He could feel his voice starting to crack, his eyes welling up. Definitely shouldn’t have had the Jameson’s.
‘
Mabruk
,’ repeated Khalifa. ‘I am very happy for you. For both of you.’
The same blank tone, the same absence of emotion. Ben-Roi’s jaw tightened.
Miserable bastard
, he thought.
Here I am pouring out my heart and you can’t even make the effort to sound like you mean what you’re saying. Maybe it
is
against Muslim principles, but you could at least pretend for the sake of friendship. A fine state of affairs when I get more of a reaction from a barman and a pair of pissed-up dolly birds than from someone whose life I saved
.
‘Listen, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to call so late,’ he said, unable to hide the annoyance in his voice. ‘There was something I wanted to ask you, to do with a case I’m working on, but this obviously isn’t the right—’
‘No, no, please, it’s fine. If there is something I can do for you . . .’
The man sounded borderline spaced, completely disconnected, like he was on drugs. Perhaps he
was
on drugs, thought Ben-Roi. Was ill or something. Maybe
that
was the explanation.
‘You OK, Khalifa?’
Silence.
‘You OK?’ he repeated. ‘You don’t seem . . . I mean, I don’t want to make a big thing of it, but I’m about to have a baby and I get the impression you’re not particularly pleased for me. Not even particularly interested.’
There was another soft rasp as the Egyptian pulled on his cigarette. When he spoke again he sounded genuinely apologetic.
‘Forgive me, my friend. I
am
interested. And happy for you.
Really
happy. To have a child is a wonderful thing. It’s just that . . .’
Another rasp, another exhalation. Ben-Roi’s annoyance gave way to a vague rumble of concern.
‘Just that what?’
In the back room the football commentary was ramping up again, accompanied by shouts of ‘Go, Katan!’ and ‘Cross it!’
‘Just that what, Khalifa? Is something wrong?’
Glasses clinked at the bar, accompanied by a renewed explosion of giggling. Dire Straits seemed somehow to have morphed into Britney Spears’s ‘Toxic’.
‘Khalifa?’
‘Cross it, fuck sake!’
‘Khalifa?’
‘Actually yes, something is wrong. Something . . .’
A muffled choke echoed down the line, which Ben-Roi might have taken for a sob had it not been for all the ambient racket. The rumble of concern grew stronger.
‘What’s happened? Tell me, Khalifa.’
There was yet another pause – it was like the conversation was on some sort of time delay – then the Egyptian started to explain, something about a boat, an accident. His voice was lost in a sudden, deafening eruption of cheering from the back room as Maccabi Haifa finally got the ball in the net and brought the scores level. Ben-Roi held a hand over one ear and ducked his head down almost to the level of the tabletop, trying to block out the noise.
‘I’m sorry, I missed that. What did you . . . ?’
Everyone was bellowing and shouting, even the girls.
‘Khalifa, I’m sorry, I can’t—’
One of the young men came leaping down the steps into the bar and charged the length of the room pumping his fists in the air. Another followed, and then another, the three of them doing an impromptu conga, which made the girls scream with delight. Ben-Roi waved a hand, trying to get them all to quieten down, but to no avail. With no sign of the celebrations diminishing, he told Khalifa to hang on, stood and went outside, pulling the door to behind him.
Suddenly everything went very quiet.
‘That’s better,’ he said, pacing down the deserted street. ‘It was all kicking off in there, I couldn’t hear a bloody thing. Now what were you saying? What’s happened?’
This time Khalifa’s voice came through loud and clear. It stopped Ben-Roi in his tracks.
‘My son died. There was an accident on the Nile and my son Ali was killed. I’ve lost my little boy. Oh God, Ben-Roi, I’ve lost my little boy.’
L
UXOR
Even now, almost a year on, Khalifa wasn’t even close to coming to terms with what had happened. Couldn’t imagine a time when he ever would come to terms with it. He’d lost his eldest son, his golden boy. How could you ever rest easy with that weighing on your heart?
They’d been at it for months apparently, ever since they’d found the skiff abandoned in a reed bank. Ali and a group of his friends, invincible fourteen-year-olds on the lookout for fun and adventure. They had patched the boat up, filched one oar from a felucca-yard down by Karnak, fabricated another from some old scrap wood, started taking it out on the Nile. Nothing too daring at first: a splash up and down the eastern shoreline, a hop across the narrow channel to Banana Island where they would build camps and eat sweets and smoke pilfered cigarettes. All perfectly harmless.
As time had gone on, however, they had grown bolder. Once they had persuaded a motorboat owner to tow them all the way up to the Nile road bridge so they could drift the ten kilometres back downriver; another time they had paddled around to the far side of Banana Island and out to the buoys marking sand bars to the west of the island.
On the night of the tragedy, six of them, including Ali, had set off on their greatest adventure yet, a voyage right the way across the river to the far shore and back again.
It had been planned meticulously. For weeks they had been hoarding food and drinks and cigarettes to sustain them on their epic journey; on the chosen night each boy had claimed to be going to a sleepover at one of the other boys’ so as not to arouse parental suspicion. They had rendezvoused after dark at a small inlet well south of Luxor, loaded the boat, taken a vow of eternal friendship in case of shipwreck or enemy attack – a playful gesture that in the event had proved agonizingly prescient.
And then they had pushed off, feeling like the greatest explorers that had ever lived. No lifejackets, of course, but then they could all swim, so why would they need them?
They had suffered an early setback when, barely on to the river, the boat had sprung a leak. They should have turned back immediately, but they had been anticipating the adventure for so long, were so excited and pumped up about the whole thing, that they had ploughed on regardless, two of the boys bailing with plastic pots while the others propelled the boat with the oars plus a pair of wooden planks they had pressed into service to give them extra momentum.
After the unpromising start, things had got back on track and, with the leak under control and the Nile flowing slow and calm, they had made it all the way out to the middle of the river without further mishap.
Then, however, everything had started to unravel.
In the first of the series of random events that would combine to shunt an innocuous situation inexorably towards tragedy, a police motor launch, patrolling well south of its normal remit, had spotted the skiff, swung past and ordered them back to land.
The other boys had been all for waiting for the launch to disappear and continuing their adventure. Ali – son of a policeman – had insisted they comply with the order. (How many times had Khalifa berated himself for not teaching his boy to be more disrespectful of authority?)
And so they had turned – with disappointed groans and much playful ribbing of Mr Goody-two-shoes-always-do-what-I’m-told – and started back the way they had come. Only to discover that the current, which had been perfectly manageable on the way out, was for some reason much more aggressive in the opposite direction.
‘It was like the river didn’t want to let us get back to shore,’ recalled the one boy to have survived the tragedy, and from whose testimony the story had slowly been pieced together. ‘The current kept pulling us north and pushing us back towards the middle. Every inch was a fight.’
The makeshift oar had snapped in half; one of the wooden rowing planks had been dropped and swept off into the night. The leak had rapidly worsened, shipping water faster than the bailers could empty it. By the time they had dragged themselves half the distance back to the east bank, the skiff was effectively unmanoeuvrable and the boys were all exhausted.
Which was when they spotted the barge.
At first they weren’t alarmed. It was a long way away, well over a kilometre, a distant black scratch on the moon-silvered surface of the river, and although it seemed to be heading directly for them, well out of the normal shipping channel over by the western shore, none of them doubted that its forward lookout would spot them in time and signal an adjustment in course.
The adjustment never came. As the current swept them north, and the barge held its relentless line south, the boys started to grow worried, and then scared. They began shouting and waving their arms, trying to warn the barge away, at the same time furiously splashing at the water in an effort to claw themselves out of its path.
To no avail. The skiff swept downriver, the barge ploughed up, the two of them locked into a seemingly irreversible trajectory, the distance between them growing narrower by the second.
‘Like two trains running towards each other on the same track,’ was how one eyewitness on the shore described it.
‘We just sort of froze,’ said the survivor. ‘We could see the barge getting closer, but it was like it was all happening in slow motion, in a dream. I remember Ali shouting we should all jump overboard, but we couldn’t move. Right up to the last minute we thought they’d see us and change course.’
Eventually the barge’s forward lookout did spot the skiff, alerted by a horn blast from the police motor launch which had come back to make sure the boys had done what they were told. The lookout had screamed at the wheelman who had frantically spun the rudder in an effort to avert collision, but by then it was way too late, less than a hundred metres now separating the skiff and the towering scalpel of the barge’s prow.
According to one of the river police, at the last moment the boys had all stood and wrapped their arms around each other, as if by sheer force of friendship they might hold a thousand tonnes of metal at bay (to his dying day that image would haunt Khalifa, six terrified children bonded in a final, hopeless embrace).
And then, like a sledgehammer pulverizing a matchbox, the barge had hit.
Four of the boys were killed instantly, sucked under the water and cut to shreds by the vessel’s giant propellers (only two recognizable bodies were ever found). A fifth managed by some miracle to thrash his way clear of the scene and was rescued by the police motor launch, so traumatized that for a week after the disaster he wouldn’t speak a single word.
A sixth boy had also lived – Ali. His unconscious, waterlogged body had been spotted thirty minutes after the accident by the police launch, tangled face-down in a raft of
ward-i-nil
. He was plucked from the river and rushed ashore to Luxor General, where he was recognized by Rasha al-Zahwi, the paediatrician wife of Khalifa’s friend Omar, who was covering the late shift in the hospital’s emergency unit. It was she who had called the Khalifas to tell them what had happened.
When they arrived at the hospital and saw their boy on the life support – ashen-faced, wire-covered, an intubation pipe protruding from his mouth like some monstrous worm – Zenab had collapsed. Khalifa had helped her up and got her on to a chair at the head of the bed, assuring her it was all going to be OK even though he had known instinctively it wasn’t. Then, not caring what anyone thought of him, oblivious to the doctors and nurses bustling all around, he had climbed on to the bed beside his boy and held him, telling him how much he loved him, pleading with him to stay with them, pleading with Allah to be merciful, humming ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ from
Mary Poppins
, which even at the age of fourteen was still Ali’s favourite DVD.
For six days and six nights they had held vigil, not once leaving their son’s bedside. There was never any hope. He’d been under the water for too long. His heart might have continued to beat, but his brain, according to the doctors, was to all intents and purposes dead. He never regained consciousness; Allah in His infinite wisdom chose, on this occasion, not to grant a miracle. The six days were, in a sense, simply an extended leave-taking.
On the seventh day they had agreed to let him go.
Khalifa had insisted that he should be the one to do it – it was too personal a thing, too intimate to entrust to a stranger. They had kissed Ali, and held him close, and told him over and over again how much they loved him, how much joy he’d brought them, how he would always be a part of their lives. Then, each of them clasping one of his hands, both weeping uncontrollably, they had said a final goodbye and Khalifa had leant across and switched off the life support.
Fourteen years before he had watched his son coming into the world – delivered at home in the bedroom of the apartment that would in a month’s time be demolished so tourists would have something interesting to photograph.
Now he watched him taking his leave of it, his boy’s beautiful, precious, irreplaceable life slowly fading to a monotonal flatline on the screen of the hospital heart monitor.
The agony of it was indescribable, the sorrow beyond any sorrow he had ever thought it possible to experience.
Zenab had never recovered. She had barely spoken a word since, just spent her days looking through photo albums and watching Ali’s
Mary Poppins
DVD and dusting the room they had made for him in their new apartment. Even now, nine months on, she still woke every morning with the same bereft howl of ‘I miss him!’
Khalifa had taken an extended leave of absence to nurse her through the worst of it, and, also, to be there for Batah and Yusuf, who had both been devastated by the loss of their brother (although with the resilience of youth they had swiftly assimilated the loss and got on with their lives). In an uncharacteristic display of decency, Chief Hassani had not only swung them the new apartment, but had also insisted Khalifa be paid a full wage while he was away, which had at least made things easier on a practical level. Khalifa still wasn’t sure whether to feel gratitude for the gesture, or resentment at the fact he was now such a pitiful figure even a renowned tough-nut like the chief felt sorry for him.