The front door banged. A face appeared. It was a woman in an apron. She was old, short, and fat. She started talking to him quickly, in English, but he could not place the emotion in her face. Was it possible she was not speaking English? She was looking him in the eye. But she needed no cues, no nods, no nothing. He kept her eye. He offered an air of ambiguous concern. Then she banged on the wall: knock, knock, knock. She fell silent. She looked at him. A response was needed, but another door banged inside the apartment. This caught her attention and she was gone toward the bedroom. He heard her steps down the hall and then more talking, all hers, but this time she was talking faster.

He took his bandaged foot off the desk of the school chair and put on his sock. The old woman was back and there was another fat woman with her who was wearing a bathrobe, a velvety cream one made of silk and lace and ruffles. She was much fatter than the first woman, and much younger, and also much prettier, with long curls of soft blond hair. Her emotions were not difficult to read in the slightest, for she gave off the presence and command of an opera singer at the full bloom of her career and her powers. She was indignant.

The first woman was as unreadable as before, but she kept knocking on the wall, and every time she did, the robed woman kicked it. No voices were raised, no threatening gestures made. It was a pantomime that meant nothing to him, and the women performing it had no interest in him, their audience. They passed out of sight into the living room, and he followed, noticing as he did that someone was coming home, wearing a mechanic’s uniform, his hands blackened, a bandanna around his head, and his hair in a ponytail. He thought it was the one Rafik had met in Paris, because he had a mole near his mouth, and from the night before Aziz remembered that he had thought this mechanic too self-composed, rude in some way.

The guy passed the women as if they were fish flapping on sand and said to Aziz in Arabic, “These whores run our lives.” Aziz was not sure if this called for comment, but apparently the woman in the robe knew what he had said and she pushed him, saying in Arabic, to Aziz’s astonishment, “Cocksucker.” The old fat woman who began this episode was not privy to Arabic, because she smiled prettily at the mechanic, curtsied, handed him a piece of paper, and was gone.