“It would explain what has happened,” his father said. He looked unaffected by Ghaleb’s scorn. Aziz’s mother had stopped picking at her sleeve. To everyone’s surprise, she said with composure, “If this mission was as you say, why have they not come to protect my son? Why are irhabiya calling our house without fear?”

“Because Ghaleb is wrong,” Aziz said. He glanced at his brother-in-law. Ghaleb looked like a man getting a manicure in Paris, or a haircut in Rome. He was neat and pampered into a plumed self-regard. He always looked like that. The rest of them were forever pulling at threads or caked with sand or napping.

“I was in my unit,” Aziz said wearily. “After we got outside Biskra, it was hard to write. I did try—maybe, from the desert, letters got lost. Since when do we count on anyone in the government to know one name from the next? One day from another? To ever give one simple answer to one simple question? This is Algeria. It is permanently confused on all levels. That one—the friend of the pharmacist—who knows if he knew what he was saying? People came and went in our unit.

“Sometimes I thought if I had just walked away, no one would have known I’d been there at all. These calls are what every soldier gets. Ask in town. I spoke to one just yesterday who came to visit me on this couch—every other night someone pretending to be irhabi calls and says things like, ‘I know where you are.’ It’s been days of these calls, yet no one has shadowed our doorstep. No one has stabbed me in the night. It is bluffing. Probably teenagers down at the docks making calls on stolen cell phones.”

He turned to Ghaleb.

“You see cinema where there is only normal life.”

He had not convinced himself. He began to feel better anyway. His arm would take much time to heal, yet it was not too early to make plans. All of them included Soumeya. Their first meeting could not come now, with him in a cast from his thumb to his shoulder. He wanted to court her, show her that just because it was arranged, his wanting her was not slight. But he imagined her as practical, wholly inured to larks. What he gave would have to be true. He decided he would write a letter to her each day but not send it. On their first meeting, he would present her with a bundle of these unsent letters, records of his thinking about her.

The letters made his days into occasions. He worked on them when he woke and just before he slept. No one knew of them at first. Then one morning his father was up early and saw him writing. Because of the boarded windows, Aziz had a candle lit. He felt like a Tibhirine monk.