It’s closer. She needs a drink right now if she’s ever going to be able to handle all this. She knew it would be difficult to come back here, has been worried since yesterday. But this? It’s worse than she expected. She shouldn’t be alone. She needs someone to talk to.

She takes out her phone and finds George Lööw’s number again. This wasn’t how she thought she’d contact him again, not under these circumstances. But what choice does she have?

I’m in Brussels, she writes briefly. At Ralph’s in half an hour. Can we meet?

14 November

Beirut

Jacob walks almost the whole way home with his phone in his hand. ‘Last chance,’ Myriam wrote. But he doesn’t need a last chance, he’s made his decision. He’s left everything behind now.

He’s in front of the apartment, and he should go up and at least pick up some clothes. Why? Where should he go? They decided that he was going to live life like usual, not draw any unnecessary attention. Now he realizes he’ll have to meet Myriam too, play along. Go to the embassy every day so as not to draw attention. And then just disappear.

He takes out the business card he’s kept in his pocket the whole time.

Alexa Tayeb

Director

Palestinian Recreational Youth Centre, PRYC

Shatila, Beirut

‘Shatila is a labyrinth,’ she told him. ‘You’ll disappear if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

Disappearing is exactly what he’d like to do. He sighs and puts the business card back again, feels discomfort and fear at the thought of meeting Myriam. But he doesn’t have much of a choice.

*

It’s so cool out now that Jacob barely breaks a sweat in the autumn sun as he climbs up the colourful staircase from Mar Mikhael to Ashrafieh, even with his backpack of extra clothes. He doesn’t know if he’ll go back to the apartment. He doesn’t know anything right now.

The time is ten to three. And he feels like he has no control over his own steps. But when he looks down at his phone, he’s put the Sursock Museum into his map app so as not to get lost among the run-down, bullet-ridden art-deco houses. He only has to deny everything, stick to his story, get her to leave him alone for a little while. Buy some time.

It was here, under these twisting power lines, over this uneven asphalt, that he and Yassim walked on that first night just three months ago. That was another world, Beirut looked different, he’d been confused and fragile, a stranger. Who was he now?

He feels like he recognizes balconies and flaking shutters. But he can’t find the garden, doesn’t see the palace or the bench where they sat. It’s as if that night was a dream.