32
Friday
A
S SOON AS THEY arrived at the hospital, even before she had her head seen to, Kay Trilling called the American embassy. Within minutes the ambassador’s staff had slipped into well-oiled gear. A seemingly countless number of earnest young men and women appeared like magic, as well as three Egyptians drawn from the embassy’s security office. From that moment, Wynn was not left alone for an instant, not even when he noticed the truck driver still standing in the corner and watching the scene with frightened village eyes. Wynn asked the American now attached to his side, “Do you speak enough Arabic to thank him properly for the ride and his help?”
In response, the young man addressed the driver with fluent ease. Immediately the driver began pouring forth his story, raising his voice every time a policeman happened by. Clearly he was terrified at being drawn into a tragedy not of his making.
Wynn had to lean against the wall to wedge his hand into his pocket and pry his wallet loose. It was not so much that he was tired as every action required furious concentration and strength of will. His hands shook violently as he peeled open the sticky billfold. Then he found that he could not make the bills come apart. So he extended the entire wad. “Here.”
The driver’s avarice overcame his aversion to touching a hand caked with someone else’s life, or taking bills drenched with calamity. The driver used both hands to accept the money, then lifted the payment to his forehead as he murmured a formal thanks, not realizing he smudged his brow with Sybel’s blood.
The young man from the embassy watched it all with round amazed eyes. “Congressman, if you’ll excuse me, I think you’re going into shock.”
“You’re wrong there.” Steadying himself on the wall, Wynn made his way down the hall and sank onto a bench. “I took that corner about three hours ago.”
Kay Trilling was seated farther along the same uncomfortable bench, talking with another embassy official. She waited as Wynn eased himself down, then reached over and took his hand. “You need to let the doctor give you something.”
“I’m not hurt.”
“Wynn,” she said, her voice softened by sorrow. “Honey, let the doctor give you a pill.”
She signaled a passing nurse, and within moments he was given water and a couple of pills. Not long after, the world receded somewhat, cushioned behind a foul-tasting fog.
From within his chemical cocoon he observed the approach of another American, this one senior enough to draw both the junior officials and the security detail to attention. The new man identified himself as the chief of the embassy’s American Citizen Services Section, responsible for dealing with all problems between visitors and the local government. He apologized that the ambassador was in Alexandria attending a ministerial conference. He inspected Wynn’s blood-drenched form and spoke faster. By his mere presence he forced the process along. Soon they found themselves being ushered downstairs, through a few yards of stinging wind, and into the comfort of an embassy limousine.
The chief aide filled the limo with mindless chatter, telling them that the Egyptian embassy was the biggest in the world, with thirty-nine federal government agencies. Egypt was America’s largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel, which guaranteed their current problem would be looked after well. They would spend the night in the new ambassador’s residence, which stood within the embassy compound. Kay interrupted his attempt to seal out the tragedy by repeating what she had already told several more junior staffers, that Nabil Saad was one of her own aides, on secondment from the World Bank. Instantly the man used his cellphone, speaking in tones too hushed for Wynn to catch. Wynn regretted the absence of the man’s droning lecture. Anything was better than being forced to hear the howling storm.
The next morning the wind still bit fiercely as Wynn crossed the embassy compound and took the elevator to the ambassador’s suite on the main building’s twelfth floor. He stood by the outer office window, staring at a city without edges. This stormy Cairo lacked the softness of glistening fog or rain-drenched clouds. Instead, the world was harshly indistinct. Even the river flowed feverish and yellow.
The ambassador’s secretary was busy on the phone, arguing relentlessly in the quiet way of one experienced with Arabic etiquette. She hung up finally and said, “The National Security and Investigation Office is handling this matter. It appears they will let you go this afternoon. You will need to make a formal statement, and for that you’ll have to go to the Gamal, that’s the tall building on Tahrir Square. The square is—”
“I know the square and I know the Gamal.”
“Ease up, Wynn.”
He turned to see Kay seated in the corner, giving him a look of quiet reproach. He had not even known she was in the room.
“I’m sorry, Congressman. But it appears unlikely the Egyptian authorities will release your sister’s body until after the inquest. On that point they remain adamant.”
He gritted his teeth and nodded. Once. He was not yet ready to speak about that. “I want to go to the hospital and see Nabil.”
“Sir, the storm is raging. Not to mention the fact that the police still haven’t apprehended your attackers.”
“That was not a request.”
Kay walked over to offer support. “Surely you have security detail who could accompany us.”
“Yes, but—”
“I want to go alone, Kay.”
She inspected his face, then accepted his decision with a single nod. “Tell Nabil I’ll be by later. I’m working to have him flown back to the U.S. for treatment. I spoke with the ambassador last night. It’s not simply a matter of hospital care. There is too great a risk the state security will try and pin the matter on him, as an Egyptian and a Copt. I don’t want to risk his being interrogated after I’m gone. Tell him I’ll be by as soon as the matter is taken care of. The ambassador has tasked it out to his best men.”
Wynn left the embassy compound in the ambassador’s bulletproof limo, accompanied by three sharp-eyed men bearing automatic weapons. They drove to the new Kasr Elani Teaching Hospital on the banks of the Nile. Wynn emerged from the limo, turned his back to the river, cupped his hands about his eyes, and stared across the street. He was surrounded by a dead wind, a breath of hatred and hopelessness.
“Sir?”
Wynn remained where he was. He recognized that building opposite the new hospital. The battered entrance was branded into his bones. “That’s the old hospital, isn’t it?”
“Sir, please come inside.”
Wynn swiveled about. “I asked you a question.”
“Yes, sir, that is the old hospital. But your driver is here. We know, sir. We checked.”
“He is not my driver. He is my friend and colleague.”
Angrily the officer by the door waved him forward. “Please come away from the exposed street
now,
sir.”
They flanked him and refused to permit anyone to share the elevator. Upstairs there was a moment’s angry confrontation before Wynn pulled rank and insisted on seeing Nabil alone. Two men inspected the room before permitting him to enter.
Nabil was awake and watching him. Wynn passed on Kay’s message while standing by the door. Wanting it over and done with. Nabil clearly understood, for he said nothing until Wynn was seated beside the bed. Then he asked, “Your sister, she is gone?”
Wynn glanced down at his hands and their invisible stain.
“What you did, sir, that was the bravest deed I have ever seen.”
“Call me Wynn.” He leaned back, flooded by all that was past. Perhaps it was the smell and the noise and the metal bed and the same gray despair seeping from the walls. Or perhaps it was because of his own helpless fatigue. He knew Nabil was watching him. Wynn had no strength to hold back the deluge. “I remember watching my parents die.”
Nabil shifted slightly, his body held by strappings and tubes. But it was enough of a motion to show he was totally awake.
“When we came into the hospital room, my father was rolled over on his side. His eyes were open. But he didn’t see me at all.”
Outside the room a metal trolley rattled noisily down the hall, the wheels banging and squeaking like the chuckles of cold death. “Then they took us downstairs, but the nurses spotted us kids and tried to keep us from going down the corridor. But I heard Mom screaming. I pushed through them and ran. I came through the door. Mom was lying there with her hair plastered down and her face purple and her mouth was open so wide.”
Strange that he could sit there and speak calmly. As though his physical body felt nothing, his nerves already numb, his emotions suffocated. “I ran away. Somebody tried to stop me, but I got away. Only things got worse. I ran downstairs looking for a way out, but instead I wound up in a children’s ward. Two kids to a bed, sometimes three, their heads at either end and their feet touching in the middle. Relatives camped on reed mats between the beds, fanning away the flies, holding hands, whimpering with the kids. The place was full of stink and noise. All the kids had these big dark eyes, and I knew they knew. They’d never get better, never get out.”
“Cairo was not a good place to be hospitalized,” Nabil agreed. “It still isn’t.”
“I freaked. Totally, utterly wigged out. Then suddenly Sybel was there. She hugged me fierce enough to break the spell, then pulled me outside. She brought me back to America and cared for me ever since.”
Nabil watched and waited, offering no false comfort, no empty words. Just a man listening to another come to grips with the impossible.
“The family learned never to talk to me about Egypt, or Mom and Dad, not ever. I would scream at them, shout anything that came into my head. Sybel was my only constant.” Wynn forced himself to meet Nabil’s gaze. “Do you remember anything about that time?”
“I am about the same age as your sister. I remember everything. My father spent his every waking day down the hall, your parents’ unofficial mourner.”
“Did they ever figure out what made my parents sick?”
“They think poison. Egypt was going through an agricultural upheaval, trying to move from medieval farming methods to modern, all in one giant leap. Some farmers never could understand pesticides. They were given jugs that should have been poured into barrels of water. But water was precious, so they sprinkled it full strength onto the closest rows. Then they complained that those plants grew sickly, and never used the pesticides again. But still the farmers took those poisoned plants to market.” Nabil might have shrugged, or maybe just winced. “You see?”
The futility of compounded loss threatened to swallow Wynn whole. His only lifeline dangled madly out of reach. Wynn raised his eyes. “I need to know what else the monk of Wadi Natrum told Sybel.”
“She did not say.”
“You were talking with her when you left the building. I saw you.”
“I stayed with her, yes. I asked several times. But she would not speak of it.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
“I am sorry, Wynn. I would tell you if I knew.”
It was the first time Nabil had ever used his name. Even in the depths of his remorse, Wynn recognized the moment and took note. It gave him the courage to ask, “And what the hermit said to me, did you understand that?”
Though the features were smudged deep as bruises, still his eyes remained alert, dark, penetrating. “Your father and mother were missionaries as well as teachers. This you know.”
“Yes.”
“For the government and most people, they were here only to teach at the university. Their mission work remained secret. Speaking of Christ to Copts, that was one thing. We were persecuted from time to time, but not too much here in Cairo. Not then. But preaching to a Muslim, that was a crime. It still is. At that time, a foreigner who converted a Muslim could be put to death. A Muslim who prayed to Jesus, the same. Your parents ran secret home churches for believers among the Muslims. Very secret. My father, he was one of their messengers. The churches, they grew and grew. This was why your parents did not leave when Nasser declared that all Americans were enemies and must leave the country. They stayed for their secret flocks. Nowadays, every time I come home, I meet some of these people. The churches are tended by others now, but still they grow. A forest rising from seeds your parents planted.”
Wynn sat and waited for more. Staring at the floor by his feet, wishing he had listened better, spoken with his sister differently, learned enough to be whole now. When he looked up, Nabil was asleep.
Defeated and empty, he rose and left the room.
B
Y MIDAFTERNOON, when Kay and Wynn had both given their statements to the security officer at the Gamal and returned to the ambassador’s suite, the wind had stopped. The office windows were encrusted with a patina of grit, filtering the light a sickly beige. The suite was empty save for Wynn and Kay. The chargé was off somewhere and the ambassador’s secretary was arranging Wynn’s travel documents, everybody busy and scurrying for the congressman and senator. Kay had spoken twice with the ambassador, assuring him that he should remain at the ministerial meeting, and that she would pass on his condolences to Congressman Bryant. Wynn’s two suitcases stood by the desk, waiting for the limo to take him to the airport. Kay was taking a flight the next day, hoping to personally shepherd Nabil out of danger.
A young aide appeared, possibly one of those at the hospital the previous evening, Wynn could not be sure. He had not taken any more of the tablets, but now and then he drifted away, as though his body was producing its own chemical veil. The young man explained that they had to put out a press release, and it would be taking the official police line, which was that the attack had been the work of local fundamentalists. Wynn observed how the filtered light cast the man’s features a sickly tan, as if he had emerged from some dismal netherworld to expel more bad news.
When they were alone once more, Kay offered, “You don’t look too good. Are you sure you’re up for the flight?”
The flight was not the problem. He would take his pills and sack away the hours. He forced himself to form the tumbling thoughts. “I’ve got to do something, Kay. I can’t just let this pass, like it doesn’t matter, like Sybel never stood for anything.”