He snorted, annoyed. “So that’s all? I’m to be painted as a scoundrel and a misanthrope?”
“No. There’s also Boutros.”
“What about him?” The edge in his voice had sharpened.
“They’ll question his choice of business partners.”
“Sensible enough.”
“They’ll point out that you weren’t seen at his funeral, and that his death made you the sole remaining owner of the Amherst.”
She paused, trying to gauge if he understood yet. He was silent, thinking. She went on. “But they might go further than that. We all thought that Boutros had made it through the worst of his illness before it returned. It’s possible that some will ask whether his doctors truly tried their utmost—or whether someone gave them a reason not to.”
A pause. “Maryam,” he said slowly, “are you telling me that I’ll be accused of murdering Arbeely?”
She sighed. “I truly don’t know. It’s happened before. An unscrupulous person whispers a bit of slander, and others repeat it as gossip. Before long, the newspapers report it as ‘rumors overheard in the neighborhood.’ If I had to guess . . . yes, I’d say it will happen, eventually. People are frightened, and they want a distraction.”
“Frightened—of what?”
“Of the war.” Then, at his silence: “Do you know about it?”
“No. Not really. Tell me, please.”
“All of Europe is in flames. And it’s spreading outward. Every day, it seems, some new country joins the fighting. America hasn’t declared yet, but few doubt that it’ll happen. And back home, in Lebanon, the fields are stripped bare, and everything goes to the soldiers. The villages are on the edge of famine. Our families . . . Not everyone will survive.”
A long pause, as he took this in. “And you can’t simply . . . bring them here?”
She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. There’s fighting at sea, and the ports are all under blockade. We send money instead, but it doesn’t always arrive. So we wait, and we worry, and we look for something else to occupy us.”
“Such as myself,” he said.
“Do you blame us? For being curious, and afraid? For wondering what exactly you’re doing in there?”
“I suppose not,” he muttered. Then, “What I’m doing . . . I had an idea, a vision. And I’ve come so close. But there’s something missing, I don’t know what . . .” His voice trailed away; he sighed. “I just wanted a home of my own. Something that would last.”
They sat there in silence, the door solid between them.
“Ahmad,” she said, “have you ever heard of a place called Mount Qaf?”
He turned his head, startled. “You know of it?”
“Yes, the emerald mountain, where the jinn come from.” She paused. “Forgive me, but—have you been there?”
He chuckled. “Of course not. It’s a story, a legend. Like your garden, of Adam and Eve.”
“Oh. What a shame. It always sounded so beautiful.”
“Will you tell me what you’ve heard?”
She thought back. “There was a storyteller in my village who loved to talk about Mount Qaf. He never described it the same way twice. Once he said that it had eight peaks, and that each was home to a different city of jinn. Another time, he said it was possible for us to reach it, but we must walk barefoot for four months, in utter darkness. Oh—and that a fabulous phoenix lived there, but it only laid its eggs on the highest tip of the mountain.”
“The roc,” he muttered, as though in correction.
“Once,” she said, “he told us that the earth itself balanced upon the peaks of Mount Qaf, like a plate held on one’s fingertips. We asked him how that could be possible, since men have crossed the world and sailed every ocean, and no one has ever seen such a thing. He told us, quite seriously, that it was because Mount Qaf was not only a mountain, but a doorway between two different worlds, one visible and the other hidden. And that to pass through, from one world to the other, was a kind of transformation.”
He frowned. “A transformation . . . into what?”
“He left that part unclear.”
“How inconsiderate of him.”
“Does any of that sound like your own legends?”
“Some of it,” he said—but he sounded doubtful, and didn’t elaborate.
They fell silent again. Maryam listened to the whisper of the breeze in the street, the rumble of the forge through the letterbox. Nighttime noises came from open windows: coughs and bed-creaks, the groans of water-closet pipes, infants’ cries that were quickly hushed. Was this, she wondered, what it was like to be him? Eternally awake among the sleepers, watching from rooftops and doorways? The wall was growing uncomfortable against her back, but she stayed where she was, alert in the quiet.
“We aren’t friends now, Maryam,” he said at last. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
She smiled. “And I don’t want to be yours. But I don’t want to be your enemy, either. I told myself I’d never understand you, so I never tried. I set myself against you, I turned everyone’s attention away . . . I thought I was protecting them. I’m ashamed of that now.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Ahmad. I ought to have helped you instead.”
“I don’t want help,” he muttered. “I told you, I just want to be left alone.”
“You’ve tried that. It doesn’t seem to be working.”
He pondered this, then snorted, half amusement and half acknowledgment.
She said, “Would it be an option, when they come knocking, to simply . . . let them in?”
“No,” he said, his voice sharp in the quiet. And then, less forcefully: “No. The door stays closed.” There was a heaviness to the words that made her think this was, somehow, not entirely his choice.
She said, “Then you’ll need to decide what to do, very soon. It’s in your hands. But know that I’m here, too. And I’ll help in any way I can.”
With that, she stood and brushed the threshold’s dust from her clothing, and went home to her bed, where sleep embraced her.
* * *
The jinniyeh hovered above the Arch.
She’d
