Tou Bakura

nomad

Dates? He doesn't want dates.

… Silks, tobacco, pastries? He doesn't want silk, or tobacco, or pastries. No, shokran, he already has a camel, has a place to spend the night.

Trinkets, antique jewelry? What for? It was years since there was a woman in his life. And he doesn't buy jewelry any more (he remembers last time with painful exactitude, the apex of the vortex of his life spiraling downwards, exactly ten years ago).

There is always a bitterness behind his eyes now (since then): weariness mixed with the desert dust his glasses don't manage to keep away.

And now (since then) he doesn't like the market place. Not because he is foreign, or because he is an archaeologist (and some things he unearthens seem to be still alive, like ghost-mirages in the sand)… not because he is weary of the folkish magic of turbans and rags full of arabesques. Simply because he is alone.

He knows the place like the back of his hand, every street and dirt alley, and he is sweaty and filthy from his last dig, and hungry and tired of the strong sun, but he could ignore it all if he could share the day with someone… the only someone he's left. He could forget it all. To start anew.

And he's tried so many times already.

But something always snaps.

But he keeps on trying.

And this time around he's called again, and he will soon be flying back home. Only one more night in Cairo to put his things in order, and he'll be flying back home.

Back home. To try again.

He sighs the knot in his stomach away (of hunger and nostalgia), pushing through tides of people coming and going- in a blur, he's seen in a blink straw hats, kaffiyehs, women in yashmaks, in black, in colors, carts, a donkey… children, laughter, scents (memories?)

In the middle of a tiled square, a sequestered nook in the intersection of seven alleyways, a Moorish fountain springs water oblivious to the heat,

and people are coming and going (forever),

he stops and looks around (he hardly does, but this square isn't familiar, and the scientist in him is vaguely exploring the architecture, the people.)

A wave of passers-by scatters into the alleys, clearing the tan-colored ground, the tan-colored space;

and someone is sitting on the border of the fountain that's tiled with lapis-blue tessera.

Hunched over, head bowed, elbows resting on knees, rare-colored locks hiding his face.

But the archaeologist could recognize him anywhere, he thinks in deepest disconcert, and he doesn't notice how they are suddenly alone in that eternally bustling city.

And he doesn't notice that the clothes could be timeless and are all wrong, that the skin began to tan in a way pale skin never tans.

He stays there, nailed to the ground. How could he be there- of all people, of all places, a chance encounter? His brain is failing to process what he is seeing.

"What?"

The one sitting asks, caustic, irritated even, and a set of rust-colored eyes drink the archaeologist up in an evanescent moment.

He is surprised to find himself slightly disillusioned, beyond the repulsion that surfaces with the eye-contact.

He isn't surprised to find that he isn't berating himself. For mistaking a stranger with his son. Because he has encountered the occult many times in many ancient tombs and dig sites.

"Who are you?"

When he asks that, he thinks it might be a djinn. Allahu akbar, his mind recites the traditional formula on its own accord, out of force of use, God is most great.

He gets something like a smirk in return, but he cannot be sure because shadows fall on the face of his interlocutor. Shadows. They flock to him like tame little rags in the breeze.

"A thief" (it sounds so simple) "I, asked you something, too," he is answered.

He shakes his head (perhaps, he's just dreaming.) "It's nothing."

The man with the russet eyes shrugs. "If you say so," and he doesn't seem to care or to be able to speak without sarcasm poisoning his words.

(things like these only happen in dreams, after all)

He reconsiders. He swallows a lump. "You look like my son."

He gets a ghost of a chuckle as a response, a shake of pure-colored locks- the thief looks, as if he'd only just understood a good joke, looks like how didn't I see it before.

"I know," is all he says.

.

.

Tou Bakura retells it hazy and Arabian, but he knows his son has always had a great imagination.

Ryou sits on the couch, eyes steely, he followed the story and now, he's speechless.

A set of russet eyes followed the story too, unblinking and distant, and a man that once was a tomb robber leans against the doorsill of the living room of a place he may have called home seven years ago.

And the three of them, lost in thought in the afterglow of Tou Bakura's words, wonder what life will be like from now on; and, somehow, if they close their eyes they can see the desert.

.