as if he were my valet. He didn’t seem to own gloves, but didn’t complain of the cold, and smoked cigarettes in hoodlum fashion, cupped in his hand, as we walked. It took less than fifteen minutes to go from their town house by the river up to my triple-decker on the wrong side of Huron Avenue. It wasn’t far. And in the beginning, in the cold months, we went straight. In February, when there was a lot of snow, he’d walk behind me down the icy, narrow shoveled paths, and we didn’t talk much. It was hard to hear, single file like that, and by the time we got to my door, I could feel that my nose was red and I could see that his nose was red, his hands deep in his pockets, and he’d smile a smile at once goofy and vague, as if he wasn’t quite sure who I was, and he’d say, “Well, thank you again, and good night to you,” with a general, whole-body gesture that seemed as though he were clicking his heels. He’d wait like a father until I had the key in the lock, and then he’d set off back again down the road, stepping gingerly because of those leather-soled dress shoes.
The day after Valentine’s Day—I was relieved they hadn’t asked me to babysit Reza on that day—they were going out to another fancy dinner, at the home of the dean of the Kennedy School, and at the studio beforehand Sirena told me that Skandar wanted to cancel.
“He’s not feeling well?” I asked. I was sewing something, I know because I have a distinct physical memory of hunching and squinting, and when I looked up at Sirena it took a moment for my eyes to focus.
“You don’t read the papers?” she asked. “Or listen to the radio?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Hariri.”
I shrugged a small shrug.
“Rafic Hariri? You’ve not heard.”
“I didn’t see the papers today.”
“The prime minister of Lebanon—assassinated yesterday, along with twenty-two other people—his bodyguards, colleagues. They blew up his motorcade outside the St. Georges hotel—it made a crater in the road the size of a small house.”
I looked at the floor and shook my head. “Wow,” I said.
“That’s the trouble with being here. It all seems so far away that nobody pays any attention to anything.”
“Who did it?”
“Who knows? Israel, Syria, Hezbollah—lots of people wanted Hariri dead.”
“Did Skandar know him?”
“He’d met him, more than once. Skandar is very upset—you can understand. His country is in mourning and in turmoil; and here, at the university, even at a private dinner, they want him to talk about this as if it were an idea, not a man, so many men.”
“He was in favor of him then?”
She clicked her teeth. “Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it’s the wrong question. You should ask Skandar if you want an answer. He’ll give you an entire course, if you let him.”
So that night, as he walked me home after the dean’s supper, at which, I later learned, Skandar had spoken to the assembled company for half an hour, explaining the context and then the potential fallout from Hariri’s assassination—as Skandar walked behind me still on the sidewalk in places but not all the way, I asked him about the attack. He didn’t hear me the first time and I had to turn around to ask again, and he almost bumped into me and we both felt awkward.
“Ah,” he said, when he understood what I was asking. “That’s a complicated question.”
“But you’re upset.”
“Violence is very upsetting, wherever it takes place, whomever it hurts. But my poor Lebanon is a special case, a very particular story. To be still recovering from our terrible war, to be trying to create our skin all over again, to make a whole body—and then, this. Sometime I’ll try to explain. But where would I begin? My beginning? The war’s beginning? The century’s new beginning? Here, with Hariri? Depending where you begin, you’ll tell a different story. We’ll have time for them.” And he left it, that evening, at that.
I, in turn, went home and turned on my computer and Googled “Lebanon war.” Not that I hadn’t known about the civil war—when I was a child, everybody knew there was a war in Lebanon, and if, for example, you’d said to me “Sabra and Shatila” my brain would automatically have added the word