When the doorbell rang, and he heard movement and muffled shouts, N knew that someone had come to inform them. He ran to his room and locked the door. He didn’t want to receive the news confirming that what he had witnessed wasn’t a dream. His father hadn’t hesitated for a second. He hadn’t spent a single moment thinking about N, caring about the presence of a child on the sofa in the corner of the room. It was as though he had departed some time earlier, and all that remained was for his body to catch up. The doctor had been depressed for years, it was true. Thurayya went on shining brilliantly while her husband hesitated and faded. She felt compassion for him and treated him well, but she had begun living where he was not.

The people came in waves to offer their respects to the deceased. Thurayya extended her hand to those she knew and recoiled from shaking hands with those she had always shunned—which is to say, the ones who used to come to see her late husband, doctor to the poor. They came in wearing their cheap clothes and their worn-out shoes and offering generous prayers for the soul of the departed. Men in red, black, and white kaffiyehs; women, veiled and unveiled, carrying their children, some suckling their babes in full view of the other visitors. Porters, villagers, day laborers, refugees, and foreigners: they came timidly and left with eyes streaming.

Thurayya’s cheeks reddened and her blood pressure rose. She gave a signal for Mary to get on with bringing out the coffee so that the masses might “get off my imported carpets and my velvet couches” as soon as possible. Then she made up her mind that, for the funeral on the following day, she would put out chairs on the landing, which was large enough to hold any number of people. The mourners would be many, and the apartment wasn’t big enough for all of them. In the early morning, wooden and wicker chairs arrived in a truck that stopped at the entrance to the narrow street. They were carried up just four flights of stairs and arranged in rows, side by side, in front of small, low tables bearing ashtrays and boxes of white facial tissues. Thurayya directed Mary to greet new arrivals in front of the apartment at the top of the stairs, and to seat “those people” outside, on the landings, while respectable people of any standing would be brought into the salon. She summoned two waiters to take over Mary’s normal role of preparing and serving coffee.