There is a third blow coming. With this he achieves the desired effect. She holds up her hand in a gesture of pleading for the punishment to stop. Leila feels like her face is made of rubber, numb from helplessness. She inhales with a whistling sound as if something is stuck in her throat. Her heart beats faster and faster, and she knows that this is a moment that will define her. Her body feels useless, an empty canvas on which strangers can paint wounds.

The principal opens a drawer and pulls out a crucifix, a bronze Christ suffering on black wood.

‘I don’t like enrolling you people in my school. I told your father that too. I discouraged him from it, actually. By law, I have to accept you because this is a goddamned democracy now, but they can’t force me to like you, or your kind. Now kiss this cross. If you do, I will write up a warning for your classmate.’

It’s not the punishment administered to her that sticks in her mind, but the image of Christ held before her eyes. The protruding metallic ribs of the crucified figure, the elongated, shiny arms. She feels a desire to kiss it to know what Jesus tastes like, but she knows he tastes of metal, and his touch is cold on the lips, like any dead man’s. She refuses because she has to stand up for her own faith.

The principal hits her twice more, then gives her a written warning for assaulting a classmate. For the rest of the week she lets her classmates pull her hair, smash her against the wall, trip her when they’re playing volleyball in gym. When they spit on her she doesn’t wipe the saliva off her face, for she knows they would just spit on her again. Leila lets go of everything. This is just a body, at the mercy of the world, just a body that is being slowly eaten up by time.

At home she doesn’t tell her father about what happened in the principal’s office. The bruises are still visible on her face. Her father takes note of them with a cold look, but he doesn’t ask questions. She could go to a religious school where the ones like her are in the majority, or to a progressive school where religion doesn’t matter. Leila hates her family for putting her through all this, but even her hatred is just a dull pain.

At night she keeps thinking about the body in Aunt Márti’s room. The body that is supposedly Aunt Márti. She’s been chewed to the bone by the disease. Leila can’t even recognize Aunt Márti in that body. How could she still be alive? What keeps her heart pumping? Why is the human body allowed to run on for so long when there is nothing left to run on?