Read the Prologue

It was midafternoon—the least forgiving time of the day, even in springtime. A cruel sun poured down like molten lead on the mourners in El-Manara Cemetery, pressing on their arms and scalps, making everything too heavy. This close to the Corniche, the cry of seagulls haunted them, though they were too far away to smell the Mediterranean’s heady musk.

Mostly what they smelled was dust. It rose from the ground at every step and coated their skin except where rivulets of perspiration traced it away. And they smelled their own shock and disbelief. How had they gotten here? How had it come to this?

Rising above the palm trees and the traffic bustling along Abu Qir, they could almost see the palatial façade of Alexandria University’s Faculty of Engineering, where they’d all once been together, young and full of dreams. And now they were all here, fourteen years and a lifetime later. Nasser was dead.

They’d come into El-Manara through the old door, where a couple of police vans were parked. Odd. Looking right and left, they wended uncertain steps through the tumble of ancient tombstones. In their grief, they stumbled; in their love for one another, they reached out to steady one another’s steps. The beggar women extending their hands to them looked as old as the stones. “A Qur'an verse for you,” they said, or, “I’ll look after the gravesite for you,” plucking at their shirtsleeves, at their skirts, never asking for the money directly. The beggars surrounded the mourners with grim, almost compassionate looks, but it was clear what they really wanted.

Everything was too bright, too loud, too hot. With every breath, the mourners sucked in dust. At the center of the maze of tombstones, they converged around a solitary grave. The gravedigger was still at work with his shovel, his thin cotton shirt soaked and plastered to his back. At the side of the pit, four men held Nasser’s body, which seemed, in its white linen shroud, too small somehow. Nasser was slim, yes, but six feet tall, with eyes like inky pools, a big smile, a laugh that wrapped you up in a hug. His reach had been wide on the football pitch, and at a party or in a café he would have drawn all the women’s eyes. This neat, white-wrapped package could not be him.

Something was wrong—the mourners sensed it—something beyond the wrongness of being reunited among the tombs, of finally recovering their long-lost friend only to lay him in the ground. It was hard to concentrate here, hard to think. The women huddled together in their flowing black silks and linens, and the older women wailed aloud. The Prophet explicitly forbids such extravagant shows of grief, but as Nasser’s father, Omar, had said a thousand times, there was more to Egypt than just Islam. This ancient crossroads had been weathered by age long before the Prophet was born. And the numb, mute pits that yawned in the mourners’ hearts felt ancient and vast enough to swallow propriety and religion itself.

All of them, Nasser’s one-time inner circle, were tempted to ululate and tear their hair. Instead, Nasser’s sister, Houda, hunched into herself, silently quaking, oblivious to the tenderness with which her friend Dalia held her to her bosom. A part of Dalia would have liked to have walked with the men, the pallbearers, but that would simply have fanned the whispers. It didn’t matter that she and Nasser had once been engaged. She should have moved on long ago, people gossiped, to start a family. Egypt had no tolerance for women in their thirties who remained unmarried. It was maddening to Dalia, a lawyer like her father before her, with passion, ideals, and ambition. Dalia and Nasser had shared a hope and vision for their motherland. Where were those dreams now?

Despite being unwed, Dalia wore two engagement rings, which she fingered nervously in moments like these: one ornate and ancient; the other more recent, more modest. Only two people knew the story behind the twin rings, and one of them was about to be lowered into his grave. Dalia stared at the pallbearers standing in silence in their dark trousers and white linen dress shirts rolled up to the elbows to mitigate the heat. Adham—living in America now, where he went by Adam—looked ready to collapse. Dust plumed up like smoke as the gravedigger completed his work, moving slowly in the heat. Adham gazed blankly at his former classmate Youssef, whose thoughtful face was crumpled and tearstained, a study in defeat, as they supported Nasser’s shrouded thighs.

Nasser had been an engineer like some of his pallbearers—friends and classmates from the esteemed Faculty of Engineering, whose elegant campus was within walking distance from the somber gravesite that reunited them in grief. Their paths had diverged dramatically after those innocent college years—geographically, politically, philosophically. And soon enough, Adham and Youssef would be departing once again in cars and planes for that distant land, known as “the Great Satan” by the extreme elements that Nasser, ostensibly, had embraced. His father, who stood at Nasser’s shoulders, still could not fathom it.

Omar’s role as a pallbearer was more symbolic than substantive; the professor had limped, even with the help of a cane, for as long as any of them could remember, and longer still since he had returned from the October ’73 War—Egypt’s last battle with Israel before peace. His elegant features, the image of Nasser’s at an age he would now never reach, were twisted in pain, and he sobbed like one who didn’t even know that he was sobbing. At the other shoulder stood Nasser’s brother-in-law, Tarek. In this, as in all things, Tarek’s demeanor spoke more of duty than of passion. His eyes were grave, controlled, his other features guarded by his dark beard. Who could have predicted that sweet, playful little Houda would have married such a stern man, imprisoned briefly for his political affiliations.

And yet there was hardly room in the mourners’ minds for such thoughts. There was hardly room even for their overwhelming sorrow; the scene was so loud and busy. Skinny dogs slinked around the tombs farther out, sniffing for scraps—of what? A beggar worked the edge of the knot of men, his hand outstretched. Finally, Adham had enough. “Get out of here,” he snarled, lunging toward the beggar, while on the other side of the grave a man who had walked here with them from the mosque held a Qur'an open in his hands and intoned, “God is great, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy. Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds, Master of the Day of Judgment . . .”

Here and there between the stones that surrounded the mourners, they glimpsed people they did not know from the corners of their eyes, and not just the beggars who lived in this place but also people who did not belong to El-Manara. The white-uniformed local police seemed to be here—not officially, not standing at the grave, but swirling around the edges of their vision. More disturbing were the others who, dressed in sharp gray Western-style suits and mirrored sunglasses, did not look Egyptian at all. Were they surveilling the mourners or mourning with them? No one could tell. At least the knot of praying men in white galabeyas, their beards longer than Tarek’s, stood near the grave, murmuring softly to themselves. Their presence felt both visible and invisible, as though they were part of the mourning yet apart from it. No one could imagine how these men had known Nasser—or if they had truly come for him at all—but no one asked.

“It is You we worship,” continued the man with the Qur'an, “it is You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.” And on everything the brutal sun pounded, pounded, pounded.

Dust rose from the path as the mourners left the grave where they had laid their friend, and the fine grit settled all around them. The crowded stones were crumbling under the weight of centuries, and walking among them, Dalia feared Egypt was likewise crumbling, from pharaonic splendor into something unrecognizable. Everything felt too old, even the noise and the heat. New buildings and compounds may have been sprouting like palms bending to the Mediterranean winds, but that day the mourners felt as weathered as the stones around them.

As they reached the parking lot, a disturbance snatched their attention. By the police car an altercation had broken out. A couple of bearded men were standing too close to the white-uniformed police. They were trading barbs, but no punches were thrown. This confrontation was another index of the wrongness of the day, but everyone was too weary, too drained by grief, to stay and witness.

Ya Dalia!” Adham beckoned Dalia with a blast of his car horn, the signature hee-haw donkey bray of the old Peugeot that had belonged to his late father. No one knew why the family still kept it; Adham insisted it had “character.” Dalia climbed into the back seat. Youssef, riding shotgun in front, felt as if he might be smothered by the oppressive heat. Having experienced several seasons in America with real winters and summer sea breezes, Youssef wondered for the thousandth time since returning to his homeland how he had endured the stifling summer air of Egypt.

Adham pulled onto Abu Qir. Soon they were out of sight of the cemetery and their beloved Faculty of Engineering. Dalia stared ahead, looking at nothing. Youssef had his window down all the way, desperate to feel the breeze which, while still hot, was better than nothing. He could smell the sea, at least, saltier and fishier here than anywhere else he’d been. New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay didn’t even rate. Only Boston Harbor was close, but still not nearly as pungent as the Mediterranean shore of Alexandria. To Youssef, it smelled like home.

As if Adham could hear Youssef’s thoughts and smell his nostalgia, he finally broke the silence: “How long has it been since you had a sobia?” At the name of the milky coconut drink, a summertime favorite of every Egyptian child, Youssef smiled despite himself. Looking at his companions, he could see that Dalia was beginning to smile too, her tearstained cheeks somehow regaining their customary cheerful plumpness.

“I’ll bet you can’t even get kebda on fino in California,” she said, reaching to pinch Youssef’s cheek in a parody of aunthood. His stomach rumbled audibly, as if on cue, and fourteen years dropped away like a dream as laughter shouldered its way into their day of tears. “What about it?” she asked, with a brightness that was only a little forced.

“Aren’t they expecting us?” Youssef objected, thinking of the others gathering now at Omar’s—but Adham waved a dismissive hand. “They won’t notice if we’re a little late,” he said. “Besides, can you imagine Nasser denying you kebda and a sobia?”

“Heaven knows how he stayed so trim,” Dalia concurred. “I never saw a man put away kebda sandwiches like our Nasser.”

Sitting moments later at one of their favorite haunts in Alexandria’s old city, they ate and drank with gusto—but silence descended again. The words of the Surat al-Fatihah echoed in Dalia’s head: “Guide us to the path of those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.” Ya Nasser, ya habibi, she thought sadly. And, for a brief moment, Dalia allowed herself to indulge in a mental fantasy—a parallel world in which Nasser was still with them, sitting across from her in the café, making everyone laugh as always. What they could have achieved together with his charm and charisma, entwined with her gumption and single-mindedness. She remembered the many times Nasser had made her furious too, the times her love for him was an anger threatening to choke her, and she wondered just how far he had strayed. Not so far, surely; a grave in El-Manara was a coveted privilege, one of the few remaining advantages afforded to a family that had once been rich and powerful. But burials still required paperwork, and to lay Nasser to rest here, Omar must have greased many a palm. If the authorities believed Nasser was a violent criminal or a terrorist, surely they would have refused. Something didn’t quite add up. Dalia half-expected Nasser to show up suddenly for his curtain call.

Adham, sitting at the opposite corner, was pondering a similar line of thinking. Terrorists’ bodies aren’t released to their families, are they? he wondered. Given that Adham’s own brother, Sharif, had likewise been imprisoned and subsequently disappeared, the matter felt deeply personal. Surely if they had died committing violence, there would have been only a phone call months later, or maybe nothing at all. The funeral today ought to have dispelled their worst fears about Nasser. Yet Adham couldn’t help but ask himself: How exactly did he die? Who brought his body home, and from where? And whom did he put in harm’s way?

Half a world away, in a sunny kitchen in Berkeley, California, Youssef’s wife, Risa, tried to picture her husband in the city where he had grown up. Almost a decade of marriage and she’d never gone there—somehow the timing had never been right. And in the fourteen years she’d known Youssef, since he’d arrived from Egypt, he’d been back only a handful of times himself. Still, she’d seen pictures and home movies; Dalia had visited them in America; and she knew Adam, of course, who lived in the United States too. She tried to picture all of them together, mourning their friend. Somehow it was hard for her to imagine people so vital, so lively, in a place so ancient and remote.

Easier to picture was the light she’d seen come into their eyes, each of them, when they talked about Nasser. She’d heard stories about his brilliance at soccer (“football,” they called it) and chess, his impressive projects in engineering school, the girls he mesmerized without meaning to. She’d seen his face in photographs, his eyes big and liquid above carved cheekbones, his lips full and purple. She’d heard the devotion in their voices even as they worried about him. She realized now that she, too, had been waiting all this time for Nasser to reappear, to knock on the door one day and surprise them. To fix everything by calling forth from Youssef the special peals of unguarded delight her husband seemed to save only for stories about Nasser and, once upon a time, for her.

It was complicated. There were secrets now—secrets with life-and-death stakes. Her marriage on the rocks, she’d been lying to her cousin Stephanie—colluding with Stephanie’s husband, no less. “Not a word to anyone,” Matt had whispered, his eyes like ice. “Not to Stephanie, not to Youssef.”

It was killing Risa to keep a secret this important from her own husband. She had wanted to shout it from the rooftops—desperate for Youssef to know where she had been, what she had seen, and what only she knew about the cherished friend he had just buried.

Would she be expected to take this secret to her own grave?

It was too big. Nasser had saved her life.