LITMIR.BIZ

      “I would have expected anything,” Brother said while unlacing his knee-high boots; the brother, of whose existence she hadn’t the slightest clue just a moment earlier, but whom—she now knew—she had awaited for so long.

      “I would have expected anything, but not that,” said Brother. “When I arrived, the Villa’s front door was locked and no one came to open it when I rang the doorbell. I went around back to the garden to see if you were walking the paths or sitting in the gazebo, but my heart was already pounding with the fear of finding, perhaps, that the windows facing the yard had been boarded up and not a single soul occupied the house anymore, because I had come too late. Still, I couldn’t have even fathomed what I would actually see. There were young, handsome people gathered on the patio and music playing; no doubt everyone who had been expected was already accounted for. But you weren’t among them. A young woman with short, chestnut-brown hair smiled at me from across the balustrade and lifted her champagne glass in greeting, but a curly-haired young man was already peeking hostilely over her shoulder to see what business I had there. He knew where to direct me when I mentioned you, although I realized immediately that as far as he was concerned, I had ruined the evening. And right at that moment it started to rain, even though the sky had been cloudlessly blue just a moment before, so they all had to move indoors and I waved to them, but no one noticed.”

      “What does that matter now,” Laila said. “What matters is that you found me.”

      “That does matter,” Brother agreed.

      “Tell me about yourself,” Laila said. “Tell me about Father and about everything that’s important but that I don’t know about.”

      Everything that’s important. There was too much of it. He could have told Laila stories about their father and his artist-friends, and about how they could debate the night away on the subject of light and colors; or about the orphanage and the windowless trains that whizzed past outside. He could have told stories about fleeing and his nomadic years, or about the French Foreign Legion and the sand grinding between his teeth; or instead about the ships and the harbors—about the two weeks in Malacca, for example, which he had to survive without a single cent; or about how he had been a night watchman at a library in the Netherlands and read everything he came across by flashlight while lying on his belly on the floor between the massive shelves every night, and how he had committed as much as he could to memory. He could have told the story of his father’s very last message, in which he asked him to locate his sister and, if necessary, to help her in times of peril—yes, he could have told her that story while omitting the main point, of course, for it wasn’t the time yet.

      He could have—indeed, all of that was important. Yet, he didn’t.

      “Let’s talk about you, instead,” he said.