His father said nothing. Didn’t sigh or hold his breath. He wasn’t panting and his chest didn’t heave. All he did was get up on a chair, open the window, and go through it. He stepped forward confidently, as though the air itself would hold his weight and let him walk through the void. He stepped and fell, just like that, fast and easy. N heard him hit the ground, and he went over to the window to look. His father was lying on the sidewalk, his face pointed up, eyes half-open, a thread of blood running from his nose and mouth. His right leg was folded inward; the left was straight but twisted at the ankle, broken. His arms too looked both straight and twisted. How had he managed to step out as he had and land on his back rather than his stomach? Had he twisted around in midair because he was afraid to meet the ground head-on? Or because he wanted to be found with his eyes open? Or because he wanted to give a farewell glance to where Thurayya was sleeping in the next room? In any case, with his exit through the window, N’s father had left his life. He’d left Thurayya, Sa’id, and N. He had left his pain, his disappointment, his failures, and his sickness of heart. He had treated the ill and taken away their pain until his own blood went bad.

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.