Echo
(A Story)
© Numan Albarbari — All rights reserved
albarbari.com
First edition · 2026
Foreword
I have known the hero of this novel for a long time, and I listened to him on those nights when everything falls silent. He used to tell me he carried a story inside him and did not know how to tell it, because the words we possess did not yet exist when it happened.
So I wrote it down in his place, in his voice and not in mine. I lent him whatever language he needed, and I left him the darkness exactly as it was.
And if it seems to you that another voice echoes behind his, do not be surprised: I knew him alone, and he was never alone.
This is his novel. The early consciousness of the unborn child, as I have drawn it here, is a literary stance and not a medical claim; what is told here of twins and chimerism is inspired by real medical cases and placed in the service of the story.
Numan Albarbari
Part One
The Warm Darkness
Blood That Remembers
At thirty-three, after the laboratory had failed twice to determine my blood type, the doctor read the result a third time, raised her eyes from the page, and said:
“There are two people in your blood.”
I thought she was joking. But her hand was trembling.
“Two different genetic fingerprints in a single sample. One of them is you. The other I cannot explain to you.”
It was not the surprise that silenced me. I already knew.
For many years, on nights when everything falls silent, I had heard a second pulse that followed mine at a slight delay, as though my heart had an echo. I called it insomnia. I called it exhaustion. And when I grew weak, I called it madness.
A month ago, when my mother died, I found a small envelope in her bottom drawer. On it, in her trembling hand, she had written:
“Do not open it, my son, until you have learned to forgive me.”
I have not opened it to this day.
But I know that the story does not begin with the envelope, nor in the laboratory, nor on the day I was born. It begins much earlier: five months before my birth, in a warm darkness that nobody remembers.
I remember it.
I remember the moment when I knew, before I knew anything else, that someone was calling me.
Week Seventeen
Three Rhythms
I will borrow your words to tell what happened; I have no others. At the time there were no words, no names, and no “I.” There was only a rhythm.
Dum … dum … dum …
A slow, vast rhythm that filled the world from its lowest edge to its farthest, as though the darkness itself had a heart. And beneath it a murmur that never broke off, as though a river were running somewhere close by.
That was the first rhythm, and I did not know that it was not mine.
Then a second, quick and small and hurried, beating beneath everything like a caged bird. I did not know it was my heart. I knew only that I could not escape it.
Everything around me was warm, damp and dark, and my eyelids were fused shut, yet I felt no lack; for the dark does not hurt one who has never known anything else.
And from far away, from behind soft walls, muffled sounds reached me, as if spoken under water. A gentle voice that rose and fell, and everything in me loosened at its sound; and a deep, heavy voice, at whose coming the first rhythm leapt once and then ran faster.
I do not know how much time passed. Time had not yet been invented.
I kicked.
I had not decided to kick; my leg shot out of its own accord and struck the soft wall, and a slow, wide pressure came back to me. That is how the wall always is: it answers exactly as much as you knock, no more and no less. I had learned to trust it the way one of you trusts the law.
Then, at a moment I do not know how to count, the wall answered me differently than it was used to.
It was not a wide, slow pressure. It was a small, hesitant one, the size of something that resembled me, with a warmth that was not the warmth of walls.
And the wall does not hesitate.
I froze. Or perhaps I did not freeze, but the small rhythm beneath everything stumbled once and then resumed, faster than before. And then I heard, for the first time, a third rhythm.
It was quick and small and hurried like mine, but it was not mine. It beat an arm’s length away, at a slight delay from my pulse, as though my heart had an echo.
Three rhythms, then. One slow and vast, which was the world; and two small ones, so like each other that it frightened me.
And I knew, without a single word, which of the two I was: because I was the one who was afraid.
The doctors tell me today that a fetus at this stage is aware of nothing, and that what I recount is a story the mind makes up afterwards, when it is too late. Perhaps. I do not ask you to believe me. I ask only that you listen to the end, and then judge for yourselves.
That same night — I say “night” because my mother slept and the great rhythm quieted — my hand moved. I did not move it; it moved, and I followed. Fingers that did not yet know how to grasp found fingers like themselves.
In the whole universe there was no one but the two of us … and my mother, of course, but in that darkness a mother was not a person; she was the place.
We touched. Then we drew apart. Then we touched again. And between one touch and the next the first words were born that were not words: You are there, and I am here, and we are both real.
It was as though a hand were asking, without a voice: Do you feel me? And my answer, with the first finger of my body, was: Yes.
I noticed the two voices only late.
The deep one had come back, and with it my mother’s voice, but this time it was not gentle; it was taut as a rope. One single word kept passing between them, heavy as a stone dropped into still water, a word of two syllables.
I did not understand it. How could I, when I did not know that sounds have meanings?
But the third rhythm understood it.
The small fingers in my hand stopped, like those of someone hearing a verdict read out.
And for the first time in my life — and my whole life then was seventeen weeks — I felt what people call fear for another.
Week Twenty-One
The One Who Does Not Obey Me
I did not name him then, because I did not know that things have names. I named him only many years later, when I needed a name to call him by in the dark: “Echo.” And I will call him that from now on, because in our first days I took him for what an echo is: something that answers me, nothing more. I was mistaken, and that mistake is the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.
We had invented our game: if I kicked once, he kicked once; if I kicked twice, he kicked twice. And I believed, in the pride of one who has discovered a law, that I governed the world: I act, and it happens.
Then came the night that changed everything.
I kicked twice, and he kicked three times.
I thought it was a mistake and repeated it: twice. And he kicked three times again, with the stubbornness of someone smiling.
And there, in the darkness of the womb, the greatest thing that can happen to a being happened: I understood that I was not the only one who decides.
A true echo does not change the pattern. This one changed it. So it was not an echo of me. It was another.
You may say that consciousness begins when I say “I.” I say that it began at the moment someone refused to obey me. One who knows no other does not know himself either; for the self widens only when it collides with someone who is not itself.
After that we always slept pressed together, his head at my shoulder and his hand in mine. And between us there was something I did not notice: a bridge of blood, fine as the veins of a leaf, along which something of him flowed to me. I felt an excess of warmth pouring into me, and took it for a gift. I learned the name of that bridge thirty-three years later, in a cold medical report. Had I known it then, I would have stopped my heart with my own hand.
And I was the bigger one. I do not know when I noticed; my hand covered his entirely whenever we touched, and he kept to the narrowest corner of the space, like one apologizing for his existence. Then his rhythm began to stumble: out of every six beats, one fell away, like a missing step on a staircase I was climbing in the dark.
I kicked to call him, and his answer came late: half a beat, then a beat, then two. And my mother’s hand came down on us from above, warm and heavy, searching for one of us. For one. I did not understand then why, each time she found me, she drew her hand back as though the truth had stung her.
On the last night of that week — and I will go on calling it “the last,” whatever they say — I kicked twice.
And I waited.
He did not kick three times, and he did not kick twice.
I repeated it. And waited.
And the great rhythm surrounded me on every side, dum … dum … dum …, slow, reassuring, knowing nothing, flooding the world with life as it always did.
And I listened for the other, the small rhythm, which was supposed to be there, an arm’s length away, following mine at a slight delay like an echo.
And I heard nothing but myself.
Week Twenty-Two
The Pulse That Does Not Return
He did not answer me in the morning, nor in the evening, nor in the stretch of time I now call “day” because the great rhythm slept and woke within it.
I kicked. I waited. Then I kicked harder, with the force of someone knocking on a door he knows has someone behind it.
And an answer came. It was not a kick; it was a small slackening of the hand that lay in mine, as if to say: I am here, but I am tired.
The bridge between us flowed in one direction, as it always had, but for the first time I felt what it carried: warmth that came to me from him, and a heaviness that filled me until there was no room left in my chest to breathe. I was filling, and he was emptying. And I tried, with all the strength of a will that had no name yet, to give him back what I was taking.
No one teaches you how to give blood back.
That night I heard my mother weep. I did not know weeping, but the great rhythm broke off as though someone were running down a staircase with it, and the salt water in her voice flooded every word and soaked it through.
Then the heavy voice came, but quiet this time, and quiet in a heavy voice is worse.
What was said that night I did not understand. I understand it now, because my mother repeated it in her sleep for thirty years, word for word, whenever exhaustion overcame her:
“They cannot both be saved. Decide.”
“I will not decide.”
“Then time will decide for you.”
And Echo was listening. I am certain he was listening, and that his small fingers tightened around mine, like someone saying: Do not leave me.
And in the morning, after the heavy voice had gone and a door I could not see had closed, I heard my mother say a single word to herself, in a voice that did not tremble.
And I knew — before I knew what knowing is — that she had chosen.
Week Twenty-Eight
The Red Light
That week I opened my eyes for the first time, and there was no decision in it; the lids parted of their own accord, the way a door opens that has long been waiting for someone to push it.
And I saw. The first thing I saw was a color that resembled nothing: a luminous red, heavy and warm as embers under ash, seeping from far away through the walls of flesh. That is how the world looks when light passes through my mother before it reaches me.
Then I turned to him.
He lay beside me, his head at my shoulder as we were used to. And his hand in mine was so thin that the red light passed through it. I saw its tiny bones like wires, and I saw that he was not moving, and that the bridge between us had dried up.
I did not know when he had died. In that darkness no one tells anyone. Death there does not cry out, does not fall, does not slam a door; it merely stops answering.
And I did not leave him. How could I leave him, when the walls were closing in on both of us? He stayed fastened to me, turning day by day from a brother into something carried, and I carried him as one carries a trust without knowing to whom to hand it over.
On one night of that month something cold touched us that we did not know: a metal body gliding along the wall of the darkness, pressing here, pressing there, searching.
And I heard a strange voice, neither my mother’s nor the heavy one: a professional voice, speaking slowly like someone choosing his words:
“One heartbeat, clear and strong. The second has none. We should plan for its removal.”
And for the first time my mother did not weep. She said, in a voice dry as bone:
“Leave him with him.”
She meant me. I did not know then that with this sentence she had condemned me to carry him for as long as I lived.
Week Thirty-Four
A Song for One
My mother sang every night.
I did not understand her words, but the melody came down on us like warm water on two stones: it enclosed them both and made no distinction between them. So I believed, in the first week.
Then I noticed that her voice leaned. She turned her mouth — if I may put it that way — toward the left side of her belly, where Echo lay still. And her hand came to rest there alone. As for me, the living one, who kicks and hears and fears, I received what overflowed.
I was jealous. Yes, I will confess it to you: the first feeling I possessed after fear was jealousy. I kicked in protest, and the singing stopped for a moment and then returned more softly, and she laid her hand on me and said, in a voice I had never heard from her:
“I know. I know, my son. You are here too.”
From that night on I made a pact with myself, which I do not know how to put into your words, but it went something like this: I will kick for him. I will grow for him. On the day the air comes, I will breathe for two.
So I kicked three times when he should have kicked three times, and stopped afterwards, and left the emptiness the place of his kick, as one leaves a chair vacant at a laid table.
And on the night I completed the thirty-fourth week, I kicked twice, left him room for three, and listened.
And I heard.
It was not a kick. It was not a movement. It was a small, quick, hurried pulse, beating an arm’s length from me, at a slight delay from my own.
I swore to myself that it was the echo of my own heart. I swore it once, I swore it twice.
Then I counted the beats, and found that every sixth one fell away.
Week Forty
The Air
The walls grew narrow.
Not narrow as they had been before, when I was growing; this was a narrowness with a rhythm: it tightened and eased, tightened and eased, as though the whole world were a fist trying to expel me.
I understood that the great rhythm, which had been everything to me, was driving me out. And I understood that it did not do so out of hatred. My mother was screaming above us, and her scream resembled nothing I had ever heard: it pushed me away and held on to me at the same time.
I was not alone in the passage. Echo was with me, light as a leaf, pressed against my side, and he slid along with me as we had always done everything: together.
Then came the air.
Cold. Hard. It cut my skin like a knife that knows no remorse. And with it came a white light with nothing in it of the warmth of the red. And I was certain I was being driven out of my only home.
And I screamed. For the first time the scream had what it needed: air. The sound left me, and I heard it and knew that it was my voice. And in my chest, in a place that holds only one heart, something else beat a single beat, which answered my scream.
And I heard, in the white noise, a professional voice say slowly:
“Careful, the placenta … there is something else.”
Then they handed me to my mother. For the first time I saw her face: a wet, exhausted face, more beautiful than anything I had imagined in the dark. But she did not look at me. She was looking at the nurse’s hand, which held something small wrapped in white cloth, no larger than a palm. He had stayed with me to the end, pressed flat and thin as a leaf between two pages.
And she said to the nurse, in the same dry voice I had come to know in the twenty-eighth week:
“Do not take him away. I will bury him.”
Then she turned at last to me and whispered what no one heard but me:
“He will never know.”
And she did not mean the little one wrapped in white.
She meant me.
Part Two
Reverberation
Age Four
The Empty Chair
At four years old I used to set two plates on the table.
No one had taught me to. I put my plate in front of me and another on the left-hand chair, then sat down and waited, as one waits who knows his guest will be late.
And my mother, when she saw the second plate, would quickly take it away, wash it and put it back on the shelf without a word, like someone removing evidence.
One morning I drew her a picture: two boys standing side by side, hand in hand, one bigger, the other the size of a sheet of paper. And I said to her: This is Echo.
I know you will ask how a child of four could know a name he had never heard. I have no answer. I am telling only what happened.
She did not look at the drawing. She looked at me, and the cup fell from her hand.
“Who told you that word?”
“He did.”
“Who is he?”
I pointed at the left-hand chair. And said, as simply as one says that the sky is blue:
“He says you are not angry with us. You are afraid.”
I remember that my mother sat down on the kitchen floor among the shards of glass and held me with a force that hurt, and said into my ear again and again a word I did not understand then: “Forgive me … forgive me …”
And that night, when the lights went out, I heard him.
The second pulse. Small and hurried, an arm’s length away, following mine at a slight delay, and out of it every sixth beat fell away.
And for the first time I was not sure that the frightened one of the two of us was really me.
Age Nine
The Pale Line
My mother kept me from the sea.
Not from the sea alone; from the swimming pool as well, and from gym class, and from every place where I would have had to take off my shirt. She wrote my teachers excuses in an elegant, firm hand: “My son suffers from a skin allergy.”
I had no allergy. I had a line.
A pale line, a finger wide, running from my chest down to my left flank, as if a hand had wiped the color from my skin for the breadth of a finger and then withdrawn. I saw it in the mirror and called it “the border.”
On a school trip to the beach, a boy named Mazen pushed me into the water, and my shirt got wet and clung to my body. And everyone saw it.
They laughed. Not because the line was funny, but because it was strange, and children do not tell the one from the other. And Mazen said:
“It’s like half of you belongs to some other boy!”
After that I heard nothing; for the small rhythm, an arm’s length away, suddenly beat at a speed I had never known, as if someone inside me had leapt to his feet.
And I saw my left hand rise and seize Mazen by the throat.
I had not raised it.
Mazen was choking, and everyone was screaming, and I was trying, with all the strength of my will, to open my fingers. And a voice in my head, not mine, said with the astonishment of one who at last hears himself named: “He says I am your half.”
And when my hand finally let him go, it was not by my will. It was because the small rhythm decided that it was enough.
Age Fifteen
The Picture with Two Circles
After the incident with Mazen we left the whole city behind, and three schools, and two doctors, and a husband who no longer had a name in our house. And in the course of it I learned two things: to hide my left hand in my pocket, and to stop asking questions.
Until the day I went looking in my mother’s drawer for a phone charger.
I did not find a charger. I found an old black-and-white photograph, with no face and no body: a wide gray blur, and in the middle of it two small circles pressed together like a pair of eyes. And in the margin, in faded ink: “Week 17 — twins.”
I read the word once, twice, and then I felt the small rhythm beat in my head with a force it had never known, as if someone were saying: At last.
My mother stood in the doorway. She did not scream. She said, in a calm voice that choked me with its calm:
“Put it back where it was.”
“I have a brother.”
“You have no brother.”
“Don’t lie. I have heard him every night since I was four.”
“You have no brother, my son. You have only me.”
And as she said it, she was not looking at my face but at my left hand, hidden in my pocket.
Then, as she tried to take the photograph from me, her hand shook, and from the folds of the drawer, where I was never meant to see it, a small yellow envelope slipped out.
Nothing was written on it yet, but it was heavy. And I saw my mother push it with her palm to the bottom of the drawer, like someone hiding a live coal.
And for eighteen years I did not open that drawer. And the small rhythm did not stop beating.
Age Twenty-One
The Microphone
I became a sound engineer. I do not think it was an accident; for one who lives with a pulse he cannot see learns to trust the ear more than the eye.
One winter night, in the empty studio, I placed a sensitive microphone over my chest and pressed record, like someone interrogating himself. Then I sat before the screen and watched the waves.
There were two lines.
The first was my heart, in its familiar rhythm. The second was finer and faster, running beneath the first like a stream under a bridge, and out of it, with unfailing regularity, every sixth beat fell away.
I told myself: electrical noise. I changed the cable, then the device, then the room. Each time the second line was there, and it grew weaker only when I moved the microphone away from my left hand.
So I laid it against my left wrist, and sat there listening through headphones.
And there, in my ear, a heart that was not mine beat, with the stubbornness of someone knocking at a door.
So I tapped the table twice with my finger. And the answer came, after twenty-one years of an answer that had not come:
Three times.
Age Twenty-Seven
The Line on the Pillow
I loved Dana because she never asked about my hand.
She would see the pale line on my chest and run her finger along it, like someone reading a beloved language, and say: “Who drew this border?” And she did not wait for an answer.
And every night I slept on my right side, my left hand tucked beneath my body, like one locking a guest in a room.
On an autumn morning I woke alone. And on Dana’s pillow lay a small slip of paper in a handwriting that was not mine: slanting to the left, delicate, as though its writer feared to burden the page.
The note was not for me. It was for her:
“Do not let him go. He does not know how to stay.”
I went into the kitchen with the note in my right hand and found her standing before her cup of coffee, unafraid. She was weeping quietly, like one who has received a gift she cannot return.
“I saw your hand write this at dawn. You were asleep.”
“Dana …”
“He is not warning me about you. He is begging me for help — for you.”
And I understood that my brother, whom I had taken for years to be a danger living inside me, had in truth been afraid for me, and that I had never once asked him of what.
Age Thirty-Three
The Last Drawer
My mother died in a hospital that smelled of nothing, on a night when the machines were beating faster than she was.
An hour before dawn she caught hold of my sleeve, and her cold hand felt for my left hand, not my right, as if she knew where the truth lived.
“I did not choose, my son.”
“Don’t talk. You are tired.”
“It was not I who chose. They told me … they told me that … The envelope. In the last drawer. Read it after …”
She did not finish.
And when they switched off the machines I heard what I had never heard in my life: complete silence in the room, and a single pulse in my head. Mine. Then, after a second that was longer than a lifetime, the other came.
It beat slower and heavier, as though he, too, were weeping.
In her empty house I opened the last drawer after eighteen years of fear. The yellow envelope was there, and on it, in her trembling hand, what you read on the first pages of this book.
I did not open it. Not yet; for I had not yet learned to forgive.
In the morning the telephone rang. It was the laboratory that had failed twice to determine my blood type, and the voice on the line said, in the tone of one who carries news that is not given over the phone:
“Please come to see us today. The doctor wants to see you herself.”
Part Three
The Blood
The Present: The Laboratory
Alive, and Dividing
Hala, the doctor, said to me, after I had sat down and she had switched off her phone, looking at me as a doctor looks at a patient who does not deserve what he is about to be told:
“Did you have a twin?”
I had prepared a thousand answers on the way, and I gave the simplest:
“My mother always said I was alone.”
“Your mother lied. Or she was protecting you.”
She explained briefly: when one of two twins dies in the womb, its cells may cross the placenta into the other’s blood, so that the survivor lives with two fingerprints; and sometimes the dead twin’s body remains until birth, and it is called a “paper fetus.” She called my case “chimera.”
“And the pale line on my chest?”
“A border between your cells and his, most likely.”
I did not ask about the hand. I knew the hand had an answer that laboratories do not possess.
And before I stood up she said a sentence that should not be said in a scientific book:
“There is something I have not told you yet. These cells in your blood are not remnants. They are alive. And they are dividing.”
And I understood that something of my brother had never stopped living. In me.
The Present: The Midwife
The Little One Who Was Not Buried
The hospital where I was born had been demolished ten years earlier, and a shopping center stood in its place. But Dana, who works as a nurse and knows how to open forgotten archives, found after a week a single name: Suad, midwife of the old hospital.
We found her in a small room smelling of jasmine and medicine, an old woman who looked at me and put her hand over her mouth.
“It is you. You are the one who stayed.”
Do not ask me why I believed an old woman I had never seen; one who carries two pulses does not ask for proof.
She told me of the night of my birth, of the rain on the windows, and of my father, the doctor who worked in that same hospital, standing at the door, daring neither to enter nor to leave.
“I was told he was the one who chose. But I saw your mother with my own eyes sign the paper, and she was weeping. And a hand that signs does not mean its owner wants it.”
I asked her about him, about the man with the heavy voice. I expected her to describe him as he deserved.
“He died years ago, alone in a room where no one visited him. A month before he died he came to me and said: I knew there was another way for the two of them, and I did not take it.”
“And in his last days he kept asking after the little one. Not after you.”
And when we stood to leave, she held on to me and said in a voice like a whisper:
“And one thing I have told no one. The little one I wrapped in white cloth … your mother said she would bury him. But I saw her that night go out with him by the back door, and she did not head toward the cemetery.”
The sea lay in the other direction.
The Present: The Song
An Old Tape
We went back to my mother’s house, and I searched it room by room, not for a body but for a voice. In recent nights I had noticed that the fingers of my left hand were not tapping at random; they repeated a single rhythm that had a beginning and an end, like a melody.
And in a cupboard under the stairs I found an old tape recorder and a single tape, on which my mother had written in red pen: “For the two.”
I pressed play, and out of the machine came my mother’s voice as a young woman, whom I did not know, and she was singing. And the rhythm of the song was exactly the one my fingers kept repeating.
“Sleep, my little one. And you too, my other little one, wherever you are.”
And her voice broke off, because in a distant room a door opened and a heavy voice was heard, a heaviness I have never forgotten in my life. It said a single word, a word of two syllables:
“Decide.”
And for the first time, after thirty-three years, I understood the word that Echo had understood before me.
And the tape went on turning in silence, and Dana beside me said nothing. Then she said a single word:
“Tomorrow.”
Part Four
The Two
The Present: The Sea
Arranged Pebbles
We went to the sea, Dana and I, in a cold dawn that was nothing like the dawns of films. It had no color; it was gray as an X-ray.
I walked on the sand like one walking on a language he does not master. When we reached the water’s edge I stopped, but my left hand did not stop; it drew me on, gently, not by force, the way a child pulls his father’s hand toward something he wants to show him.
“Follow it. I am with you.”
We walked with it, I, Dana and the hand, for an hour along the shore, until we reached a rocky headland that juts into the sea like a finger.
And at the foot of the headland, between two rocks, we found a small heap of pebbles, arranged as carefully as the bed of a sleeper. In the hollow between the rocks lay dried flowers of many years and fresh ones, laid there not long before.
My mother used to come here. Every year, on a day I spent at our neighbor’s because my mother was “tired and would sleep.” I stood before the pebbles, and the small rhythm in my wrist beat slowly, with a slowness I had never known, the slowness of one who finally reaches home. And I knew that my brother was there, under the pebbles, and not in a cemetery toward which my mother had not turned that night.
I sat down on the sand and took the yellow envelope from my pocket.
Dana said:
“Do you want me to go away?”
“No. I think I cannot forgive alone.”
And I opened it.
The Letter
Your Mother
My son,
I was a frightened girl. They told me that one of you would die no matter what, and that I must choose, and I signed, and I did not choose. I do not ask you to forgive me for that.
I named him “Echo” because you called to him at night and he answered. And when you spoke the name at the age of four, I knew that there was something between you into which I may not enter.
I ask only that you tell him that I loved him.
And I chose you, every day after that, with something that resembled punishment.
Your Mother
The Two
Yes
I read the letter once, then folded it, and looked at the pebbles.
I did not forgive her in that moment; for forgiveness is not a moment. But I sat beside the pebbles and said aloud what she had asked: “Our mother loved you. And she did not choose.”
And when I said “our mother,” my left hand moved.
It did not seize a throat. It did not write. It laid its palm on my right, gently, the way one hand touches another in the dark to say: You are there.
And I heard in my chest what was happening for the first time: the two rhythms beat together, without delay, without echo. Two hearts beating as though they were one, and as though the sixth, the missing beat, had at last returned to its place.
I took off my shirt, for the first time before the sea, and the whole world saw it, the pale line, and I did not hide it. It was a border between me and the one who was not me, and I had finally understood that borders are not walls; they are what makes meeting possible.
And I walked into the water.
It was cold, but not hard like the air of the fortieth week. It was something like a return. And when the water reached my chest I struck its surface twice with my hand, and waited.
And the answer came from the deepest point of my chest, not from afar and not from an arm’s length away:
Three times.
You may say that consciousness began when I said “I.” And I tell you, now that I have reached the last pages: it did not begin on the day I said “I,” nor on the day I was born, nor on the day my brother died. It began when someone called me in the dark, and I answered.
And my answer was: Yes.
Afterword
His story ends here, and it remains for me to confess what I did not say at its beginning: whenever I wrote about him, I heard behind the words a rhythm following mine at a slight delay.
I do not claim it was an echo, nor that it was not. And when I laid down the pen, I tapped twice on the table, and waited.
If an answer comes to you, on a night when everything falls silent, do not ask where it came from. Answer.
Numan Albarbari
