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different interpreter with him, a man named Parviz. Mr. Cole joined them on the speakerphone. Fernandez switched on a cassette recorder, and asked Ali to swear on the Quran to give truthful answers to all his questions.
    Fernandez asked him for his name, his date of birth, and the place and time he’d fled. Ali didn’t know his birthday or his exact age; he thought he was about eighteen years old, but it was not the custom in his village to record such things. He did know that at the time he’d left his uncle’s house, twelve hundred and sixty-five years had passed since the Prophet’s flight to Medina.
    “Tell me about your problem,” Fernandez said. “Tell me why you’ve come here.”
    Shahin had told Ali that the history of this world was different from his own, so Ali explained carefully about Khurosan’s long war, about the meddlers and the warlords they’d created, about the coming of the Scholars. How the Shi’a were taken by force to fight in the most dangerous positions. How Hassan was taken. How his father had been killed. Fernandez listened patiently, sometimes writing on the sheets of paper in front of him as Ali spoke, interrupting him only to encourage him to fill in the gaps in the story, to make everything clear.
    When he had finally recounted everything, Ali felt an overwhelming sense of relief. This man had not poured scorn on his words the way the guards had; instead, he had allowed Ali to speak openly about all the injustice his family and his people had suffered.
    Fernandez had some more questions.
    “Tell me about your village, and your uncle’s village. How long would it take to travel between them on foot?”
    “Half a day, sir.”
    “Half a day. That’s what you said in your statement. But in your entry interview, you said a day.” Ali was confused. Parviz explained that his “statement” was the written record of his conversation with Ms. Evans, which she had sent to the government; his “entry interview” was when he’d first arrived in the camp and been questioned for ten or fifteen minutes.
    “I only meant it was a short trip, sir, you didn’t have to stay somewhere halfway overnight. You could complete it in one day.”
    “Hmm. OK. Now, when the smuggler took you from your uncle’s village, which direction was he driving?”
    “Along the valley, sir.”
    “North, south, east, west?”
    “I’m not sure.” Ali knew these words, but they were not part of the language of everyday life. He knew the direction for prayer, and he knew the direction to follow to each neighboring village.
    “You know that the sun rises in the east, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “So if you faced in the direction in which you were being driven, would the sun have risen on your left, on your right, behind you, where?”
    “It was night time.”
    “Yes, but you must have faced the same direction in the valley in the morning, a thousand times. So where would the sun have risen?”
    Ali closed his eyes and pictured it. “On my right.”
    Fernandez sighed. “OK. Finally. So you were driving north. Now tell me about the land. The smuggler drove you along the valley. And then what? What kind of landscape did you see, between your valley and the bridge?”
    Ali froze. What would the government do with this information? Send someone back through their own bridge, to find and destroy the one he’d used? The mosarfar-e-waqt had warned him not to tell anyone the way to the bridge. That man was dead, but it was unlikely that he’d worked alone; everyone had a brother, a son, a cousin to help them. If the family of the mosarfar-e-waqt could trace such a misfortune to Ali, the dead man’s threat against his uncle would be carried through.
    Ali said, “I was under a blanket, I didn’t see anything.”
    “You were under a blanket? For how many days?”
    “Three.”
    “Three days. What about eating, drinking, going to the toilet?”
    “He blindfolded me,” Ali lied.
    “Really? You never