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a dust storm lasting so long that after we stopped the next morning I discovered beside me two low mounds of reddish sand that revealed themselves in the gathering light to be the sleeping forms of my retainers.
    We rode into the evenings, Ismail singing more Kurdish songs while we plodded along in the moonlight. I was stunned each daybreak by how the excess of light seemed to smooth away all before it.
    Finally we began the ascent of a steep ravine whose shale slopes offered every few miles a smallish larkspur or some white Aethionema. What looked like yellow heather in the washes of dry gullies were disclosed to be great carpetings of thorns. Rows of flustered little birds took flight as we rode past, and circled back round and resettled once we were gone. With each day my companions’ unease increased. And in the evenings they grouped themselves ever more tightly around me on the ground to guard my rest.
    When I was a child, there were nights I would startle out of sleep and, in the stillness that followed, would listen to the entire house and become convinced that a flood was slowly filling the room. I heard wavelets beneath my sister’s breathing. The only remedy for it was to climb into her bed and fall asleep in her arms, and our mother would scold us when she found us the next morning in our hopeless tangle with cold feet protruding from the bedcovers.
    Vera and I were both outsiders who never overcame our odd and lonely upbringing or foreign accent and manner in thatremote Italian hill town, and for many years we were each other’s solitary playmates. Vera tied her lavish long hair back with a velvet ribbon so she could take part in my projects of rooting through brambles and bracken, and accompanied me wherever I roamed. She reassured herself with the knowledge that I had to look after her and she had to look after me. Remaining in a room once I had left it seemed to her meaningless. Once the Count took to dropping by our bedroom to chat we used for our secret conferences the kitchen’s larder cupboard, which afforded space for two people if they stood without lifting their elbows. She sympathized with my desire to leave but said it was only permissible if I took her with me. While I studied and waited she chided me for brooding too much and being ungrateful for those blessings we enjoyed. One rainy March afternoon she noted I’d been peering out our window for an hour, and wanted to know at what I’d been gazing. It then occurred to me that I’d been looking at a hedge, and that a hedge was not enough at which to have been staring for so long.
    We agreed on the necessity of understanding others’ affections not as fixed commitments but rather as ever-changing seas, with their tides coming and going. This was of considerable service after the Count’s proposal and our mother’s response. He repeated his proposal some months later on the occasion of Vera’s seventeenth birthday, and the previous week news had arrived that I’d be matriculating at Bedford College, London, a real school at last after all of my scuttering. Our father had agreed to pay the tuition. He himself had resolved to move to England.
    Vera had been without words in my presence for a day and a half following this development, and then had slipped into my bed in the wee hours of the morning.
    â€œSee?” I whispered to her. “You do love your sister.”
    â€œPut your arms around me,” she whispered back. Her nightgown’s periwinkle was indigo in the darkness.
    â€œNot without a declaration of love,” I told her, and when she started to weep I gently teased, “Well, why else are you here?”
    She turned so that her back was to my front and my arms could more easily encircle her. “Because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” she finally whispered.
    We awoke to a predawn aurora in the east and the cheerless and clanking procession of a small tribe descending to