He lay beside his mother’s grave, like a piece of abandoned, rotting flesh, waiting for the worms to eat his body and fill its cavities. It was as if the sky above him had been torn apart, and from every crack, rain was pouring down in torrents. The hailstones, as big as rocks, hit the ground and his body with such force that they left marks. The bruises on his flesh would remain dark and painful for days. The mud surrounded and covered him so that he seemed to be part of the cemetery itself.
He dreamed that his mother was standing in a dark kitchen. And she was cooking a large pot of lamb shorba. She filled a bowl with breadcrumbs and poured lamb shorba over them. His mother sat next to him and put a handful of bread in his mouth. No matter how much lamb shorba Ahmed ate, he was still hungry. And he dreamed that lightning struck and darkness covered everything.
Then the kitchen, the bowl of lamb shorba, and his mother disappear, and he is alone in the darkness. He screams, but wherever he runs, he sees nothing but darkness. He runs, runs, until he sees a glimmer of light in the distance. He steps toward the light and sees a body wrapped in a shroud. The light shines on him. He moves closer and crouches down.
He unties the thread at the top of the shroud, pulls the white shroud away from the body, screams, and stands up. His mouth is full of mud. He covers his face with both hands and spits constantly, but no mud comes out of his mouth. He places a hand on his mother’s tombstone and kneels. He remembers dreaming that his mother had become young and her face was shining. And the rain-soaked dust swirls around his mother’s body. Smoke rises from the soil and smells of incense.
Ahmed lowered his head. His shoulders shook violently. Tears larger than the hailstones spilled down beside the grave. Something broke inside him. His voice burst free—scream after scream so deafening that the dead rolled onto their backs and covered their ears. Above the cemetery, the sky cracked wider with every cry until the fractures burst apart entirely and water came pouring down like waterfalls from heaven and Ahmed’s eyes alike.
Then the cemetery sinks into a muddy ocean. The dead sit in their rotting shrouds, undoing the threads on their shrouds. They take a deep breath. Water runs down their throats. The dead are faceless. They come out of their graves and gather around his mother’s grave. It’s as if there’s a secret that Ahmed doesn’t know about. Fear has taken hold of his heart, and his breathing becomes heavy. But his mother doesn’t get up, she does not untie her shroud.
The thousand-year-old dead, in groups of thousands, circle his mother’s grave. The faceless dead speak. Ahmed does not understand what they are saying, he is confused and terrified. His hands and feet tremble, he is bent over and cannot move. He is afraid, but he does not know what he is afraid of. Suddenly, a hand reaches out from above the ocean. It grabs Ahmed’s shoulder, pulls him out of the underwater cemetery and throws him onto a large ship. The ship is full of tombstones and the dead. Ahmed looks around him. The world is full of cemeteries that have sunk under the water, forming a large ocean. There is no sign of a village or land. Wherever he looks, he sees only water. His world has been emptied of any living creature. A man with impossibly long arms stands at the edge of the ship, reaching into the sea and lifting the dead aboard one after another.
As soon as Ahmed gets closer, he hears him whisper: “I am taking the dead into the new world. This time, I will build the world from corpses and gravestones, not from the living and beasts.” Ahmed stared at the enormous ship, at the dead, at the gravestones. One name echoed in his mind: Noah.
He is building a dead world. Full of tombstones. Noah reaches out and lifts the dead as they circle his mother’s grave one by one. The cemetery is emptied of the dead. Noah reaches out to lift up Ahmed’s mother. The grave that has become the place to walk around for the dead under the ocean. Something trembles in Ahmed’s heart. Chaos rises from his toes and fills his chest. Ahmed wants to scream: “Don’t bother my mother, leave her alone.” But his voice is stifled somewhere in his throat. His mother does not respond to Noah’s call. She does not get up.
Noah groans: “This dead woman is heavy, as if she has been blessed. I will not bother her. I will let this old woman sleep. Her place is in this world.” Noah steers the ship in another direction. Ahmed, as if the ship’s anchors were clinging to his feet, is pulled back. He throws himself into the ocean. As if he wants to drown without leaving a trace. The water pulls him into itself and carries him towards his mother’s grave, and the two of them are alone again.
Ahmed thinks about the empty cemetery he is in. The thought that his mother is the last survivor of Noah’s flood brings a faint smile to his lips. The thought that his mother is the queen of the underworld lights a light in his heart.
The thirsty soil of the cemetery slowly sucks up the ocean water. The soil is saturated. The water is slowly receding. Ahmed looks at the path that Noah’s ark has traveled. There is no sign of Noah, Noah has disappeared into a parallel world. In a world full of ocean. An ocean that all the cemeteries in the world lie beneath. He looks at the sky, there is no sign of a crack in the sky. Snow is falling gently. The surface of the cemetery has flattened. No tall graves, no tombstones. The soil of his mother’s grave has become higher. A mound on the flat surface of the cemetery. As if his mother is sitting on her throne. Ahmed touches the wet soil of his mother’s grave. Sadness nestles in his eyes. Sadness has crept under his skin again. The thought that he no longer has a mother to throw peas and raisins into the air for him, to cook lamb shorba for him, to henna his hands, to find a bride for him, to sing songs, to hold him, breaks his heart. And tears come to his eyes again.
Snow continues to fall slowly, turning the cemetery white. Ahmed feels orphaned for the first time. His shoulders are hunched; his eyes hurt, they burn. Tears fall from his eyes onto his mother’s soil. Then, with each teardrop, tulips grow on his mother’s soil. A heart of tulips, because Ahmed’s heart is bloody. But something has changed in him. It is as if the feelings of sadness and joy have become one and created a temporary peace in him. His head is empty of everything. His tears flow, the smile has faded from his lips. His hand rests comfortably on the dirt of his mother’s well-watered grave. She is sleeping peacefully.
