Dirva and Nisa went forward, drawn together like magnets. I’d never seen her in anything but her work clothes. I’d never seen her hair uncovered. She looked different, there in flimsy, soft clothing. Her white hair was long and wavy; it hung loose, freshly washed, gently curled. She looked young like that. She looked girlish. And she looked so obviously, so totally, in love with him. Dirva stood across from her, a well of lies. The genealogy was a fiction, and she would never know it. He had oceans of love for someone else. She stared at him, devoted to who she thought he was, and he stared back, hopeful that he could become that man for her.

“Now, when the sun and moon meet, in this room where you first met, you are married,” said the matchmaker. “A bond is forged, a bridge is built, and two lives are now lived in parallel.”

Dirva opened Nisa’s genealogy. It was a thick book bound in black leather, the spine a full two inches thick. She had spent days copying her parents’ genealogies into it, name by name, relationship by relationship. She had written so much that her hands were still stained with ink that day. He wrote his name, the one on his citizenship papers, the one that hid his family from existence, next to hers. “A life together and only together,” he said.

She beamed. She took his hand in hers, and he handed her the pen. She opened his genealogy, a slim volume detailing the course of lives, which had never been lived, and wrote her name next to his. “A life together and only together.” Together, they signed Qin marriage licenses. The razehm stamped their marriage onto their citizenship papers. I left Rabatha three hours later.

PART FOUR:

ALAMADOUR

Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Vathorem’s status as an envoy awarded us a private car on a state-of-the-art train from Rabatha to Shalakesh. Not a private cabin, mind you: an entire car. It was strange and luxurious. The car was larger than my parents’ house, larger than Dirva’s apartment. I had a cabin with a bunk completely to myself, and the mattress in the bunk was softer than any I’d slept on before or since. The Qin rail agents brought us three meals daily from the dining car free of charge. It was a week and a half of creature comforts.