The way Zim had described the situation to the colonel was that “a kid was expecting a kid,” and there would be no one to look after the young mother or her child if Colonel Zimmermann didn’t “pull some strings” and bring the older brother back from combat. While it was highly unlikely that the younger sister had managed to get herself pregnant, the colonel did pull some strings; the older brother was brought home and relieved of further military obligations. The young man was endeavoring to look after his pregnant sister, as best he could. Elmira would help them, Zim had written me. What was not helping the young pair was their whispering to each other, because the whispering concerned the identity of the baby’s father. The brother wanted to know who’d knocked up his baby sister. The sister, wisely, wouldn’t say who it was.

Elmira (and the colonel, of course) had told the brother to let it go. It wouldn’t help him, or his sister, if he knew who the baby’s father was. “It’ll only make more trouble,” the housekeeper had told the brother. His sister didn’t need to be told.

Their parents had abandoned them, Zim wrote me. The brother was Talib and his sister was Ayla.

“The only thing that matters, Talib, is that you aren’t that baby’s father, and we all know you aren’t,” Elmira had told him.

“Nothin’ that bad happened, Talib—that’s all you need to know,” Ayla had said. But Talib was obsessed. Who did it? he kept asking. Talib whispered names. He named his high school friends—as if they were the only ones who could have done it, knowing Talib was away. “Are you kiddin’, Talib?” Ayla whispered back to him.

Thanking me, Talib took two egg salad sandwiches; with one of the sandwiches, he pointed to his pregnant sister. “She’s got mornin’ sickness—just thinkin’ about eggs makes her puke,” Talib told me.

“Just you pointin’ at me with those eggs makes me think about pukin’, Talib,” Ayla told him.

“I don’t think there are any eggs in the soup,” I said to her, trying to move on—not wanting to hold the platter of egg salad sandwiches in front of her.

“Thank you—I’ll wait and see what’s in the soup,” Ayla said.

“I don’t know why they call it mornin’ sickness—the pukin’ part isn’t limited to the mornin’,” Talib was saying.

“Not everyone needs to know everythin’ about somethin’, Talib,” Ayla whispered to him.

“Not everyone, Ayla, manages to get herself pregnant—not even the Virgin Mary acted entirely alone,” Talib whispered back to her. I moved on. Anyone seeing them would have thought they were an attractive young couple. A tall, slender young man with his hair cut short and wearing military fatigues—in Talib’s case, the fatigues were his working clothes, not a costume—and a pretty young woman who was noticeably pregnant.