As she approaches an elderly couple, she doesn’t attempt to control the trembling of her lower lip. She suspects they have noticed the paw hanging from her earlobe. Then she goes to the café. Beside her is a very pale, potbellied man of around forty, and she feels the urge to tell him everything. She ties back her hair into a pony-tail and glances between the bottles behind the counter at the mirror: her left ear is higher than the right. The man doesn’t notice, even though the difference is obvious. The ear feels heavy, and it’s been getting increasingly red over the last few hours.

2

She remembers that she visited the city of T a year earlier. The guide showed them around the cathedral and they went to the seafront. The light was soft, filtering through the mist. It must have been early afternoon, and although spring had hardly shown its face yet, it felt as though there were a scorching hot summer to come.

The guide led them to the southern end of the city wall, by the beach. She noted some foreign tourists walking into the sea, still taking swigs from their cans of beer. Others had climbed onto the rocks of the breakwater that formed a path to a small island with an ochre fortress; the horizontal structure looked like a heap of earth floating on the ocean. But what she saw wasn’t a military installation or a clod of earth, but an excrescence sprouting from the city.

3

Finally, she disembarks. Rain has been falling through the whole crossing. It takes her an hour to get through customs; the cabs are mostly old Mercedes that smell of musty leather. She walks through the medina quarter, up the narrow streets that remind her of canyons. She’s booked a room in a hotel that had its heyday more than a century before. It feels as though night is about fall, because angry gray clouds are crowding the sky, but in fact it’s only three in the afternoon.

She crosses a terrace overlooking the bay. The desk clerk stares at her ear, and when he speaks there’s mockery in his voice.

The hotel is in shadows. Her room has two beds, shabby blankets, wall hangings that look like they’ve been hanging on the walls since 1870, when the hotel was built. Only the bathroom is new.

She attempts to write her story but gets no further than making a few scant notes. She numbers them. When the storm has passed, she leaves the hotel and goes into the souq, where she sees groups of women. Shopkeepers are offering them chickens, beans, onions. The carcasses of lambs, slashed from sternum to pelvis, spread the sour smell of blood over the dirty, greasy sidewalk, littered with disgarded vegetable leaves and offal.