‘Not me.’
‘Just hold out your hand,’ he said.
I watched him without blinking.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Hold out your hand. Don’t be scared. It’s not bad, I promise.’
He took my hand and opened up my palm.
‘Now close your eyes.’
This thing had gone too far now. I attempted to pull my hand away, but Nadim tightened his grip. ‘Come on. Just close your eyes,’ he said with a grin, his eyes sparkling in the firelight.
‘No way,’ I said, and attempted to pull my hand back with force, without making a scene. But what happened next was so sudden and unexpected that it caused my mind and my body to freeze. I felt intense pain across my wrist. He’d slashed me with his knife. I held my arm up like a wounded bird, the blood coming out fast, dripping onto my trousers.
I rushed away from him, stumbling over to Afra, pleading with her to wake up. She opened her eyes, frightened, and I led her hand to my wrist. She sat up sharply, the blood now running through her fingers. She began to feel the wound with her hands and she pressed down on it, attempting, in vain, to stop the blood. Then I could feel another pair of hands. Angeliki had taken off her green headwrap and was twisting it around my wrist.
‘What happened?’ Afra said. I looked back toward the statue, but Nadim had disappeared.
Angeliki exhaled and sat down beneath the tree, her face full of anxiety. The blood was seeping through the layered material of the scarf, my arm throbbing. I lay down from exhaustion, but Angeliki was sitting upright. The last thing I saw before my eyes closed was her long neck, her polished cheekbones sharp in the dying light of the fire.
When I woke up, hours later, in the middle of the night, I saw that she was still sitting in the same position, her eyes scanning the darkness and the shadows.
‘Angeliki,’ I whispered, and she turned to me, wide awake. ‘Lie down here next to Afra. I’ll take over for a bit.’
‘You won’t fall asleep again?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She was hesitant for a moment, but then she lay down on the blanket next to Afra and closed her eyes.
‘Odysseus,’ she said out of nowhere, ‘he pass the island of Sirens. Do you know who the Sirens were?’ This was not a rhetorical question – she waited for me to reply, and she opened one eyelid, halfway, to make sure that I was listening. But I was in pain and I found it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’
‘They will try to entice men to death with their song. If you hear their song they will take you. So, as they are pass the island, the men put wax in their ears to no hear the song, but Odysseus want to hear the Siren song because he had been told it is so beautiful. So do you know what they do?’
‘No.’
‘This very important. The men tie Odysseus to the mast of the ship – they tie him on so tight. He says for them to leave him tied there no matter how much he begs, until they are safe, far from the Sirens and their song.’
I didn’t respond. I held my bandaged arm, trying to ignore the heat of the pain, and looked out into the woods, into the things unseen lurking there.
Angeliki continued, ‘Athens, this the place where people get caught in dangerous things – they are called to those things and they can’t help it, so they go.’
I noticed that Ryad and Ali were not on their blankets. They still hadn’t returned, and I didn’t want to think about where they had gone and what they might be doing. I looked at Angeliki’s blood-soaked green wrap on my arm, at her tufts of unruly frizzy hair, full of life, at Afra’s hair spread out around her without her hijab. Angeliki had drifted off quickly and both women were sleeping now. I remembered what Angeliki had said about Odysseus when we had first arrived here, how he had travelled to all those places, made such a journey to distant lands, in order to find his way home. But there was no home for us.
I touched the letter that Mustafa had written to me, which was still in my pocket. I took out the photograph of us both and looked at it by the light of the fire.
Where was home now? And what was it? In my mind it had become a picture infused with golden light, a paradise never to be reached. I remembered one evening, about ten years ago, it was Eid, and to celebrate the end of Ramadan Mustafa and I had organised a party for all our employees at the Martini Dar Zamaria Hotel in Aleppo. It was held in the inner yard – there were palm trees and lanterns and plants hanging from the balconies overhead. Above us a square of night sky, full of stars.