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eyes must have betrayed me. He blushed and backed up a step. I walked him over to a stack and handed him The Conformist .
    “The lizards are in the early pages of the book,” I said.
    He held it in his hands as if it were the Quran. Did I have it in Arabic? I didn’t think it had been translated (I wouldn’t translate it because I found it didactically dull, not that I would have showed him the translation had I done one). His English wasn’t very good.
    “I’m not a teacher,” I said. “Reading a book would definitely help your English.”
    Was it all right with me if he examined it to see if he could read it?
    I returned to my desk. He sat on the floor leaning against a bookshelf, his legs splayed before him, the rubber soles of his shoes facing out, conspicuously visible. Three books faced out as well, As I Lay Dying , Goodbye, Columbus, and A Moveable Feast, the last two having recently arrived in Beirut. Separated by the spines of other books, they formed a triangle that floated atop his head. It was only then that I understood he couldn’t afford to buy a book, any book. The army pants he wore were neither a fashion nor a political statement—they were inexpensive.
    I asked if he had killed lizards when he was a boy. He asked for the meaning of the word magpie, the word austerity, and the word covet .
    I liked him.
    He loved the book, finished it in twenty-three days (the bookshop wasn’t open on Sundays). He appeared every afternoon, sat in the same spot. On the infrequent occasion that I had a customer when he arrived, he’d sheepishly wave and tiptoe to Moravia’s book, which he’d returned to its position the day before. By the second week he began to do little things around the shop, by the fourth he was signing for deliveries. I tried to have him hired, but the owner refused. I needed the help. I was the only employee. If I was sick, the bookshop didn’t open.
    “Give him part of your salary,” the owner replied. “The bookshop isn’t a moneymaking enterprise. It’s a labor of love.”
    Not exactly. I provided the labor, I provided the love, and he enjoyed the fugitive cachet of owning a bookstore. Ahmad worked in the shop without pay for four years. He didn’t seem to mind. He helped me whenever he could, sat in his spot and read during slow periods. He came and went as he pleased, may not have been punctual, but he was fervently devoted to the bookstore, to his reading, desperate to educate himself. When I apologized for working him without pay, he replied that sons always worked without recompense.
    One day he decided to paint the interior of the shop. He’d ended up with free cans of light lavender paint. It seems someone at the refugee camp had bought them for a bargain before realizing that no one would want their walls that color. Ahmad left the spaces behind the stacks unpainted because we didn’t have enough cans. I loved the color and kept it till the bookshop closed and I retired.
    I relied on him. A few young men used to trickle into the bookstore before his arrival, solitary and in groups, without any intention of buying books. With a single woman working at the store, a boy could practice flirting, try his luck. I dealt with them by ignoring them. They were harmless, but I found them irritating. My friend Hannah, who often visited me at the store, found them amusing. She didn’t interact with them, but her face lit up whenever one of the lads walked in. Ahmad, on the other hand, considered them offensive. He glared, followed them around until the offenders left the bookstore. One time after he chased two teenagers out, Hannah asked him if he was sure that they were not going to buy anything.
    “They only wish to harass respectable ladies,” he said.
    “Are you sure respectable ladies don’t wish to be harassed?” she said. “I don’t know about Aaliya here, but maybe I want to talk to a handsome young man, just a few words here and there.”
    He looked up at both of us