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year.) I handed Nadya one and sat down opposite her. She continued to read the article on her homeland, taking grateful pulls from the bottle. When she was finished, she laid the magazine down carefully and again treated me to one of her unflinching stares.
    “I am grateful for this refuge. You are good to take me in. Your wife was right when she said I could trust you “
    “Ex-wife.”
    Nadya nodded vehemently. “Yes, ex-wife, exactly, just as I am Zaid’s ex-wife. Thank you for the correction. In any circumstance, I suppose I must tell you something about myself—”
    “That’s not—” I began.
    “No, I owe you something, please let me say what I have to.”
    “Okay.”
    “My father is a big businessman. Many generations in my family were businessmen. ‘Tajir’ even means ‘merchant.’ I grew up in a cave outside Sanaa, our capital.”
    I must have looked puzzled.
    “Maybe ‘cave’ is not the right word. A building carved out of the rocks, into the hillside. There are many such in the mountains outside Sana’a. It is a lovely home, much sunshine, with carpets everywhere. Anyway, I was my father’s only child. Always he promised me that I would become part of his business. I even go to college in Egypt for one year. Then happens the coup. My father thinks it would be of more advantage to him to marry me to Zaid. I think you know the rest.”
    I nodded agreement,
    Nadya said nothing else for some time. Then I noticed one lone tear escape and trickle down her cheek. She began to bang the arm of the chair softly with her fist.
    “I am not a peasant woman to be sold into bondage like some whore! I can read, I am educated, I have plans! I knew one day I would escape that bastard. Now I have done so. Let him try to get me back!”
    I refrained from saying that Zaid was attempting just that, and might very well succeed. I got up and went to another part of the room, wanting to leave Nadya some privacy to cry if she felt like it.
    Idly, I booted the Go disk and began to play. Before I knew it, I was deep inside the game.
    Sometime later, I sensed Nadya behind me, so I took my hand off the mouse and looked up.
    “What is this game?”
    “Go.”
    “And how does one play?”
    I explained. “…and so to kill a man and remove him from the board, you must surround him with his enemies, separate him from his mates. Two opponents suffice to trap a man in a corner, three on the border, and four in the center.”
    “That seems easy enough. Let’s play.”
    “It’s not as easy as it looks. I’ll take black, since it goes first and is at a disadvantage.” I switched to two-player mode and ported in another mouse.
    Nadya won the initial game. But it was only because I was so tired.
    For the first time, she smiled.
    “Hey, Leon,” she said, while I was still trying to reconstruct how I had lost.
    “Yeah?”
    “No sweat.”
     
    For the next five days—a time which seemed much longer—Nadya and I enjoyed a strange kind of domesticity, like the ideal arrangement of some spurious, apocryphal middle-class culture of at least half a century ago, when only men held jobs.
    I would wake to the smell of coffee and toast—Nadya, I surmised, didn’t sleep well or long—and share breakfast with my surrogate wife. Then it was off to work for me, the ritual departure lacking only a peck at the door. Home in the evening to a unique supper, then settle down for reading and Go and an extravagant beer apiece.
    Nadya never beat me again after that first game. But she was a sharp and good enough player so that I was never bored.
    The only deviation from this marital charade came each night when I unfolded the convertible couch and Nadya disappeared behind the door of my bedroom. But it was only a surface deviation. Below the separation, the closeness that had grown between us was still maintained. There just never developed any sexual tension between Nadya and me. I simply couldn’t see her in those terms, and I doubt she