Content if not devout Party members until the unification, her parents had not been too blithe about her conversion to any faith, let alone one they considered so rigorous and strange; but after all, her father mused, nothing should astound us—who could ever have predicted the changes in our own lives, and at such a late stage? Besides, they were immediately enchanted with Salim, his gracious demeanor matched by that eccentric sense of humor. Where, they wondered, did he ever develop such a gift for mimicry? It was quite amazing to hear their son-in-law capturing every inflection of Depardieu’s voice; if you closed your eyes for a moment (as Lenore’s mother had done, sitting in the old burgundy wingchair) you would have thought that exuberant bear of a man was taking up the whole room, only to discover with surprise the unassuming, compact figure with its dusky oval face.

Salim had shrugged at their amusement, offering an explanation as simple as it was humble: he was, in his own words, un musicien manqué, recognizing that his exquisitely attentive ear lacked the necessary complement of dexterity and discipline required to resolve his merely receptive talents into the active mode that professional performance demanded. Lenore had lain beside him, enfolding him as he wept over the failure of his dream; but in his customary way, he had transformed tragedy into charm. The unfulfilled talent allowed him to get inside the music of another’s voice, just the way a flautist, he suggested, has to find the path to the center of the music.

This time, of course, her mother was more interested in Nuria than in Salim: when last they visited, the child had not yet begun to speak, and the telephone imposed an artificial atmosphere; her grandmother had awaited a conversation with eager patience. But for most of the trip from the airport, the girl only offered a brief, warm smile before her attention was absorbed by the novelty of her surroundings. For the time being, Magdalena had to content herself with her daughter’s news, reminding herself, for Salim’s sake, not to revert to German. Again she expressed her delight that the tenure process had been less grueling than Lenore had feared.

And the flight from Istanbul—no problems? Unremarkable, Lenore reported, except that Nuria had been an angel. But that was no surprise by now: all the way from Boston she had slept or stared out the window, unable to believe that what she saw below were clouds. She was convinced it was the ocean, even though the waves didn’t seem to move.

“Well,” Salim had hesitated. “It’s a different sort of ocean.”

Lenore’s father chuckled at that, but said nothing, distracted as ever by the traffic; all those years in Berlin he had never driven. When they emigrated he had taken up the challenge, but he had not grown entirely comfortable; even now he turned warily down the Rue Prévoyance, as if even in nearing his own neighborhood he might suddenly lose his way.

Her father had been rather well-connected before the Wall came down, yet not so intimately that he was suspected of dangerous loyalties to the old regime; it was not difficult for him to arrange to spend the last three years before retirement as a minor functionary in the German Embassy. And though he missed his native city, this life had its share of delights, not least of which were the long walks he took with Magdalena in the Bois de Vincennes. After a lifetime in East Berlin, the quiet was both welcome and oddly unsettling, but Paris was very close, when they needed a little cosmopolitan glow.

When they emerged from the elevator, he began fumbling for his door key, never quite certain which pocket he had slipped it into. “Why don’t you keep them all on the same ring, Franz?” his wife often asked. But he could only lamely reply that the key to your home was different; it was separate from the others, just as you didn’t keep your toothbrush with the brushes you used to clean the floor or the toilet. Magdalena was always a bit vexed at that reply, but Salim suggested that it made perfect sense, provided you looked at it the way Franz did.

The large apartment was redolent with the smell of braised chicken and onions. Magdalena had risen at four, her husband announced, to begin her preparations. Not that the dish took so long, but her excitement at their arrival made her restless.

Over the meal, they shared stories of the recent fortnight in Istanbul. Absorbed in listening, Franz nearly forgot the protocol, and once or twice briefly slanted the bottle of Beaujolais in Salim’s or Lenore’s direction before snatching it away and discreetly pouring his wife another glass.

But he had no trouble recalling Salim’s family, asking particularly about each member. He had even relished, on first meeting his daughter’s husband, what a friend of hers once called the obligatory martyrdom of photos. Magdalena could not fail to be impressed with her husband; she still had trouble with some of those names, despite her good faith in trying. When Lenore had first announced what her daughter was to be named, an uncomfortable pause ensued; the silence spanned the distance between Boston and Paris several times. No doubt her mother had hoped for something more conventional—Elsa or Amalie or even Hedwig, like her own beloved grandmother.

“What does that mean, exactly—Nuria? It’s a Turkish name?”

“Aramaic, actually, though a Spanish friend of ours insists it’s Catalan. It means glänzende. Lumineuse.”

“And your Uncle Murad,” Franz wanted to know, “what about him?” He always asked after him, even though he wasn’t really Salim’s uncle but his father’s oldest friend. Based on a photograph, he had taken an instantaneous liking to him. “Now there’s the face of a man,” he had proclaimed. Murad belonged to the Mevlevi Order, having begun dancing at age thirteen, and during this visit he had arranged for the family to attend a special sema one evening. For days afterward Nuria had repeated the dancers’ movements, swirling about with one hand raised, the other lowered. Before they left she said she wanted a dress like the one the men wore.

Over her mother’s gentle laugh, Lenore confessed that it was hard to tell exactly what the girl understood. But she took in everything; one had to be careful with the offhand remark. She had always loved to watch her mother pray, echoing her ablutions and prostrations, watching her intently during dhikr, reaching out to touch the soft red tassels of her mother’s masbaha, as she recited the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names.

Early this spring, just before she turned three, she had asked her mother, “What is the one-hundred name?”

“The hundredth name?” Rarely did Lenore ever correct her directly.

“They always say hundreds. Nobody talks about ‘Ninety-nines and ninety-nines’ of toys, or anything.”

Lenore caressed her cheek. “No one knows that. At least, not until they get to Paradise, where the hundredth name is hidden.”

“Nuria, my child,” her grandmother said, gathering the dinner plates. “Help me slice the apples and lay out the cheese.” After ten years in France, her mother now invariably provided a platter of cheeses as a coda to any formal meal.

“We have to meet sometime,” Franz insisted, “your parents and us. None of us is getting any younger.” Then, as if the thought were too painful, he asked what else they had seen in Istanbul, and how Nuria had reacted.

She had squealed with delight, Salim said, at the fountains near the Blue Mosque, casting their arcs toward the central pillar of water, and then had run through the shadows of the trees surrounding the edifice, holding her potato börek so tightly that by the time she finally nibbled at it, the pastry was a mush of crumbs. Her ecstasy had subsided once they entered the mosque, and she stood very still under the double circle of suspended lights, rapt as she stared at the colors of the windows in the domed recesses, fascinated by the red and gold glass, the large petals of deep blue like the wings of an angel.

But tonight Nuria was weary and hungry, and wasn’t thinking about windows or angels.

“This one is the best,” she announced, sinking her teeth into another creamy lump of goat cheese.

On Friday the young family took the subway to Place Monge. After prayers, they walked along the gallery of the mosque, its walls lined with radiating tiles of blue and brown. Passing the concentric designs, Nuria gently tapped out constellations among the outer and inner rings. Carefully she avoided touching the white center. “Where do these maps take you?” she asked.

Her father smiled. “Closer and closer.”

In the café behind the mosque, sitting under a fig tree, Salim and Lenore drank Moroccan mint tea and spoke to the garrulous Lebanese waiter while Nuria nibbled at her baklava, scattering almost as many crumbs on her dress as she fed to the sparrows. Little wonder, her mother laughed, when she declared, long before they returned to Vincennes, that she was starving.

A few days later, all of them went to the city together. Salim had insisted on inviting Magdalena and Franz to a restaurant he had heard about, around the corner from Notre Dame. When they passed the cathedral early that evening, Lenore remarked that neither she nor Salim had ever been inside.

Her father declined to enter, and was baffled at his son-in-law’s eagerness. “Why shouldn’t I go in?” Salim smiled. “Wasn’t the Archbishop born a Jew?”

“It’s not about you,” Franz frowned. “I still have trouble with churches.”

“Someday, if you’re interested,” Salim said, “I could tell you what Uncle Murad has to say about such things.”

Inside the cathedral, Nuria gazed about in wonderment at the height of the vault, the arches, the clusters of pillars, the vivid shadows, the rack of fluttering candles. Suddenly her father touched her shoulder and pulled her out of the stream of tourists, pointing behind them at the Rose Window. In the afternoon light it was ablaze with luminosity, its violet kindled to intense but tender warmth.

Entranced by the colors, by the beauty that possessed her wide eyes, she heaved a sigh, and with a voice clear and pure with praise cried out loudly, “Allahu Akbar.”

For a moment Lenore was mortified, and her mother mirrored the shock in her own face. Two or three old women, wearing long coats despite the warmth, stared up at the little family. Who could tell whether dismay, disgust or simply astonishment gathered in the wrinkles of their faces? The horrific image of a furious sexton bustling them out of the cathedral assailed her.

At the peak of her chagrin, a tall man passing down the nave beside them halted abruptly, a large volume of music tucked under his arm. Turning, he lowered his long slender face, peering directly into Nuria’s eyes. The girl smiled at him, noticing that his closely trimmed beard was not unlike her father’s. Raising his hand toward her face, his wrist pivoted, the curve of long, cool fingers caressed her cheek.

“Oui, ma petite,” he said, in a soft tenor voice. “C’est vrai.”

He cast a fraternal smile at the parents of the child, as if to dispel a portion of their embarrassment, gathering them in a brief look before turning to continue on his way down the nave.

A short while later, they rejoined her father, who stood intently listening to a man playing a melancholy flute in the square. As her mother told him what had just happened, Lenore determined to recall the man’s face, fix it in her memory. But she was uncertain about his eyes. They had seemed blue-gray, yet in another light they might have been some other color altogether.

Her father was surprised to hear his son-in-law’s enthusiasm for the cathedral.

“Yes,” Franz conceded. “I suppose it’s rather beautiful.”

“Oh, more than that, I think,” Salim gently countered, slipping his arm around his father-in-law’s shoulders. “In a way, you know, we are all expatriates, perpetual wanderers,” he said. “Who knows, in this world, where he really belongs?”