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they spoke quietly to each other. As Tarent stared at them the man turned slightly away from her, pulled on a black sleep mask and screwed in earphones. He let his head droop forward and he relaxed in his seat, rocking with the endless jerking movements of the Mebsher.
    Tarent regarded the woman. He had not yet seen her face. It was half shrouded by a scarf or shawl, a concession many Western women made to Islamic convention, but not formally
hijab.
The woman had not yet looked directly back at him, nor even shown any awareness he was in the row of seats behind her, but he sensedthat she was as alert to his presence as he was to hers. Her shoulder-length hair, partially revealed where the scarf did not cover her, reminded him of Melanie’s.
    Inevitably, he started thinking about Melanie again, what the first attraction had been. Her hair, straight and fine, not too long, had framed her face well. He simply liked the way she looked, and on that afternoon in Bracknell, where he had just completed a photo-shoot, he struck up a conversation with her. It was then they discovered the link between them that had created the initial superficial bond: they were both semi-foreigners.
    Tibor Tarent – American father, Hungarian mother, born and mostly brought up in England, feeling British, but always with that revealing European first name, and because of his father speaking with an ineradicable sound of East Coast USA. Melanie was more remotely descended from another culture. Her grandfather had moved to Britain from Poland after the Second World War, married a British girl and changed his name from Roszca to Roscoe. His son Gordon had been brought up without any knowledge of his Polish background, and only discovered it from family papers after his father died. Melanie had even less awareness than that of her distant heritage, saw it as amusing and irrelevant, and had never really thought about it until she and Tarent met. Yet he discovered, early on, that some of her friends called her by an affectionate nickname, Malina, or Mally. Malina was a Polish name meaning raspberry, Melanie said, quietly making the rude noise with her mouth. They were married a few months after they met.
    Tarent was less comfortable about his background. It led him to the habit of feeling different, an outsider. He had known it all his childhood, and it worsened when his father was killed in Afghanistan, in circumstances never explained, even by the US State Department for whom he had worked. Tibor was a child at the time, only six. The concealed bomb beneath the roadway that destroyed the armoured Jeep in which his father was travelling was in its own way comprehensible through the familiarity of so many other similar incidents, but why his father had been out there at risk in the rugged hills was never established, or at least never made known to his family. Officially his father was a diplomat but clearly he was more than that, or less. Something other than diplomacy was going on, putting him in a role that sent him out there to a mountain road, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
    Tibor’s mother, Lucia, also a diplomat, remained in Britainafterwards. She was a cultural attaché at the Hungarian Embassy in London, so never in the same kind of danger as her husband, but she too died a few years later, victim to breast cancer, as Tibor was leaving university.
    That sense of foreignness became more remote as he and Melanie began a more or less conventional married life. No children appeared. She worked at a hospital in London, but his freelance photography caused him to travel, took him away from her, sometimes for a week or more at a time. After ten years in London, Melanie found the hard routines of hospital work were telling on her. She enrolled with Médecins Sans Frontières, loved the work, but it took her away too, often for many weeks at a time. Their marriage began to crumble. The expedition to Eastern Anatolia, not with MSF but with a new