When I looked back at Mahmood Majid he had lowered his eyes and was staring at something on the ground. Hundreds of tiny red ants crawled away. The one at the beginning of the line carried a bread crumb, almost the size of himself, in his mouth.

“Look how straight they crawl.”

“Yes,” I said, aware of a tiny ache at the wavering of his attention from me.

“It’s very funny,” he said, turning to me. “But I feel I can tell you anything, anything at all. That’s what I liked about you immediately. You and I have a lot in common. We both have tried living in the West and have been disappointed.” He laughed, perhaps thinking he sounded too serious. “Don’t you think?”

I nodded.

Some men came in and sat not far from us. They greeted Mahmood Majid. Everyone seemed to know him. He belonged so much in these surroundings. I had seen Tony the same way, only in another context.

Mahmood Majid began to stir the thickened sugar at the bottom of his tea glass with a spoon. I watched him with the same ache I had felt a moment ago when he had looked at the ants.

He leaned very close to me. “That night when we were in the garden you seemed like a real Eastern woman. You looked and acted differently … it’s hard to explain.”

I waited for him to elaborate but instead he said, just as vaguely, “I don’t want you to think I was being cold.”

The awkwardness and the stiffness I had felt that night came back to me and I tried to fight it. I could see, behind my attraction to him, that a real conflict remained: he kept drifting in and out of a stage of my life that I had rejected and wanted to regain; he embodied the same pain, the same elusiveness.

“I think I know what you’re saying,” I said.

He searched my face. “I hope I didn’t offend you. I see that I have.”

“No,” I said, willing myself to say no more. It would be self-defeating to begin to depend on him just as I wanted to pull so many strings together, think things through.

In a few moments I said, “It’s getting late. I’d better go back.”

He put a bill on the table and said, “Now that you’re staying we’ll see each other often.”

I nodded hesitantly but said nothing.

Shops were now lit up and music blared out of radios. Horse-drawn carriages and donkeys trotted next to cars, making jingling sounds. We walked for a moment and then I raised my hand for a cab.

He waited until I got in. When I turned around after a block he was still standing there on the sidewalk.

23

My mother and I rode side by side on donkeys along with many other pilgrims travelling on foot, bicycle, and donkey. We were all going in the same direction, to the shrine of Zeinab, a poetess-saint. We had started out in the morning and now it was dusk. The sunset splashed against the sky. We were all quiet now as we were reaching the rest area before the shrine. My body ached from the long, bumpy ride. We passed the flat road, went up a hill and down again. From narrower paths, other pilgrims were joining us, making the main road very crowded and harder to travel on. The color of the sky faded quickly and stars began to come out.