Behind me, the old man had begun to cough and shudder again with an uncontrollable urgency, trying to speak. Reaching back, I tried to hand the picture over to him. “Here,” I said, and then, to my mother—in the spot where she had seemed to be—“I’ll be back in a minute.”
But the painting wasn’t what he wanted. Fretfully he pushed it back at me, babbling something. The right side of his head was such a sticky drench of blood I could hardly see his ear.
“What?” I said, mind still on my mother—where was she? “Sorry?”
“Take it.”
“Look, I’ll be back. I have to—” I couldn’t get it out, not quite, but my mother wanted me to go home, immediately, I was supposed to meet her there, that was the one thing she had made very clear
“Take it with you!” Pressing it on me. “Go!” He was trying to sit up. His eyes were bright and wild; his agitation frightened me. “They took all the light bulbs, they’ve smashed up half the houses in the street—”
A drip of blood ran down his chin.
“Please,” I said, hands flustering, afraid to touch him. “Please lie down—”
He shook his head, and tried to say something, but the effort broke him down hacking with a wet, miserable sound. When he wiped his mouth, I saw a bright stripe of blood on the back of his hand.
“Somebody’s coming.” Not sure I believed it, not knowing what else to say.
He looked straight into my face, searching for some flicker of understanding, and when he didn’t find it he clawed to sit up again.
“Fire,” he said, in a gargling voice. “The villa in Ma’adi. On a tout perdu.”
He broke off coughing again. Red-tinged froth bubbling at his nostrils. In the midst of all that unreality, cairns and broken monoliths, I had a dreamlike sense of having failed him, as if I’d botched some vital fairy-tale task through clumsiness and ignorance. Though there wasn’t any visible fire anywhere in that tumble of stone, I crawled over and put the painting in the nylon shopping bag, just to get it out of his sight, it was upsetting him so.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll—”
He had calmed down. He put a hand on my wrist, eyes steady and bright, and a chill wind of unreason blew over me. I had done what I was supposed to do. Everything was going to be all right.
As I was basking in the comfort of this notion, he squeezed my hand reassuringly, as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. We’ll get away from here, he said.
“I know.”
“Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.”
Relieved that he’d calmed down, exhausted with my headache, all memory of my mother faded to a mothlike flicker, I settled down beside him and closed my eyes, feeling oddly comfortable and safe. Absent, dreamy. He was rambling a bit, under his breath: foreign names, sums and numbers, a few French words but mostly English. A man was coming to look at the furniture. Abdou was in trouble for throwing stones. And yet it all made sense somehow and I saw the palmy garden and the piano and the green lizard on the tree trunk as if they were pages in a photograph album.
Will you be all right getting home by yourself, my dear? I remember him asking at one point.
“Of course.” I was lying on the floor beside him, my head level with his rickety old breastbone, so that I could hear every catch and wheeze in his breath. “I take the train by myself every day.”
“And where did you say you were living now?” His hand on my head, very gently, the way you’d rest your hand on the head of a dog you liked.
“East Fifty-Seventh Street.”
“Oh, yes! Near Le Veau d’Or?”
“Well, a few blocks.” Le Veau d’Or was a restaurant where my mother had liked to go, back when we had money. I had eaten my first escargot there, and tasted my first sip of Marc de Bourgogne from her glass.
“Towards Park, you say?”
“No, closer to the river.”
“Close enough, my dear. Meringues and caviare. How I loved this city the first time I saw it! Still, it’s not the same, is it? I miss it all terribly, don’t you? The balcony, and the…”
“Garden.” I turned to look at him. Perfumes and melodies. In my swamp of confusion, it had come to seem that he was a close friend or family member I’d forgotten about, some long-lost relative of my mother’s.…
“Oh, your mother! The darling! I’ll never forget the first time she came to play. She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw.”
How had he known I was thinking about her? I started to ask him but he was asleep. His eyes were closed but his breath was fast and hoarse like he was running from something.
I was fading out myself—ears ringing, inane buzz and a metallic taste in my mouth like at the dentist’s—and I might have drifted back into unconsciousness and stayed there had he not at some point shaken me, hard, so I awoke with a buck of panic. He was mumbling and tugging at his index finger. He’d taken his ring off, a heavy gold ring with a carved stone; he was trying to give it to me.
“Here, I don’t want that,” I said, shying away. “What are you doing that for?”
But he pressed it into my palm. His breath was bubbled and ugly. “Hobart and Blackwell,” he said, in a voice like he was drowning from the inside out. “Ring the green bell.”
“Green bell,” I repeated, uncertainly.
He lolled his head back and forth, punch-drunk, lips quivering. His eyes were unfocused. When they slid over me without seeing me they gave me a shiver.
“Tell Hobie to get out of the store,” he said thickly.
In disbelief, I watched the blood trickling bright from the corner of his mouth. He’d loosened his tie by yanking at it; “here,” I said, reaching over to help, but he batted my hands away.
“He’s got to close the register and get out!” he rasped. “His father’s sending some guys to beat him up—”
His eyes rolled up; his eyelids fluttered. Then he sank down into himself, flat and collapsed-looking like all the air was out of him, thirty seconds, forty, like a heap of old clothes but then—so harshly I flinched—his chest swelled on a bellows-like rasp, and he coughed a percussive gout of blood that spewed all over me. As best he could, he hitched himself up on his elbows—and for thirty seconds or so he panted like a dog, chest pumping frantically, up and down, up and down, his eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see and all the time gripping my hand like maybe if he held on tight enough he’d be okay.
“Are you all right?” I said—frantic, close to tears. “Can you hear me?”
As he grappled and thrashed—a fish out of water—I held his head up, or tried to, not knowing how, afraid of hurting him, as all the time he clutched my hand like he was dangling off a building and about to fall. Each breath was an isolated, gargling heave, a heavy stone lifted with terrible effort and dropped again and again to the ground. At one point he looked at me directly, blood welling in his mouth, and seemed to say something, but the words were only a burble down his chin.
Then—to my intense relief—he grew calmer, quieter, his grasp on my hand loosening, melting, a sense of sinking and spinning almost like he was floating on his back away from me, on water.—Better? I asked, and then—