The end of the road
Three years ago the car had come round the corner. Three years ago it had been a Wednesday afternoon. All the children had gone to the park; most of them with their parents, or in the company of friends. She had been at work though and her daughter, who was six years’ old at the time, had to cross the street on her own. The car had rounded the corner at approximately ten miles an hour. That had been fast enough. All the girl’s schoolmates had come to the funeral; the first of the dreams came two days later:
The car is turning a right corner; her daughter is crossing the road. She herself is now floating up in the air. She tries to swim or crawl down but stays in the same position; she is forced to watch what will unfold. The front of the car is now a glittering of knives. Her daughter looks up, reaches for her, says something, screams. Even before the car hits her daughter, blood comes pouring from the child’s mouth. In the two, three heartbeats before the collision the girl looks straight at the driver. The woman, the mother, watches through the girl’s eyes; she’s watching herself: she, the mother, is the one behind the wheel. She wakes up to the sound of her own screams; she is cold and sweaty.
That was the first time she had the dream - and more followed: every time the same dream. At first she had the dream three or four times a week, then once a week, then once a month. And now, three years later, the dream came around about once in every three months. Time forgets at times but never forgives. And once in every three months still was enough. She and her husband got a divorce one year after the accident. He didn’t dream but he could not forget either.
She walked alone through a cathedral of guilt and hate. She hated herself, hated the car, her work, her husband at times. And sometimes, in the bleeding of night, she hated her dead daughter who still visited her in dreams and who kept accusing her mother of causing her death. The divorce had almost come as a relief.
She now lived in a small apartment at the edge of town. It was ugly, functional and anonymous. She didn’t work for the fashion magazine anymore, where she’d been a senior editor and of which she’d once held hopes to become editor-in-chief. Through a friend who worked there she had gotten a half-job at a daily newspaper. People there knew of the accident and they’d been happy to be of some assistance. So now she travelled to places where the other journalists didn’t care to go; sometimes because pursuing a particular story was too boring, sometimes because it was too dangerous.
She had watched the pope from great distance eight times already; she had gone to Brussels more times than could be borne by most people. She had been to the Kongo, to Ruanda; she’d seen the wars, the famines, the fugitives of too many nations. She had talked to too many politicians and UN bureacrats. She had interviewed war lords, nuns, Red Cross doctors and the mothers of children who were dying of AIDS. She had listened to all, seen it all and had written the stories she was sent to cover. And she still dreamed of the car, of her daughter.
And now she was in Cairo, to cover yet another international conference. Something to do with the Middle-East peace process. The paper wanted the story, wanted some pictures, so she had gone. It was summer and Cairo was a swirling sea of stone and stench and an all-permeating heat. It was chaos: the gates of Hell tumbling down. It didn’t touch her; she just had a job to do. In the evening she walked back to the hotel; she didn’t travel by car if she could in any way avoid it. Roads knew too many curves and corners; there were too many children forever crossing the street. And the cabs of Cairo took these corners with much more speed than a comparibly sedate ten miles an hour.
So she walked and was accosted by men, women and children. Everything was for sale; all was on offer. But she didn’t buy anything, didn’t want anything; she walked on. She walked to the congress centre in the morning, walked back to the hotel in the evening. She drank tea on her balcony and prayed to a God she had stopped believing in three years ago: no dreams, no more dreams.
And now it was a Friday morning. The streets were relatively quiet but the heat and the stench still ruled. She walked to the congress centre, deep in thought, dreaming up the usual, useless scenarios: what if, if then, if only She walked but was without purpose, observed without seeing; she felt nothing, she was nothing. She was a walking noise, a painful shadow that could not escape its bounds.
Then she heard a child laugh. She knew that laughter. For the first time in years she felt her stomach clench with something that felt like hope, like life. She heard the ringing and pounding of her blood. She felt the sweat on her body; she felt the heat, the change. She had been in Japan, after the big earthquake had hit. She had been forced to take a taxi from the airport: the only way to get to her hotel. When she got out of the car there’d been an aftershock. A last ripple through the skin of the earth. It had been an awesome experience. This though was altogether more miraculous and all-encompassing.
The child laughed once more. The woman didn’t know anything anymore but felt all. The street, the city, the whole world was now a strange music, an unknown dance. She walked she couldn’t walk. In the next minute she died ten times but each time her heart resumed its beating, like an old goat: perverse, stubborn, unrelenting. She felt time like some insane river running back up the mountain. The child laughed.
The crooked street stones carried her forwards: the laughter was much closer now. She was carried round the corner: she saw the child. It was a girl of three or four years’ old. The child was dragging a plastic spoon through a small pile of sand. She was sitting with her legs spread in front of her; she was wearing a short and dirty dress. It looked as if the girl was playing on some invisible beach, as if she could feel the cooling wind on her face, could hear the seagulls and see the fishing boats return safely home. She looked intensely happy and thoroughly at home.
The woman looked at the child that played in the dirt. After a while the child looked up and smiled at the woman: self-assured and trusting. The smile was the smile of another girl; the eyes were the eyes before the corner, before the car. The woman sat down; she started to cry. The girl laid a small hand on the woman’s arm and smiled at her. She said something soothing in Egyptian. The woman shook her head, then smiled back at the girl. She felt everything, everything. The girl laughed.
The woman now lives in Cairo. From time to time she writes an article in a local, English newspaper but she doesn’t travel anymore. She has enough money to get by. Her parents, who were moderately well-to-do, are dead; she was their only child and inherited all. Her ex-husband pays some alimony. The sale of her old flat generated more than enough cash to buy her new apartment in Cairo. She has enough to live on; she doesn’t need much anyway. The girl lives across the road, with her mother and two other children.
Each month the woman gives the mother some money: the amount an Egyption worker would make in four weeks. The girl wears new clothes now but she’s still the same girl that can hear the waves and the gulls and the fishing ships in the hot and dusty, stone heart of Cairo. She still plays in the street.
Sometimes a cab screams by but the woman is no longer afraid of such things: the girl is safe. She lives in her old apartment that has a small balcony. For hours and hours she stands there and looks down upon the street, where the girl sometimes looks up at her and waves. She is learning Egyptian now and has long and hesitating but all-encompassing conversations with the child. She hasn’t dreamed of her dead daughter in months now. She is happy.