Without flinching
FARAH He comes to my room at a time he doesn’t usually come. I know his knock, but the hour is wrong, and the wrongness of it brings me off the bed and to the door with a quality of alertness that lives close to fear. I open it. His face is doing something I haven’t seen before — not cold, not armored. Careful in the way of someone carrying something breakable. “You need to come with me,” he says. I come with him. We walk through the corridors in our particular silence, and I read the care in his face and I think about what kind of news produces that specific quality in a man who has controlled his expression for centuries. And I am completely unprepared, when he opens the anteroom door, for what is on the other side. My mother. She is standing with her coat still on and her bag o
- Writer
