He paused again. The blood didn’t move on his cheek. Then he continued.

‘I took another route. This time I didn’t hide and I avoided dark places because I wanted our street people to recognise me. As I neared home two people, who had been hiding in the burnt van, jumped out and set on me. I shouted and they gave me as good a beating as they could before they ran. And then I came here, because I didn’t feel safe in my room or anywhere else.’

He was silent again. He listened to the rats and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘They must be big rats,’ he observed.

‘How do you know?’

‘You can tell by listening to them.’ I listened.

‘They havebigteeth,sharpteeth,’hesaid.‘DidyouknowthatinEgyptratsateup a whole camel?’

‘What is a camel?’

‘The only animal that can survive in the desert.’ I marvelled at the idea of such an animal.

‘And rats ate it?’ I asked.‘Yes.’‘How?’‘With their teeth.’I listened to the rats.‘Will they eat us?’‘They would have done so by now. But you can’t be sure.’‘Of what?’‘Of their hunger.’ I listened again.‘But I know agood poison for killingthem. Thebest. I willbringyou some.’The rats stopped eating.

‘They can understand us,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He stood up. ‘This head is hurting me. Lead me to the backyard. I want to wash away all this blood.’ I went out with him. The wind swept hard through the passage. At first it was very dark and I thought the clothes on lines were men in black glasses, but the wind made them flap, and I got used to the darkness. The photographer washed his wounds from a bucket near the well. He groaned in horrible agony. When we got back to the room

Dad was awake. ‘Who is that?’ he asked as I came in. I lit the candle. The photographer stood at the door with water and blood dripping down his neck. Dad looked at both of us without changing his expression. While the photographer dried his hair on his shirt I told Dad what had happened. I tried not to be loud, but soon Mum woke up. After Mum had learned what was going on she went and warmed some food for the photographer and pressed ointments on his wounds. They all talked deep into the night. They discussed what they could do for him and insisted that he stay till the morning. They decided many other things as well but I don’t know what they were because I became drowsy and fell asleep.

When we woke up in the morning the photographer had gone. On the centre table there were the pictures of the celebration of my homecoming.

TWO

IN THE DIABOLICAL heat of that afternoon six illegitimate sons of minor warlords, whom I first thought were minotaurs, enacted a battle of ascendancies. They fought near the burnt van. No one came to separate them. They lashed at one another with long sticks, clubs, and whips. They all looked alike. They were the interchangeable faces of violence and politics. They were all muscular. They looked like failed boxers, like the thugs and the bullies and the carriers of loads that I had seen at the garage. They were hungry and wild. Their chests were bared. Their faces were awesome. And they fought for hours as if they were in a dark place, trapped in a nightmare.

Whips cracked. I saw the swift descent of a club; one of the men fell; three others surged over him. Two others grappled with the three and a man behind flogged their backs indiscriminately with a horsewhip. Soon they were all covered in foams of sweat and gore. Two of the men, fierce antagonists, their deep bronze skins glistening under the burning orb of sun, detached themselves from the chaos of bodies and concentrated on one another. The one whipped the other’s back, whipped the taut back till the skin broke into strips of whitish underflesh and soon turned red. The other bore it and after a while lifted his own whip and repeated the process on the other, lashing and flogging, with an absolute silence, utterly devoid of passion. They weredisinterestedenemies.They went onlashingandbearingthewhips.Thenoneof thembrokethespell,caught theother’swhip,andthey bothgrappled,fellrollingon the ground, their backs covered with blood and sand.

One threw the other, kicked his head, and uttered a modest cry of exultation. The one on the floor picked up a stone. The other rushed at him. The one with the stone pressed it into theeyeof theother, drawingagreen sort of blood. Theother didn’t cry out. They began punching each other, hitting one another in a dream-like sequence. The bloodied eye grew greener and wider. The inhabitants of the street watched the fight, perplexed.

The other four men battled with one another senselessly. They fought on the bonnet of the burnt van. They fought all over the ground. They fought on the glass fragments fromthephotographer’s cabinet,bled,withbitsofglassstickingfromtheirbacks,but went on fighting as though pain were alien to their flesh. At first it seemed we could make out a pairing; then their entangled combat baffled us, for they fought one another, every which way, without passion, without politics even, their eyes bulging. It became impossible to tell what party they supported, what codes they were fighting for, or what was the purpose of their battle. They fought in the strangest ways, throwing sand into one another’s eyes, spitting, offering their faces up for punches, bearing the blows stoically, sometimes being knocked down by them and picking themselves up again and resuming the fray with absolute disinterested ferocity. One of them was kicked in the crotch and he jumped up and fell down, and rolled uncontrollably. When hegotbackup hekeptstampingtheground.Andwhilehetried to sort out his agony another man, who I thought was on his side, came and smashed his head with a brick and he fell down and stretched out like a dead animal.

‘They are the madmen of our history,’ one of the inhabitants on the street said. ‘They are just waiting for a crazy war to come along.’

And then quite suddenly the man who had stretched out like a dead animal began to twitch on the earth. He twitched and kicked and made guttural noises. Then, like a figure in a nightmare, he rose from his death, his upper part stiff, his eyes dull and passionless. When he stood up he released a deep-throated sound of laughter. He brought out something from his back pocket, waved it in the air seven times, pressed it between his hands till he crushed out a flow of red juices, and then hit the chest of an advancingantagonist with his open palm.

The man who had been hit screamed as if he had been branded, and then he fell heavily on the ground and thrashed about in mortal agony. The man with the peculiar weapon repeated his feat with another antagonist, slapping him on the face so hard it sounded like a minor thunderclap. We saw the man’s face turn red and the redness began to drip as if it were melting wax. The man turned round and round, shouting and stamping, and fell on his knees, holding his face. And when he stood up again, swaying, we saw his raw underflesh in the shape of a man’s palmprint. The skin had dissolved. He wailed like a madman who was being tortured.

The three men now gathered and thoroughly beat up the only man left standing on the other side. They threw him to the ground five times in succession. They jumped on his chest and kicked his head and lifted him up and knocked him around till he collapsed altogether. Then the alliances clarified themselves. The three men picked up their large shirts, waving them like monstrous flags, and went up the street, arms held high, chanting the songs of their ascendancy, the songs of the Party of the Poor, or was it of the Rich. No one could be certain. Then I recognised the new incarnation of their recurrent clashes, the recurrence of ancient antagonisms, secret histories, festering dreams. The three men went their way, dancing up the street, and no one cheered them, no one acknowledged their victory, and no one thought of them as heroes.