years, I herded my goats toward the city on the Nile, and as we progressed, their bells tinkled in what Westerners would call a symphony of sound. It was the sweetest music I ever heard, that of my herd, and whenever we passed camels who had the talent for dancing, they recognized that this was music and began to dance, and the sounds of their harnesses and jangling gear added their own notes. This earthly music is too sweet to take to town, I sometimes thought. I hesitated and thought, Allah is telling me, Go back, do not surrender the unbearable peace (and loneliness) of your pure life in the desert for the city. There were many voices in the music, but finally I took this confusion to be a snare and a delusion, and I decided to obey the bright, clear idea that had first come to me. I continued to follow the flow of the river northward almost to the place where its waters bifurcate and fan into the Mediterranean.
But my hesitation, my ambivalence, had been real, and I had wasted time going first one direction and then backtracking, then going off at an angle, and reversing that path till my footsteps printed their own star in the dust as I tried out many directions. But finally again, I remembered the necessity of pursuing the road beside the north-flowing river, and I came to the city. I was to find my son, you see.
That was Allah’s will for me: to have the son I never had.
It was the crack of dawn when we came, the herd and I, not back to Nag Hammadi because we had not just traveled in a circle, but because my journeying in the wilderness for a long time had led to the very outskirts of the city of Cairo, which looked like a village to me, though I heard a kind of murmur that might have informed me had I paid attention and might have caused me to realize that a whole vast city lay beyond the villagelike outskirts. But this seeming village was only the fringe of the city, the frayed edge of the garment of the city.
BANG! Such a noise, and again BANG!
I recognized what startled me was the firing of a powerful gun such as no one should carry into the city where the most fierce animal is only man whose skin is so very tender and can be so easily pierced by even the weakest bullet, or even a knife. One can also kill another man with a wire for a garrote. And there is poison. Or one can drop down a simple rock from a high place. One can plant an evil seed such as a coiled snake or several scorpions under the blanket where his enemy sleeps. What is the need of a powerful gun?
I left my dog with the herd and took only one goat with me as a sort of escort because it was early morning, and I was a stranger in this place, and I did not want some ranger or policeman asking, “What is this man doing walking in our streets?” No. Instead they would see me with the fine goat and think, He is here to sell his goat, and they would let me pass.
My goat—his name was … His name is a blank. My goat’s name and even his meaning to me have become like two blank eyes staring over time at me. His name and his features have been erased from my memory, but still I remember he was. In any case, I turned the corner, and there we saw a young woman sliding down the wall of a building, leaving a smear of her own blood behind her on the whitewash of the wall. She sagged down onto the street. In amazement and horror, I turned for an explanation to my goat, but now he had grown large and turned into a cow—yes, a cow. (Usually to turn a goat into a cow, there must be a trade between two men each of whom owns one of each, but in this case that step was simply stepped over, and I looked into the sweet, gentle eyes of a cow.)
And then I saw my boy where once there had been nothing but a blank wall. He was wrapped in a woman’s shawl, but I knew him to be my boy, all huddled at the place where the wall met the