1

MANY TRAGEDIES HAD BEFALLEN THE garbage man. Thirty years ago, he had lost his eye, and the memory of that day had never left him. He’d been sitting at a café in al-Daher when a fight broke out beside him, so he’d gotten to his feet in order to steal a leather wallet that one of the men had left on his chair. The man had spotted him just as he’d grabbed it and made to flee, and had shouted a warning to the others. The garbage man had fought fiercely. Even after his eye had oozed out and he’d known he’d lost it forever, he had still fought on. They’d never seen a thief fight like he did, which is why they all decided to let him go on his way without turning him over to the police.

Working in a plastics factory, he’d slipped a disc, which had put him on his back for a long time, and because of the close ties between plastics and trash he’d been able to leave work at the factory and get a job at a garbage plant—that’s what he called it: a ‘plant’—where household trash was picked and sorted into plastics, paper, and organic waste. Work you only needed one eye for, and ragged clothes—for those who sorted garbage didn’t matter.

There, amid the mounds of trash brought in each day, the garbage man had found plenty of food. He’d turned his nose up at it back then: he was earning nicely, and eating well, and living fine, lots of fucking the women he worked with and even more with the neighbors’ wives. He was a bull: a massive body, a face disfigured from his many battles, and a blank white eye. When he fucked, darkness was the perfect cover for that face.

But the food people threw in the trash kept him up at night: fresh fruit, pieces of chicken still with their meat and skin, stale loaves. He saw millions of scraps of bread. Food a man might pass on, but real food nonetheless. He’d toss it to the pigs and it would be killing him, though this was the best way to get rid of organic waste: pigs would eat anything.

Then they had said that the pigs had a dangerous disease that would infect people and kill them, and the garbage man had dug a deep pit. The plant’s owner had dug with him, weeping bitterly, and when the time had come he’d asked the garbage man to finish the job on his own because he wouldn’t be able to help him. The garbage man had shattered the skulls of the small black pigs with an iron bar, and whenever one had run from him, he had let it go. He’d known another worker would kill it within minutes. It was just a body he wouldn’t have to bury. The garbage man had tossed the pigs’ corpses into the pit, then heaped dirt over them. A few days later, the owner had let him go. He was going to get into another trade, he’d said—there was no future in garbage without pigs—and he’d advised the garbage man to find other work. He had said that garbage was finished.

That day, Insal and Zahra visited two morgues. They viewed hundreds of bodies, and with each one Zahra would turn her head away, would see the dead face and hide hers in his neck, or turn it away to stare out over Insal’s shoulder, her way of signaling rejection or refusal. Then Insal would pass on to the next fridge—or the metal table in the corner of the hall, the simple cot—and stand before the corpse to ask her for the thousand-and-first time: “Is this Papa? Is this Papa? Zahra, is this Papa?” And Zahra would not utter a word. She just turned her head away.

This was supposed to be the last morgue of the day, but Insal still had to stop by Qasr al-Aini, where he’d been told that two new bodies had arrived. There could be something there for Zahra, although she was worn out. It had been another long day: two morgues already, and the return to Qasr al-Aini would be the third. Zahra might fall asleep on the way from sheer exhaustion, but Qasr al-Aini it must be, no getting away from it.

Zahra was limp on his shoulder. Insal stopped for a moment outside the door, staring at the morgue attendant.

Visiting hours were over and many people stood outside the door pleading with the attendant, who was turning them down with a face of stone. They were ready to hand over small bribes, but he refused all the same. He felt no indignation, but he was tired of the way people around him were acting, of their desperation to come in. He had corpses piling up and dozens coming in each day to peer at them, but the number of bodies kept rising: only a few of the missing were ever found. One or two a day, perhaps. The morgue never emptied; the number of bodies arriving just went up.

Zahra had woken up a little. Insal put her down and they walked slowly along at a pace suited to her little legs. They approached the morgue door. The attendant followed their progress, and when they got to the door he opened it.

Inside, Insal launched into the standard preliminaries—“We’re going to look for Papa, Zahra, got that? Okay? Is this Papa? Is this Papa?”—and at each body Zahra turned her face away. Her father’s smell was not here. Not here, except for a very distant trace, a memory, as though he had been present many days ago.

At the last, as Insal approached the final refrigerator
and the attendant opened the final metal hatch, as Insal asked, “Zahra, is this Papa?” the girl stiffened before the days-dead face. It looked uninjured, with no traces of congealed blood. Zahra did not move her eyes away as she usually did. Again, Insal asked her, “Is this Papa, Zahra?” and she replied, “Papa.”

Insal signed many forms without reading a single one of them. He wanted the whole business done with, and signed over all responsibility to the hospital. They would wash the body, would arrange for prayers to be said over it, would bury it in a pauper’s grave. The only thing he learned was that it would be going to the Imam al-Shafei cemetery. Zahra leaned her head against the wall while Insal was busy with the papers, and when he was done he picked her up and walked out.

The attendant had seen many bodies and he remembered them all. He never forgot what his eyes had seen. His memory preserved everything. It could summon up anything that he’d stored away over the years. He would create images of the dead in his mind, would gather the images together, would sketch them out with faint, translucent lines—lines described in the air against a white background—then lay them one over the other, in as many layers as there were pictures in his head: right eye layered over right eye, nose atop nose, lip on lip. And one lip might be askew if the face was torn up, and parts sometimes missing from the head; and then again, the face might be whole and perfect. The attendant stored thousands of faces in his memory, image on image, layer on layer, and had no idea himself where it would all end, or whether there was an end. His memory now held a single image made up of many images, of thousands: a neutral face with no clear features, just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all sketched in loose, indeterminate lines. Now, when a new face was laid down over it, the composite image did not change. Unchanging at last. One face. But of whom the attendant didn’t know.

He would watch the youngsters come happily into the hospital, laughing as they noisily recounted the exploits of the day before—when someone had fired tear gas at them, or when one of them had run away or rushed over to attack the hired thugs. He would observe their delight as they talked about the progress they were making on the street, full of zeal as they walked the corridor to the morgue. One might get overexcited, hopping in the air as he described how he’d caught the canister of tear gas. These kids were plucking canisters out of the air. Their torment was truly terrible, the attendant would tell himself.

As they approached the door, the kids would frown, would slow their pace, would look at their feet. Their voices would grow quiet. One would ask about their missing comrade, then in they’d go and hurriedly look around, snatching glances at the bodies, then on their way again, recounting their absent friend’s heroics. He must be shacked up with his girlfriend, they’d say, in clover, while they were here, beside themselves with worry, searching for him. The attendant would follow their progress down the corridor. Slowly, they’d fade from sight, their bodies becoming identical little flecks, moving dots in torment. They were driven by hope, these ones. They were being tormented as none had been before—the greatest dose of hope the attendant had seen anyone take in his life.