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scowled as soon as she saw Raf. Then she noticed Ahmed sitting on the other
side and promptly relaxed. Everyone offered the peace, then said good morning
and finally said hello. By the time that was done another shop had begun to
open, the metal grille being pulled back from the doorway and an awning being
wound down in a screech of rusty metal.
"Ishaq and Sons?" Ahmed said to the woman who twisted her thin neck to one
side, making her seem more birdlike than ever.
"Ishaq?"
"This man's looking for their office."
And not finding it
, Raf thought to himself. Most of the shops did without numbers but even
counting forward from some that did and back from others he'd failed to work
out where number 132 should be.
With one hand on a tarnished metal pole she'd been about to use to wind down
her own awning and her other on a bony hip, the woman considered Ahmed's
question, head still cocked to one side in thought.
"Ishaq and Son . . ." Slowly she straightened up, small eyes turning to gaze
at Raf.
"Perhaps this was a notario?" she suggested.
Raf nodded.
"Ibrahim ibn Ishaq," she told the street cleaner, jerking her head backwards
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to signify somewhere behind her. "He used to be above the French bookseller."
"Used to be?" Raf said.
"He died," said the birdlike woman. "Years ago. Pneumonia. After that really
bad spring."
"His son took over?"
"Ibrahim was the son. That was it. The place is empty."
Surprise should have been the first thing Raf felt. Or maybe shock, disbelief
and blind refusal to accept the impossible. All of those would have been
normal. But what Raf actually felt was sick. A cold nausea at the centre of
his gut spreading out through his veins, his skin growing pale as blood
withdrew from his capillaries and shivers syncopated the length of his spine.
It felt like static playing across his body, twitching muscles and burning
like ice along the branching pathways of his nerves.
The fox coughed, its bark close to laughter.
Just because something is chaotic doesn't make it random. Raf remembered a man
in a white coat telling him that. Years before. The term phase space kept
cropping up but the surgeon had been talking about his brain.
"Are you all right?"
"Ibrahim was family?"
Two questions asked together, voices male and female but both worried, though
the man at least glanced away from the tears that had sprung into Raf's eyes.
Wiping them clumsily with the back of his hand, Raf laughed. The small
embarrassed laugh of a man who has let emotion get the better of him.
"My mother's cousin," he said with a small shrug. "I'm fine but I know she
will be upset."
To make up for Raf's disappointment the woman insisted on showing him where
the office had been, walking slowly so that he could keep up with her in his
crude shoes. Kairouan was Ifriqiya's most important city, she told him on the
way. A place of real learning, unlike Tunis, with its crowds of nasrani and
unsavoury way of life. If he was lucky he might find a job at the market.
From Kairouan to Tunis was maybe 150 kilometres by road, perhaps less;
although, as no railway reached the city and Raf had been forced to leave at
M'aaken to catch a bus, the distance would be more than this by the time he
returned to M'aaken and rejoined one of the local services for Gare de
Tunis.
"There you go," she said, pointing to a window above a dusty shop front. "That
was where your cousin used to work. We had to reach his office from the back .
. ."
Raf thanked her, then did so again, leaving her standing on the pavement a
hundred paces from her own shop as the first customers of the day came out to
buy pastries and fruit for breakfast.
On his way to catch the return bus to M'aaken, Raf detoured into an alley that
ran parallel to that side of
Rue Ali bel Houane and walked slowly along the narrow street, counting
openings and looking at signs painted directly onto the peeling length of
wall. He found the one he wanted halfway down, faded and partly lost under a
smear of concrete that someone had used to patch a hole in the plaster.
Isaac & Sons: Commissioners for Oaths. The only words he'd been able to read
from the letter in Lady
Nafisa's hand. The door to the office was bolted from the inside and had an
extra padlock hooked through a rusting clasp at waist height, as if locking an
empty office from within might not be enough.
Next to the door was an odd cast-iron blade set into a small arch at ground
level, which Raf eventually worked out was for scraping mud from boots during
the winter months.
"Talk to me,"
said the fox.
All Raf gave him was an angry shake of the head. He knew how absurdly easy it
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always was to give in.
To welcome Tiri back and make it speak to him or, rather, make Tiri speak for
him, because that's what the fox did, they both understood that now.
And Raf wanted the cold deep in his bones to go away and the memories that
flooded his veins like iced water to vanish. Most of all he wanted to spend
the rest of his life, however long that was, knowing that when he woke each
morning the room in which he slept would not have changed colour, that no
hedges would have grown to maturity from seedlings outside his window, that
the season when he awoke would be the same as when he shut his eyes.
If banishing the fox from his head was the price Raf had to pay to achieve
this, then the fox would have to go. And it had been a stupid idea of Tiri's
anyway to go ask advice of a lawyer who was already dead.
CHAPTER 16
_____________
Flashback
Sometime around noon, with the sun burning down on the outside of Sally's
airless carriage, three men wearing combat trousers, khaki T-shirts and
checked kufiyyeh came by to throw passengers off the stalled train. At least
that's what Sally assumed was happening given that the nuns suddenly stood up
and began to collect together their baskets, wrapping what was left of the
salami inside its white cloth and burying the package at the bottom of the
biggest basket, as if bandits might have stopped the train to steal their
food.
"I find out what's happening," said the boy and nodded to Sally, pointedly
ignoring the nuns as he jumped down onto the track. Sally watched him walk
away, dodging between exiting passengers until he disappeared from sight.
After a while she realized he probably wasn't coming back.
Everyone waited in the sun for two hours beside the train. And then its diesel
engine fired up and the abandoned carriages began to reverse slowly away from
where the passengers still sat, picking up speed as they went. True to type,
the nuns immediately formed a small circle with their baskets in the middle,
as if they were the wagons and their luggage the settlers waiting for an
Indian attack. Occasionally one or another would glance over to where Sally
stood, too nervous to sit, but that was all.
As dusk arrived so did the soldiers. Teenage conscripts with hard haircuts and
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| Cytat |
Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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