The Witch of Portobello Page 0,8

engineer, ex-husband

When I first met Athena, she already knew that she was adopted. She was just nineteen and about to have a stand-up fight with a fellow student in the university cafeteria because the fellow student, assuming Athena to be English (white skin, straight hair, eyes that were sometimes green, sometimes grey), had made some insulting remark about the Middle East.

It was the first day of term for these students and they knew nothing about each other. But Athena got up, grabbed the other girl by the collar and started screaming:

'Racist!'

I saw the look of terror in the girl's eyes and the look of excitement in the eyes of the other students, eager to see what would happen next. I was in the year above, and I knew exactly what the consequences would be: they would both be hauled up before the vice-chancellor, an official complaint would be made, and that would probably be followed by expulsion from the university and a possible police inquiry into alleged racism, etc. etc. Everyone would lose.

'Shut up!' I yelled, without really knowing what I was saying.

I knew neither of the girls. I'm not the saviour of the world and, to be perfectly honest, young people find the occasional fight stimulating, but I couldn't help myself.

'Stop it!' I shouted again at the pretty young woman, who now had the other equally pretty young woman by the throat. She shot me a furious glance. Then, suddenly, something changed. She smiled, although she still had her hands around her colleague's throat.

'You forgot to say please,' she said.

Everyone laughed.

'Stop,' I asked again. 'Please.'

She released the other girl and came over to me. All heads turned to watch.

'You have excellent manners. Do you also have a cigarette?'

I offered her my pack of cigarettes, and we went outside for a smoke. She had gone from outrage to nonchalance, and minutes later, she was laughing, discussing the weather, and asking if I liked this or that pop group. I heard the bell ringing for class and solemnly ignored the rule I'd been brought up to obey all my life: do your duty. I stayed there chatting, as if there were no university, no fights, no canteens, no wind or cold or sun. There was only that young woman with the grey eyes, saying the most boring and pointless things, but capable, nonetheless, of holding my interest for the rest of my life.

Two hours later, we were having lunch together. Seven hours later, we were in a bar, having supper and drinking whatever our limited budgets allowed us to eat and drink. Our conversations grew ever more profound, and in a short space of time, I knew practically everything about her life Athena recounted details of her childhood and adolescence with no prompting from me. Later, I realised she was the same with everyone, but, that day, I felt like the most important man on the face of the Earth.

She had come to London fleeing the civil war that had broken out in Lebanon. Her father, a Maronite Christian ( Editor's note: a branch of the Catholic Church, which, although it comes under the authority of the Vatican, does not require priests to be celibate and uses both Middle Eastern and Orthodox rituals ), had started to receive death threats because he worked for the Lebanese government, but despite this, he couldn't make up his mind to leave and go into exile. Then Athena, overhearing a phone conversation, decided that it was time she grew up, that she assumed her filial responsibilities and protected those she loved.

She performed a kind of dance and pretended that she'd gone into a trance (she had learned all about this kind of thing at school when she studied the lives of the saints), and started making various pronouncements. I don't know how a mere child could possibly persuade adults to make decisions based on what she said, but that, according to Athena, was precisely what happened. Her father was very superstitious, and she was convinced that she'd saved the lives of her family.

They arrived here as refugees, but not as beggars. The Lebanese community is scattered all over the world, and her father soon found a way of re-establishing his business, and life went on. Athena was able to study at good schools, she attended dance classes because dance was her passion and when she'd finished at secondary school, she chose to take a degree in engineering.

Once they were living in London, her parents invited