'Why yes,' Kirana said, cackling again. 'It's a pretty damned good trick, now you put it that way. Here's the deal!' she shouted over the river at the world. 'I tell you want you don't want to bear, you give me food!'

Even Budur had to laugh.

They walked across the last bridge arm in arm, laughing and talking, then into the city centre, trams squealing over tracks, people hurrying by. Budur looked at the passing faces curiously, remembering the worn visage of the fake guru, businesslike and hard. No doubt Kirana was right to laugh. All the old myths were just stories. The only reincarnation you got was the next day's waking. No one else was you, not the you that existed a year before, not the you that might exist ten years from now, or even the next day. It was a matter of the moment, some unimaginable minim of time, always already gone. Memory was partial, a dim tawdry room in a run down neighbourhood, illuminated by flashes of distant lightning. Once she had been a girl in a good merchant's harem, but what did that matter now? Now she was a free woman in Nsara, crossing the city at night with a group of laughing intellectuals – that was all there was. It made her laugh too, a painful wild shout of a laugh, full of a joy akin to ferocity. That was what Kirana really gave in exchange for her food.

SIXTEEN

Three new women showed up in Budur's zawiyya quiet women who had arrived with typical stories, and mostly kept to themselves. They started work in the kitchen, as usual. Budur felt uncomfortable with the way they glanced at her, and did not look at each other. She still could not quite believe that young women like these would betray a young woman like her, and two of the three were actually very nice. She was stiffer with them than she would have wanted to be, without actually being hostile, which Idelba had warned might give away her suspicions. It was a fine line in a game Budur was completely unused to playing or not completely – it reminded ber of the various fronts she had put on for her father and mother, a very unpleasant memory. She wanted everything to be new now, she wanted to be herself straight up to everybody, chest to chest as the Iranians said. But it seemed life entailed putting on masks for much of the time. She must be casual in Kirana's classes, and indifferent to Kirana in the cafes, even when they were leg to leg; and she must be civil to these spies.

Meanwhile, across the plaza in the lab, Idelba and Piali were hard at work, staying late into the night almost every night; and Idelba became more and more serious about it, trying, Budur thought, to hide her worries behind an unconvincing dismissiveness. 'Just physics,' she would say when asked. 'Trying to work something out. You know how interesting theories can be, but they're just theories. Not like real problems.' It seemed everyone put on a mask to the world, even Idelba, who was not good at it, even though she seemed to have a frequent need for masks. Budur could see very plainly now that she thought the stakes were somehow high.

'Is it a bomb?' Budur asked once in a low voice, one night as they were closing up the emptied building.

Idelba hesitated only a moment. 'Possibly,' she whispered, looking around them. 'The possibility is there. So, please – never speak of it again.'

During these months Idelba worked such long hours, and, like everyone else in the zawiyya, ate so little that she fell sick, and had to rest in her bed. This was very frustrating to her, and along with the misery of illness, she struggled to get up before she was ready, and even tried to work on papers in her bed, pencil and logarithmic abacus scritching and clacking all the time she was awake.

Then one day she got a phone call while Budur was there, and she dragged herself down the hall to take it, clutching her night robe to her. When she came off the phone she hurried to the kitchen and asked Budur to join her in her room.

Budur followed her, surprised to see her moving so quickly. In ber room Idelba shut the door and began to pile a mass of her papers and notebooks into a cloth book bag. 'Hide this for me,' she said urgently. 'I don't think you can leave, though, they'll stop you and search you. It has to be in the zawiyya somewhere, not in your room or mine, they'll search them both. They may search everywhere, I'm not sure where to suggest.' Her voice was low but the tone was frantic; Budur had never heard her like that.

'Who is it?'

'It doesn't matter, hurry! It's the police. They're on their way, go.'

The doorbell rang, and rang again.

'Don't worry,' Budur said, and ran down the hall to her room. She looked around: a room search, perhaps a house search, and the bag of papers was big. She looked around, thinking over the zawiyya in her mind, wondering if Idelba would mind if she somehow managed to destroy the bag entirely – not that she had any method in mind, but she wasn't sure how crucial the papers were – but possibly they could be shredded and flushed down a toilet.

There were people in the hall, women's voices. Apparently the police who had entered were women officers, so they were not breaking the house rule against men. A sign perhaps; but men's voices came from out in the street, arguing with the zawiyya elders; women were in the hall; a big knock on her door, they had come to hers first, no doubt along with Idelba's. She put the bag around her neck, climbed onto her bed, then the iron headboard, and pulled herself up the wall and shoved up a panel of the false ceiling, and with a push off like a dance step, knee in the meeting of the two walls, got under the panel and onto the wall's dusty top, which was about two feet wide. She sat on it and put the panel back down into place, very quietly.

The old museum had had very high ceilings, with some glass skylights that were now almost perfectly opaque with dust. In the dimness she could see over the ceilings of several rows of rooms, and the open tops of the hallways, and the true walls, far away in every direction. It was not a good hiding place at all, if they only thought to look up here, from anywhere.

The top of the walls consisted of warped wood beams, nailed to the top of the framing and over the drywall like coping. There were two sheets of drywall to each wall, notoriously transparent to sound, nailed onto each side of the framing; so there would be gaps between the two sheets of drywall, if she could get a beam off the top somewhere.

She moved onto her hands and knees and swung the bag onto her back, and began crawling over the dusty beams, looking for a hole while staying well away from the hallways, where a glance up could reveal her. From here the whole arrangement looked ramshackle, cobbled together in a hurry, and soon enough she found a cap where three walls met and a beam had been cut short. It wasn't big enough to fit the whole bag, but she could stuff papers in there, and she did so quickly, until the bag was empty, and the bag dropped in last. It wasn't a perfect hiding place if they wanted to be comprehensive, but it was the best she could think of, and she was pretty pleased with it, actually; but if they found her up on the beams, all would be lost. She crawled on as quietly as she could, hearing voices back in the direction of her room. They would only have to stand on her bed's headboard and push up a panel for a look to see her. The far bathroom did not sound as if it had anyone in it, so she crawled in that direction, ripping the skin over one knee on a nailhead, and pulled up a panel an inch and peered in empty she pulled it aside, hung from the beam, dropped, hit the tiled floor hard. The wall was smeared with dust and blood; her knees and the tops of her feet were filthy with dust, and the palms of her hands marked everything like the hand of Cain. She washed in a sink, tore off her jellabah and put it in the laundry, pulled clean towels from the cabinet and wetted one to clean the wall off. The panel above was still pulled aside, and there were no chairs in the bathroom; she couldn't get up there to move it back in place. Glance out in the hall – loud voices arguing, Idelba's among them, protesting, no one in sight – she dashed across the hall to a bedroom and took a chair and ran back into the bathroom and put the chair against the wall, stepped up onto it, stepped gently on the chair back, reached up and yanked the panel back into place, smashing her fingers between two panels. Yank them free, push the panel into position, down again, the chair slipping across the tile with her movement. Clatter, bang, catch herself, another glance out, more arguing, coming closer; she put the chair back, went back in the bathroom, went to the showers and got in, soaping her knees and feeling the sting in the cut. She soaped and soaped, heard voices outside the bathroom. She washed off the soap as quickly as possible, and was dried and wrapped in a big towel when women came into the room, including two in army uniforms, looking like soldiers from the war whom Budur had seen long ago, in the Turi railway station. She looked as startled as she could, held the towel to herself.