“Sit,” he commands, sliding the omelet from the skillet onto my plate. Obediently, I take my place, just as I used to do when my father called me to the table. I eat quickly, without seeming to taste the food, so as not to give him any pleasure—although it’s good, the best I’ve had in a long time. My father used to say that food tasted better to him when I ate it, but it also always tasted better to me when he’d prepared it. I pick the last salad leaves off the plate with my fingers, and when I look up, the stranger is watching me with pale green eyes.

“Your hair,” he says, “you always wear it so short?” I shoot him a look to make it clear that I have no interest in getting personal. He eats in silence for a few minutes before trying again: “You’re a student?”

I drink my water without bothering to correct him. Through the bottom of the glass I see his blurred mouth.

He tells me that he is an engineer. “Then you can afford to stay wherever you want when you come to the city,” I say. He stops chewing and smiles, revealing small, gray, childish teeth. “I work for the municipal department,” he says, and names a city in the north. “Anyway, this is the most convenient.”

It makes no difference to him, whoever he is, that my father has died—why should he let that get in the way of convenience? I decide to tell him to leave right now. I push back my chair and drop my plate in the sink, but what I find myself saying, instead, is that I am going out for a walk.

“Good,” he says, and goes on chewing in a slow manner, his fork and knife poised delicately in the air above his plate. “Get some fresh air. I’ll do the dishes.”

It’s late in the afternoon, but the heat hasn’t let up. All the same, my annoyance dissipates once I’m outside. On the taxi ride from the airport I’d been surprised by how ugly and run-down everything looked, the pockmarked walls and rusted rebar poking from concrete columns on the roofs. But now I’m already used to it. It even comforts me in a way, this lazy decrepitude, along with the dusty trees, the yellow sunlight, and the sound of my father’s language.