presence was a source of delight and joy. I wish I had behaved differently—if we could recover ground that has already been lost. But you are right, it is nonsensical to try. I wish only that what has happened is not definitive.
I have the impression that I am writing into a void—it is strange not to know how you will feel when you read this. I wish I could see your face. Oh, Midhat. Sometimes I think I feel you in my breathing. This is difficult to bear.
The long years of this war have been a weight on all of us, and now they are over I want to ask you one last thing: will you come back? I know you have just arrived so I wouldn’t expect you immediately, and I don’t want to beg, I want only to tell you how much I am longing
“Stop!”
Haj Taher’s face was red.
“It appears to be a love letter,” said Hubbard, putting it down and raising his glasses to his head. “Who is Midhat?”
Taher did not answer. He inhaled, bowed, and said decorously as he rose and reached out for the letter, “Thank you, Mister Hubbard,” and, turning, mumbled: “A great kindness.”
Hubbard half stood from his own chair, and bade Haj Taher goodbye.
“Salaam.” Hubbard pronounced the word to rhyme with “alarm.”
“Salam,” said Haj Taher. “Allah yabarak fik.”
In Cairo, Layla’s chauffeur was driving Midhat to the Bab al-Hadid station. From the car window Midhat watched the locals and foreigners walking separately, the clatter and babble of the traffic dulled by the heat.
“One ticket to Jerusalem, please,” he said to the ticket attendant in the booth.
“No Jerusalem train today.”
“What?”
“Delayed. The tracks are being fixed.”
“Damn. When is the next one?”
“It is the same train, it is delayed,” said the attendant. “It is leaving in the morning, at six o’clock Frankish time. A ticket is seven piastres.”
Midhat sighed, and counted out the money.
“Ya mu‘allim,” he called to the chauffeur. “Take my bag, and meet me in the morning here at half past five. The morning, not the afternoon. Mashi?”
“Yes, ya haj.”
“Haj!” repeated Midhat, sardonically. “Ya‘tik al-afieh.” He handed the driver a piastre and turned back to the ticket attendant. “Are there any good restaurants nearby for lunch? Ishi baseet, ya‘ni, not too heavy.”
The attendant leaned forward at his desk and looked Midhat up and down. Then he disappeared from the booth and reappeared from around a corner in the foyer. He beckoned Midhat, shielded his eyes against the sun, and directed him to the Ezbekiya Garden, which was surrounded by restaurants and hotels where efendi will surely find something to his satisfaction. Then he waited for his tip. In the sunlight, Midhat saw that a thin layer of dust covered the blue uniform and grouted the crevices of the outstretched hand.
The path through the garden channelled the wind. Midhat dawdled in the shade of the beefwoods and gum trees, inhaled the breath of flowers beside the banyan trunks trailing hair with hollows like open mouths; he passed the spindly rubber trees and the royal palms, and reaching out across the pathway, the weird dangling fruits of an African sausage tree beside their big, crude red petals. The thicket opened onto a lawn where a band was assembling. The musicians wore galabiyas but their stringed instruments looked imported, and the sound they produced was definitely not Egyptian; nonetheless on the grass before them a trio of bare-bellied ghawazi women in billowing trousers began to swing their pelvises and beckon passersby as if to a native melody. Next he passed an empty Japanese pagoda, then a gabled building with a timber and mortar facade that resembled a chalet but whose signpost indicated the YMCA “Soldiers’ Recreation Club.” European couples in broad hats and white trousers danced on a terrace. The sun fell between the trees and Midhat’s despondence lifted as the long hours of the night ahead began to appear rich with possibility. What had been lost by the delayed train was far outweighed by the gains of an evening suddenly unaccounted for.
For the past week he had walked every day over the decks of the Caucase, the engine pulsing under his feet, bitter air curling off the spume and pricking his cheeks with salt. Each turn roused a memory of his fearful self on the outbound trip, nineteen years old, with a shaky grasp of European manners, and sore with isolation. From his new vantage of self-possession and social grace, he could look back at that young