4

ZAHRA’S ISOLATION WAS COMPLETE, HER features almost completely sealed off. Only her two small nasal openings remained, permitting the tube’s awkward insertion and allowing air to pass in and out.

He prepared many kinds of food for her: vegetables, beef soup, chicken, and stewed fruit. Realizing that she could still make out smells, he started lifting the food to her nasal openings, waiting for the skin to wrinkle in appreciation. He bought her flowers and held them where her mouth had been. He picked basil and jasmine from the neighbors’ little garden, rubbing the basil between his fingers, then smearing it over her missing mouth so that the smell might reach her. He couldn’t see her smile, just a slight creasing in her cheeks, but he knew that she was happy.

One sunny day, Insal understood that he was in hell. He was slicing up an apple when he saw what he had done in the world, and for a brief moment he trembled, then understood that this was his final lifetime in hell, that though he must remain here for a few more years, he would go to heaven when he died. Reassured, he resumed his slicing.

He realized, too, that what was happening was too great for men to comprehend, and that what was to come would be no less than what had gone before, but more violent still, and that the fortunate were those who would die before this hell was ended. Then he understood that the attendant had shown Zahra mercy when he’d extinguished her sense of sight, and he understood that she would live in order that others might see her—and not because she was to be tormented by them.

He had given Zahra her breakfast and was thinking that today he might continue teaching her to walk unaided. He remembered the past few days, helping her to walk down the passage leading to the living room, calling out a warning whenever she looked like stumbling and then smiling to himself, at his own spontaneous reaction: how could he have forgotten that she couldn’t hear him? He heard the sound of her footsteps emerging from the bedroom. She was holding onto the doorframe with her left hand as he had taught her and feeling her way with her feet, when the doorbell rang.

Insal opened the front door to find two women there, one wearing a niqab and the other unveiled. The unveiled woman said she wished to speak with him, and told him that the woman in the niqab was Zahra’s aunt, her father’s sister.

Zahra’s aunt and her companion sat on the sofa. The moment they were seated, the aunt clasped her companion’s hand in hers and pressed her fingers into the palm. She wanted to see Zahra, the companion said. Insal was at a loss. How was he to tell them what had happened, especially since their first request was to see the girl? How was he to prepare them for the shock? He replied that Zahra was ill, that she was suffering from a strange disease. For a few moments, the companion tapped at the niqab-wearer’s hand, pressing her fingertips into the palm and the underside of her fingers as though typing on a tiny keyboard. The woman in the niqab appeared to tense and began pressing quickly on the palm of the other, who told Insal: “Never mind. Bring her.”

They know about Zahra’s illness, Insal thought, but how could they know what had happened? And where had the aunt been all this time? Many days had passed since Zahra’s father had disappeared, and it made no sense that a strange woman should suddenly appear and ask to see the girl. If this was her aunt, then she’d take her away for sure, but how did he know she really was her aunt? The woman in the niqab anticipated Insal’s thoughts. His silence and stillness, communicated to her by her companion, made it clear. To her, Zahra’s illness had been expected, had been likely, but the timing was unusual and painful. Unhurriedly, she started undoing the covering over her face. She lifted the niqab, and her face was the most eloquent confirmation of her kinship.

Her head was devoid of all features. Just two holes in place of a nose and nothing else besides. An undifferentiated sheet of skin, without crease or fold.

The companion explained that they communicated by tapping their fingers. Zahra’s aunt touched her fingers to tell her what she wanted, she repeated it to Insal, and what Insal said was passed back the same way. There was no other way: the woman hadn’t spoken, seen, or heard a thing for many years.

Insal asked her name. “Zahra,” said the woman. “Zahra’s father named his daughter after his sister.”

Zahra came into the room, walking slowly and feeling her way along the wall. Insal fell silent, as did the companion, who stared woodenly at Zahra. Slowly, very slowly, she advanced across the part of the room without any furniture until she reached the chair next to the sofa. She leaned on it with her hand, and came to a halt before the three of them: a dazed Insal, a woman she didn’t know, and her aunt, whom she hadn’t smelled in a long time.

This is how it came to her:

At first, the aunt’s smell seemed to have altered slightly. Zahra’s two nose holes detected a tremulousness, an anxiety mixed with fear. Her aunt was worried, and Zahra did not know why but neither did she care and, turning her body toward the source of the smell, she walked in a straight line until her knee touched her aunt. Zahra thought her sense of smell must be deceiving her and that this lady couldn’t be her aunt. She wanted to be sure, to be certain of her aunt’s presence in front of her.

As her knee hit her aunt, the smell of fear and confusion rolled over Zahra. The elder Zahra lifted her up and sat her on her lap. The girl was now face to face with her at last. For a moment, their breath mingled—the older woman’s feelings crept across to the girl, and then a powerful force, an irresistible urge, raised the child’s palm to the aunt’s face. Gently, Zahra felt across the place of her missing right eye, delicately brushing over the eyeball as though unable to credit that it was gone: this really was a missing eye; this was her auntie’s eye, for sure. Then her fingers crept toward the brows, to check if they were missing, before descending the slope of the temple to the ear. For this, Zahra had to come very close to her aunt. As her hand touched the site of the absent mouth, a sense of profound equanimity enveloped both girl and woman and—for the first time in a long time—Zahra relaxed and became still.

Zahra kept running her hand over her aunt’s cheek. Slow, even passes, testing out her favored sense: touch. At the nasal openings, she stopped, lifted her head, and stuck the tips of her first and middle fingers into the holes. There was a momentary lull, then the aunt released a sudden blast from her nose and Zahra snatched her hand away in feigned alarm. The aunt rocked her head back, as did the girl, then the two foreheads met once more. They were laughing.

And all the while, Insal was moaning and as the moans swelled into wails it became more than the aunt’s companion could bear—the feeling fingers, the muffled laughter, Insal’s grief—and she stumbled away, looking for somewhere in the unfamiliar apartment where she might cry in peace, then stood sobbing in the corridor. Insal wept, too.

The companion returned more composed. She sat next to the aunt and gave her her hand, then asked Insal if Zahra’s father had been found. He told her that he’d died. He told her that Zahra had identified him before she’d lost her sight. She asked if he had identified the man himself. Insal explained that he and Zahra had searched long and hard for the body, that she’d accompanied him on every trip to the morgues, that they’d finally found the body in the morgue at the Qasr al-Aini hospital. He told them that the body had been moved around from morgue to morgue, and that it had ended up at Qasr al-Aini—they’d found it by chance. Zahra had recognized the face at first glance. Insal said that the father had died in the demonstrations, that he was a martyr—no doubt about it—and that he, Insal, was sorry. Sorry because he’d exposed Zahra to all that suffering, but he hadn’t been able to identify the man on his own.

The companion asked if there’d been any distinctive mark on the father’s face. Insal thought for a minute, then confessed that he’d noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The man had had a black, fairly thick mustache and slightly protuberant front teeth.

The aunt raised her arms in the air, then slapped them down hard against her thighs. That wasn’t Zahra’s father, the companion said. Zahra wouldn’t mistake her own father. That man had been a stranger. Zahra’s father was just like Zahra’s aunt, and like Zahra, too: without face or senses.

Through her companion, she said that her brother’s features had disappeared long ago. He’d been a young man when his eyes and nose had closed up and his ears had dropped off, and he’d lived without his senses from then on. Zahra’s father loved people, was a friend to many, and the older Zahra had learned that he had indeed participated in the demonstrations and had gone missing on a Friday. The aunt was briefly still, and busied herself patting little Zahra and playing with her hair. Then she grasped her companion’s hand again and continued.

The aunt lived abroad, the companion told Insal, and had come to Egypt when Zahra and her father went missing. They had asked a lot of questions until at last they’d reached Insal. The woman told Insal that from now on he wasn’t to worry about Zahra or her father. The aunt couldn’t go looking for him, and the living trumped the dead.

The aunt stood up with Zahra in her arms. She lifted her right arm and took a step toward Insal. Insal reached out and touched the outstretched palm. The aunt took hold of his hand, then his forearm, then pulled hard, bringing what had been her mouth closer until it was touching his forehead. Then she let her niqab fall back over her face and wrapped up Zahra’s face and head to hide her from prying eyes.

She walked the short distance to the car that was waiting for them with her companion beside her and together they sped away.