“Yes,” he says. “How much do you want?”
The boy’s mother reemerges, realizing that I am harmless, just a man who doesn’t know exactly what he wants. She says something to her son in Arabic and he translates: “What are you using it for?”
The squat woman winks at me, evidently understanding. She pulls a plastic bag off a roll and plunges her hand into a white, plastic bucket behind her. She captures a big piece of halloumi floating in the water and deftly inverts the bag.
“He’s just a friend of the family,” I explain, “not a friend exactly, a writer, a famous writer, we published his book, perhaps you know him? David Sarkis?”
The squat woman squints, opens the plastic bag, spits onto the halloumi, twists and ties the neck of the bag, and thrusts it into my hand.
I am left standing there holding this clear plastic bag at arm’s length as if it contains a dead goldfish. I hand over all the money in my pocket to the boy. Perhaps he shares the same view of Sarkis as his mother; he makes no effort to hand me any change. And I make no effort to ask for it.
I was not happy about being forced to leave Paris, particularly when I had just been introduced to the world underneath Isabel’s school uniform. I understood the principle behind having to leave, though I had trouble comprehending how it was that a fourteen-year-old boy from Paris should be sent away because of the publication of a book he had never read by a Lebanese-American man he had never met. It made me feel the world was very small and perhaps it is for just that reason that my parents had to send me away.
And big it became: endless. The dusty town in the middle of a continent on the other side of the world gave way to dusty desert on all sides. The schoolyard had no fences – what would have been the point? There was nothing but sand and rocks and sky and the occasional three-legged dog out there. There was nowhere for me to run except back to Trudy’s house, where I slept in a shared room wallpapered with palm trees on white sandy beaches.
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