She clearly made a great many decisions in the days that followed. She didn’t tell me any of this, not in so many words, but it was clear enough from her behavior. And as the weeks went by, her reticence took on the solidity of fact. To repeat, nothing was said, but even so I began to think of my fingers—in my dream, in the moment they’d let her slip away from me—as somehow criminal, and her aloofness as her punishment.

In an attempt to get her back, I suggested she come and work at the magazine as a translator. “Use your languages.” She came, and very quickly settled in, but in ways that could only be sensed, not seen, her reticence continued. One day I came in to find her clutching that old edition of the magazine, the one the revolutionaries had trampled into the streets and that I’d thought was gone forever. She had it open on the article I had written at the editor’s request. Was actually reading it. When she sensed me standing there, she looked up, and casually flipped the page. She was on the verge of saying something, but instead she just pressed her lips tight, dropped the magazine on the chair, and walked out, leaving me standing by that window, looking out over the trees.

2

BESIDE A TREMBLING CANDLE

I said to Leila, “Stay here tonight.”

“I only came to check on you,” she said. She held my gaze a beat longer, then rose.

“My friend lives nearby. Can you take me there, Seif?”

“The car’s dead.”

She smiled, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it alive. Anyway, my friend’s too close to drive.”

She beat me to the front door; I followed her out.

We were at her friend’s place in no time. On the way, Leila kept trying her number but there was no reception. Before she went upstairs she said, “Just wait here for five minutes. In case no one’s in.”

I waited in the lobby, peering up the stairwell. Suddenly, Leila was there.

“Looks like she’s out.”

The streetlight’s gleam in her eyes was the edge of a memory, and I trembled.

Pull yourself together.

I asked, “Are you still in that place on the other side of town?”

She nodded but said nothing.

“Then let’s go back to mine then.”

Again, she nodded, and it looked like despair. On the way back she walked next to me in silence, and for the first time I found myself wondering if losing Alya could put everything right.

We were unaware that the curfew had already started until we saw the cars jockeying, racing to get home. Up ahead, two armored cars were rolling steadily toward us down the street, each blocking a lane.