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his hand. “I’m Joshi.”
    â€œMarie,” I said, taking the offered hand. It was cool and soft against my own.
    *   *   *
    We ate at the Café Africa, a well-lit establishment near the Grand Socco. The restaurant was clean and cheery, with a white-tiled floor, mirrored walls, and freshly laundered tablecloths, a slightly exotic copy of a French brasserie. The meal was like a strange dance. I had the uneasy feeling that despite his meticulous appearance Joshi had little enough money to be hungry, that the price of a meal was the unspoken fee for his guidance. Yet when I reached for the check at the end of the meal, I could sense the depth of his embarrassment.
    It was raining when we left, turning the sidewalks slick with filth. We walked across the Grand Socco and in through the gates of the Old City, down the bustling Rue as-Siaghin, past the Great Mosque.
    â€œMy apartment,” Joshi said, as we neared the eastern ramparts of the medina and turned into a narrow side street. “There. Do you see the flag?”
    I looked up, following his finger. There was a series of low rooftops lit now by flickering streetlights and a slightly taller building beyond. In one of the dirt-smeared windows of the taller structure was a white flag with a simple red circle in the center. I nodded. “I see.”
    â€œAnd here is the Hotel Continental,” Joshi announced, directing my gaze to a plaster gate that lay just a few steps in front of us. “I’ll take you in.”
    The Continental was a large colonial structure, a Western stronghold perched at the edge of the medina. Inside the gate, a stone courtyard led to a sweep of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a generous veranda with an unobscured view of the port. It was a terrace wide enough for the foregone days of cocktails and dancing and Dior dresses, though my best guess told me even in its prime the Continental had verged toward the seedy. Today, a few bedraggled tables and chairs sat empty, staring out toward the dark bay. The building’s pinkish facade was cracked, the plaster flaking.
    Inside, the hotel was like a movie set, the walls richly mosaicked, trimmed with carved plaster and wood. The few guests in the lobby were a strange mix, a new breed of Western traveler, more Lonely Planet than Paul Bowles. Several members of an American film crew loitered around the front desk, hassling a gray-haired clerk about the rooms they’d been given. Two young German women huddled around the public phone, each taking turns with the receiver. A middle-aged woman in sensible travel attire, lightweight pants, hiking boots, and fanny pack, sat on a sagging couch paging through an English-language travel guide.
    I stood behind Joshi, eavesdropping on the disgruntled Americans, while the clerk listened patiently, then politely explained that the rooms were the best he had to offer. The men were not easily convinced, but in the end the clerk’s implacable manner won out, and the crew retreated, grumbling, while the elderly clerk turned his attention to us.
    Spend a year hoping for recognition, and you will come to know the intricacies of the human face, the delicacy of expression. In the first few months of my new life I lived in a state of constant anticipation, examining each person I passed on the street for some hint of familiarity, some clue to a shared past, however brief. And though what I saw was never the bewildered tic of the long-lost acquaintance, I saw every other possible countenance, love, despair, and even emptiness.
    When the manager turned his face from Joshi’s to mine, the ripple that passed across his features was almost imperceptible, slight as the barest breeze roughing the surface of a lake, slight as a minute’s interval of light at sunset. His eyes paused for just longer than a second on mine, long enough for me to think we had met before, then he murmured something in English. “It is