Cafe life went on as gaily as ever, at least on the surface. There was perhaps more of an edge in people's voices; eyes were brighter, the laughs harder, the binges more drunken. Opium too became subject to boarding. People came in with wheelbarrows of paper money, or exhibited fivetrillion drachma bills from Roma, laughing as they offered them in exchange for cups of coffee and were refused. It wasn't very funny in all truth; every week things were markedly more expensive, and there didn't seem to be anything to be done about it. They laughed at their own helplessness. Budur went to the cafes less often, which saved money, and the risk of an awkward moment with Kirana. Sometimes she went with Idelba's nephew Piali to a different set of cards, with a seedier clientele; Piali and his associates, who sometimes included Hasan and his friend Tristan, seemed to like the rougher establishments frequented by sailors and longshoremen. So through a winter of thick mists that hung in the streets like rain freed of gravity, Budur sat and listened to tales of Yingzhou and the stormy Atlantic, deadliest of all the seas.

'We exist on sufferance,' Zainab Shah said bitterly as she knitted in their regular cafe. 'We're like the Japanese after the Chinese conquered them.'

'Let the occasional chalice break,' Kirana murmured. Her expression in the dim light was serene, indomitable.

'They have all broken,' Naser said. He sat in the corner, looking out of the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. 'I can't say I'm sorry.'

'In Iran too they don't seem to care.' Kirana appeared to be trying to cheer him up. 'They are making very great strides there, leading the way in all kinds of fields. Linguistics, archaeology, the physical sciences, they have all the leading people.'

Naser nodded, looking inwards. Budur had gathered that his fortune had gone to fund many of these efforts, from an exile of some unexplained sort. Another complicated life.

Another downpour struck. The weather seemed to enunciate their situation, wind and rain slapping the Cafe Sultana's big windows and running across the plate glass wildly, pushed this way and that by gusts of wind. The old soldier watched his smoke rise, twined threads of brown and grey, ox bowing more and more as they rose. Piali had once described the dynamics of this lazy ascent, as he had the rain's deltas down the windowpanes. Storm sunlight cast a silver sheen on the wet street. Budur felt happy. The world was beautiful. She was so hungry that the milk in her coffee was like a meal inside her. The storm's light was a meal. She thought: now is beautiful. These old Persians are beautiful; their Persian accents are beautiful. Kirana's rare serenity is beautiful. Throw away the past and the future. The old Persians' Khayyarn had understood this, one reason among many that the mullahs had never liked him: Come fill the cup and in the blaze of spring The winter garment of repentance fling: The bird of time has but a little way To fly and hey! The bird is on the wing!

The others left, and Budur sat with Kirana, watching her write something down in her brown backed notebook. She looked up, happy to see Budur watching her. She stopped for a cigarette, and they talked for a while, about Yingzhou and the Hodenosaunee. As usual, Kirana's thoughts took interesting turns. She thought the very early stage of civilization that the Hodenosaunee had been in when discovered by the Old World was what had allowed them to survive, counter-intuitive though that was. They had been canny hunter gatherers, more intelligent as individuals than the people of more developed cultures, and much more flexible than the Inka, who were shackled by a very rigid theocracy. If it weren't for their susceptibility to Old World diseases, the Hodenosaunee no doubt would have conquered the Old World already. Now they were making up for lost time.

They talked about Nsara, the army and the clerics, the madressa and the monastery. Budur's girlhood. Kirana's time in Africa.

When the cafe closed Budur went with her to Kirana's zawiyya, which had a little study garret with a door that was often closed, and on a couch in there they lay on each other kissing, rolling from one embrace to the next, Kirana clasping her so hard that Budur thought her ribs might break; and they were tested again when her stomach clamped down on a violent orgasm.

Afterwards Kirana held her with her usual sly smile, calmer than ever.

'Your turn.'

11 already came, I was rubbing myself on your shin.'

'There are softer ways than that.'

'No really, I'm fine. I'm already done for.' And Budur realized with a shock she could not keep out of ber eyes that Kirana was not going to let her touch her.

FIFTEEN

After that Budur went to class feeling strange. In class and in the cafes afterwards, Kirana acted towards her just as she always had, a matter of propriety no doubt; but Budur found it off putting, also sad. In the cafes she sat on the other side of the table from Kirana, not often meeting her eye. Kirana accepted this, and joined the flow of conversation on her side of the table, discoursing in her usual manner, which now struck Budur as a bit forced, even overbearing, although it was no more verbose than ever.

Budur turned to Hasan, who was describing a trip to the Sugar Islands, between Yingzhou and Inka, where he planned to smoke opium every day and lie on white beaches or in the turquoise water off their shores, warm as a bath. 'Wouldn't that be grand?' Hasan asked.

'In my next life,' Budur suggested.

'Your next life.' Hasan snorted, bloodshot eye regarding her sardonically. 'So pretty to think so.'

'You never know,' Budur said.

'Right. Maybe we should take a trip out to see Madam Sururi, and you can see who you were in your past lives. Talk to your loved ones in the bardo. Half the widows of Nsara are doing it, I'm sure it's quite comforting. If you could believe it.' He gestured out through the plate glass, where people in black coats passed in the street, hunched under their umbrellas. 'It's silly though. Most people don't even live the one life they've got.'

One life. It was an idea Budur had trouble accepting, even though the sciences and everything else had made it clear that one life was all you had. As a girl her mother had said, Be good or you'll come back as a snail. At funerals they said a prayer for the next existence of the deceased, asking Allah to give him or her a chance to improve. Now all that was dismissed, with all the rest of the afterlives, heaven and hell, God himself – all that claptrap, all the superstitions of earlier generations in their immense ignorance, concocting myths to make sense of things. Now they lived in a material world, evolved to what it was by chance and the laws of physics; they struggled through one life and died; that was what the scientists had revealed by their studies, and there was nothing Budur had ever seen or experienced that seemed to indicate otherwise. No doubt it was true. That was reality; they had to adjust to it, or live in a delusion. Adjust each to his or her own cosmic solitude, to nakba, to hunger and worry, coffee and opium, the knowledge of an end.

'Did I hear you say we should visit Madam Sururi?' Kirana asked from across the table. 'A good idea! Let's do it. It would be like a historical field trip for the class like visiting a place where people still live as they did for hundreds of years.'

'From all I've heard she's an entertaining old charlatan.'

'A friend of mine visited her and said it was great fun.'

They had spent too many hours sitting there, looking at the same ashtrays and coffee rings on the tabletops, the same rain deltas on the windows. So they gathered up their coats and umbrellas, and took the number four tram upriver to a meagre neighbourhood of apartments abutting the older shipyards, the buildings displaying small Maghribi shops at each corner. Between a seamstress's workshop and a laundry hid a little walk up to rooms over the shops below. The door opened to their knock, and they were invited in to an entryway, and then, farther in, to a dark room filled with couches and small tables, obviously the converted living room of a fairly large old apartment.