blank spaces?'
'I learned calligraphy while I was in Dubai. I dance whenever I can, but music only exists because the pauses exist, and sentences only exist because the blank spaces exist. When I'm doing something, I feel complete, but no one can keep active twenty-four hours a day. As soon as I stop, I feel there's something lacking. You've often said to me that I'm a naturally restless person, but I didn't choose to be that way. I'd like to sit here quietly, watching television, but I can't. My brain won't stop. Sometimes, I think I'm going mad. I need always to be dancing, writing, selling land, taking care of Viorel, or reading whatever I find to read. Do you think that's normal?'
'Perhaps it's just your temperament,' said my husband.
The conversation ended there, as it always ended, with Viorel crying, Sherine retreating into silence, and with me convinced that children never acknowledge what their parents have done for them. However, over breakfast the next day, it was my husband who brought the subject up again.
'A while ago, while you were in the Middle East, I looked into the possibility of going home to Beirut. I went to the street where we used to live. The house is no longer there, but, despite the foreign occupation and the constant incursions, they are slowly rebuilding the country. I felt a sense of euphoria. Perhaps it was the moment to start all over again. And it was precisely that expression, start all over again, that brought me back to reality. The time has passed when I could allow myself that luxury. Nowadays, I just want to go on doing what I'm doing, and I don't need any new adventures.
'I sought out the people I used to enjoy a drink with after work. Most of them have left, and those who have stayed complain all the time about a constant feeling of insecurity. I walked past some of my old haunts, and I felt like a stranger, as if nothing there belonged to me anymore. The worst of it was that my dream of one day returning gradually disappeared when I found myself back in the city where I was born. Even so, I needed to make that visit. The songs of exile are still there in my heart, but I know now that I'll never again live in Lebanon. In a way, the days I spent in Beirut helped me to a better understanding of the place where I live now, and to value each second that I spend in London.'
'What are you trying to tell me, Dad?'
'That you're right. Perhaps it really would be best to understand those blank spaces. We can look after Viorel while you're away.'
He went to the bedroom and returned with the yellow file containing the adoption papers. He gave them to Sherine, kissed her and said it was time he went to work.
Heron Ryan, journalist
For a whole morning in 1990, all I could see from the sixth-floor window of the hotel was the main government building. A flag had just been placed on the roof, marking the exact spot where the megalomaniac dictator had fled in a helicopter only to find death a few hours later at the hands of those he had oppressed for twenty-two years.
In his plan to create a capital that would rival Washington, Ceau¼escu had ordered all the old houses to be razed to the ground. Indeed, Bucharest had the dubious honour of being described as the city that had suffered the worst destruction outside of a war or a natural disaster.
The day I arrived, I attempted to go for a short walk with my interpreter, but in the streets I saw only poverty, bewilderment, and a sense that there was no future, no past and no present: the people were living in a kind of limbo, with little idea of what was happening in their country or in the rest of the world. When I went back ten years later and saw the whole country rising up out of the ashes, I realised human beings can overcome any difficulty, and that the Romanian people were a fine example of just that.
But on that other grey morning, in the grey foyer of a gloomy hotel, all I was concerned about was whether my interpreter would manage to get a car and enough petrol so that I could carry out some final research for the BBC documentary I was working on. He was taking