• South

I woke myself up by laughing and couldn’t stop for quite a while, even though from the first moment on I couldn’t remember what I was laughing about.

Henri said he once woke up bleeding, but the worst were dreams where you were bored. Cairo glowed outside the open window. It was four o’clock in the morning.

Without thinking, I pulled at the drawer in the old wooden table as I passed it. It opened easily. The whole summer it had been stuck. It was to do with where the sun was in the sky, warming the wood. On the day the drawer opened easily again, Aunt Nelly usually declared summer over. It was the tenth of September.

Henri, Stella’s younger brother, had helped me get a job here. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the trip otherwise, and I needed the money. I needed it for Stella. Money is vulgar, but I know she needs it.

And I had been looking forward to seeing Aunt Nelly again. She’s lived here a long time. I loved visiting even as a child, and now I know the city and a few people, and so I was able to help the man Henri works for as an engineer.

But Aunt Nelly has disappeared. As Wahid brought us into the flat and told me that my aunt was gone, his fingers blossoming open like a flower, weighing a great worry in his hand.

Uncle Leonard had died two months earlier, and the drawer contained his electric razor. I took off the shaving foil and saw the salt-and-pepper dust of his last shave between the blades. I casually tapped the hair out of the razor’s head and shaved with it; a final moment of intimacy.

Cairo is a triumph over silence. With the delivery traffic there’s a noise that arises from the night’s hum of tyres like a twilight of the goods. A tram ran by the front of the house like a lawnmower being pushed through iron filings.

I had woken Henri, and now I was peeling an orange for him. The acid sprayed out from the peel, and the shadows of the heat rising from the toaster’s ventilation slots flowed like tiny streams of traffic over the surface of the table.

Henri is a boy of many talents. He has a haircut that looks like a burning puddle of petrol carved out of cherry wood, and a little scar below his right eye. He works as a hitman, among other things. When beginners first try their luck in an online game, they have no chance – they’ll get blown away by experienced combatants. If that upsets them, they can hire someone like Henri. The scar came from one of these people who got blown away, and had met Henri at a gaming convention.

I had scattered books all around the ottoman where I slept. They were all open, but in the four days since our arrival from Hamburg, the compulsive channel-hopping I had brought with me had subsided.

When I first met Stella two years ago, she told me her favourite part of The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is sitting in a car and crying because he knows he will never again be as happy as he is at that moment. At the time Stella told me that, I was very happy with her but not prepared to rule out the chance of an even greater happiness for us.

Now I was finally reading the book. While Henri ate his toast, I finished The Great Gatsby, and my suspicion became a certainty. The wonderful passage that Stella talked about isn’t actually in the book.

Wahid took us to a goldsmith, and I explained to him what I needed: A setting for a South Sea pearl in folded gold and platinum intended for a Japanese lady. I had to prohibit all repoussé decoration and request very simple elegance.

Then – it was still dark – the ember pedlars came round, selling good, ready embers to the smiths. We watched the ash-covered men lift one of the large pots from their cart, the embers rolling out of their nest of ashes into the forge, and I watched the whole room glow as the bellows started up.

‘I’m just off to pray,’ said Wahid. The many times his head had touched the ground had left a visible callus on his forehead – the ‘raisin’.

When Uncle Leonard was still working as a construction manager, Wahid had been the boy responsible for making tea on the large building site. There was no clock anywhere, and he started boiling the water for the tea much too early, and the labourers began to take breaks much too early. And so Uncle Leonard bought a large blue kitchen clock and hung it round Wahid’s neck.

Another of Wahid’s jobs was to mind a little dog for one of the workers whose wife had lost interest, and the dog was in heat. To stop the local strays lusting after her, he sprayed orange signal paint on her coat, and when some inspectors from the Swiss construction company in charge of the project arrived, the first things they saw were a tall, friendly boy with a blue kitchen clock on his chest and a poodle painted orange standing by a fire.

The smith sweated over the brooch, and the coals sometimes shone so brightly that you could no longer see the shape, just the hot glow, the piece itself like a shadow within.

When Wahid came back, we played an old game that goes like this: I try to explain to him what punk is, and he tries to explain to me what Arabic music is. Wahid likes punk’s combativeness, but not its contempt.

He told me about the four table legs of Arabic music, about Umm Kulthum, the great female singer, who for decades created a new song on every first Thursday of the month. Politicians stopped making Thursday speeches, and when she died, her coffin was passed from hand to hand in the streets of Cairo for hours, a boat on an ocean of people, then Wahid told me about the three other great singers. When it dawned on Henri that all four table legs of Arabic music are now dead, Wahid said darkly: ‘The Israelis are to blame.’ The game was over.

I knew that at this hour Stella was on her way to work. She’s a nurse on an intensive-care ward. I sent her a text message consisting of two spaces. A while later, three spaces came back in response, and I thought: she does still care. Then I saw that the smith was already starting to chisel off a new piece, and we drove over to Giza and the pyramids. 

Henri looked out into the desert. So much beach and no sea, he said. An Austrian tour group walked past, and someone asked me something. I answered in very bad English that I was sorry, I was Finnish and it wasn’t cold enough for me here.

Mr Shirakawa had performed another small miracle. We had the equipment and the permissions for Schwetz. The company Shirakawa worked for had been trying for a long time to build a nuclear power plant in Egypt, and I knew he would be glad of any opportunity to demonstrate their fantastic technology. He’d had a microgravimetric device brought in with which Schwetz could measure the stones.

I had helped to get someone from the ministry for tourism to convince someone from the antiquities authority that foreign visitor numbers had not yet properly recovered since the most recent attacks, and that an undiscovered burial chamber would undoubtedly receive some positive interest in the international press.

Schwetz, who was paying Henri and me, intended to reveal the secret of the pyramids. He was from Hamburg, he was a crank, and he stood next to Shirakawa by the crate containing the gravimetric scales. A pink plastic bag was drifting up the Great Pyramid. 

Schwetz gave me his hand, which then disappeared again at once, like a liquid. I was moved by him, but there was something about him that made that difficult. He told us something about his theory, and it was like someone giving a person money, them saying nothing, and then giving them more money. Terrible.

I recognised the dilettante immediately, someone like me. His hypotheses were outlandish, but carefully worked out, and I felt the need to protect this person and his construct, so soft, as if built of flakes of ash. A tourist bus with Christian Transport on the side pulled up. Down on the plain, sugar-cane fields were burning after the harvest. 

Around midday, Wahid came out from the city. He had heard that Aunt Nelly had gone away in the old camper van. My eighty-four-year-old aunt had no driving license and no car. She had asked around, and the agent for a hairpiece company had taken her and the little camper van to Alexandria and put her on the ferry to Athens. Wahid shook his head, so slightly that you could only sense it, and this tender expression of despair decided it for me.

Shirakawa and I walked past the Sphinx to the old quarry. Up ahead, a tall tower of scaffolding was fixed to the cliff. A man at the foot of the tower lifted a stone the size of a watermelon off the steep slag heap and into a wheelbarrow, and pushed it over to the scaffolding. A man on the second level used a pulley to let down a rope, which swung ever more lazily the longer it got. A thick steel hook dangled at the end of the rope like a large dead question mark. Two men pulled up the barrow with the stone in it and turned it onto the boards. One of them wheeled it a short distance, and the boards made wooden waves beneath the barrow’s wheel. The other climbed up to another man on the next level. The wheelbarrow was pulled up once more, and a man wheeled the stone to the end of the scaffolding. Then he tipped it onto the slag heap. The stone rolled down with a series of dull thuds until it came to rest roughly where the man at the foot of the tower had picked it up.

We watched the team working, and I gave Shirakawa the little box with the pearl brooch inside, with regards to the wife, that way it looked most genuinely like a gift. ‘I need your help again,’ I said. ‘It’s urgent.’

Back in the city I drove past the university with Wahid. There is a stone sphinx on a plinth outside the entrance, and beside it stands a woman taking the veil from her face. As we drove past this time, the sculpture switched like a visual puzzle: a woman in the act of lifting a veil to cover her face.

Abeer – Wahid’s niece, who works as a travel agent – managed to get me one of the jump seats on the last plane to Athens. Henri lent me some money, as Schwetz was apparently a bit short. Abeer and one of her colleagues were taking some Canadians to the airport in a minibus, and they could give me a lift. People summarised, superlatives fell like autumn leaves. I spoke Arabic with Abeer.

‘Sounds really strange,’ said one of the Canadians appreciatively.

‘That’s because Arabs speak from right to left,’ I said.

Abeer is twenty-two and she lives with her parents, two brothers, and an uncle in a small three-room apartment. Recently she was asked to fill in for someone on a ship. That meant she couldn’t spend the night at home, an absurdity for an unmarried Egyptian woman. Her job feeds half her extended family, and after a long back-and-forth the family council agreed. After a steward took her to her cabin on the boat and she closed the door, she was alone in a room for the first time in her life.

From the air, Athens at night is a mighty, glittering deep-sea organism. Traffic flows through arteries of light. During the landing I held an empty plastic cup. As the plane taxied towards the terminal, the clicking of seat-belt buckles pattered through the rows like a hail shower. There was an aura of moisture around each of my fingerprints on the plastic cup.

Shirakawa had met Mr and Mrs Pantidis, to whom he had recommended me, in the 1980s, when he used to fly from Cairo to Athens once a week to make phone calls. At that time, even attempting to reach someone in Cairo by telephone could take up a whole afternoon.

The Pantidis lived in Piraeus, and I was given food and wine and a clean bed. At five in the morning, Mrs Pantidis drove me to the quay where the ferries docked, and I met a network of old ladies who provided the stray cats of Piraeus with food and love, and who observed the comings and goings more diligently than any secret service.

On the north side of the jetty, a gallery of old men sat on a low wall. One of them was almost drowning in his own fat, and his small eyes shone with the fear of a man who has been shipwrecked. An old woman in a green jacket was clearly telling him off for his gluttony. She had spoken to Aunt Nelly two days previously. They had fallen into conversation about one of the dock workers: he had threatened to poison the cats because they sat on his car, and the lady had sewed him a tarpaulin to put over it. Aunt Nelly said she wanted to go to the Peloponnese and to Patras.

I caught the bus. While the driver was taking his lunch break in a village, I walked past a wall of firethorn into lush pillows of bright wild cyclamens and looked across the Gulf of Corinth and a great shower of light bursting over it. Henri called and said the World Trade Center in New York had collapsed. On the crossing to Italy I saw an almost hand-drawn line where the dark blue water of the Aegean met the green water of the Adriatic, and sometimes it seemed to me that I could use the flavour of the spray to taste the depth of the water.

In Italy I asked about my aunt at petrol stations. I looked at the countryside and saw the green and thought, for Stella I could get more out of that than just one green. So I wrote a letter.

‘There are the grape vines. Scattered patches of green gloom dot the wall of tendrils and leaves, and little hollows hold the invisible light illuminating the faces in the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt. There is the dark green of the cherry-tree leaves, with a black in it that you can feel, and that you can eat in summer in the form of fruit. There is the universal green of the nut trees. Leaves stick up like birds from the crown of a tree, but they will fall. The green floods across the boundaries of all private property. It gives us back distance. That is a bouquet, Stella. I provide the greenery, and you are the colour, the beauty.’ 

It started to rain, then a roar rose up from the green. Raindrop rings gently opened in the puddles. Then the rain eased off; it crackled on an awning, like crumpled-up plastic bags unfurling themselves again.

Once I even asked at a motorway police station. In Rimini, I gave up. I had lost Aunt Nelly and had just enough money left for a train ticket and an umbrella.

• North

I arrived in Hamburg’s central station late one evening. On the platform stood a woman whose clothes looked like they had bought her and not the other way round. She was clutching her shoulder with one hand. I crossed over to the unlit path along the bank of the Alster.

‘Talk politics to me, come on!’ someone screamed behind me.

Then I felt a hard blow to the head, as if a machine had hit me. Carrying an umbrella in Hamburg is really an exercise in defeatism; perhaps that’s why someone was attacking me. I dropped my holdall, opened the umbrella, and held it between me and a man whose left arm was in a plaster cast with a black stripe down it. A second man and a woman were standing a little way off – then the umbrella was broken.

‘What measures are you going to take to control the conflict in the Middle East?’

I climbed up a road sign and kicked downwards. I didn’t want any of this. But you can’t hold out very long up a road sign. Again I felt the meteoric force of the plaster cast, then there was complete chaos, and then only the woman remained.

‘Is that you?’

‘Hello, Stella,’ I said.

‘I didn’t realise it was you,’ said Stella.

‘Were those friends of yours?’

‘Someone,’ said Stella. She was slightly drunk.

When we came to the street lights on the cycle path, I saw I was wearing a wide necktie made of blood.

At home I realised I hadn’t been the one bleeding. I was incensed at this unwanted victory. Stella rubbed hand cream into her palms, and I saw a reflection of it in the neck of a glass bottle, a lick of flame. Then I saw her naked. She is direct when it comes to love. Her breath, every emotion speaks to me; I answer. Something begins with a soft noise like carefully breaking the spine of a new book.

Ocean-supple flotsam. 

Is that what we are, or are we fighting animals?

Pleasure in the sack. Kids under the kitchen table, cats in cardboard boxes. I would have liked to watch a Jacques Tati film I hadn’t seen before, but I’ve seen them all, and Tati is dead.

Stella told me about a retirement home for animals where there’s a pensioner pig who thinks he’s a horse. He runs round the paddock with the old nags and is one of them. My top lip had swollen up.

‘There’s something there,’ said Stella.

‘There’sh shomething everywhere,’ I said and let go of my top lip. ‘That’s the lovely thing about reality. Imagine if somewhere there was nothing. Straight away you’d have a flat full of philosophers.’ 

Later we sat in the kitchen, where half a pumpkin was sitting on a large plate. Once it was turned over, opinions began to differ. Stella thought the back of it looked like a dead fish; I thought a lebkuchen with white icing. We started to argue in fun, then more seriously. You shouldn’t make a crystal glass ring; it stores the vibrations in its structure. Even months later, a gentle tap can cause the whole thing to shatter.

Henri was staying on in Egypt, so I was going to stand in for him here. There was some funny work to be done. I needed the money; I needed it for Stella. Money is vulgar, but there is a difference between making it and making it for someone.

We were writing television screenplays, comedy. Henri had taught me how it was done in Cairo, as we were stuck in a traffic jam with Wahid.

‘What does a person want?’ said Henri. ‘He wants a happy day. What is a happy day? A day when nothing happens. So you think of something to happen.’

Nothing equals happiness; we were being paid to disrupt it. There was probably an immovable deadline, and so the company accepted my standing in for Henri.

The neighbours were not to know what we were doing; it wouldn’t have made a good impression, not this September. There were eight of us, in teams of two. One had broken his ankle, and as we carried the injured man up the three floors to the office, like we did every day, someone asked us from their doorway what we were doing.

‘We’re making jokes,’ said Roland. He and I are a team.

‘You shouldn’t make jokes like that,’ said the man in the doorway.

‘Oh, but he thinks it’s funny too,’ I said, pointing to the man being carried. He was in pain and didn’t think it was funny. I was canned laughter. It even works when, as is usually the case, what is said isn’t funny at all.

That day Stella called me and said she’d found my aunt, she was in hospital, she was doing okay. I drove there after work.

‘I wanted to go home,’ said Aunt Nelly.

She was very weak. Her skin was white and almost transparent. She had once told me that she’d lived in Hamburg as a child and that it had been lovely.

She told me a lot of things. Under one of the windows in the Cairo flat there is a window sill made of light wood, into which over the years she had leaned a dark, silky hollow. As a child I couldn’t understand how someone could lean on a window sill and look out into a street when there is nothing to see but a street and people. Then Aunt Nelly showed me what there was to see. 

I saw that there was only her bed in the room, and that there was no medication on the bedside table. Stella came in with a young doctor whose left arm was in plaster with a black stripe down it.

‘She’s very old,’ said the young doctor, and we walked slowly down the corridor outside the room. I sensed that he actually wanted to walk very fast, because he was needed urgently, and how kind it was of him to walk so slowly along this corridor with me.

Roland and I worked in a small room in front of a computer. Roland said that it’s a wonderful feeling when your mouse has been cleaned and runs like new again. An impression of light lay on the screen, and the cursor swam in it, on the edge of a void.

The situation: a couple in a flat, the TV is on.

‘He needs to say something now,’ said Roland.

‘The universe is like Liz Taylor,’ I said. ‘It’s unfathomable, and expanding.’

Roland nodded and wrote it down. He was English, mid-fifties, a nice house. He’d been doing this work for more than twenty years.

When the boss read the script, he said: ‘Who’s Liz Taylor?’

‘Well, can the universe be saved?’ asked Roland.

‘Liz Taylor is old old old. Our target audience is the under-forties.’

I imagined that instead of canned laughter, you could mix in a weeping audience. But it’s the same with sad people as it is with kings. Too many in one place and they lose their majesty.

I worked by day and spent the nights in a chair at Aunt Nelly’s bedside. I read The Great Gatsby again – perhaps there was something I had overlooked. Occasionally Stella came. We leaned on each other like playing cards. ‘Things for which there is no solution,’ she said once, ‘are not problems.’

One night in October I had a dream. Light waves and light brigades. The kitchen sank. Why are there no emergency entrances? A nurse woke me, the young doctor was standing at the bedside. Aunt Nelly was dead.

The crematorium was a hall built from light, clean concrete, with two cremation chambers inside. They were pink, and on the floor in front of one of them lay the coffin with Aunt Nelly’s body in it. Then I saw the fierce yellow flames inside the chamber, and I was startled when, quick as insects, two rails rose up from the floor under the coffin and heaved it into the chamber. After a short while I could smell the warm scent of burning wood; a last moment of intimacy.

The days that followed saw the end of the work as well, then the money came in and I transferred it to Stella. I went home to her place, and her cat nuzzled the palm of my hand and made me laugh with joy.

Then Henri was back; the pyramids had kept their secret. One evening we went into the many possibilities. Tides of restlessness washed customers, like us, into a restaurant or carried them away. The blue reflections of watch faces and jewellery danced on the restaurant ceiling.

We wanted water.

‘Club soda?’ asked the waiter.

‘Cub soda,’ said Henri.

‘Sofa water,’ I said.

One-all, and we were both too lazy to win. In the shadows of the stemmed water glasses, delicately shifting refractions shone on the white tablecloth, dragonfly wings of light. The table was set with silver cutlery, including English soup spoons. Then I ate cassava for the first time. In a pleasant way it tasted of nothing, though not such a soft nothing as mozzarella.

I tried to thank Henri for the invitation to dinner with a gimmick, saying how remarkable I had found it when someone had recently told me that the ancient Egyptians were afraid of someone ejaculating in their left ear, because it was the passageway for the soul, and with great delight Henri reminded me that that had actually been him.

Then he said that Stella had given my money to Schwetz, and that they had once been a couple. 

The stone rolled down with a series of dull thuds until it came to rest roughly where the man at the foot of the tower had picked it up.

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Henri. ‘I didn’t know you didn’t know.’

Sometimes you have to drink so that the not-drinking doesn’t get out of hand. And so we drank. Firewater.

I took a taxi home. The driver was from Bosnia, he had been a lawyer in Tuzla. When he fled for the sake of his wife and children after eight months of war, he had to leave his library behind. 

‘It’s not so bad that the office and the house are gone,’ he said, ‘but when I lost my library, I lost everything.’ One thousand three hundred and twenty-seven books, many of them inherited from his father and grandfather, each of them read.

‘But we’re alive,’ he said in a friendly tone.

And so we drove. It was the last mild night of that year, and we drove with the sun roof open, and it wasn’t just like being in a car driving across the earth, but like the earth was a convertible driving through infinity, the tenderness and openness of the atmosphere above us and our hair blowing out into the cold expanse of space.