This continued until Aryagash came, the crazy Ethiopian, with hair that she would spend days in front of the mirror trying to tame into some semblance of shape. After arriving from her country with long braids and blond highlights, she showed up at work only a few days later with short hair combed down around the delicate features of her small face. The tips had been colored a burnt orange, using the last of an old tube of dye. Her hair was short, and her mood was foul. She cried that her mistress had rebuked her, and asked Mr. N to bring her back to the agency because she didn’t want to stay. But then she changed her mind and asked him for money to go to a hair salon. She left and then returned with long hair, dyed and braided, as well as a cheerful mood and smiling, black-lined eyes. Thus, back and forth, with hair that was long and then short, tame and then running riot, and with many hours spent in front of the bathroom mirror or looking at the screen of her cell phone, Aryagash fell in love with her hairdresser’s neighbor, an Assyrian Iraqi who owned a smartphone repair shop. She ran off with him without looking back—without a thought for her passport, nor for her husband and her three-year-old child, whom she had left behind in Addis Ababa.

When Mr. N called the office of the housekeeping agency, he was told it was necessary to make a report about her abscondence so that the responsibility for her would no longer be his. He went to the police station and did what was asked of him. One of the officers tried to persuade him to accuse her of theft because that would increase their chances of catching and arresting her, but Mr. N couldn’t bring himself to do it. After some days, he headed to the General Security office, having been summoned there for an investigation into the reasons behind the foreigner’s flight. Afterward, he had nowhere to go but home, where the worm of dotage was already boring into Thurayya’s head. She no longer spoke in complete sentences, but would stop in the middle of a thought like someone losing their footing or driving into a roadblock. It began subtly, with her repeating words, sometimes asking the same question multiple times. She would ask, and Mr. N would reply, and after a while, she would put the question to him again. He would again give the answer, then she would forget and start from scratch. When Aryagash first warned Mr. N about this behavior, he’d lost his temper, for reasons he didn’t care to explore. Yet he suppressed his anger, since, for so long, anger had been the sole province of Thurayya. It was as though the emotion was her private possession. She had registered a patent on the invention and posted it on the gates of her kingdom, so that no one else dared even to touch it.