Klara dips a piece of bread, chews and swallows while she looks at him evenly. ‘Or you could come into the bed with me?’ she says. Damn, that sounded more forward than she’d planned.

They haven’t discussed what happened on the sofa before he picked up the food, just let it be.

Now he turns around from the fridge, still squinting in the dark kitchen, but with something more confident and interested in his eyes. ‘Is that what you want?’

She doesn’t say anything; she just dips another piece of bread and stares down into the food. Does she? Really?

Then she looks up and nods.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I do.’

15 November

Beirut

Shatila is far from the glittering downtown and the galleries of Mar Mikhael, far from Cornichen and the university. Shatila is poverty and permanent impermanence, a fifty-year-old refugee camp that’s turned into a neighbourhood.

The taxi drops him off at the Embassy of Kuwait, near the edge of the camp, and Jacob stumbles on through winding, narrow alleys, between walls covered with flaking graffiti and spray-painted stencils of Arafat. As he looks up at the gritty, decaying buildings, he sees Hamas flags and Fatah emblems hanging out of the windows. The sun is setting, and he can feel eyes staring out at him from small, improvised kiosks and shops. He tightens the backpack around his shoulders.

Nobody will find him here, but he also knows he shouldn’t be alone; he should have calmed down and waited to enter with a guide. Most of all, he should have called Alexa first, despite the risk, and asked her to meet him.

Reflexively, he puts his hand in his pocket and reaches for his phone, but then remembers that he doesn’t have one any more. He tossed it in the garden.

The alley he’s walking down bends slightly to the left and narrows, and when he rounds the turn he sees two men in leather jackets staring at him without expression and his mistake dawns on him with full force.

Jacob stops. He glances around and sees another man blocking the path behind him. He raises his hands with open palms to show that he’s unarmed, that he’s not a threat, that his intentions aren’t bad.

The men say nothing at first – they just stand there with unreadable eyes. Jacob opens his mouth and closes it again, takes a step backwards. He doesn’t know what to say or what’s required in a situation like this. Something flashes in the sunlight. A gun at one of the men’s belts.

‘I’m a friend,’ he says in his faltering Arabic. ‘I’m looking for the youth centre.’

It rings so hollow, and he can feel the man behind him getting closer. The two other men also move slowly towards him. Jacob swallows hard, panic pounding in his chest.

‘I’m looking for the youth centre,’ he tries again.