“What are you thinking about?” asked Abu.

“Your sister.”

“Did you like her?”

“In a way.”

“I wish you could have married her. She is just your age.”

Since meeting her at dinner, Thanakar, too, had speculated what it would have been like if she had married him and not the old commissar. Their families were connected; it would have been a likely match, if not for his leg. He would have been a prince and married her, and his children would have inherited his house and income. He would have broken down the barriers of the courtesy that she had learned in school, and in time she would have become a free woman, capable of loving. It was a stupid fantasy, without detail in his mind, because as always his leg wouldn’t permit him to limp over the first if. His child would never wear his clothes. For this reason, he thought, it was too much to expect him to forget what small privileges he had. Abu could shake beggars by the hand, drink from polluted cups. What did he care?

Abu laughed. “How stern you look.”

“Shall we go?”

They walked away into the dark beyond the streetlamp, and at the end of a long alleyway they found a makeshift barricade of garbage and concrete, lined at the top with barbed wire and sheets of corrugated iron. They walked along it till it joined another, higher wall, and at the gate a wide, vacant face, shiny in the light of an acetylene lantern on a pole, looked out at them through a hole punched in the wall. It looked a long time out of bulging, expressionless eyes, motionless, unresponsive to inquiry, entreaty, threats, silence. Framed in the square hole, it seemed less a human face than a picture on a wall. It seemed deaf and blind. But Abu laughed, and at once the face changed, its lips twisting into a silent grin, revealing long antinomial teeth. That was all; there was no more movement, but from behind the wall came a shuffling and a banging, and the gate swung open on wire hinges. A man stood in the gap, gigantic and muscular, dressed only in a pair of cotton breeches, roughened to look like leather. Unlike the gatekeeper’s, his face was animate. And he spoke, too. Sound bubbled on his lips, nonsense syllables set to a frothy tune, as if he were laughing to music. With his palms, he beat a loud, complicated rhythm on his thighs and his chest, finishing with a roll across his belly, which he distended for the purpose. “In!” he shouted, in rhythm with the slaps. “In! In! In! In! In!” He stepped aside.

Summoning courage, the cousins stepped over the concrete threshold onto a kind of platform set into the top of the barricade. A number of men and women were standing around or sitting, wild, savage-looking, scantily dressed. But as usual with antinomials, there was no sense of menace about them as a group.