This was more information than he’d previously shared. Perhaps Tom hadn’t asked the right questions. But he had respected Allam’s privacy, believing that a man said what he had to say when ready to speak. And hadn’t Allam also respected Tom’s privacy? The two men did not approach subjects head-on. Information was gleaned in small bits, like the stories about their fathers. Knowledge was built incrementally. Sometimes facts were given, sometimes not. And yet, knowledge was what Allam was all about. Before his life changed in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

“In Syria, people disappeared,” Allam was saying, his voice rising. “People I knew most of my life. Not seen again. During the worst fighting, when I was in Aleppo, we heard rumours about a body lying face down in the street. Or maybe three bodies in sprawl somewhere. Someone saw this, or spied through ruins of a building or through a doorway before running to get away. Rumours spread house to house, one family to another. The bodies disappeared. Some were never found. Many in our area were killed when barrel bombs were dropped from helicopters. No one was safe. My grandchildren stopped going to school. We had no electricity, no running water. People left quietly in the night. They passed through checkpoints, sometimes paying much money, and escaped to another country. My daughter and her family arrived at safety. I was glad when word came to me from Turkey.”

There was a long pause, and everyone sat quietly, waiting.

“My wife,” he said softly. “Killed when a bomb destroyed the building where she visited to help a neighbour. Her body was one that disappeared. Before my daughter left the country. Now my wife does not exist. We gave up our hope of finding—as you say—the remains of her.” He looked at no one. He stared straight ahead. “After that, there was nothing left in that place for me.”

Hazzley saw effort, intention. He had spoken these words of loss before and stowed them away. As he did now. Deep sadness, private place, private space. But he had shared that much, and shared with strangers. Hazzley thought of the capacity, the reservoir each person carried inside. She turned the idea over in her mind. With no warning, up from the deep well, up from the reservoir came grief.

Allam broke his own silence, his voice strong again.

“My daughter is speaking English,” he said. “She is speaking well because she studied English in university, before the war. Now, in our new country, she works, but she reads at the noon meal or after her children are in bed. She and friends at her work talk about books they borrow and lend. She told me about a book by a Canadian woman. A friend gave her stories to read about one family. In the stories, when a man dies, after the funeral service the women roll down the hill by the graveyard. Not the men—only women, when one of their men dies. Each woman lies flat and crosses her arms over her chest and rolls. Over hard earth and rock and stone and sticks, whatever is there.