The crowd melted away, the angry roar muted now. Still holding Malik’s hand, as young men often did, Amira led him away from the square. His eyes were blank, unseeing; he moved like an automaton. When they reached the car, she released him. Pressing her hands against her cold, clammy skin, she doubled over, vomiting into the dust.

Malik seemed not to notice. Staring straight ahead, he turned the key in the ignition; the car lurched forward, then careened into the road as Malik floored the accelerator. On the drive home, he spoke only once, his face sculpted in cold fury.

“Never again. I swear it.”

3. Malik

Malik

The plane banked, one wing pointing to pure blue sky, the other to khaki desert. Sky and desert. Al-Remal. One night in Marseilles—in a smoky cafe crowded with seamen and the occasional tourist in search of “atmosphere”—a business acquaintance of Malik’s, a middle-aged American well advanced in drink, had become sentimental and sententious. “I’m gonna tell you young fellas something,” he informed the group around the table. “You’re all away from home and think you’re going to make a pile of money and go back in style. But you can’t. You can’t go home again. A famous writer said that. I forget who, but truer words were never spoken.”

“What does it mean?” Malik asked. In all honesty, the remark made no sense to him.

“It means you can’t go home again, damn it, no matter how much you might want to.” The drinker reiterated that the quotation was from a famous writer, also an American apparently, and attempted to explain its meaning for himself, personally. It still made no sense.

One of the party, a multilingual young Lebanese, tried to translate the thought into Arabic. Malik tried, too. They found that it could not be done. Maybe the saying was true in America, but not in al-Remal. Not anywhere in the Arab world. An Arab could always go home, and almost always did, no matter where he had gone, no matter for how long.

Yet, afterward, Malik often thought about what the man had said, and came to see that, in a way, the words applied to him. It was not that he could ever come home a foreigner—another concept that made no sense—but that al-Remal could be all too familiar, like an ill-fitting thobe or bedclothes that tangled and bound.

He felt that way now. He had felt that way ever since the day they killed Laila. Never again. He could not think of Laila without thinking those words, his oath to himself and to God. And he could not think of the Laila he had loved without seeing in his mind the Laila he loved now. An infant when last he beheld her, would she be walking now? Would she know words? Would she know him? It had been a year, a little more than a year.