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I am Ibrahim who writes.

Of course I should have known from the beginning that he was not like other men. But what could have prepared me for the events I was to witness? I shall never forget that night, the white storm, and him just lying there breathing, breathing. But let me step backwards in time.

When he appeared as he did at the costume party on Halloween, I considered it to be a very bad joke. He had shrouded his person in white bedsheets and fashioned a burnoose out of a gold curtain cord. 'You can only kill me with a golden bullet, Ibrahim!' he laughed. 'This is not a costume!' To me, an Arab! He wandered around the room looking as though everyone else was dressed up, not him, and we were all therefore extremely foolish. 'Lawrence of Kanada, I presume?' someone said in an attempt to deflate him. But he merely touched his forehead, his chest, then brushed the floor with the back of his hand and whispered a gracious Salaam. Tiny hailstones drummed against the windowpane and the sky was the violet and green of an autumn evening. The smell of winter was in the air.

At that party I listened to many jokes which I didn't understand at all, and still don't, although they were explained to me many times. (When Kanadians are not joking, they are saying 'Excuse me.' I do not know what it is they wish to be excused for, but it seems to be something very important.) One very incomprehensible joke is about, I think, a Polish man who lives in Newfoundland. It seems that if you hand him a card which says FOR THE THRILL OF YOUR LIFE TURN THIS OVER, and he turns it over and on the other side it says the same thing, then he will proceed to turn the card over and over infinitely, or until someone restrains him. It obviously means that he has not comprehended the card. I on the other hand, do not comprehend the joke. And so it is. (I mean only to suggest that for me the English language and its humour is a nightmare. I recall the horror I felt when I first took certain words and phrases literally. A person was fired from his job, and I had visions of some great furnace receiving him; the violent Bible proclaiming 'Suffer, the little children to come unto me.' People laughing when I applied for a job, saying 'I lust after this position.')

But I'm being tangential. Let me tell you how I came to meet this strange being called Noman. He rented a room on the top floor of the rooming house where I lived, so we bumped together frequently. (His favourite word was sideways, I learned. Winter comes in sideways, and so on.) I thought I understood him better than anyone in the world; I looked and saw the lostness in his eyes. However, it was massively evident that he didn't understand me at all. Once we met in the supermarket and talked about women. I learned that he knew absolutely nothing about women, and I - for I have been in and out of women since I was thirteen - tried to teach him a few things.

I recall I was loaded down with cans of chick peas and ears of corn, and I was thinking to myself, I shall die in this crazy country. I shall die without ever having been born. Noman joined me and asked if I was sick. 'No,' I said, 'but my soul is rotting here in this foreign land. My spirit has the measles. I shall die. Unknown and despised. My verses unpublished. I hate this country.' We walked together down the aisles and gathered tins of sardines and pimentoes. Then we stopped at the fruit counter and I picked up a lemon and looked at it with disgust. 'They call this a lemon,' I said. 'This is not a lemon, this is a joke. At home I used to go out every morning and pick a single lemon from the tree outside my door. Think of it. Then look at this.' And at the meat counter I stopped in dismay and cried, 'Look at all this food! In my village when I was five years old I used to come home from school for lunch, and do you know what lunch was? It was my mother's milk! Look at this wealth, this decadence. This is the corruption of all capitalist countries.'

'You hate this country but you stay,' Noman said. 'You stay here, in the dark mysterious West.' He was smiling, but not smiling, and he had a strange way of looking just beyond my shoulder, so I had to shift my position continuously to try to place myself in the line of his gaze.

'I stay to make money!' I protested. 'In my village in Syria is my sister Leila who is sick. I send ten dollar bills in all my letters. I have a cousin in Jordan who has a place called The Holyland Buffet, just outside of Bethlehem. I wrote and told him how much money you can make here and now he wants to come.'

We made our way to the frozen food counter, and it was there that I felt compelled, for reasons which I cannot explain, to tell Noman the absolute truth about myself. 'Look,' I confessed, bending over the Highliner fillets. 'I left my village and came here because for three years I was screwing my best friend's wife.'

In the distance was the ring of a cash register. Noman said, 'Let's get out of here,' and we headed for the front of the store. I gathered more vegetables and at the counter I held out tomatoes and cauliflowers and two gleaming bluish-black eggplants. 'Do you know what the Arabs call these?' I asked Noman. '"Satan's balls."' Some people ahead of us turned around and stared.

'Do you want to know the truth?' I heard myself saying, because somehow Noman, by saying nothing, was forcing me to speak, and I was afraid of his terrible, eloquent silence. 'The truth is I can't go back. If my friend ever found out about his wife and me, he might kill us both.'

Still there was the silence.

'I'm sorry if you don't understand,' I said. 'East confronts West. One Wintario ticket please,' I asked the cashier.

Outside in the street it was clear and cold, as his face with its fine sharp features was clear and cold. 'Look,' I insisted, although he had still not said another word to me, 'in my country we are civilized. I am a modern Arab, I have no prejudices against women. I am betrothed to a girl from my village - Yasmin. When I have enough money I'll bring her here and we'll marry. She writes me two times a day. Once she asked me if it is the law in Kanada that you have to be in love to get married. Consider such innocence.'

I found myself running on and on in a great hurry to tell him everything, even though he showed not the slightest interest in my words.

'She is pure virgin, like the wool. She will not go with every man she sees like the women in this country. And she is not like one of those rich University girls in Damascus who go with men before they are married and then go to a doctor to get themselves sewn up before their wedding night, ah no.'

We stood at an intersection and I thought that the lights would never change from red to green and that we would stand at that horrible corner forever. At last he spoke.

'Here you are, Ibrahim, lost in time, frozen somewhere in the seventh century, waiting for the lights to change. Can you see yourself? Obsessed with virginity, for God's sake!'

He blithely stepped off the kerb in the middle of the red light. I followed him. Several cars screeched to a halt and I swore at them in pungent Arabic. On the other side of the road I turned to him. Our eyes were flashing.

'The point is that life must be full of mystery, and women must be full of secrets. That's what makes them so spiceful. Even if Yasmin tricked me, I would never find out, so the mystery would still be there. I don't understand why this is not obvious to you.'

A large black dog rushed out from behind a tree and stood in front of me, barking at some obscure wrong. 'Do you know how to calm a mad dog?' Noman said. 'Look at it directly between the eyes. Like this,' he demonstrated, bending over and fixing the satanic animal's forehead with a terrible stare. The dog turned away. A chill October wind rustled through the grocery bags and whispered through the ears of corn.

'Listen, I must tell you something, something that may distress you,' I said. 'It's about your lady friend Kali. She entertains men alone.'

I then proceeded to inform him that two nights before I happened to be in the area of her house after work, and I called in to say Hello, after which she invited me in for a cup of coffee. I was hurt and horrified when Noman laughed out loud at my words.

'You Kanadian men are fools!' I cried. 'What kind of woman invites a man into her house when she is alone? Anyone can see what that means.'

'It means she saw that you were lonely and wanted company,' Noman said.

'She entertained me alone - me, your friend! That means she will do it with others, that means there's no telling what she might do. I was testing her, for your sake, because you are a fool and I am your friend.' I proceeded stiffly down the road, confronting the wind which was growing chillier each moment. I felt as though the whole world was offending me. 'Look Ibrahim, we're friends!' he laughed, opening the door of the rooming house ahead of me.

'Are we indeed?' I said sadly.

The hallway was dark with the particular sort of brown darkness I have found to be peculiar to rooming houses. I invited Noman to my room to share black olives and cheese and bread with me. I told him of how when I first came to Kanada I worked in a factory making parts for bombs which I later learned were sent to Israel. Only in this crazy country could such a terrible thing happen to me. I left the factory and did odd welding jobs and wrote my delicate poetry in Arabic by the light of the forty watt bulb that lit my room by night.

A voice which was both torment and enchantment enveloped us when I switched on the radio to the Arabic program I listened to continually. 'Fairouz,' I told him. 'Fairouz the perfect, the unattainable. She is not a singer but a goddess. At the sound of her voice men weep, make love, go to war. It is not her fault that she is a Christian and a Lebanese.'

Noman smiled. I was becoming afraid of his smile, as indeed I was afraid of him. His smile was not cruel, or sarcastic, or cunning; it was quiet and perfectly still and perfectly contained, like a pool of dark water.

'Do you know any women in this city?' I asked.

'Only one, really,' he said. 'Kali. You know her.'

'Can I have her?' I asked.

'I really don't think so.'

'Can I borrow her for a while?'

'I really don't think so.'

'Is she yours?'

'I'm not sure.'

'So. She plays with you. I can handle that, that's right up my sleeve, or my alley. Whatever. English is such a meagre language,' I said. He asked about my poetry. I said that I was studying the Revolution for the third time, and my poetry was about politics and women. And of course death, because if you are writing about politics and women you are also writing about death. 'But tell me where the women are in this city,' I pleaded. 'The ones who do it. Have you ever done it with two women at once? No? Neither have I, but I have it all worked out in my head.'

The voice of the immortal Om Kalsoum came over the radio, and I told him how she used to broadcast songs from Cairo that went on for hours and hours, and that millions of Arabs in different countries would smoke hashish and listen all night as her music delivered them to paradise. 'For you who do not understand, the music is an interminable wailing,' I said. 'But for us it is the eternal voice of the eternal East.'

'What makes you think I do not understand?' he asked.

The music surrounded and seduced us, and the voices of the deadly angels who lead men into love and war and death held us captive as the night wore on. We were absolutely stoned, although we had smoked nothing. I remember that on my bedtable was a little ornament of clear plastic with a picture of Niagara Falls inside, and when I turned it upside-down fake snow fell on the upside-down Falls. It seemed to me to be the most significant and profound thing in the world, and I gazed at it in wonder. 'Remember,' I said to Noman, 'that you are a fool. A fool and a Kanadian.' Then I set the piece right side up and more snow swirled around the great gorge. 'But a friend.'

At three in the morning he went upstairs and left me pounding chick peas into tahini paste and dashing olive oil and lemon juice and garlic into the mixture which would become the divine and indescribable humus on which the Arabs and most of our enemies fed. The last thing he said to me was: 'Ibrahim, my fine mad Arab friend, standing there lost among the voluptuous cauliflowers and tomatoes and satanic eggplants, tears rolling out of your marvellous great mournful eyes - you have just showed me that perhaps there is someone in this country who is more foreign than me.'

Something shone from his eyes, something that made him different from everyone. But when did I suspect that he was almost - how shall I say it - a different order of man, another species? When winter came, and we walked through the cold December streets, he would often stop dead in his shoes and stare off into space and dissolve right before my eyes. I do not speak literally, you understand. Once, in a moment of quiet frenzy, he attacked a large snowbank with his hands and demolished it, convinced that there was some 'king' hiding beneath it - but there was nothing beneath it, nothing. It seems he had a fantasy about this king because he had been lost and severely injured in a place called Kingsmere, the king's own forest. I understood this to be some sort of Kanadian fairy tale.

Another time he urged me to accompany him to the art gallery, and drew my attention to something an artist called William Blake had written: You can see what I see if you so choose. 'But people choose not to see,' he said, 'for to see means to confront one's own mortality, and it is too hideous, too beautiful. They are terrified and suspicious of anything that speaks of the spirit; art speaks of the spirit, so they laugh and belittle it out of embarrassment and fear.'

'A Western fear!' I cried. 'You know nothing of death and therefore nothing of life! I come from a fiery people, a tragic people, a people who live in pictures of black and white, not grey like you North Americans. We love and weep and kill and get killed and sing and dance and overthrow our governments. Can you understand this? And this man Blake paints angels.'

Noman looked at me and his eyes for one moment were black as obsidian. I confessed that I had rather jumped overboard with my words. 'I must stop this,' I said. 'I must forget who I am. I must lose myself to find myself. Then I will write better poetry. I must merge with people, cohabit and amalgamate. I must forget the Old World altogether. Down with the past; up with the future.'

He smiled.

But then, a few days later, I received news of my best friend Ali's death in Lebanon. I shrank back into myself, I wished only to be alone and disband. I took refuge in a kind of calculated insanity; I started painting portraits on grains of rice - a feat so difficult it almost abolished me. I listened to the radio deep into the night, the musty news of lost worlds, the stinky news of death. I was going nowhere and would never go anywhere again. I would die here in this crazy country. Old suitcases filled my closet, suitcases I had dragged through the teeming streets of Damascus and Cairo and West Berlin, heavy as memory, sorrowful as memory, full of trinkets and old clothes and failed poems. I would carry my brain's old luggage through the awful streets of my life forever.

Noman came down to my room one night and gazed at me with his disorienting eyes. 'You look terrible,' he said, and I jumped to my own defense.

'You think I am morose and mournful?' I cried. 'My people are a mournful people. And desperate, the soul and the body desperate. One of my childhood friends went into the back yard one day and fucked a chicken. The chicken died of course, and he mourned it forever. You smile. Can you understand this? Can you understand horror? Can you understand the cripple-makers in Egypt who take beggars and break their legs or blind them to make them more pitiable? Can you understand Lebanon?'

Noman looked at me huddled over my table with a strong desk lamp at one side and the magnifying glass squinched in my eye. 'Ibrahim, what are you doing?' he asked.

I looked up and the lens fell away from my eye. He said that my eyes looked large and liquid, like the sad, wise old eyes of babies, and that I was staring at him with the bright stare of the convert who has left the world far behind.

'Since you ask me I will tell you.' I regarded him with infinite patience and weariness. 'I am painting. Yes, I am painting a portrait of Castro on a grain of rice.'

Noman went upstairs and got a bottle of brandy. When he came back down I was still at work, the single-haired brush in hand and the row of tiny paint pots at my elbow.

'Yes indeed, my friend. I intend to present it to him when I go to Cuba. He will be thrilled. Then I intend to go on to bigger and better things. I might inscribe the history of the world on a chick pea, or possibly a map of the Northwest Territories on a little pebble. I learned patience from the life of Taha Husein, the Egyptian scholar whose mother rubbed some ointment into his eyes to punish him for a childish misdeed and blinded him for life. He nevertheless memorized the Koran when still a child. You smile at my hobby, but you will see. I read about a man in the newspaper who's done more than four hundred portraits on grains of rice. I thought - why not me? This is a large and noble venture. What I am doing is miraculously and intensely difficult.' I bent further over my work, but Noman's silence filled the room and exploded within my head, forcing the truth from me.

'Some of my people are fighting the Falangist dogs in Lebanon. My best friend has been killed. I heard it yesterday. The dogs are backed by Israel, as you probably know. It will never end, the Druze will never let it end; they keep fighting and dying, and they don't care about dying because they believe in reincarnation. And Ali, like all good Moslems, believed he would go straight to paradise if he died in battle. I do not believe such lies. I told you about Ali. We were so close we shared the same women, although he never knew. It was like we were doing it together, but through her.'

'I'm very sorry,' said Noman. 'But doesn't this mean you can go back, there's no danger now that he'll find out about you and his wife?'

'You kill me with those words!' I cried. 'Every time somebody looks at me I have the feeling they're accusing me, asking themselves "Why isn't he there fighting alongside of his brothers? Why does he stay here in this godforsaken country? Why is he alive?" And I can't answer those questions, not even to myself.'

'You shouldn't be so hard on yourself,' Noman told me. 'We can't all be fighters and heroes.'

'True. I'm a poet and poets just talk.' I turned away. 'But we were so close he used to tell me his dreams. Ali.'

Noman said, 'Just think - you could boil your life's work away in ten minutes.'

'You laugh, you laugh. But if I succeeded in writing the entire Iliad on a strip of macaroni, would you laugh then? You'd probably cry because you're morose, like a potato, you're probably part Irish. I, an Arab, am also morose, but it's a passionate moroseness, it's different. You Westerners, with you I always see apathy in action. What I am doing now is stationary but dynamic, do you see? The truth is I am lost.'

I concentrated on a part of Castro's beard and tried to forget Noman altogether, but this was impossible, for he was breathing very heavily and there was a terrible excitement in his voice as he whispered the next words.

'Nothing dies,' he said.

I asked him what in the name of God he meant.

'Nothing dies. You'll see.'

Then he went upstairs and I didn't hear from him for a day or two. I decided he was a madman. I heaved and floundered in my grief. You're wrong Noman, I thought. I shall die here in this crazy country. We all will.

I decided I had to drown my grief in a woman, but I hate the brazen women of the West who play hard to get while they walk around with their nipples sticking out of T shirts which read My Body Is Mine. These cruel little cock-teasers, they can hide their passion and pretend not to be aroused, but how can a man pretend when his own body betrays him with its spectacular display of readiness?

I chose, then, a down to earth female of German extraction who indicated her willingness to hit the bed with me after our very first meeting. She had apricot-coloured talons, and wore pink-tinted glasses and a collar around her neck made with fox - a fox whose plastic head clipped onto its own tail, as if in this grotesque death the animal was forced to devour itself. She unclasped the head of the dead fox and released its awful grip on its own body, then stripped and sat on the edge of the bed.

'With me,' she said, 'no foreplay is necessary, no time-consuming and frivolous diddling around.' Then her muscular mouth began eating my ear and her tongue whirled around in wild circles until I heard a roar of rivers in my head. Her large face loomed above me like a moon. 'Arabs,' she breathed. 'I love Arabs. Scimitars, black horses, swirling robes. Dominance. Abraham, most men are only after me for my mind, it's disgusting. I'm sick of women's lib, I want to be a sex symbol!'

Bloody Western amazons, I thought, bloody Western whores. My body was betraying me with a spectacular display of unreadiness. I told her I had an excruciating pain in my abdomen, the result of an old wound I received in a skirmish in Algeria. She was surprisingly nice about it. 'That's all right,' she said. 'Some other time. Apply a cat to the afflicted area; that's an old German remedy.' Then she got dressed, picked up the inert collar and squeezed the dead jaw of the fox open, flung the thing around her neck and clipped the head back onto the tail. She let herself out into the night, leaving me flexing my teeth in frustration.

I thought of the goddesses and the whores of the world, Lorca's blazing angel trailing wings of rusty knives, my virginal Yasmin, and the breasty unquenchable creature who was my best friend's wife. Blood, roses, milk, each with her undercurrent of unspeakable obscenity. I thought of the women of the East in their eternal black.

'Death, woman is death,' I told Noman that night. 'You grow up among a lot of black crows with white breasts and white skin; they make you dwell on death. White milk and black death and the red blood in between which is agony, which is life. Women and blood and war and death. Ali, Ali.'

And Noman gazed at a spot just beyond my shoulder with an expression as fathomless as the steel grey waters of the winter lake beneath the sheets of ice that crowded the harbour.

He disappeared before Christmas - (Mithrasmas, he called it, the birthday of some savage ancient god) - and a great blizzard descended upon the city. The visibility outside was almost zero as the white demons of the wind shrieked and swirled like dervishes. It was as though the whole world was turning in upon itself and choking out its own life. It was like a desert sandstorm, but the sand was white.

The eve of Christmas was also my birthday, and I had a party to which only Kali came. Later that night long after she had left I went up to Noman's room to see if he had returned, and in the hallway I heard a ghastly agonized wheezing as though someone were being strangled or sucked into quicksand.

I went into his room and found him sitting on the end of the bed with his hands clutching the mattress, his shoulders raised and his face drenched in sweat. The horrible sound grew louder, and each time he fought to gain a full breath his chest and his shoulders heaved.

'White,' he whispered, 'everything white, the sky and the lake all white, no division, no horizon...'

'What has happened to you?' I pleaded, but he could say nothing coherent. He shivered and sweated and struggled for air.

For some reason I thought of Ché in the mountains of Bolivia. When he had these terrible attacks of breathlessness he would go on smoking his big cigars and talking to people, and when it got too bad he went to bed and drank matte and read his way through the tortuous hours. But one could die like this, I thought with terror, with everything going black before the eye, a black cloak lowered before the eyes. Was it not terrible to be drowning without water? And he was drowning without water, he who was a swimmer.

I called for an ambulance, visualizing how the medical men in white would come and take him away on a white stretcher through the white blizzard and give him adrenalin and an oxygen mask. I did not try to speak to him for I had read somewhere that so perverse were such attacks that the more one tries to reason with the afflicted and call them into consciousness, the more acute they become. The whole being must work, must concentrate on achieving the next breath, as oxygen fights its way through bronchial tubes which are being constricted and strangled by uncontrollable muscular spasms. And Noman was working, fighting.

Through all of this there was thunder, thunder in winter, which I thought to be very portentious and foreboding.

'Death is not black, Ibrahim, it is white,' he whispered.

And then - my heart cringes when I tell it - then he fell back on the bed and closed his eyes and began to speak loudly and clearly in a voice that was not his own, a voice I knew as well as my own, the voice of Ali.

In pure, faultless Arabic the voice of my dead friend poured forth from Noman's mouth. It greeted me with warmth and love, it told me I must feel no pain or guilt for the mistakes of the past, it absolved me of all my sins. 'Ali!' I cried, and flung myself across the bed. But the voice had ceased, and the body beneath me was motionless.

Two ambulance attendants entered the room. One pulled me away and the other leaned over Noman and touched his wrist, his neck.

'This man's dead,' he said.

He began asking me questions, and the other took down notes. In my shock and horror I do not know how I managed to speak. I told them I thought it was a violent asthma attack, but I could not be sure. They said I would have to accompany them and the body to the hospital for certification of death, and that I would have to fill out forms and give information about the dead man's next of kin, and so on.

'His name is Noman,' I said. 'That's all I know.'

My heart was heavy as they brought the stretcher to the bed. But when they started to move him, one of them gave a little cry and stepped back in alarm.

'This man's not dead,' he said.

Noman's eyes were open and he was lying there breathing, breathing.

I was so happy and angry I wanted to nail him to the floor and dance on his stomach. He gained strength and began to tell me of his ordeal. He had no memory whatsoever of the last phase of it, which convinced me that it was indeed Ali himself who had spoken through him.

'It is as though the storm outside is also inside,' he said. 'And through a wall of white the angel of death comes crashing; its spectacular white wings are white fire searing along your ribs. The white folds in around you, it has become dry ice which imprisons you. There is no exit for the body or the soul. Then it begins, the stone on the chest and the fear, and the stone growing into a concrete slab, your tombstone, and you know what is happening and you can do nothing. The wind outside, God screaming at you, and you are trapped in the cave of your own lungs, and you sit upright pulling your chest up and down and praying breathe, breathe, and each breath is a miracle, an impossibility. You want to weep but the effort would kill you, so you pray and work. Your soul goes screaming through tunnels of white mucous and slime, horrible corridors, and the pain of the breathing makes each breath and each exhalation a small death. Somehow it is even harder getting the air out than in. Your lungs try to burst open in an incandescent cloud of white effluvia, the whole world is enveloped in a sac of ghostly phlegm, an afterbirth.'

Then his voice dropped and he spoke more to himself than to me.

'But there's something else,' he said, 'inside the storm, inside the white, the thrilling centre, the core of absolute quiet, it's this that I must reach...'

He looked out the window to the lake which lay beneath the white sheet of the blizzard and which I visualized now as a huge organ, a lung, dark and diseased.

'It will be death for you,' I said, 'this swim you plan to make this summer. No one in your condition should attempt such a thing.' (My God, I thought, I'm saying this to a man who has already died!) 'It's the kind of monstrous idea that this crazy country gives birth to. Like those madmen who walk on tightropes over Niagara Falls or fling themselves over the edge in barrels. A northern madness, a madness born of desperation and anemia. I despair of you.'

'You may think I am crazy,' he said calmly, 'but I am actually the only sane man here.'

'You will throw yourself into the lake this summer and drown, and you're the only sane man here!' I screamed. 'You want to be a famous swimmer like Barbara Ann Scott or Victor Bauman or Sandy Nikolas who is famous in my country because in I975 she swam from Jabbul to Latakia. You want to die? Well, go ahead and die! It is probably written that you shall meet your end thus.'

'My end,' he mused. 'I've died so many times I can't remember. I'm always dying, so for me there is no real death.

'But still I possess the Terrible Knowledge; I live with death. Most people don't know that they will die at all. I have embraced my death and made it part of my living; in a sense my life is nothing but the knowledge of my end. I know I will die; thus I am reborn.'

And on that outrageous and mad remark he smiled with such a brilliant delight that I was alarmed, and thought that he was perhaps still feverish from his ordeal.

'Now I confess I don't understand you at all, my friend, and I never have.' I said. 'Is it I who am dead, and is this the afterlife?'

'Where then are the beautiful houris?' he laughed. Then this most baffling of men put an arm around my shoulder and said. 'Look, the past is a clamour of voices, the Old World wails in your head like the songs of those singers you listen to. You must find your way into the New World.'

'But I thought I was in the New World!' I cried.

'Then you must go home,' he said, adding softly, 'I can't.'

'Home is a dream, home is a picture I carry in my wallet, home is an old woman in black clothes. When Ali died my country died in my head. Now there is only the music.' I found myself weeping with the truth and the shame of my words. I would write to my betrothed, the beautiful Yasmin, and tell her to live her life without me. I would remain here in Noman's land with my despair and my loneliness and my silly hobbies. I would remain wherever Noman was, for he was all I had left of Ali, and all I had left of myself.

I lied before when I said Noman did not understand me, for it is obvious that it is indeed I who have not understood him. I shall never know him, for he is not like other men. His mind works - how shall I say it? - sideways. He thrives on paradox. Explain me this man. He bade me goodnight by touching his forehead, his chest, then brushing the floor with the back of his hand and whispering a gracious Salaam.

Now I shall never forget that night, the white storm, and him just lying there breathing, breathing. Sometimes just before I sleep I feel ghosts dancing in my head. Last night as I lay in bed a white angel with wings of white fire and the face of Noman came into my room and crept around everywhere, crept up the walls like a bat and upside down along the ceiling, and down again, then out the window where it became part of the white night winter sky.

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