The terrace slowly fills up with people in jeans and dresses speaking a hundred different languages. Alexa lights the candles standing in empty wine bottles from the Beqaa valley, and they flicker in the breeze. Somebody manages to get a small generator running and a string of naked incandescent bulbs are strung along one wall. A stereo is plugged in and Arabic pop mixes with The Weeknd and Rihanna. Jacob fills his glass and his body starts to feel lighter even though he’s so confused, he barely even remembers how to speak English any more.

But for once, it doesn’t matter. For once he might just be able to let go and fall into or rise up to something he doesn’t totally understand, but which makes his head feel lighter, his heart beat harder, makes him move faster, with greater intention and direction.

This, this is why he left everything he knew behind. This was why he went to Uppsala. This is why he reads foreign newspapers and studies political science, and this is why he has to take that damn statistics exam and learn Arabic.

This roof is the kind of place he’s longed for, searched for without even knowing it. This is the adventure. This is where it happens. This is where you become someone else. He’s so close to blurting out this ridiculous idea that he decides to drink a glass of water and sober up. It’s only his first night, he has to keep it together, not be seduced by cosmopolitan magic; he has to keep his eyes on the prize, the embassy, make a good impression there.

But right now he feels so happy in the company of the foreigners here, the anonymity, maybe even the safety of it, secure in the insecurity, in the uncertainty. So instead of water he grabs a beer out of a barrel, where it is lying on ice, just like in a movie. He thinks: Fuck it. That’s just how this night will be. One night. Then focus.

He walks to the edge of the terrace and looks out over the city, run down, broken, missing walls, bullet holes, the injustice and chaos and confusion and beyond that the Mediterranean lying in the darkness. He can’t see it, but he knows it’s there.

He feels like he could put his beer down on the ground next to him, climb onto the concrete ledge in front of him, take aim at one of the ten towering cranes down below, stretch his arms out like wings and fly.

And then he hears a voice close beside him. First he lurches in surprise. He can barely hear the party any more, barely hear someone strumming ‘Redemption Song’ on a guitar. Has almost forgotten there is a party, that there are other people here at all.

‘You look like you’re about to take off?’