He said that, for months and years, he lived in fear. In fear that the woman would surface and report him, in fear that the men would show up, in the fear that such a dirty secret would pop up out of nowhere and ruin his life. Even now, he said, after all this time passed, I still walk against the wall, with my head down. ‘You’re fortunate, Salma,’ he said. ‘You are more fortunate than you think.’

The confession drew her closer to him. The catch in his voice, the fear he invoked. She understood what he had gone through, at least understood the compulsion and the shame. He would never be the same again and no one would guess why. Later, when the men drove him back to his clinic, still polite as ever, he could not believe what had happened. A slice out of his life. A bad dream. Count yourself lucky. Among the disappeared and the imprisoned for years, his tragedy wasn’t such a tragedy, his loss minute.

‘They put a gun to your head,’ Salma said. ‘There was nothing you could do. You were forced into it.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s what I tell myself.’

‘Were they really state security?’

‘I don’t know. How can I ever be sure? Gangsters, mafia. I don’t want anything to do with them.’

‘Why didn’t they just get a corrupt doctor and pay him?’

‘I thought of that too. I can’t figure it out.’

The suppositions and making sense were part of the pleasure of their phone calls. She had not spoken like that in years. Every culture has its own way of reasoning. With him, she was untangling things the way she had done long ago. The same probes, the same logic. This is a function of that, this is correlated to this, correlation is not causation and, of course, there is the law of diminishing returns.