Well, that’s a slightly strange way to put it: every bakery over there is foreign. I don’t mean it like that. In the village where I grew up there was this place called the foreign bakery. It made the soft white rolls called fino, and was across the road from the ovens of the traditional bakery that turned out the rough flat discs of baladi bread. In their homes, most women still baked the huge, heavy loaves which sometimes had the buttery taste of fateer. Then the women realized that the foreign bakery could save them the effort of making Eid cookies. They would drop off empty trays in the morning, and send their kids to collect them, fully laden, that evening.

The bakery was the site of my first attempt to meddle with fate. We children were hanging around, waiting for the cookies, and the women working there asked us to help them pack the little fino rolls into bags and tie them shut. Five fino rolls in a bag was called a kaiser. So, I decided that I was going to spread a little joy among my fellow villagers. In every other bag I stuffed an extra roll or two. In the days that followed, I made the rounds of the local stores supplied by the bakery, buying myself a kaiser to take to school, in hope of finding one of the bonus bags I’d packed. But I never came across a single one, and I started to wonder whether the whole thing hadn’t been a dream or an illusion, the way it always feels when you do (or imagine you are doing) somebody a favor—especially somebody you don’t know… But look at where my thoughts have taken me, look at where I’ve taken you. Poor Irene left standing there, waiting patiently for this idle talk to end…

Irene was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best thing in that bakery. I had been in the country for years by then, but was still having difficulties with my papers. Plus, I had a bit of cash saved up from all the different jobs I’d done. You might say that circumstance conspired against us; that it laid a trap and in we fell. Or in I fell, I should say, because I knew it was a trap. Irene, though: How could she ever have known?

Whatever the case, we met our punishment together. See how purely evil life can be?

All I said was: “Morning, miss. You’re beautiful.”

She stared, then smiled: “What would you like?”

“A date.”

The smile in her eyes turned to cheerful contempt. At the window, death peered in. Fresh victims. But he was happy to wait until the two of us had become three.