Neither of them spoke a word. After all their arguments, all their attempts to explain themselves to each other, when the bridge between them broke, it broke in silence. He stood and watched as she ran from him, her boot-heels splashing through the frozen puddles. Then he went back inside the Amherst, and closed the door.
It was nearly two in the morning when the knock came.
Toby Blumberg woke on his pallet beside the sofa. Another knock, loud and urgent; he groaned, wondering which of the laundry girls it was this time. They all liked to come to the apartment and cry on his mother’s shoulder after a fight at home. He got to his feet, wiped his eyes, and opened the door.
Missus Chava stood in the hallway. Her hat was gone, and her cloak hung in tatters. A wet gray dust covered her from head to toe. She might’ve been a statue, save for her eyes, which were wild with anguish.
His mother’s footsteps, behind him. “Toby, who—” And then, with a cry of fear, his mother pushed him aside and slammed the door in the woman’s face.
Toby was aghast. “But Ma, that was—”
“Be quiet, Toby.” Her voice allowed no argument. Her hands were flat upon the door, as though to brace it. “Go to the kitchen, and open the window. Get ready to climb onto the fire escape.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do as I say!”
Frightened now, he complied, and stood shivering in his pajamas next to the open window.
“Chava!” he heard his mother call. “Are you still there?”
Silence from the hallway. After long minutes, Anna cracked the door open—but there was only a trail of sodden boot-prints, and the muddy mark of the woman’s hand upon the door.
When morning arrived, the residents of Little Syria all greeted their neighbors and asked if they, too, had been woken in the night by an echoing boom, as though a wrecking-ball had broken free of its chain. No one could say what had caused it—but then it was forgotten, as the news spread that Boutros Arbeely had passed away in the night. A number of callers knocked at the Amherst, but there was no response. A few of the local businessmen took it upon themselves to purchase a mourning wreath and hang it upon the Amherst door. Immediately the winter winds began to tear the crepe away, shred by shred.
Weeks passed. Eventually the Jinni’s landlord decided that he’d been lenient enough in the face of tragedy; the fact remained that the man was delinquent on his rent. He went to the apartment, expecting to find vermin feasting on rotten food—but the larder and icebox were completely empty. There were no portraits or photographs on the walls, only a number of candles set inside mirrored sconces. The cabinets were bare of plates or cups, save for one small glass that sat beside a bottle of araq. The shelf in the bathroom held neither soap nor razor, not even a toothbrush. There was only the wardrobe with its minor assortment of clothing, and a wrought iron bed, elegant and well made.
The landlord claimed the bed for himself, and the bottle of araq. The rest of it was put out on the street, for the tinkers and ragpickers to find.
Eventually, a crew from Public Works came to look at the strange crater that had been discovered in the alley behind the Amherst. They gathered around it and scratched their heads, wondering what could’ve fallen from the roof that was heavy enough to shatter the concrete, yet light enough to be carried away without a trace. At last they shrugged and patched the crater with a mixture of tar and gravel that would turn viscous in summer, and foul the shoes of all who walked across it. Soon it was the only outward sign of all that had changed that night, save for the circle of bare and tattered branches that still hung upon the Amherst door.
* * *
The staff of the Beirut Deutscher Hof, Sophia decided, must be the most industrious and overworked in the entire city. Every room in the hotel was kept neat as a pin from top to bottom, the bedsheets boiled and ironed to a crisp, the mirrors polished daily. Merely to inhabit one of the rooms felt like a discourtesy to the maids. It’s the sea air, miss, one of them said when Sophia commented upon their labors. If you let the salt take hold, there’s no getting rid of it.
Sophia had come to Beirut for neither cures nor artifacts, but to recover from a mortifying disappointment. She’d spent the spring in Jerusalem, traveling with Abu Alim to the ruins outside the Old City’s walls. There she’d dipped her hand in the Pool of Siloam and drunk the water from the Well of Job, and had felt no effect from either—but she hadn’t really expected to. The most necessary ingredient for a Biblical cure was not water, but faith; and for all that her eyes had been opened to what was real and what was possible, she’d never once felt the sort of faith that the Bible demanded.
One afternoon, they’d traveled to a nearby village, where a number of Yemenite Jews had recently settled. She’d thought she might look in their market for a healer; but instead, she’d found Daniel Benbassa.
Daniel was a Sephardic Jew, the youngest son of an old Jaffa merchant family. As a student in Jerusalem he’d fallen in love with the Old City, and when his schooling was over he’d turned to charity work in a bid to stay. He’d been on his usual rounds in the village, distributing food and donations, when he saw Sophia in the market and took her for a member of a nearby Presbyterian settlement. He’d stopped to introduce himself—she’d apologized, and corrected his misapprehension—and the conversation had gone on from there.
Soon
