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falling behind her ear.
    Tarent took a few surreptitious shots of the others. One picture caught the profile of the woman in what he recognized as a typical gesture: her head was tipped forward, her eyes were closed, a finger lifted the side of the scarf to touch her hair.
    She still reminded him of Melanie, and he wished she did not. Maybe it was guilt. The sense of the years wasted and his failure to do anything about that. Melanie was thirty-eight now, or had been thirty-eight until the week before last. Memories of her kept returning, maddeningly. Tarent sometimes imagined he could hear her voice, trying to break in over the racket of the Mebsher’s engine. Her scent was still on his skin, or so he thought.
    The night before she was killed they made love, something they sometimes did after a row. It was unsatisfactory for them both. The bunk they were in was too narrow and the walls of the safehouse were treacherously thin. It was hot. Humidity and heat, endlessly, invariably. They made the effort, an unspoken attempt to try to tell each other they were still together, but they both knew they were not. After those fevered minutes of physical and sexual exertion, the habitual distance spread out again between them, not a real barrier but a painful and familiar reminder of how fragile their marriage had become.
    Lying in the dark they riffed a fantasy they both knew well, the one about returning to Britain, taking a vacation, going to a good hotel in London or one of the other cities and spending the back-pay on a few nights of selfish luxury. But it would never happen, they both knew, and even then they had no idea how disastrous the next day was going to be.
    She resented him, he resented her. But how can you resent a nurse? Tarent had found several ways, a defence mechanism. His own practical qualification, a degree in environmental sciences, was where there were jobs for the taking. Allegedly. After university, Tarent had found there was no apparent need for an inexperienced pyrologist. After a year’s visit to the USA he returned to Britain while the political and social upheaval that accompanied the foundationof the IRGB was still in progress. No jobs were going at all at that time, so he drifted into photography, working first with a friend from uni, later striking out on his own as a freelance. That was what he was doing when he met Melanie.
    She once described photography as a passive activity, receptive, non-interventionist. It recorded events but never influenced them. She believed that nothing was worthwhile that was not practical, hands-on, proactive. That was her function, but not his. He defended himself in what he saw as a candid way, but which Melanie described as ineffectual. Photography was a form of art, he said ineffectually. Art had no practical function. It only was. It informed or it showed or it simply existed. But it could move the world. Melanie derided him for that, pulling open the loose neck of her shirt and pulling it down, exposing yet again her shoulder and upper arm. That was where a deranged patient had scraped a soiled needle against her, trying to infect her with whatever it was he had. That was her trophy, the personal reward for proactivity.
    ‘So photograph it, why don’t you?’ she yelled at him once, during the second week of their transit across Turkey, somewhere in the high arid deserts beyond the coastal strip. That day their Mebsher convoy had run short of water, and they were waiting to be resupplied. Tarent could still remember the grim surroundings of stone and desiccated vegetation, the abandoned town of Hadimá down the hill, the mountains of yellow rock, the distant glimpse of the sea, the blasting hot wind and the cloudless sky.
    The resentment hurt, but he still loved her. He remembered what she seemed to have forgotten, their early days, their intensive letters and long phone calls, the excitement of all that, the immense emotional challenge. Love was stronger than