I don’t know what I said. Nothing, probably. I was tumbling into a black hole. I could see shadows . . . my father, my mother, Rachel spiralling into madness, poor Nadia screaming as she died, the emir burning her with a blowtorch, the shadow of the imam looming over the estate, I thought about the massacre in Aïn Deb, about . . . I don’t remember. I remember yelling, ‘What are you telling me all this for? What’s it got to do with me?’

He leaned over and said, ‘It’s got everything to do with you. I know what’s going on in that head of yours. You’re conflating the past and the present, you’re comparing yourself and Rachel, your father and the imam, you’re thinking about the Nazis who stole your father from you and used him as a tool in their genocide, you’re thinking about the Islamic fundamentalists who murdered your parents, who murdered poor Nadia, you want revenge, you want to take down the imam because he’s the leader, the Führer, because you used to belong to his Brotherhood of pathetic losers busy trying to wipe out humanity and you think this gives you a way to redeem yourself, to see your father differently, to forgive him. Do you understand?’

‘This is just bullshit. Can I go now?’

‘Sure, you can go. But read your brother’s diary again, maybe you’ll realise something that even Rachel didn’t realise – though it was staring him in the face – you can’t get justice for a crime by committing another crime, or by committing suicide. We have laws to do that. For the rest, we have to rely on memory and wisdom. But the most important thing you need to learn is this: we are not responsible for the crimes of our parents.’

‘Can I go now?’

‘My door is always open, come back if you feel like it.’

I went up to see Uncle Ali and Aunt Sakina. I intended to sleep at their place that night, I felt terrible, I hadn’t seen them in over a month. Actually, I was scared to be alone in Rachel’s house, I didn’t know what I might do. But there was another reason: there was something I wanted to ask Aunt Sakina, something that hadn’t occurred to me before, or to Rachel – at least there was nothing in his diary about it – how did Papa and Uncle Ali meet? It’s weird the stuff you don’t know, that you don’t even think about. Ten years I’d been living with Uncle Ali and Aunt Sakina and I didn’t now anything about them, I didn’t know how they knew Papa.