By Light Alone Read Online Free PDF

there; but there he was, sunk in that chair. His face was grimly hairy; a black moustache possessing almost structural solidity and density, and little wiry hairs sparking in several directions from his long eyebrows. He was dressed in a nondescript suit, and his head – ostentatiously – was shaved down to a raincloud-purple oval of stubble.
    Turning to face this man Marie asked: ‘Do you know where my daughter is?’ The stranger nodded slowly, as if in affirmation, but then spoke in a sepulchral voice from the chair to deny it: ‘No, Madam, no. Perhaps it seems callous, but this is the information you will need to master. Your daughter is no longer in the hotel. This means she is somewhere in the district.’
    ‘No longer in the hotel,’ said George, stupidly.
    ‘What do you mean?’ Marie said again.
    ‘We have, of course, sent out officers of hotel security to search,’ put in Captain Afkhami. ‘And alerted local police, and bosses.’
    ‘Bosses?’
    ‘Indeed. Bosses run the villages, police keep them in line. But,’ the deep-throated man in the chair continued, and his thrum appeared to fill the room, ‘we must alas, alas, face the possibility that such inquiries will be fruitless. Accordingly, you will need to know that this part of the world has a – complicated political history. This history has been complicated since Noah’s time, it has been so. It is one of the portions of the globe that humankind has squabbled over.’ There was a particular inflection, or accent, about the way the man spoke English, but George couldn’t quite place it. It sounded almost Irish, or perhaps Scottish. Not Scottish, no. That wasn’t it. ‘I am talking,’ the man said, ‘about Iranians, and Turks, and Kurds, and Armenians, and Russians too – we must not forget the Russians. Since Noah’s times. Since the time of Noah , but also more recently.’ There was some extra twist or flavour to the man’s Iranian- or Turkish-accented English. But it. George couldn’t focus his thoughts. But. ‘Since two decades now,’ the man said, ‘a form of Protectorate has operated.’
    ‘I don’t see,’ said Marie, in a high, loud voice, ‘what this has to do with anything .’
    ‘Only, Madam, that you may instruct your lawyer to hire Iranian experts,’ said the man, ducking his large, vaguely cubic, head so that his chin touched his chest. ‘And I shall say nothing more to intrude upon you at this difficult time. It is very sad that this has happened, but – mashallah .’
    At this word Captain Afkhami looked sharply round at the man. George was still trying to find a way of understanding what he was being told; which is to say, of understanding on a more than merely semantic level. Something momentous had happened. This was a day, like any day, except that as this day slid innocuously past something shadowy and monstrous had risen from between the flower-dotted green hills in the background. What had come up was a head the size of the moon, and it had flashed sword-long teeth and bitten down into the tender flesh of George’s being-in-the-world. He didn’t really feel it; but, he reflected, sometimes people lost limbs, or suffered terrible gunshots, and felt nothing. Perhaps the numbness was actually an index to the enormousness of what had happened to his life. Prompted, possibly, by an obscure sense that he ought at the very least to act out the requirements of shocked bereavement, he said. ‘Marie, would you like to sit down?’
    ‘I do not want to sit down,’ his wife replied.
    ‘I think I need to sit down, at any rate,’ he said. A servant – another individual George had not even realized was in the room – was immediately at his side with a chair, and George settled his weight into it.
    ‘Of course it is a shock,’ said Captain Afkhami, blandly.
    ‘I want to go to her room,’ said Marie. George could hear in her voice – a voice whose emotional tenor he had, of course, become adept at decoding