My husband is very impotant man. He's a scholar. To me, it seems that he spends more time sitting in a cafe talking to other scholars. I don't know if they are studying or not. To me, it looks like they are chatting. But I don't know, I'm only a woman. I look after our family, and I am not a scholar. I do not go into the cefeU in town and spend hours talking with other men. I stay at home and look after our children and prepare food. When I am not preparing food or looking after children, I like to read books. I like to read books of adventure stories, of traveller's tales, of poetry. I like books that make me wonder and be amazed at the world we live in. I like books that take me far away from our town and the desert on one side and the sea on the other.

  We live in a town that lies between the sea on one side, the desert on the other, and a river to each side of us. They call our country Mesopotamia, the land between rivers. Because our town is a port, and because it has two rivers, there are often many people from other lands here. My husband says he meets men from India, from China, from Europe and from Africa. People from all over the world come to our town. Often they come to buy or sell things, but they also come to talk, to meet other people, to share ideas and opinions, to think about different ways of seeing the world. When a lot of people from different countries and different cultures meet, new ideas are born.
  At night I lie awake on our bed thinking. "What are you thinking about?" my husband asks me. "Nothing" I reply. My husband shakes his head in despair. "Women!" he says. "They think about nothing!"
  My husband often brings back books when he goes to his meetings with other scholars. He stays awake at night pretending to read them. I say "pretending" because I know he doesn't read them really. Sometimes I go in to his study late at night and I find him asleep, snoring with a book open in front of him. When I wake him up he says how interesting the book he's reading is. I ask him to explain it to me, to tell me about it, but he says that women don't understand such things. I let him go back to sleep and take the books for myself.
  Some of them are very interesting. There are collections of stories from all around the world. They make me think. They make me think about lots of things. And the books about arithmetic from Greece and India, and the books about astronomy and navigation from Europe and Africa, they make me think about nothing.
  "How many numbers are there?" I ask my husband. He likes it when I ask him questions. It makes him feel wise and intelligent. "Nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine" he answers.
  "And if I add one more?"
  "Then the world will end" he says. I don't believe him.
  "How many stars are there?" I ask him. He doesn't know. "Where does the land end and the sky begin?", "What happens if a ship sails until the end of the sea?" My husband can't answer any of my questions. He thinks I'm stupid because I ask them. "Is ‘nothing' a number?"
  "Of course it isn't!" he replies.
  "How can ‘nothing' be a number? If a merchant has five horses, then he sells five horses, how many horses does he have?"
  "No horses, but lots of money".
  "If I buy ten aubergines from the market, then I eat ten aubergines, what do I have?"
  "A fat stomach". We laugh. He thinks I'm stupid. His answers are right if we only think of merchants, traders, salesmen and market people. His answers are right as long as we think of money and buying things and eating things. I understand this. But when I read the books about philosophy that he brings back from his meetings, I think that there is more than this. I think that the world cannot be explained in terms of buying and selling things. We cannot describe the world as if it were only a huge market. "Nothing" is not a number that is good for people who buy and sell things. But if you want to be a navigator, if you want to travel and discover other countries, if you need to know where the sea ends and the sky begins, you need different numbers.
  I am helping my children to learn. We practice counting. We count all our fingers, then our toes too. Five fingers on each hand. Ten fingers altogether. Five toes on each foot. Ten toes altogether. "What comes next?" asks my son. "What comes after ten fingers and ten toes?"
  "Then you have to start again!" I tell them. My son hides all his fingers and makes a fist. "How many fingers?" he asks me.
  "None!" I reply.
  But how can "none" or "nothing" be "something"? At night, when it's cool I walk out into the desert because I like to be alone. I draw numbers in the sand. I draw a line for "one", two lines for "two", three for "three"... and for "nothing"? What should I draw for "nothing"? I put a coin down in the sand, then I remove it. It leaves a small, empty circle in the sand. This is it - sifr, empty. Zero.
  My sign looks like a plate after someone has eaten all the food. It looks like a cage when all the animals have gone. It looks like a sack with all the grain taken from it. It is nothing, and it is also something.
  I write down my symbol on paper. I write down an explanation of what it means. I write down why it will be useful to geographers, mapmakers, travellers, astronomists, navigators, scientists, philosophers and poets. I put the piece of paper in one of the books my husband takes back to his meetings in the cafe.
  The next day, my husband comes back from his meeting at the cafe looking very happy. He tells me that he has just made an important discovery. Some of the other men in the cafe were very interested in the piece of paper in the book. He will probably become famous, he tells me, rich and famous. "History will remember me as a great mathematician".
  I go out into the desert at night again. I try to count all the stars in the sky. I can't decide how many there are, and what number could ever possibly describe them. I will be ignored by the important men in the cafe meetings. I will be forgotten by history. Perhaps that was because I invented something. I invented nothing.

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  Fouad sits in the cafe that looks out over Jaffa Street listening to the sad, sad music playing on an old tape recorder. "Oum Khalsoum", says one of the other men sitting in the cafe to nobody in particular. "This is Oum Khalsoum singing".

  Fouad takes another sip of sweet mint tea and nods in agreement without saying anything. Fouad's uncle lives in Egypt, and every time Fouad visits him, he tells Fouad the story of how he saw the legendary singer at one of her concerts in Cairo in 1970, not long before she died. The song seems to go on forever, and it's very sad.

  Fouad thinks it's beautiful, but he doesn't want to hear it now. It's too sad for him. It makes him think of his uncle in Egypt who he hasn't seen for many years now, and also about the reason why his uncle lives in Egypt while his aunt lived in Lebanon and why he, on the other hand, lives in Jordan, and why he is in Jerusalem now.

  Fouad's father had died a few months ago. After that, Fouad found that there were so many things that he had wanted to ask his father, but had never asked. He realised that he knew very little about his own family, and decided to try and find out more about the place where his father had grown up, and where his grandparents (who had died when he was very young) were from.

  He has now spent a couple of days wandering around Jerusalem with an old, torn photograph in his hand. The photograph shows the whole family, his grandparents standing proudly at the centre of a group of four children in front of a house on a busy street. Next to the house there seems to be a garden with what look like cedar or olive trees in it.

  Fouad, though, can't find anywhere in this modern Jerusalem that looks much like the street or the house where the photograph was taken. He feels sadder than the sad song playing in the cafe, thinking now that he might never find the place where his father had been born and the place where his grandparents had lived until they moved away in 1947.

  At first they had gone to Lebanon, then to Jordan and finally to Egypt, always staying with some distant relatives or old friends, trying to find work and a place to live. They left parts of their family, sons, daughters, cousins, uncles and aunts all over the Middle East. Some of them went to France or Britain or America. None of them ever lived in same place for long, never being able to find a home.

  Oum Khalsoum keeps on singing her sad, sad song, and Fouad decides to head back home over the bridge into Jordan, hoping the checkpoint hasn't been closed. He pays a few shekels then goes out onto the street.

  As he walks out he accidentally bumps into a young man about his own age hurrying in the opposite direction. They look at each other in the eyes for just one second as they both apologise, then walk on, in different directions along the street.

  Yossi is in a hurry because he has to get to Tel Aviv to catch a plane. He thinks he'll probably take a taxi as it's the quickest and easiest way, and nobody really likes travelling by bus at the moment. He's going to Poland to visit to his great aunt who has just moved back to Warsaw at the age of 93. His great aunt has spent most of her life in America, but said that she wanted to come back to the place where she was born before the end of her life. Yossi thinks she's a silly, sentimental old woman. Surely she's much better off in America than in Poland! However, he understands her need to find her home again. Yossi's great aunt was one of the lucky ones in his family. His grandparents, too, had been lucky - in a way. They had stayed in Poland, and were still alive in 1945. Many other people in their family hadn't survived. After that, they moved to Israel, and had never been back to Poland again. "This is our home now" they said to Yossi.

  As he finally gets on the plane, Yossi thinks about his friend Agnieszka who he had met in Poland the last time he had been there. He went to see the small village near Krakow where his grandparents had been brought up, and to see the small Jewish Quarter in the old part of Krakow. He thought it was very beautiful, but was amazed at how different it was from his life in Israel. He found it difficult to imagine how different his grandparents' lives had been from his own.

  He had been hoping to meet up with Agnieszka again, but unfortunately he had received an email from her a couple of months ago. Agnieszka was leaving Poland. In the small town where they were from it was too difficult to get a job, she said. She had managed to get a visa to stay in Britain.

  After she had arrived in London, she had written another email to Yossi. "I feel like a refugee" she said. She had found a job working in a cafe in Finsbury Park in north London, she said. It wasn't the job she really wanted to do, but it was OK while she studied English and looked for something better. Yossi remembered the name of the cafe, which was run by Turkish people: "The Oum Khalsoum".

  Fouad is walking back over the bridge to a land which is where he lives but which he doesn't feel is his home. Yossi is on a plane going from one home to another, more distant, home. Agnieszka is in London, feeling homesick, thinking about making a new home in a country she knows will never be hers, in a place where nobody seems to be at home.

  She cleans another table and looks at the people who come into her cafe: from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Congo, Sri Lanka, people who have looked for refuge from famine, oppression and poverty from all over the world. They spend time listening to Oum Khalsoum singing sad, sad songs and wondering if they will ever go home, and wondering where home is, and thinking that they could all sing songs that are even sadder than those of Oum Khalsoum.

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