When Youssef finally showed the back of his heels, leaving the room filled with the aroma of the Drava cigarettes he usually smokes, Fatima sighed. She opened the window, so the smoke could escape in the evening. The older brother of her husband was a warm-hearted and thoughtful person. But his visits were always the same scenario. Ahmad and she would listen to his stories about the Turkish village where he grew up. Interesting stories, little anecdotes told with dry humor. However, while passing the bowls imam bayildi, lamb-stew, onions and green peppers without speaking, her thoughts would swirl around. "Words are difficult to apply to complicated thoughts and feelings. They long for clarity, but accept ambiguity. They resist the facile, but tolerate the adroit. They abhor translation, but yield to distortion. Words, often bizarre, even comical in their odd reappearance in on-line translations, introduced us, engaged us, and continue to expose us. Their inaccuracies create an ad hoc poetry of naivete that holds our intimacy hostage and obscures our motives with charm."
...
It's quiet in the living room, the noise of the busy traffic on the city-centre is barely audible. Ahmad is reading a book, while she rests with her head on his legs. She closes her eyes, like they were the curtains of a theatre scene. Behind the heavy shades, in this vacuum, is she describing Ahmad and hers unique domestic joy of the last days for a non-existenting public. Their intimacy and their mutual need for each other's presence grew more urgent, more natural, more integral to their identities and more essential to their happiness. It all developed so naturally, so inevitably, like the evolution of destiny. Their lives together moved effortlessly between the miraculous and the ordinary. It was good this way.
I spent a hilarious evening, yesterday, with the Sky Devils, two trapeze artists of circus Baf, Gesicht, Hannibal, Murdock and BA Baracus from the A-team and Jackson & Malone, the detective couple.