The authorities had given him his papers, but the country had not adopted him as its own. Sicilian society eyed the immigrant population warily, from a distance. The two worlds seldom mixed. Kamal missed his home country, he said. When he talked about it, a great veil of sadness seemed to wrap itself around him, like a cloak.

Giulia came back to the workshop two hours late that day. She reassured her anxious Nonna by telling her that her bicycle had suffered a puncture.

She kept the truth to herself: her bike was intact, but her soul had veered wildly off course.

Sarah

Montreal, Canada

The bomb had detonated, right there in the surgery of an awkward doctor who had no idea how to tell her the news. He had plenty of experience, years of practice, but there it was – he could never get used to it. Too much empathy with his patients, no doubt, all the young and not-so-young women who saw their lives change forever in just a few moments, when the dreaded diagnosis was delivered.

BRCA2. Sarah would learn the name of the mutant gene soon enough. The curse of Ashkenazi women. As if they hadn’t suffered enough, she would say. The pogroms, the Shoah … Why this, now, for her and her people?

She saw it spelled out in black and white in a medical article: Ashkenazi Jewish women have a one-in-forty chance of developing breast cancer, compared with one in five hundred in the world’s population as a whole. It was a scientifically established fact. There were other aggravating factors: a previous history of cancer in the immediate family, falling pregnant with twins … All the signs were there, thought Sarah. Plain to see, obvious. But she hadn’t seen them. Or hadn’t wanted to see them.

The doctor sat opposite her. He had dark, bushy eyebrows. Sarah was transfixed by them. How strange: this man she didn’t know was talking to her about the tumour on her X-rays – the size of a mandarin, he said – and yet she was unable to concentrate on his words. All she could see, it seemed, were his brown, bushy eyebrows, like heathland, populated with wild beasts. There was hair coming out of his ears, too. Astonishingly, months later, when Sarah thought about that day, that was the memory that came to her first: the eyebrows of the doctor who had told her she had cancer.

He didn’t say the actual word, of course; no one spoke the word, you had to spot it, lurking behind all the euphemisms, the paraphrases, the deluge of medical jargon. As if it was some kind of insult, a taboo, a curse. And that was exactly what it was.