Miss Zahra entered. She looked pale and afraid, but when she saw me crying, she approached Andrew, who whispered some clipped, muffled phrases. I was able to catch only a few words: “The old treatment … forty milligrams, each morning and night, chlorpromazine … I think he realizes we aren’t running a hotel … ” He wrote something for her on a piece of white paper and then left the room.

———

I closed the taxi door. “Abdel Wahab El Inglizi Street!” I cried, only to realize I was speaking much louder than was appropriate for the short distance separating me from the driver. But it was necessary, given the noise outside. The commotion subsided a little, and suddenly I realized I had forgotten all my bags in Mr. Joe’s bar. For several moments, I was torn over whether to stop the car and go back to get my things, but there was someone inside me, scolding me and shouting, “Careful! Don’t go back there! And don’t stay in the area to buy anything else!” Fine. I’d tell Shaygha that I hadn’t found the shop in the Cola district, but had just gotten lost and came back when I got tired.

The driver looked at me. “So, sir, you live in Achrafieh?” he said, darkly. I regretted having taken a chance on sitting next to him in the front seat, instead of in the back as I usually did. “Yes,” I replied, saying nothing more in the hope he would take the hint that I had no desire to enter into conversation of any kind. I leaned my head against the window and turned my eyes to a group of young women crossing the street, shrieking loudly to each other.

The driver went on talking. “They come as housekeepers, and then they run away and become whores. That profession pays better, sure, but this area is teeming with them. The cops know they don’t have papers, but they don’t arrest anybody. Why? They’ve taken on a kind of brotherly regard for them. One girl told me she wasn’t afraid to wander around without papers because the whole thing amounted to no more than two hundred dollars if she got caught … Do you think their presence here and their cheap prices will prevent another war? How else do you expect so many nations and so many foreigners to gather in this dwarf country, scarcely large enough for its own people, without tearing each other apart? Five thousand lira buys you a quick orgasm, and if you want something more … ”

I opened the door even before asking him to stop the car and dug ten thousand lira out of my pocket just to get him to shut up. His words seeped into my ears like poison and made me sick to my stomach. I planned to walk as far as the bridge over the river and stop another car there. Taxi drivers in this country were a plague. They carried contagions and passed them on to their passengers without even realizing the harm they caused. They were the bane of the country. They entered our lives without so much as asking permission, and then they settled in to make themselves at home, pushing our buttons and riling up the evil instincts buried inside.