She sat entirely still, the room silent, and then he heard her move forward on her chair.
“Let me see your hand.” He extended it toward her. She bent it at the wrist and said, “Spread your fingers.” After he did, she set the base of her palm against his, and then pressed against it with her entire hand. He could feel her fingers extend well above his own, and the tiny spaces the creases in them made, and her palm was cool and dry. He felt the intimacy of his effort to see her through the pressure of her hand on his. And then she tightened her fingers around his, squeezing, and he could feel the strength in them.
“That shouldn’t necessarily be a complicated question, should it? But for me, it is. I’ve kept others from hurting me when I could.”
She pulled her hand away.
The evening deepened as they continued to sit for a time without speaking. Outside, he occasionally heard voices, then a door closing and someone laughing. He remembered the table he’d seen days ago with the three place settings, and he had wanted to sit down there with that small family. And then the call went out for the evening prayer—he wasn’t sure how far away the mosque was, but it was surely equipped with loudspeakers for the muezzin’s voice to carry this far. Odd that a man’s singing, with no instruments to support him, calling people to gather, could sometimes sound like a mournful plea for company.
“When I was seventeen,” Josephine said, “a girl in my high school took an interest in my mortal soul. I think of her every time I hear that particular muezzin. He sounds like a woman, don’t you think?”
“Before I came here, if I’d heard him, I would have been sure of it.” He was feeling a sympathy for Josephine that he couldn’t have explained.
“Years ago, I used to wonder if they tried to. Sound like women, I mean. I’m not sure why I wanted to think that. Jibril laughed at me when I asked him about it.”
“Jibril was the man you traveled with?”
He imagined she nodded, sensed that she did, which meant that she had forgotten his blindfold because of the memory.
“The girl in my school,” she said. “She was tiny, really. One of those young women who somehow managed to be short and thin at the same time. I towered over her. She wasn’t particularly popular with the other kids, but she had that kind of sunflower face, round and always turning toward the light, and her brightness was appealing, so most of the kids forgave the Bible she hauled around with her schoolbooks. She didn’t push it most of the time, but once she invited me to a concert in a small, open-air stadium in a park. I didn’t believe in God then, but because she was sweet, and I considered her a friend, I spent the evening there with her. It was Christian rock, which I didn’t have much patience for, but it was played well enough, and the lead singer would occasionally tell stories in between songs. In the middle of one of those stories, an ambulance went by with its siren blaring, louder and louder as it neared the venue, and the singer broke off his story and asked everyone to bow their heads, and as he was saying a prayer for whoever it was who was hurt or dying, my girlfriend took my hand. It was the only thing that reached me in the entire show.”