“My God!” Mr. N heard himself say, unable to control his eyes, which darted here and there like frenzied dogs. He wanted to touch everything he passed. He kept on walking, turning in circles as he went, until he reached the bridge connecting Achrafieh to the Dekwaneh neighborhood. This one was a cement bridge as wide as the entire street, running between houses forever choked on dust and car exhaust. Actually, it didn’t so much run between them as squeeze itself in, abutting the balconies, touching them even, such that someone taking the air could easily shake hands with a passing driver—or the driver, if he so desired, could easily jump from his car to a balcony. Mr. N enjoyed a momentary fantasy in which his own home was relocated to one of those buildings, his own balcony, his own gardenia and carnation, his own chair and table and all the papers on it. And then he imagined himself as a sniper, looking down at the road, holding a rifle and sighting his prey …

“Outskirters,” Thurayya would say, in a tone of superiority tinged with disgust, when she noticed one of those people to whom Mr. N’s father dedicated his Saturdays at the clinic. You couldn’t just say “that riffraff,” for example, or even “the poor,” though the people who came to see Mr. N’s father, a doctor renowned for providing his services free of charge on Saturdays, were indeed the poorest of the poor. The doctor did this in honor of his own father, Nadeem, Mr. N’s grandfather, a farmer who came from his village to one of these same suburbs of Beirut to study in the city after his family sold all their land in order to educate their only son. Mr. N’s father also did it to spite his mother, Eugénie, Mr. N’s grandmother, who came from the Jaffa bourgeoisie, from a family that used to send steamships full of oranges around the world and then escaped to Lebanon from Palestine in 1948. After the Nakba, they abandoned oranges and began importing cars. Eugénie wanted her son, who hated business, to become a doctor in order to preserve the honor and status of the family. Mr. N hardly remembered his grandmother Eugénie. She had white skin, he knew, with freckles covering her face and hands. Unfailingly elegant, she would always wear her full set of jewelry no matter the occasion: a small pearl necklace, pearl earrings, gold bracelets, and her wedding band with a diamond ring alongside. She didn’t like Thurayya, though she preserved the rudiments of a relationship with her daughter-in-law and tried to treat her with respect. Still, she never missed an opportunity to remind this interloper that she, Thurayya, could never catch up to Mrs. Eugénie with respect to her lineage, no matter how much she boasted, how much she exalted herself, how much she looked down on others. This was one of the old woman’s few qualities of which Mr. N’s father, the doctor, was—secretly—pleased.