that what lay in wait for Zahra would be terrible indeed.

Insal moved through the apartment as though drugged, unaware of his surroundings but still carrying out his daily routine. He fed Zahra and changed her clothes with a beginner’s clumsiness. He watched her as she began to play with a little ball, but the fetus lying in the dish was distracting him. Every so often, he’d go over and stare at it. He couldn’t believe that this was his child.

When she answered his call, Leila’s mother was straight to the point: “Your son’s on the table. Eat him.”

He kept quiet, didn’t utter a sound, and she fell silent, waiting for just one word so that she could rail at him. When she heard nothing, she said, “Eat your son. You hear me? Eat your son!”

Insal lay beside Zahra until she fell asleep.

When he’d realized what was in the dish, Insal had been stupefied.

“No, it’s not dates,” he’d answered her, and she’d asked, “What is it then?”

The little corpse couldn’t stay like that forever. Ants might swarm and eat it. He wrapped the body in a little blanket that he’d bought especially for the newborn, placed the bundle in a plastic bag, and went out.

There was hardly anyone in the street, just the odd pedestrian here and there. People had grown tired of standing around questioning everyone who walked past. He went on, ordering his thoughts. Where would he go? What would he do with the body?

About a hundred meters away, there was a large park. Maybe he could reach through the railings and dig a little hole, then lay the bundle in it and cover it with soil? The body would lie amid the trees and flowers. But his arm would only reach a few centimeters into the soil. He’d be buried near the surface and that was a risk. A dog might dig down and eat him. No, the park was no good.

Halfway down the street, another park began, running down to the overpass. Perhaps he could bury the body in that park. There was no fence and he’d be able to get to a much more secure spot, dig deep, and bid the body a safe farewell. But dogs still posed a threat. That pack staggering down the street could still dig. The dogs were the only thing Insal was afraid of.

So where then? In the vast heap of garbage, like other people? Whenever he heard of someone dumping their child in the trash, he’d be astonished. It was claimed that the new towns—the great city’s far-flung satellite suburbs whose names were all variations on the one event (October 6th, The Crossing, The Tenth of Ramadan: names of victory)—were home to whores who were always falling pregnant and giving birth. Insal had heard of one girl who’d chucked her baby out of the window the minute she’d delivered him, dropping him expertly on the garbage pile beneath. She’d had a lot of practice: she threw her trash out of the window every day. He’d heard of the notorious whore from October 6th City who’d broken down in tears before throwing her newborn away. The baby had still been alive. Maybe her heart hadn’t let her dump him while he’d lived and breathed, so she’d set him on the sidewalk and sat on him until he was dead, then tossed him in the cart. A woman walking by had been suspicious. She had reached into the cart and come out holding the baby’s hand. People had gathered around and shouted, and the whore had said, “Even cats eat their young.”

Insal wasn’t going to sit on his fetus. He walked on through the darkness, the little dish with its tiny red contents a vision hovering before him, swelling until it was as wide as the street itself. On he walked, and however far he went the dish went with him, and then it swelled further until it covered the whole neighborhood. Insal could not go on. Walking was exhausting, and the body weighed heavy in his hand. He sat down on the sidewalk, and beside him sat the whore, a white bundle like his own beneath her rump.

“Next time, I’ll eat it,” she said.

The dog pack went by. They were walking down the empty center of the street. Not one of them was following a scent—they just stopped, staring at him and the bundle resting on his thigh. This was the first time they’d come across a tiny body accompanied by an adult male. They were alarmed; their howls might scare him, might anger him. Then the dog man arrived, pulling his cart, and came to a halt before Insal.

Insal saw the bodies heaped in the cart, some featureless, all with visible wounds, some covered with scraps of newspaper, and some without anything to hide them. The cart wasn’t yet full and it rested lightly in the dog man’s hands. Insal estimated the distance to the tree in the neighboring street. He looked at the whore next to him and saw her lips moving, but no sound came out. He turned back to face the dog man. He was sweating despite the cold, his hands huge on his scrawny frame, and his clipped hair was uncombed—it looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. The dog man drummed his fingers against the cart’s shaft, tapping the keys of a piano, awaiting Insal’s move. It occurred to Insal that the dog man passing by was no coincidence—that he’d come looking for a body that could find no grave.

He raised the hand that held his child in a salute, thanking the dog man, who waved goodbye. Insal’s gaze fastened on the cart as it lurched away.

The dogs barked: “Another dead one! Here’s another! He must be buried! Over there, by the big building! A young man’s body! Just died! He must be buried!”