The Names

Two blood-covered stones were found near the body on the outskirts of the fifteenth-century town, at first light, by a woman fetching water or by boys on their way to the fields. By this time three men would be trekking west, leaving behind a comatose woman and two other men, one dead, one merely sitting still. Eventually a constable would make his way along the rough path to the storage bins, and then a subdivisional officer, to question the one conscious person. He would be sitting in the dust, blue-eyed and sparsely bearded, without documents or money, and he would probably try to speak to them in some dialect of northwest Iran.The trekkers dispersed without a word in the wild country before the border. The one in Western clothes, carrying a small pack, had imprinted in his passport a visa which would not expire for some months. It included the stamp of the second secretary, Embassy of Pakistan, Athens, Greece, and carried above the stamp an example of this gentleman's handsomely scripted initials.

It was interesting how he'd chosen to finish, impersonally, gazing as if from a distance on these unknowable people, these figures we distinguish by their clothing. There would be no further commentary and reflection. This was fitting. I had no trouble accepting this. I didn't want to reflect further, with or without Owen. It was enough to see him sit there, owl-eyed, in the room he'd been arranging all his life.The alleys were full of people and noise. Bare bulbs were arrayed on strings over tiers of nuts and spices. I paused every few feet to see what was here, nutmeg and scarlet mace, burlap bags of coriander seeds and chilies, rock salt in crude chunks. I lingered at the trays of dyestuffs and ground spices, heaped in pyramids, colors I'd never seen, brilliances, worlds, until finally it was time to go.I came away from the old city feeling I'd been engaged in a contest of some singular and gratifying kind. Whatever he'd lost in life-strength, this is what I'd won.

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