10:16 <Quaker> "You are such a disappointment. Your father would be disgusted with you." 10:16 <Quaker> Agostina stood in the doorway. She looked at the floor. When her mother is like this, it is better not to try and hide, but to get it over with and hope that it passes. 10:17 <Quaker> "You are so ungrateful for everything you have." 10:17 <Quaker> Silence between them, until she saw her mother's eyes flare. She tried to stand stock still at the book thrown at her, but at the last moment she flinched, and then she gasped as her mother closed the space between them and wrapped her long hair around a fist and pulled. 10:18 <Quaker> "I try to give you a life after all I have been through, and you are still so ungrateful. Better that I never had a daughter. Ungrateful. You wouldn't care if I got cancer and died." 10:19 <Quaker> At the crack of dawn her mother got up and walked across their bedroom and puts her hand on Agostina’s forehead to whisper a prayer for her before she leaves for work. Agostina was not sure where her mother worked, but she knew that her mother earned a little money here and there, enough for the room in Saroujah. 10:20 <Quaker> Sometimes it would not be enough for food and then maybe Umm Souad, the gentle widow next door, would give them a little bread to last the week. And sometimes Agostina would leave the apartment and walk through the souk and take small things that would not be missed or noticed. Or sometimes they starved, and her mother went mad and cursed her. 10:21 <Quaker> Her mother got cancer and died. 10:21 <Quaker> In her belongings Agostina found only one thing that surprised her. It was a little cameo pendant with a man's face on it and a family name engraved below. She had never seen her mother wear it while she was alive but she placed it around her mother's neck before they wrapped her body in a white shroud. 10:22 <Quaker> She lived with Umm Souad for a few weeks. Then one day the widow came home from her job at the ministry office and the young girl was gone for good. 10:22 <Quaker> ... 10:23 <Quaker> Agostina looked through the fence of the great house. It was set back from the street, so that the portico and the sidewalk were separated by a wide granite courtyard. 10:24 <Quaker> The house was made of neat white stones and very tall, with many handsome doors and weathered black wood shingles. It looked slightly out of place between two larger apartment buildings, but the shade cast by the jacarandas lining the street calmed her and for a moment she imagined her and the house both stood awkwardly in the same way, like two people waiting to be introduced. 10:25 <Quaker> She wondered what the people inside would be like. Would they take to her immediately, or be shy like her? Did they like to read old books about faraway places and people, and spend their time talking about interesting things while they laid on grand sofas and pillows and beds? 10:26 <Quaker> She pressed the buzzer for the gate. A few minutes later a servant in tails opened a little door to the side of the portico and approached the fence. "Go away," he said. 10:27 <Quaker> Agostina held out the letter with her mother's handwriting on the envelope and pushed it through the bars and held her hand out until the servant took it. "Go away," he repeated. 10:27 <Quaker> "I'm supposed to show this to you," said Agostina. 10:27 <Quaker> The servant looked at her, and the letter, and at her, and then at the house. "Wait here," he said, and walked back inside. 10:29 <Quaker> She waited for them to come spilling out the house in beautiful dresses and dignified suits. 10:30 <Quaker> A few hours later, the servant re-appeared. "Go away," he said, "or I"ll call the police." 10:30 <Quaker> Agostina looked at him. 10:30 <Quaker> The servant dropped the letter back onto the concrete of the sidewalk. 10:31 <Quaker> "You are mistaken about something, obviously. Leave before I alert the police." He went back inside and the small door closed behind him. 10:31 <Quaker> Agostina sat on the ground. 10:32 <Quaker> A few hours later, she stood and started walking up the street, which led to the northeast. 11:07 <Quaker> She stared at the ground as she walked. The city she had been told about was all around her, and if she lifted her eyes to see, her mind began to race and her throat began to tighten. The sound of the road and people pushing past her filled her head until it dissolved and ran together like the sound of a waterfall. 11:07 <Quaker> Agostina walked and walked, and did not think. 11:09 <Quaker> She walked past skyscrapers and crumbling public offices, past hospitals and grand hotels and smouldering trash heaps and lean-tos with corrugated tin siding. 11:13 <Quaker> She stopped at a gate. Four white columns held up a great marble bar inset with terracota tiles. Above the tiles it read ‘Expectamus Dominum.’ Beyond the gate’s metal was a grassy space, and a marble statue of the Holy Mother holding Christ. 11:13 <Quaker> Agostina walked in at sunset. 11:14 <Quaker> It was an odd little neighborhood, she thought at first, with narrow streets and tiny houses. 11:18 <Quaker> She heard the gates close behind her, and men calling out. She crouched in a small little stone hut that had been overgrown with green vines. Footsteps passed by. Agostina held her breath for as long as she could, and when she was lone she stayed stock still for hours more. 11:19 <Quaker> When she came out, it must have been around midnight, and she realized that it was not a neighborhood at all, and that these were not little huts but crypts, the grand and elaborate kinds like in movies. 11:20 <Quaker> The moonlight was bright enough to read by. She walked slowly down the endless little streets. 11:22 <Quaker> Here was a great stone altar sheltered by an arch, with a stone angel lighting a votive candle. Here was a little cobble hut, as if someone had raised a building out of random jagged stone. Here was a great black obelisk. Here was a great Turkish dome, glittering with colored glass and wild white flowers. 11:23 <Quaker> Here was a statue of a young woman, pointing to her own tomb. 11:25 <Quaker> Agostina left the grave of Rufina Cambaceres and walked until she saw a tomb with the face of the man on her mother’s pendant. 11:27 <Quaker> The sides were carved in bas-relief, with figures of Indians and men in uniforms, and angels praying. The figure of a woman laid across the tomb’s arch, her hand holding a stone rose. The face was one of many. She read the name under it. 11:28 <Quaker> Celestino Juan Maria Izurieta Weldmann (1948-1981). 11:29 <Quaker> The tomb said WELDMANN in bronze lettering. 11:30 <Quaker> Agostina slept in the dead city for four days until some people caught her stealing. She tried just to take the food people left at the graves but it was not enough. There was a little market outside and some more markets past that, in the neighborhood people called Villa Paradiso. 11:32 <Quaker> On the fourth day she was trying to take some fruit from a cart when three men grabbed her from behind and carried her off into an alley. They threw her down against a wall and her head swam from where it had hit the concrete. 11:32 <Quaker> The men did not look very much older than her. They did not look like anybody memorable. One of them was in charge of the others. He crouched down next to her and had a gun in his hand. 11:33 <Quaker> “What the fuck is your problem?” he said. “Piece of shit little thief.” 11:37 <Quaker> The men behind him flexed the balls of their feet and rocked back in forth in impatience. “Let’s just do her in. They don’t learn.” 11:37 <Quaker> The man with the gun shook his head. “Do you want to drag the bag all the way across to the docks?” 11:38 <Quaker> He stood up and lit a cigarette. “Just mess her up and throw her on the dump.” 11:39 <Quaker> “Hey, if I see you again, I’ll kill you. Get it?” He pointed the gun at her, and cocked the hammer. “Got it?” 11:39 <Quaker> The other men came from behind him and hit her until she stopped seeing things. 11:40 <Quaker> She thought she felt them drag her and throw her again. She landed on something hard. Then she heard nothing except the sound of the city. 11:41 <Quaker> Agostina thought it might be much later when someone pulled at her body again. She did not know if she was dreaming. Was it her mother holding her? She felt someone pulling at her legs, dragging her, so that her clothes caught sharp things and tore where they caught. 11:42 <Quaker> She heard a voice, but only the words. She could not make out whether it was a man or a woman, or young or old. 11:42 <Quaker> It asked: “Where did you come from?” 11:42 <Quaker> She did not know if she actually said what she tried to say. She tried to say: “From the cemetary.” 11:43 <Quaker> Her legs stopped being dragged for a moment. Or she might have imagined that. She just remembered it stopped and started again and then she fell asleep again. 11:45 <Quaker> Agostina woke up in a dark room. She did not know if she was dead or dreaming. The room was made out of cinderblock. There was no door, just a space to another room. Instead of a door there was some plastic strips hanging down in the space. There was a blanket on top of her and when she touched her face she felt bandages. 11:46 <Quaker> The air in the room smelled like sediment. She was on a mattress on the floor. 11:47 <Quaker> In the next room, she could hear a machine hum and things being moved around gently. 11:48 <Quaker> Before she fell back asleep, she could hear someone coughing.