I grabbed both Miss Zahra’s wrists. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gripping her hands, I drove my eyes into her like nails. “We didn’t do anything to her,” I whispered. “The war in her country is what did it. The war is what ended her life even before we first laid eyes on her. The ghoul ate her family and destroyed her city, but it left her alive to prolong her torment. Daoud said she had reached her limit, and Daoud wasn’t lying. She really had reached her limit. She would invite us to dinner and beg and plead for us to help reunite her body with her soul. The soul of Al-Dante remained back there, Miss Zahra, back where her husband and her children were killed, and it was calling for her body to rejoin it. Daoud is innocent! He didn’t hang her. She hanged herself with his help. If you’d heard her recite Dante’s passage about the River Styx, you would understand, and you would have helped her too.”

I began reciting:

We set off across the water, leaving the shore behind.

Sluggish, that ancient boat embarked,

Weighted as never before.

As we crossed that lifeless slough

The mud rose up, and from within came a voice:

“Who are you, you who have come here before your time?”

“I am one who weeps.”

“May you weep and wail forevermore … ”

I finished my recitation with a flourish. My voice rose as high as the ceiling and would not come back down to earth. Suddenly, I was a Shakespearean character, a Greek tragedian calling to the chorus and the audience. I was Wahid Jalal in Order in the Court; I was Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar; I was Youssef Wahbi, augustly calling out, “Free the soul of Al-Dante! Let her fly free through the sky of her city, Aleppo! Grant the innocence of my client, Daoud Majid Daouuuud!”

When I released Miss Zahra’s wrists, her hands were about to explode from the blood swelling her veins. Fear was etched on her face: true fear, the kind that changes the color of your skin, shortens your panting breath, draws the sweat from your body like water pouring from a clay pitcher, freezes the blood in your veins, and bends your bones until you fold like a blade of grass. A third Miss Zahra appeared before me, in such agony and terror that she was about to fall to the ground. Throughout all my years of living there—so many I could no longer count them—I had never seen her in such a state: melting, dissolving, shaking, and nearly breaking apart and shattering, mirror-like, into a thousand pieces.

Miss Zahra began massaging her left wrist as she slowly edged backward. Scarcely believing she had reached the door, she put a hand behind her back to fumble with the knob. “It’s getting late,” she said, forcing her lips to open in the semblance of a smile. “Have a good … Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”