Chapter Twenty-Three
Caroline left a strange atmosphere behind her in the cell: most of the men sitting around Yosir understood Russian, and now he felt as if November 22 had closed in tight around him. Not that any of them would have dared suspect him of anything forbidden, but this non-Muslim girl’s final words had left Yosir isolated in a separate kind of space, and if anyone there had said: “Beat him!”, the entire cell would have thrown themselves on him and torn him to pieces. The really strange thing, though, was that there was no correlation between him the rest of the cell: he didn’t glance at them, didn’t say a word to them, there was no pride or guilt, he remained just the same as he had been all that morning, locked into a kind of stupor, a state of non-belonging to which no on
