The man from the terrace was right: the stairs are only fifty metres further down the street, each step painted in red, green, blue, black, yellow, forming an abstract pattern that leads straight up into the darkness and another part of town. Ashrafieh. Mar Mikhael, where he lives, is a working-class neighbourhood; Ashrafieh is for the rich, Christian elite.

Jacob sees the man standing halfway up the stairs and raises a hand in an eager, childish greeting. The man smiles and calmly waves him up. Jacob stops for a moment. He shouldn’t be doing this. Not on his first night in Beirut. He should say: ‘We’ll talk some other day.’ He should sleep and focus on his career and his new life. What he’s dreamed about ever since he started dreaming. Call Agneta early and ask if he can go in to the embassy, show them his resourcefulness, his sense of duty, his abilities.

He should, he should, he should.

But he knows he won’t do that, and as soon as he takes the first step onto the staircase he has to hold himself back from running up to the man.

*

They walk in darkness down the street above the stairs. Jacob is still winded; the stairs were longer than they looked. It’s unusually quiet up here in the middle of the night – not even the honking on Armenia Street makes it all the way up here. They walk in the middle of the street, because here among the crumbling art deco houses there’s no traffic, not now – this isn’t the Beirut Jacob saw earlier in the day, this is another city. Still chaotic, but calmer, with empty streets and alleys. Abandoned perhaps, a city after an evacuation or an apocalypse.

At first they say nothing to each other. Jacob feels like he’s lost his voice, or has suddenly forgotten how to formulate words and sentences. There’s so much he’d like to say, so much he’d like to ask or discuss, but he’s giddy and excited and tired, and this moment is so crisp and brittle that language might destroy it, words and sentences and subject matter might ruin it, change it, shift it up or down, or just cause it to disappear completely.