Only the boy from Shobrakheit didn’t notice the subtle changes in my appearance. We had been talking for two months and he seemed to only just realize, when he saw the schoolgirl, that I, too, must once have had hair long enough to braid. This is what he was like, what I liked about him: a transparency that seemed at times a failure of imagination but at other times a form of respect. He didn’t think too hard about where I had come from or where I was going, how different we were from each other. He just assumed a warmth of feeling.
