Authors: Parker Bilal
‘If it was any fresher it would have legs on it,’ said Umm Hamida as she set the plate of fried liver in front of him. Plates of eggs and white cheese also arrived along with warm flat bread and a bowl of mashed fava beans on which a shield of golden olive oil floated. Pushing aside the paper, Makana began to eat, suddenly aware that he had not eaten since lunchtime the previous day.
‘Are you going to find the animal who did it?’
A man loomed over him. He had a large, oddly shaped nose with some kind of growth on it that resembled a cauliflower.
‘What did you say?’
‘The Qadi. Are you going to find the one who killed him before he gets the rest of us?’
‘We have families to think of,’ another chimed in. Makana slowly became aware that everyone in the place was looking at him.
‘I’m sure Sergeant Hamama is doing his best.’
‘Hamama,’ muttered the first. ‘He’s only interested in helping himself.’
‘We heard you were sent from Cairo to help us,’ another man sitting in the corner said.
Before Makana had a chance to answer this, the first one broke in again, berating his friend. ‘What are you talking about, Cairo? You can see he’s one of us. He’s from the south. Am I right?’
Makana didn’t have to speak, they seemed to have him all figured out for themselves.
‘I don’t have time for those fancy types from Cairo. They understand nothing about us. They just have their bits of paper.’ Dramatically, the man with the large nose pointed into the distance. ‘We know nothing of that. We live by our own rules. You know why? Because out there the only borderline is between you and the Lord.’
‘Let the man eat in peace,’ Umm Hamida shooed them out of her way, cutting between them like a stubborn ewe.
‘Let me ask you,’ Makana ventured before they moved on. ‘Does anyone remember the Abubakr family? They used to live on land over beyond the mountain.’ He noticed a look pass between them. The second man spoke up.
‘Is this something to do with the Qadi?’
‘One of the daughters married a man named Musab Khayr. Another went abroad. The third girl disappeared. Does anybody remember that time?’
The man with the bulbous nose spat in the sand. ‘I remember the father. People said bad things about him, but I thought them unfair.’
‘What do you know?’ another interrupted.
‘They used to have lots of land,’ said a third man. The first man concurred.
‘It’s true. In the old days they owned most of the land on that side of town. The grandfather, or some such, maybe the great grandfather. He was a rich man. Everyone worked for him.’
‘He was an idiot. Nobody missed him when he went. The daughter died. Remember that?’
‘Yes, now that you mention it, I do remember. It was an accident.’
‘The eldest sister killed herself. I remember that. She drowned in the lake.’
‘No, she went away.’ The man rubbed his large nose. ‘One of them did, anyway. And one of them died. That I remember.’ A look passed between the two men. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
‘You think Musab killed the Qadi like that?’ asked the second.
‘Can you think of any reason why he would want to kill the Qadi?’
‘Musab never needed a reason to kill anyone. He did it for fun.’
After that they seemed to lose interest in the subject. They busied themselves with paying and getting ready to leave.
‘You don’t want to pay any attention to what that lot say,’ said Umm Hamida. ‘They have no idea what day of the week it is. Ask them the same thing tomorrow and you’ll get a different answer.’
When he had finished eating Makana decided to stretch his legs. He walked to the end of the narrow road thinking he might speak to Kamal at the bicycle shop, but the place was closed. Two tourists stood outside staring at the shuttered door.
So Makana turned and made his way up the winding road that led into the ruins of the old town. What had lured poor Ayman to lumber up this hill that evening? Had he been on his way to meet someone? At the scene of the crime the ground was still stained with dried blood. A handful of flies buzzed lazily in the warm air. Over the houses Makana could see the blue-grey sliver of the lake in the distance and the distant hump of the hillside. Beyond that the desert stretched away into infinite nothingness. Lighting a cigarette, Makana turned his attention back to survey the town behind him. Just below him the uneven pillar of the mosque rose up. A strange clicking sound of electrical static was coming from the speakers as if someone had left a switch on. Why would Ayman come up here in the middle of the night? There was nothing to show that he had been dragged up here, or forced against his will. Such a place, remote and yet central. A meeting, an assignation? With a woman?
As he stubbed out his cigarette, Makana stepped closer to the low wall. A small bird was worrying at a scrap of silver paper jammed under a fallen stone. It took to the air as he reached down. He sniffed it. A sweet wrapper. Tucking it carefully into his pocket, Makana spotted the nose of a car jutting out of the wall below him. Makana began descending the hillside by a series of winding paths that wound between the walls. The dried mud was flaked with flecks of light from the salt crystals it contained. They gleamed like gems hidden in the dull earth. He became lost, turning left and right. Finding his way blocked he scrambled up onto a wall to get his bearings. When he finally reached the bottom he discovered there wasn’t a road there at all. The way had been obstructed by a mound of crumbled earth that might once have been a wall. The nose of the car, a Lada Niva, was buried in the sand. The car’s paintwork was worn by sunlight and age to an uneven brown colour. Makana looked around him.
The Lada might have been an old army jeep. Hidden out of the way here, out of sight. Cairo plates. Shielding his eyes with his hands, Makana peered through the dusty rear window of the car. The interior was empty save for a plastic crate in which stood rows of what looked like withered plants. Their roots were wrapped in black plastic. The rest was wilted stems and dried leaves as if someone had forgotten them in there a long time ago. A stray dog began barking and when he turned it loped mournfully by to nose through a patch of wasteland, covered in broken bricks, pieces of tin, plastic bags – blue, white, striped, all the colours of a faded rainbow.
He was on the other side of the hill now and it took him fifteen minutes to find his way back around.
Makana was sweating by the time he reached the Norton. The machine was already hot enough to make him swear and pull back his hand when he touched the bare metal. Climbing into the saddle he turned the ignition switch and stamped on the starter a couple of times before being rewarded with the throaty grumble of the engine coming to life. He was aware of people watching him as he went by, no doubt wondering what evil this eccentric stranger had brought with him. Makana was beginning to get the feeling that the answers he was seeking were common knowledge, to everyone but himself. They all knew Musab and they knew what had taken him away from here. Some of them no doubt knew what might bring him back. They let him walk around and ask his foolish questions though none of them had the slightest intention of telling him what he needed to know.
Picking up the road west Makana rode out of town. The air cooled him down. Dust blew sideways across his path, at times gusting so hard that he felt the Norton wobble beneath him. The depot was about five kilometres outside of town; it wasn’t hard to find. It stood alone in the middle of nothing. A simple rectangular structure set back from the road. The walls were not the usual mud adobe but fired brick, though now faded almost to the same colour by sun and wind. Sergeant Hamama had said the place was abandoned, but it didn’t look that way. The doors were made of sheets of corrugated iron held together by a brace of crossed metal struts. They were locked with a heavy chain and padlock. Makana parked by the side and switched off the Norton. Without the engine chugging away he was suddenly plunged into silence, broken only by the gentle whistle of the wind. Looking south he saw the dust whipping itself up into a cone that rose high into the air, and twirled around. A desert jinn.
Traffic on the road was limited to the occasional vehicle going by. Makana peered through the corroded gaps in the corrugated steel gates. Inside he glimpsed a yard with a shelter along one wall. It had metal supports and roofing sheets. Underneath were parked three large Magirus-Deutz trucks. Covered in dust but serviceable by the looks of them. At the far end he could see what looked like storerooms. Makana circled the entire perimeter of the compound and then returned to the part just behind where the lorries were parked. It took him ten minutes to gather up enough broken bricks to pile into a rather unstable tower. It took several attempts before he was able to balance himself on this wobbly perch and reach the top of the wall. Heaving himself upwards, Makana managed, not without difficulty, to get onto the wall, catching his clothes in the strands of barbed wire that had been strung along the top of it. Once on the wall he could hold on to one of the supports to step over the wire and climb down onto the back of one of the trucks.
It was a bit of a disappointment. He didn’t find much more than he had already seen through the gate. The storerooms at the back were empty but for a heap of old tyres and didn’t look as if they had been used for anything in a long time. He returned to the trucks and discovered that the cabs on two of them had been locked. On the third one there was a hole you could stick your finger into where the lock ought to have been. The interior didn’t reveal much. A sun-bleached Quran lay face up on the dashboard to provide divine protection against mishaps. Apart from that there was nothing. He lifted the seats, looked through the tool locker, but came up with nothing more interesting than a broken lighter. He climbed down again and walked around the yard some more. There was a large blackened area in one corner where something had recently been burned. Makana sifted through the ashes with a stick and came up with a blackened tin can and a few strips of torn cardboard. Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep the place clean. As he straightened up and looked around him one last time he caught, out of the corner of his eye, something fluttering in the warm breeze. It was a torn piece of string or rather tape, that had been tied to one of the iron supports holding up the roof of the shelter. Makana went back over and climbed up into the back of one of the trucks. He had to step up onto the side of the flatbed and then, with a bit of fiddling, he managed to free it. It was a strip of white plastic which someone had knotted over the metal bar to use for something else perhaps and then forgotten. He turned it over. There were words printed on it, formed into a shape. A company logo. Something he had seen before,
AGI LandTech
. He rolled it up carefully and tucked it into his trouser pocket. Then he climbed up onto the wall and dropped down on the other side. Two minutes later he was back on the road with the noise of the machine and the wind whistling in his ears. He didn’t have any goggles, which meant that he had to squint against the wind and still the sand made his eyes water.
Far off in the distance the escarpment rose up like a crater on a distant planet, tapering down to meet the road that was nothing but a thin, dark thread that lost itself in the horizon. This was the old road along which Alexander had once led his trusted army through the desert in search of the blessing of the oracle. This was also the road Captain Mustafa took when he was killed. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the spot.
The remains of the pickup lay in the sand by the side of the road. From a distance it resembled the blackened, ugly carcass of a crow. Burnt and twisted. Setting the Norton on its stand Makana walked around the wreck. The road vanished into a point whichever way you cared to look. This was the kind of place it was easy to lose one’s sense of purpose. What had Captain Mustafa been after out here? Turning the other way he looked south and west towards the magnificent nothingness that was out there. Was it an accident or had the captain been surprised by a convoy of smugglers, old Wad Nubawi and his boys coming in from Libya with a fresh cargo of cigarettes and video players? Or was there something more?
‘Are you lost?’
An old Bedford lorry, the bonnet held down by a strand of electrical flex that trembled like a divining rod, rolled to a halt beside him. An old man, his face the same colour as the grubby white cloth wrapped around his head, leaned out of the window. Where he had come from wasn’t clear. He seemed to have materialised out of thin air like a mirage.
‘This road,’ Makana pointed south-west, ‘where does it lead to?’
‘The desert.’ The old man peered over his shoulder as if to make sure they were talking about the same track.
‘It doesn’t look like there’s much out there.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ the old man laughed. ‘There’s plenty. There’s a whole city of wonders. All you can dream of and more. Have you never heard of Kalonsha?’ The old man chuckled to himself as he wrestled the lorry into gear and trundled off in a cloud of black exhaust. Kalonsha. Makana recalled that Doctor Medina had mentioned the name. The word echoed round in Makana’s head like a mystical incantation, the way the sufi devotees turn in circles repeating the name of the Almighty in order to rise up and attain a transendental state, a trance that would take them on high.
Patience appeared to have run thin. When Makana arrived outside the police station a spectacle awaited him. The crowd from the previous day had swelled both in size and, it appeared, outrage.