So he stays silent, and they walk side by side in the same direction, even though Jacob has no idea where they’re headed. He doesn’t even know where they are. They zigzag between the hundreds of dusty cars parked on the sidewalks, glancing at each other now and then, while avoiding each other’s eyes. Jacob’s thoughts dart back and forth, searching desperately for the right words to begin. There should be a thousand things, but his brain is too fast, and it stumbles over every idea, never able to focus on just one. Finally, he gives up completely, just lets things be as they are, realizes he has no control over anything now, nothing at all, just has to follow. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. He never loses control of himself. One night in Beirut, and he’s already fallen. Suddenly they stop at a garden hidden behind a rusty iron fence. Jacob can just make out a large house behind it, a palace in the darkness. He bends forward to peer between the rails of the fence. Gardens and parks are apparently quite rare in Beirut. He read that the American University campus is the closest thing to a park that Beirut has. He clears his throat.

‘What is this place?’ he asks.

He regrets it immediately, because his English sounds so Swedish and childish in his ears, the question so flat and silly, and he wishes he could take it back, had stuck to saying nothing at all.

But the man standing next to him, the man who has eyes Jacob recognizes though he’s never seen them before, just laughs and shrugs his shoulders and follows the fence, drumming his fingers along it.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Some rich family that fled during the war?’ He turns and looks at Jacob. ‘It doesn’t matter. Tonight it’s ours, habibi.’

They stand in front of a warped, high gate locked with a chain. The man bends down, pulls the gate and succeeds in creating a small opening near the ground.

‘See if you can squeeze in there,’ he says.

Jacob doesn’t say a word or even hesitate, just falls down on his knees and crawls through the little gap into the garden. Right now he doesn’t care what the consequences are; he doesn’t care about anything except making sure this continues.

As soon as he’s through, he grabs onto the bottom of the gate, bending it up so that the man can crawl in over the broken cobblestones between which yellow grass is sticking up.

Then they’re both in the garden. The man points to a lopsided wooden bench under a magnolia tree weighed down by heavy flowers that almost glow in the dark. They sit down there. They both open their mouths at the same time, then laugh, fall silent, then try again.

‘My name is Jacob,’ Jacob says.