Who she thought she was-who her mother thought she was-was not someone chained to the rough life of tiny failing circuses, doomed to live in trailers, fifteen shows a week during the season and scrabbling at menial jobs in the winter, no education, no culture, living with stupid, larcenous people. So Marta Kracinski of Warsaw, from a murdered family-an aristocratic family in the Polish manner, proud as bishops, poor as dirt-sat every evening of Sonia’s young life and, by the light of a dim bulb or a hissing gas lantern, put her girl to her lessons, conveying an eclectic, idiosyncratic education: the classic books of Europe, whichever of them happened to turn up in small-town used bookstores; the French language; the Catholic religion; mathematics up through plane geometry; and more than American girls usually get of the glorious and tragic history of Poland. And typing. Marta was big on typing. If you could type, you could get an office job, you could meet a man, a distinguished man-that is, not like Dad. Sonia could type over sixty words a minute by the time she was fifteen and handled all the small correspondence of the circus office.

Sonia rarely thinks of this part of her life and what came after. She has come to terms with her past, as she learned to say in her therapy. Coming to terms: a curious phrase, she thinks, a metaphor from the military and affairs of state. Armies and governments at war come to terms-who will yield and who will gain-and the use of the phrase in therapy supposes a war in the psyche that must be ended. But it never ends; it is like the War on Terror.

Her first meeting with Farid, on a warm day in late May: sitting on a park bench, her belly hollow and griping, with not a dime for food, watching a woman feeding bread to a flock of pigeons and wondering, in a hysterical way, what the woman would say if Sonia got down on her knees and scrabbled for the bread among the filthy birds. A man sat down on the opposite end of her bench, took a bag out of his briefcase, opened a Styrofoam container, and began to eat from it. From which the most wonderful odor arose, spicy and rich with the promise of stewed meats. She felt the spit well up in her mouth and felt also the blush of shamed anger. She looked at the man-stared, really-and after a while he looked up at her. He was dressed like a student, in chinos and a checked short-sleeved shirt, sneakers on his feet. He met her eyes, then looked nervously away.

The pigeon fancier dumped her bread bag, shaking out the crumbs, and left. Sonia sat wretchedly in place, thinking about money, about what she would and would not do to get it, about the man on the bench, heedlessly eating, when with a clatter of wings the whole flock of pigeons rose into the air, and within that clatter came another, stranger sound, a flat noise, like a bat hitting a pillow.

In the center of the asphalt path a small tan hawk clutched a pigeon, from whose open mouth a small ruby of blood shone. The next moment the hawk flew off with slow flaps of its long wings, straining to lift its lunch.

Sonia said, “Wow!” and looked at the man on the bench. His face was transformed by wonder and he smiled at her, white teeth flashing in a face that was almost the same color as the hawk’s plumage. He said something in a bubbling, throaty language she did not recognize and, at her puzzled expression, recited in slightly accented English:

“This was fated from the beginning of the world,

That this pigeon should meet her hawk.

So, we too, from the moment I saw your coils of black hair

And let your talons tear my heart.

“It’s a poem from my country,” he added. “Originally in Urdu.”

“Are you an Urdu?” she asked, and touched her black hair, half consciously.

He laughed sweetly. “No, Urdu is the language of the poet. I am Punjabi, from Pakistan.”

“Is that like India?”

“Very unlike,” he said, still smiling. “We are neighbors, however, like that hawk and the pigeon.”

Then he introduced himself formally, and she did the same, and they chatted there on the sunny bench. He was Farid Laghari, a law student at Columbia, just finishing his degree. She hid her own life from him then, ashamed, and the shame surprised her. She was ashamed of being an ignorant horse girl in a failed circus, speaking to this polite and educated man. Now she recalled her mother speaking of manners and breeding, and how the carnival people had none, and Sonia had not understood what she meant; she had imagined it was part of the fantasy world called Poland or an oblique way of nagging her husband.

But this was the thing itself, here on this park bench: manners and good breeding. She turned toward it like a flower to the sun.

After a time he looked at his watch and told her he had to go. They stood up, and the world spun and she fell clumsily against him.

“What is wrong?” he cried. “Are you ill?”

She was starving. She had breakfasted on a cup of coffee and a doughnut at six that morning and had then cleaned the stalls and exercised the horses before cleaning herself and dressing for the city. She confessed this and he stared at her, shocked.

“Horses?” he said. “You are a groom?”

And then the whole story came out, what she did: the stranded circus, her disgraceful poverty, though never disgraceful before now, but she could not stop talking to him. After listening to the tale he insisted on buying her something to eat; he took her to a restaurant on Madison Avenue, bought her a meal such as she had never eaten, and watched her consume it with evident pleasure. During the meal it emerged that she was looking for work as a typist, and he said, “This must be fate again, because I am just now seeking a typist. I have whole notebooks that must be transcribed for the law review, and later there is my thesis to be typed as well.”

So they agreed. She would begin working for him the next day.

At Zurich Sonia boards the Pakistani International Airlines flight to Lahore. It is another red-eye, scheduled to arrive in Lahore at seven-thirty the following morning. She is seated next to a bulging Lahori matron of a familiar type, a real begum who, on spotting Sonia’s getup and learning her name, immediately engages her in conversation or, rather, monologue. She begins in a thick subcontinental English but after the plane has ascended switches to the Mahji dialect of Panjabi. Sonia has not spoken Panjabi for some years and at first she picks up barely one word in three, but the flight is long, the begum tireless, and in a while the old synapses start firing again and she can appreciate in full the perfect banality of the discourse.

Little response is required in any tongue. The woman drones on and Sonia’s thoughts are free to drift, carried back by the flow of Panjabi to her first entrance into Lahore and her first meeting with B. B. Laghari.

There he was in his white suit and his British school tie, behind a rose-wood desk in his study with the fan turning slowly overhead. She stood in front of him like a schoolgirl and he stared at her out of his hawk face, although not unkindly, and said, “My son tells me you have an interesting story. I would like to hear it. Please take a seat.”

She did. “What part of the story?”

He answered, “All of it, if you please. I have a great love of stories. Start with your family. Farid tells me they were performers in the circus.”

So she told him a story, one that would entrance him, one that would make him have sympathy for her and, more than that, make him think of her as an interesting person, because she had nowhere else to go and he was the power. Some of it was even true.

She started with her parents. Tadeuz Bielicki is a stage magician in Poland, working in a provincial town. It’s wartime. Marta Kracinski is in the Polish resistance, on the run from the Gestapo. Tadeuz saw her in the freezing little theater of some miserable town and approached her after the show; they spoke; she asked for help: You’re a magician, she said, make me disappear! And he did. He used the hidden compartments of his apparatus, and they escaped to Yugo slavia. It turns out that he was some kind of minor Allied agent, and after the war, as pay-back, the visas appear, first for Britain, then for the United States, where Sonia is born.