on the hall tiles to disguise the fact that, really, she was watching her father as he moved about the room, talking to different people, standing alone and staring. Every so often, she wiped her finger on the back of her sock.
He was quite as elegant as she remembered, dressed in his black suit with a blue tie. He did seem older, and a little less fat—but that might have been because of the photograph in the salon, which had, during his long absence, replaced her memories of his real body. In the photograph, Baba was sitting at a table, looking quite stout. She knew enough now about perspective to recognise that this was in part because of the angle. One of her recent discoveries was that when things were further away they were smaller, and when they were nearer they were larger, and her father’s legs loomed in the foreground of the photograph, and his foot was huge. He wore a linen suit and was reading a book, with a cat beside him. He was staring at the camera, head resting on his hand, but he did not look as though he were really seeing. Rather, his mind seemed elsewhere, although at the same time, when she pulled the photograph close to her face, she could see that his lips were a little stuck out, as though about to say something. Perhaps the word “and.” Once, while she was holding the picture close to her face, she did not notice her aunt Nuzha entering the room. Nuzha whipped the picture from her hand, ignoring Ghada’s outrage, and said: “I think this one was staged by the photographer. He is dressed too elegantly for reading. And that cat is sitting too perfectly. It must be fake.” Although Ghada knew her aunt was not deliberately trying to annoy her, she sucked her teeth and huffed her breath. How poorly Nuzha understood her father, who always dressed elegantly, even for bed.
She lifted her gaze, holding this photograph in her mind to compare it with the man before her. Baba laughed softly at something Hani said and the expression she recognised from the picture returned. He looked up at the distance, lips slightly pursed as if to say “and.”
Khaled was the one who told her where he had been all this time—and at first she did not believe it. Then a new nightmare had taken hold that Baba might never return. Or he might return a madman, or another person completely, pretending to be him.
She looked up again, with an instinct that he might run away. He was talking to a man she didn’t know now, with a tall tarbush and grey in his hair. Baba’s lips began to move, and from the way he was waving his hands she knew he was telling a story.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to run an errand.” Midhat touched Ghada’s hair. The guests were gone; the afternoon was almost over. “But now, you know if Mama asks where I am, you must tell her I’m in the garden. Mashi? I’m looking at the chickens.”
Ghada covered her mouth with both hands. Midhat put on his coat and selected a cane, and stepped out of the house.
The street was hot, and the air, alive with flies, smelled strongly of wild, dry thyme. At the intersection, the thoroughfare was as quiet as a Friday. He walked quickly in the shade. Something thin and black on a rooftop caught his eye. It moved, and revealed itself as the shadow of something pushed by the wind.
The route to the hospital took him near the road to Nouveautés Ghada. He hesitated at the bend with the corner of Barclays Bank just in sight. The fire at Nouveautés seemed so remote—now every shop in Nablus was closed, and that was the least of their worries. This, he supposed, must be catastrophe’s slim gift, to make other terrors seem from its vantage comparatively light.
A pattering struck up behind him and he turned. Something white was running down the hill.
“No, Papi, go home!” he shouted.
“I’m coming with you!”
“Ghada, go home.”
Ghada’s scrubbed, flushed face expanded into view, and as she reached his side he saw she had combed her hair into a centre parting. He gripped her shoulders and the white puffed sleeves of her dress rose like meringues.
“Papi.” He let out a breathy syllable of exasperation. “I can’t take you with me, it’s too dangerous. And now I have to take you home. You are