Below the wall on which the flowers roosted, I walked with Bahr, looking for some trace of disaster but finding nothing. No shattered glass, no gore, just a too-quiet street, with hardly a pedestrian in sight and only the occasional car. No shops, no cafés, no trucks, and at the top of the hill ahead, a frieze of high walls and trees. The plants above us were densely packed, but none looked especially large. Perhaps the flowers had been removed. Perhaps this was the wrong villa. Our toes were rubbed raw by the steep climb and the gravel, and I was on the point of asking Bahr, not for the first time, just where he got his information from, when suddenly he paused, peered intently at the wall beside him. He brought out his little camera, glanced briefly around at the empty street, took a picture, and set off again. I looked, but at first I couldn’t see a thing. Then, along the base of the wall, I made out writing, crudely painted and almost worn away. A single phrase: Beware giant flowers.

We saw the sign and its bizarre warning, and course we didn’t take it seriously. We didn’t beware, and we would pay the price.

We didn’t beware the day the chants came, their protest dressed in heartfelt songs that broke over the balcony and washed into the living room where we sat. Alya pricked up her ears and mewed like a cat. Then she was pulling me toward the front door as I tugged her back to the sofa.

“Come on, let’s go down. Just five minutes. There’s no harm in looking.”

We looked down from the balcony. We couldn’t see the ground through the people.

I did warn her.

“What am I, Alya? What are we? Shadows on the wall, Alya. A mirror that mirrors back but does not see, an unseen breeze. Just a breeze, demurely passing by and minding its business. Two lovers sitting together in a corner, our feet tucked in so as not to trip time in its march.”

But she laughed and pulled me anyway. She cooed to me, sang me strains of desire, and made (though I couldn’t say how) the sound of hope. And the songbirds, long forgotten in my breast, woke up. She pressed her ear to my chest and listened to the birds and whispered something to them, then she got to her feet. She grasped my hand and we went through the door together.