2

Farida

Not two weeks after Hela Mansour returned to the village by the southern road to face her terrible fate, Farida arrived in a Land Rover. She was absolutely stunning: she had big, kohled eyes and long dark lashes, she was tall—taller than five foot eight—and svelte, and she had a beguiling gait. If she'd been born nowadays, she'd have certainly become a model. This was the woman who would change the emotional texture of Sarmada for years to come, back before she was consumed by oblivion, before her life came to an end on this very evening.

I had to return. Sarmada had become Scheherazade, weaving the story of my home, so that I could come to realize, unsettlingly, that everything I'd ever done in my career had been nothing more than a reaction, a reflex without grounds. And grounds here means only one thing: belief. I saw Sarmada in a new light. Farida had thrown open the windows of my memory. A single sentence out of my childhood and a few dozen conversations stored away in the hearts and minds of the villagers, that was what I had to dredge up. As I rescued those memories from the darkness, Sarmada burst upon me in all its seductive charm, its force, its depth, and its captivating plainness.

Sarmada had been through a bitter winter in the year that Farida came; and two years after the Six-Day War the country was still suffering from its defeat. A terrible emptiness had engulfed the village, its people, the trees and the stones, in a heavy silence. After Hela’s murder, most people in Sarmada had an uncomfortable, choking feeling. The image of her being slaughtered had tainted the village mood; it was depressing, and the air was heavy with guilt. Places, like people, live and feel: they hate, they love, and their moods deteriorate. They get bored, too. You can walk into any town or city in the world and figure out its mood before you’ve even drunk your first glass of the local water.

Salama explained to me what it was like. “Like having a hairball stuck in your throat.” “If it hadn’t been for Farida, I don’t think we’d have ever been happy again,” he added, whispering. I asked people about Farida. I loitered around streets and hangouts. I met people, listened carefully, wrote and took notes—all acts of opportunism that weighed on my soul and made me think again and again about how blind I’d been. How had I overlooked all that was happening around me? Was it really true that all this life, all this coming and going, and the anger and uproar, had been here beside me the whole time? Was it true that the great questions and poignant answers had been with me for more than thirty years while I was busy chasing dreams in Paris and delusions in Dubai?

I looked anew at every proudly solid stone, at the trees and streams. I was amazed by the gutters coming down off the roofs, which were tiled with stone, cement, and mud. I wandered through the desert of stories. I gathered everything up and saw that it made a banquet with enough for everyone: the banquet of life, most likely. But I'd better disappear and let the place tell its own story. I'll watch from a distance, silent but with every sense piqued. I won't interfere; I'll simply record it all and send it to the physics professor waiting for me in Paris.

The people of Sarmada were living with pain that stabbed at something inside of them. A kind of remorse had taken hold of many of those who'd witnessed Hela Mansour's murder; it was a feeling that they, too, were butchers. Hela Mansour had taken away something they'd gotten used to. She'd refused to give them the dignity of a secret story to pass around behind her back, something to chew the fat over, to embellish or pare down as required, as they'd done over those many years since she'd run away with her Amazigh lover. No, instead, she'd proclaimed her return and lanced the boil herself. She'd decided for herself how it would end and surrendered to fate without reservation. They wanted a new story, something to wipe away the trace of that disgraceful death. Their lives were as meaningless as they'd ever been and the place simply couldn't take the guilt much longer.

It surely didn't help that they couldn't bring themselves to forgive the Mansour brothers for what they'd done. They tried the best they could, but they still harbored a vague disapproval. Quietly and deeply confused, the brothers withdrew, and over the next few years each would suffer his own individual collapse. The youngest emigrated to Colombia after experiencing the ecstasy of Farida's body and then being denied her love. Two of the brothers were drawn to Khalwat alBayada, the hermitage of ascetic Druze shaykhs in Lebanon, who—cut off from the world and worldly life for the rest of their lives—were free to unlock the secrets of the Epistles of Wisdom and write commentaries on the Unique Text, while they waited on the doorstep of God's house in case He should choose to purify their hearts. Five years later, the fourth brother was to die fighting in the October War, and Nawwaf was left alone. He returned to the house in the center of the village and stood guard over the shadows. He spoke to the mulberry tree and at every full moon, he wept and, as if howling, repeated over and over, “Forgive me, Hela, forgive me...”

The day Farida arrived in Sarmada with Salman al-Khattar, the driver and gambler, she was twenty-six. He brought her back in his famous car after he'd spent three nights in the eastern district. The man risked everything, as though he didn't care if he won or lost but played only for the thrill of the bet. It was a habit he'd learned from life itself: nothing's worth holding onto. He spent money with a kind of lunatic generosity, living by the motto: Spend and ye shall receive! On that particular occasion, just as he was about to fold the rubbish hand he'd been dealt, he spotted that magnificent figure walk up, dazzling, the faint light falling over her as she crossed the courtyard of the mountain house. His mood did a complete one-eighty. Luck showered him with considerable winnings and, in fact, right at that moment it began planning a whole new destiny for him.

The card sharps from the neighboring village of al-Manabi had come together that night; they were known for their skill and for turning anything and everything into a bet. No matter what happened in the village, it was always met by the question “Care to make things interesting?”

But he, Salman al-Khattar, that is, had no trouble winning at sette e mezzo, poker, blackjack, and baccarat. Not only the Queen of Hearts, but the Queen of Clubs was smiling at him. One unlikely hunch after another never betrayed him and the pile of cash and valuables in front of him got bigger and bigger.

Muaz, whose house they were playing at, bet everything he had: his wife’s bracelets, the Rado Diastar watch he’d won off a guy in Beirut, and yet the guest kept on winning. Even when Salman got nervous and figured it’d be safer to lose a few hands, Lady Luck had other ideas; the pile of money, watches, gold necklaces, and wives’ bracelets only grew. The more he tried to lose, the more winnings came flowing in. In the end, the men of the house and the gamblers of al-Manabi lost everything. Salman packed all his winnings into a hessian sack and got ready to leave. He didn’t want to patronize those hardened gamblers; after all, offering to give them back some of what he’d won would’ve been worse than winning it in the first place. He tried to stay calm and to hide his excitement; he’d never won so much in his life! And that was when Farida strolled up, bold as anything, electrifying the tension among them. As they tried to scrape up the shame of their losses, she baldly announced, “The jackpot’s still up for grabs.”

They looked up. She was all defiance, all insistence, and any standing they’d felt evaporated in an instant. “One last hand,” she said to Salman. “You win, you get to keep everything and you get to marry me. You lose, you give it all back… but you still get me.” Her poor uncle didn’t know what to think. His jaw dropped and all he could do was wait to hear an answer. Salman didn’t need to be asked twice: those big, bold and desiring eyes had stirred his heart and filled his mind with a sweet and sticky madness.

As chivalrous as any nobleman, he emptied his winnings out onto the table and said, “I lose. Go get ready.” He threw the empty sack on the floor and turned to the others. “Tell the shaykh he’s got a ceremony to perform.”

She drove away with him, leaving her cousins and relatives behind. They couldn’t hide how happy they were that she’d saved them from the idiocy they’d brought on themselves; they’d almost been forced to unload a pistol clip into the lucky stranger's skull. Bitterly, but with grim smiles, they sat down to divide up what they'd wagered.

She arrived in Sarmada, stepping down from the Land Rover in her crimson dress, which, along with her timid gait, her giraffe-like neck, and her lovely, big eyes, stayed embedded in the memory of many. The first person to lay eyes on her was Aboud Scatterbrains. His jaw dropped and his eyes glazed over; her beauty—which would soon be the death of him—undid him. A number of nosy people came to Salman al-Khattar's house to ask about this vision of loveliness who'd come out of nowhere. “Who is she? What's she doing at the al-Khattar's?”

Salman's mother, Fadila, put an end to the questions: “The wedding party's next Thursday. It'll go on for three nights.”

Sarmada danced until dawn. The village needed to forget the bloodbath that had taken place two weeks before and the fear that had bound many in its chains. On foggy days, they could see Hela Mansour's headless ghost roaming through the village after midnight, trying to collect her scattered innards. Wellwishers came from all the neighboring villages, al-Mantar, al-Harash, al-Qita, al-Matukh, and Sufuh al-Rih. Everyone knew Salman al-Khattar, the “chauffeur,” the noblest, handsomest, best-respected driver in the mountains. They could spot that Land Rover of his from a mile away. It was an ambulance for the sick and a coach for brides and grooms, it transported the isolated, and sheltered the aimless and those between paths. Salman was an adventurer: he had a legend and a woman waiting in every hamlet, and in every town some buddies to play cards with or to smoke hash, which grew in abundance in the volcanic soil until the Revolutionary Government got involved and decided to uproot everything and plant wheat instead. Salman still knew how to get his hands on “God's high,” though, which was what they called a joint.

The men got drunk. They danced the Dabke and emptied whole clips into the air. Endless bursts from automatic rifles, 7.5mm, and Baker and Makarov pistols peppered the sky. In a country that'd been defeated before the war had even begun, their repressed, unavenged manhood was on display for history's sake. They still had their self-respect, you know, the people of the village, even after the Six-Day “Setback,” even after they'd watched a young woman be slaughtered. After the pseudo-gun salute, the feast began.

Five separate fights were stamped out, and they would've ruined the party had it not been for Umm Salman, her relatives' steel nerves and her advance planning. She'd taken eleven young men aside and gave them each five lire to stay sober—no drink, no hash—for the whole party. She gave them strict instructions, which can be easily summarized: If anyone makes trouble, throw them the hell out—but don't make a scene. If necessary, take them into the barn where we feed the cattle, tie them up and let them sleep it off.

The party went off without a hitch, and the marriage, too, was consummated without complication. A white banner dappled with nine drops of blood flapped in the breeze, announcing a deflowering that had been some time coming. The final harvest produced eleven drunk and stoned men locked up in Fadila al-Khattar's hay store. They were set free the next morning.

Farida's family missed the party. Not a single relative turned up, even though the al-Khattars had sent an invitation. To tell the truth, there wasn't anyone in al-Manabi to send: her father had been killed in a fight with a Bedouin, her mother had remarried and moved with her new husband to Brazil, and her uncle, in whose house she'd been brought up, harbored all sorts of resentment, as her father had left him with debts that he was still paying off. As far as he was concerned, the girl’s mother was a whore who’d slept with every man in the mountains until she finally got a blind man to marry her and left the country.

Farida had returned the favor, though, repaying the family all she’d cost them in an instant. She’d given them back everything they’d lost with a noble gesture that they just didn’t understand at the time. She’d been raised in that house, but they’d always treated her like a servant. After the disaster of their loss to Salman, her uncle Muaz and his relatives were ready to forget all about those three nights and they hoped desperately that the Land Rover driver would keep all that had happened a secret. They didn’t come to the party. Rather they disappeared from her life altogether.

On the second night of the wedding, she swam in a magical halo. Her eyes rang with mystery, passion, and an intoxicating coquetry. Salman had been good to her. He let her taste the body’s splendors slowly at first, counting on many repeats. He let it happen gently and only after he’d first celebrated with her, lavished her with gifts and irresistible affection.

Sarmada was overwhelmed by the al-Khattar family’s generous hospitality and decided to pay it back the next night. Families of well-wishers came from all the neighboring villages and contributed to an astounding feast studded with huge trays of croquettes and tender sheep’s heads. Ghee flowed without end and magazine after magazine of bullets flashed in the sky. As the party raged, a 1947 SIG pistol was loaded and fired into the air, but then it suddenly jammed in the hands of one of the guests, a member of the al-Qazzaz family. The young men of Sarmada sniggered at the pistol no one had ever heard of and at the stranger whose embarrassment was more than he could bear. His manhood was on the line! He couldn’t manage to fix the jam that had stalled the final bullet, and rather than take care of it later, he started trying to yank the bullet out of the blasted chamber frantically—with the barrel pointed at the crowd. Fadila had the presence of mind to walk up and point the barrel toward the ground, but before she could reach it, the bullet shot out, straight through her right hand, whizzing over the head of one of the children who was busy collecting empty cartridges, singeing Umm Numan's headscarf and Buthayna the groom's sister's shawl, and ending up in Salman al-Khattar's chest; he'd only just returned to his seat beside the bride after leading a whirlwind round of happy Dabke dancing. He died on the spot.

The boisterous wedding party turned into a blood-soaked funeral, and Farida had to live with the mark of ill omen from that day forth. The great dread that would envelop Sarmada in the coming days had begun.

The villagers took turns inviting me over; each had something to add and something to cover up. Some of the local dignitaries were getting on in years and I seemed to make them feel young again. I listened closely and put the story together the way the village told it to me. It beggared belief: Farida's death hadn't actually buried Sarmada's secrets, on the contrary, everybody wanted to come clean all of a sudden. For the first time ever, I'd come upon a story that everybody agreed on. Let me paint the picture for you now. I promise not to butt in.

I turned on my mobile and found a text from work and another from a friend of mine in Damascus who said he'd been expecting me for several days now. There was a message from Azza Tawfiq, too. She teased me affectionately and said she'd been dreaming about Sarmada every night since we'd met. She was dying to come see the place for herself, she said, and she begged me to hurry up as her curiosity was killing her. I replied, telling her that my own curiosity was about to cost me my job and that Hela Mansour was still in Sarmada's heart, still alive in shattered memories. I turned off the phone as I walked up to Raifeh's house. A few old women who claimed they'd been friends with Hela and Farida had got together there and they took turns telling me the story of the mythic torment that plagued the village in the days following the wedding.

After the forty days of mourning were up, Farida found she didn't have a lot of options: she could either stay in Sarmada and face her fate or she could go back to nowhere. The al-Khattar family just watched her spitefully, and as their feelings of hurt and loss grew, she began to hear muttered suggestions that she ought to leave and return to her own family. Shaykh Farouq came to see her and asked her gruffly about her “plans,” but the message was clear. She wasn't welcome in that house any longer and it was time to get going.

The following morning she began to pack up her things. She was getting ready to leave Sarmada, but she didn't know where for; she just knew she had to get out of that awful place. And then something happened to put her departure on hold. The cemetery opened its devilish maw and began receiving corpses. At Salman's funeral, the throng, who were pushing and shoving in their agitation, caused the coffin to teeter twice on the pallbearers' shoulders. Some of the women screamed wildly and burst into tears at the ill omen. “Steady the coffin! Steady the coffin!”

When they brought the coffin out of the women's majlis, they danced the groom's dance as he was carried on their shoulders, and the mourners all threw handfuls of rice and rose petals into the air. They broke out in wedding songs and well wishes and forgot all about his death, cheering him on like a groom come to fetch his bride. Sarmada and half the mountain bewailed the groom who hadn’t got to enjoy his wedding day. In the days that followed, the al-Khattar family was visited by the worst spate of bad luck imaginable; it was as if some blind power had descended on Sarmada and transformed the quiet village into a senseless nightmare. The family had no end of disasters. A week after the forty-day period of mourning was over, they received news that Salman’s younger brother, Saji, had been shot by a gang trying to rob his shop in Caracas. Once again, the suffering home seemed enshrouded in grief, and only a few days later, Umm Salman al-Khattar’s half-sister, Samiha, was caught by a flaring bread oven fire that charred her face and left her with third-degree burns all over her body. They all hoped that she’d just die as it would’ve been more merciful than the excruciating pain she had to endure.

Death stalked the house and wove its sticky web about the unhappy family. In a moment, it could strike or just skirt past. In another, its sickle would cut down young men in the prime of their lives, just because they were connected to the family in some way. Slowly but surely, death made its presence felt, and even began to round up those who’d taken the al-Khattar’s side and paid them a visit. As one group of mourners was leaving the house, a tornado blew in from the north, scattering plastic bags and dust, obscuring sight and knocking down Abu Muhammad Qasim’s barn. The tornado then lifted a zinc panel off the roof of the village patrol and sliced Samih al-Ali’s neck with it. The offering of condolences became a funeral in its own right. Salih Korkmaz, Khazim Wahhab, Murad Qamar al-Din, and Radwan Massa were all killed in horrific accidents after going to the doomed al-Khattars to pay their respects. Suspicions were also raised about Juwayda al-Jarazi: she choked to death on her own tongue not long after she’d sent some food over to the al-Khattar house to help feed their condoling guests; and so she too was added to the list of fatalities.

“You centipede! You scorpion! You crow! You owl!” Umm Salman and her daughter Buthayna hurled all those slurs at Farida, along with many more, exhausting every entry in the dictionary of ill omens. The friends who'd come to commiserate all agreed, though there were fewer of them now. When faced with the tyrannical force of death, people find that assigning blame helps them accept the apparent caprice. A simple—or simplified—cause helped them accept the greater wisdom that cut lives short and how strange its choices seemed. Eventually, Umm Salman ran out of tears: she'd cried so much and for so long without any interruption. As her tears dried up, her breasts began to swell with every new calamity until she needed two men to help her carry them when she went to the bathroom. They grew so large she couldn't get through the door anymore and Saeed the blacksmith brought her a wheel-barrow to help her move around. The various remedies the herbalists prescribed failed to halt their inexplicable growth and the village's resident nurse, whom everyone called Doctor Salem regardless, said she needed to go to the hospital in Damascus. It was a condition that neither modern nor ancient medicine had ever encountered before.

Raifeh told me that she'd felt the breasts with her own two hands. They were filled with liquid, she said. The milk sloshing around inside sounded like a waterwheel. Poor Umm Salman was consumed with the hardships the Lord had sent to test her and she stubbornly refused to go to any hospital and let some stranger put his hands on her body, not even if her breasts got as big as hot-air balloons!

“It's a punishment for something she did in a past life that she must have been pretty damned proud of.” That was how Shaykh Farouq began and then he asked the other shaykhs to pray for Umm Salman al-Khattar and to ask God to release her from the bonds of her affliction. They recited passages from the Holy Epistles of Wisdom; the shaykh had chosen “Crushing the Heretic” and “Bearing the Truth” and they read them with profound humility and chanted. Late Thursday night, two of the shaykhs brought her a bowl of water, over which they'd read the necessary prayers and asked Umm Salman to reaffirm her faith. She repeated the Covenant of the Faithful over and over and declared that as a Druze woman of pure blood she'd submit to her destiny no matter what form it took.

As she drifted off, somewhere between asleep and awake, five horsemen appeared before her eyes. They were each a different color, lined up before a gate and shielding her from fate's whims. She had a sudden epiphany: these were the five cosmic principles who'd taken human form and established the Druze doctrine. They represented Reason, Soul, Utterance, Precedent, and Consequent. According to Druze teachings, they would appear from behind a great wall on the Day of Resurrection and free the earth from the False Messiah and bring all humankind to Egypt to be judged. Then she watched as they galloped toward the distant horizon and faded away. But her anguish returned the next morning, sharper than ever, culminating in a ceaseless, tearless scream.

As Death came and went, along with a steady stream of tears and prayers from the church and the majlis, Farida could only hide in silence from the dry-eyed crying and a painful grief that wouldn't let up. She had a vision in her sleep, or she dreamt something that startled her awake in the morning. She went into the bathroom and saw the late Salman's razor lying in front of the mirror. She took it and steeled her nerves. She entered Umm Salman's bedroom and walked straight up to those barrel-sized breasts. She undid the woman's nightgown as Umm Salman merely watched with reddened eyes and a knotted tongue, imploring the crazy bitch to get the hell away. She summoned all her strength and lashed out at Farida: “Get the hell away from me! Leave me alone!” She shouted: “Where the hell is everybody?”

Farida glared at her and held the blade against her throat. “Shut up. Not another word... I’m warning you.”

Umm Salman was paralyzed with fright as she watched Farida take a nipple in her hands and make two perpendicular cuts with the razor like a plus sign. Poor swollen-breasted Umm Salman started to scream as if she were possessed, but Farida’s cruel hands paid her no attention. She waited and when nothing came out, she bent down and began to suck on the nipple as hard as she could. She could taste the milky grief as it spurted into her mouth and on her face. The peculiar sweetness caused her to shiver. Then she did the same thing to the other breast.

She left Umm Salman whimpering, her grief flowing out in the milk, and ran to get as many containers from the kitchen as she could. She collected twenty bottles and half a bucket’s worth of the blue-tinged liquid over the next two hours. By midday, the people of Sarmada—Druze, Christian, and Muslim—had all gathered to see the miracle. The massive swelling had come down and her breasts were back to normal; by sunset, Umm Salman was on her feet to greet the guests who’d come to congratulate her on beating the curse. Everyone had been affected by the mysterious burden that had struck Umm Salman and her family. It had taken her sister, her only two sons, cousins, and a whole host of guests; it paralyzed two of the neighbors, gouged out the eye of another, and caused no end of trouble for the people of Sarmada, who were too afraid to speak out in the midst of invisible, unpredictable Death. But now, it seemed, the curse had begun to lift. The villagers greeted one another the next morning with the knowledge that better days—happier, less painful days—were in store for them. They’d waited the whole night for any sign of continued foreboding from out of the rocky wasteland and the surrounding wilderness, but nothing came—nothing but a resounding silence with occasional cricket chirps. The jackals that had hounded Sarmada with portents of impending evil had fallen silent at last.

The neighbors didn't have to stuff their ears with tree sap and cotton wool when they went to bed to block out the mixed cacophony of Umm Salman's wailing and the menacing jackal howls. Umm Salman hugged Farida tightly the next morning. “God bless you, my daughter. How can I ever repay you?”

“For what, mother?” Farida asked, all the love in the world radiating from her face. “I don't want anything except to see you well,” she said, and then softly added: “Just let me go live in the shed.”

“What shed are you talking about, Farida?”

“Princess's shed next door.”

“As you wish. You're family now, my daughter,” she said, submitting to a gentle sob embroidered with a clear thread of salty, colorless tears.

Farida set about moving her things into the shed straightway. The shed belonged to Salman al-Khattar's family and it was really just a small barn where they kept the cattle. Its last resident had been Princess, the daring cow who met her demise at the bottom of the cliff not far from the Salt Spring. Umm Salman had given her her blessing, but Buthayna, Farida's sister-in-law until a stray bullet had killed her husband, had only curses for her. Buthayna felt she had to go see the men of the family to get them to do something about this madness. When they came to object, Umm Salman just stood her ground. “What I do with my inheritance is my business.”

She got the village elder to come witness the sale contract; she sold the shed to Farida for one Syrian lira—that was all. Farida wandered around her new home, carefully checking it out: there were two rooms under a mud ceiling propped up by seven beams stolen off the Hejaz railway line. The roof was made out of sugar cane stalks and planks of wood resting on stone arches, and the walls desperately needed to be whitewashed again. There was a place to store straw out the front and enough room for a veranda or a sizable garden. She rolled up her sleeves and started cleaning the place up tirelessly. Only a few weeks later, the rank old barn surged with life and, for some reason, many of the neighbors had lent a hand; the place was as good as new. Once it was fit to live in, Farida went to thank Umm Salman for her generosity.

“You've got to take all of my dear departed son's furniture. It's yours by right.”

“God bless you,” Farida said, kissing her mother-in-law's brow and hands. Now she had a home.

Umm Salman turned and went into her room, where the walls were covered with the pictures of the dead and there was one of Shaykh Jalil standing in front of five horses, each a different color. She remained there for many years, cut off from society, free to worship God and mourn her departed children and relations, until she became divorced from reality and moved into a permanent limbo that she only ever left once: on her way to the Khashkhasha cemetery in a solemn funeral procession.

Farida followed her visions and vague intuition. She wanted to be independent but also to belong, and it seemed she'd finally got what she'd wanted. She took the bottles she'd filled with the grief-milk that had poured out of Umm Salman's breasts and found a place for them in the shed. She wrapped them in hessian and buried them among the damp and brittle straw husks. She realized it was best to keep them out of the sun and reasonably cool. She turned half of the milk into cheese that she soaked in brine, and the other half she distilled as you would wine. She used the skills she'd learned distilling grapes in her village of al-Manabi and patiently performed what time had shown was best: to keep it in a cool, dark place until she could figure out what the essence of the substance was: blessing or curse?

She took a bottle of the grief-milk and examined it. She carefully took off the lid and sniffed: it was pungent and perfumed. Her skin broke out in gooseflesh and the very roots of her hair trembled. A vague fear filled her and she nearly thought about throwing the whole lot away, but then she decided she'd give it time.

As she walked back to the storeroom, her foot slipped and the bottle fell. The white, blue-tinged milk spilled all over the ground. She picked up the scattered shards of glass with the ill omen of the spilled milk rending her heart. The liquid flowed down into the middle of the garden. She hosed the area down, prayed for protection against the Devil, and engrossed herself once more in planting pots of basil, oleander, and damask rose.

On the spring morning of March 9, 1969, you could say that she nearly fainted when she saw that the plants that had soaked up the spilt milk were green, unlike any she'd seen before. Their wafting scent was like longing mingled with delicate pity, and as the fruit-, bud-, and flower-laden branches swayed in the spring breeze, Farida was bewitched by the soft, whispering rustle they made; it was like the song of wailing mourners. It stirred hearts and rescued the names of deceased and absent friends while the unique and unfamiliar perfume filled the air.

Farida shook her head from left to right, trying to clear out the mysterious images that had populated her morning, and invoked the name of God. Then she listened once more, though now she heard nothing but a whirring whisper. “You're losing it, Farida,” she muttered to herself. She waved to her neighbor: “Good morning, Abu Khalid!” It was none other than Salama.

“It certainly is a good morning,” he replied, adding “Praise the Lord who made you, you vision” under his breath.

She went on with her work, spurred by the puzzle of the plants and the rustling of desire for something unknown, whose mysterious pigments had begun to tint her whole existence. She built a low stone wall around the garden and planted cypress trees and cactuses along the perimeter. Out of that square plot, she created an arousing oasis of shrubs, trellises and flower beds filled with basil, oleander, jasmine, and damask rose. She tended the morning glory and storksbills that climbed the walls, until the garden became a dark grove perfectly suited to her own shrouded isolation.

Nine months after moving into the shed, she decided she finally had to do something about the endless stream of suitors, courters, and give-it-a-triers. She needed to find a suitable husband who'd protect her from the vulnerability of solitude and agree to marry her without any fuss or big celebration. One day, Aboud al-Dari, or Aboud Scatterbrains—as the people of Sarmada affectionately called him—came to propose. Farida's only condition was that she would stay in the shed and that he would have to come and live with her. They read from the Quran to make the engagement official; the wedding would take place in a month's time.

Once the well-wishers had all left, Aboud just sat there, his round, wheat-brown face etched with bashfulness. He had big eyes that gave off an innocence and benevolence that didn't quite fit his giant's figure. His thick fingers were scarred and bruised from his daily battle with bricks: he was the most talented builder in the village and for miles around. He'd turned down the chance to go abroad, not swayed by the invitation to join his two brothers in Venezuela. He'd built his own house, stone by stone out of the ruins of a Roman temple. He'd saved the best rocks for the walls, cutting and shaping them with his uncommon skill.

Aboud Scatterbrains told Farida how he felt in two sentences: “The day I saw you step out of Salman's Land Rover—God rest his soul—I couldn't sleep all night. My life didn't begin until the day you agreed to marry me and the shaykhs read the Quran for us.” Farida smiled but said nothing. Aboud wished her a nice evening and left the discomfiting silence for home.

He didn't come the next morning to take her shopping for the things they needed, as he'd promised. Instead she heard news of him: He's dead. It was heart failure, most likely.

“Hold on. Hold it right there—Let's stop for a second,” I interrupted the man telling the story. “Hold on, there's no need to embellish here. Did you just make that up? You can't be serious.”

The man looked at me, leaving aside for a moment the important task of deciding what to say. “Why's it so hard to believe that Aboud Scatterbrains went to bed and never woke up? He asphyxiated. He up and had a heart attack in the prime of life. You know, a little emotion can melt away cold reason. If you just listen and pay attention, you'll discover how ridiculous death is, how cheap. Why would I lie? I'm supposed to be telling you the facts, not trying to win your approval, even if the only victim is a certain reality. I've got everything I need in order to change the story as I wish—to add or omit, create or destroy. What can you possibly have against an honest and serene death in the night?

“Would it have been better if a rabid dog had run up and bit Aboud on the leg? Would that seem more plausible to you? Who cares if he died? Or went abroad? Or committed suicide after Farida spurned him? Or maybe he got killed while hunting or drowned while swimming down at the pond? Or what if he'd married Farida and lived happily ever after? Anything's possible, anything could have easily happened. But it didn't. And you know why? Because Aboud went to bed that night and never woke up. He developed a clot and his heart stopped.”

Memories were awoken again a year after the wedding. Farida became the black widow once more, an ill-omened murderess, because Sarmada had an imagination, after all, just like any other village in the world. You were always bumping up against mysteries and miracles and genies and secret powers. It didn't take much to build a fortification against the meaninglessness of life out of the dry dust of legends.

The man telling the story asked me to be quiet and uprooted anything in my mind that might have kept the truth out, anything that might have kept the truth of what had happened, and what had yet to happen, from getting in. He dropped me back into the world of Sarmada, where events take place according to its mood, paying no mind to the rules of novels.

Farida met the outcry surrounding Aboud Scatterbrains' death with silence. She shut her windows and withdrew, surrendering herself to insuperable waves of sadness and deep feelings of disgrace and solitude. She was cursed, she felt, and there was no one there to cushion her fall, no one to lean on. She didn't attend the funeral, which was the source of much village anxiety, lest it mark the beginning of another spate of fatalities. Everyone thought it best to bury the deceased quickly and to return straight home to await the jackals' howling in the distant rocky wasteland.

Yet Buthayna, her former husband's sister, couldn't stand it any longer and flew into a rage. She grabbed a can of petrol and attacked Farida's shed. She soaked the door and courtyard and then set it alight, shrieking curses on the wicked, evil witch inside. She kept shouting, “Get out of here! Leave us alone! Leave us alone, you crow!” until her cousins came and dragged her back to the house. Farida, trapped inside the house, crouched in a corner, wrapped herself in a thick woolen blanket, and sobbed without end. She woke with a start after a sudden blackout and ran to the kitchen. She grabbed a knife and made a deep gash across her forearm; blood came gushing out.

“Forgive me, Lord! Forgive me, though I don't know what I've done to deserve your wrath!” She wailed as she fell to the ground.

Salama saved her. He'd come over to pay his respects and cheer her up. He, for one, didn't like the idea of her bearing the blame for something that obviously wasn't her fault. And if she truly was cursed and prey to fate, well, then that wasn't her fault, either. It plagued him that she had no support, no family, nobody. He was distraught, but his wife, Umm Khalid, just kept repeating the same old curses, the same old poison against that “unholy chameleon!”

He arrived at Farida's place and knocked. He waited. “Farida?” he called. “Open up.” No answer. He thought about going back home, but then he saw a thin stream of blood trickle out from under the gate. He knocked down the gate and found her, nearly dead.

She finally woke up, and with a little tender care from Salama and his newly compassionate wife, she recovered quickly. Her health improved, but she'd lost that arresting smile and she moved more ploddingly now. Her spirit sank deeper into the abyss of a grief that couldn't be remedied. She had to find a way to protect herself from want, and from the twisting corridors of emptiness and suffering. Nothing was better for it than tending her plants and her stash of grief-milk, extracting essential oils from flower petals and sesame seeds, and making her own dusky-tasting wine; discovering plant secrets. She took some bottles of the blue-gray grief milk she'd stored and began to run some experiments, many of which she'd learned as a child; she was the daughter of an herbalist who'd been fascinated by plants and their power to heal the sick.

She sniffed the grief-milk and found it smelled ever so faintly rancid, with an underlying sweetness. She poured some into a copper saucepan and brought it to a boil, stirring in a handful of nigella seeds and some honey from the mountains. As soon as it started boiling, she sprinkled in a roux of flour and ghee. She rolled the resulting mixture into small knucklesized balls and wrapped them in cellophane like bonbons. She poured herself half a glass of homemade buttermilk and drank it down with one of her little bonbons. She licked up the clotted trail at the side of her mouth and instantly her stomach began to cramp. Her body went into spasms, she clenched her teeth, poured with sweat, and dissolved into a fit of violent sobbing unlike any she'd ever known. She wanted to call out for help, but no sound came. She curled up on the floor, writhing and twitching, until she finally lost consciousness.

She came to that evening. She hurried over to the mirror and saw that her face was uncommonly white, smooth and refreshed. Stranger still, her spirits soared and her heart seemed full of laughter; she felt wonderfully happy. She realized at that moment that it was her duty to reawaken joy in the village that was surrounded by sorrow, stones, and dark blue basalt.

To double check the substance's extraordinary effects, she decided to test it again on a woman from the al-Hamid family. The woman was suffering from the pain of a crushing loss. All her dreams had become recurring nightmares ever since her husband and son had heartlessly immigrated to some country in Latin America whose name she could never quite remember. She'd heard nothing from them ever since Saji had been killed in Caracas. Farida sat down beside the woman, Khoza al-Hamid, who'd started working as a hired mourner at funerals to heat the frigid ones up a bit. Her heart-breaking ballads caused previously held-back tears to pour out and made the families feel as though they'd given their loved one a fitting send-off. And she got some money for her trouble. Farida gave her one of the bonbons she'd made and told her to chew it. Farida's heart began to throb as she watched the woman's face contort in pain and go dark red. She was sweating and gasping for breath. The woman's daughter came in and screamed: “What have you done to my mother, goddamn you?!” Farida would have wavered had she not felt that what was needed now was a little patience.

With feigned composure, she gestured to the girl to quiet down, and when calm gestures failed, she shouted back, “Be quiet!”

After a helpless hour, the red mask cleared and the woman began to sob uncontrollably. She was crying for every year of her life, for all that she'd longed for and all that she'd lost. For two straight hours, she writhed and groaned and screamed and pleaded as all the toxins of her heart were gathered up and expelled through her eyes. Her body now only gently rose and fell. She was refreshed little by little and her breathing became more regular. Her face glowed tranquilly. Her voice was lilting, and though it was still drenched in grief, it had an arresting grace.

“What did you give me, Farida?” the woman asked innocently.

“Medicine, dear,” replied Farida, confident and soothing. “You ought to be able to rest easy now.”

“It's like a weight's been lifted off my chest,” the woman said.

Farida put the bedcovers over her and kissed her brow. “Go to sleep now. I'll come check on you tomorrow.”

“God bless you. Thank you for everything.”

“Don't mention it.” Before she left, Farida turned to the woman's daughter and said, “Send for me if anything happens.” Though she had no clue what, if anything, she could do if something actually were to happen. She said it only to inspire the still-suspicious daughter's confidence, and to remind herself that she was now sworn to a greater duty, which she couldn't ignore.

Now that she'd managed, with her happy heart and winning smile, to regain nearly everyone's trust and made them forget all about that “cursed woman” talk, Farida started making preparations for a rice pudding party. She'd become famous throughout Sarmada and the surrounding area as a talented herbalist, though she'd still failed to win over Buthayna, her slain husband's sister. While Farida was making preparations for her feast, Buthayna was still consumed by her hatred and envy of this satanic outsider. After more than a few days' hesitation, she paid a secret visit to the famous soothsayer of Kanakir. “I want Farida's heart to burn,” she said, “like mine did when my brother died. I want her to suffer. I want her to get a taste of what she's put us through.”

“Are you absolutely certain she's the cause of all the suffering in the village?” the soothsayer asked.

“She's the cause of all that and more. I'm a million percent certain. Ever since she came to Sarmada we've had nothing but death and bad luck.”

The soothsayer warned her that the spell wouldn't work if Farida was innocent.

“At least I'd know then that she was,” Buthayna quipped.

“Okay, as you wish.” The soothsayer consented indifferently.

She agreed to prepare the amulets for driving out evil in exchange for a 21-karat gold ring, a ram with a broken horn, and an eighth-kilo of the choicest raisins. Buthayna handed over the ring and the raisins and promised to bring the ram after the job was done. The soothsayer told her she also needed one of Farida's nightgowns, which Buthayna had no trouble getting among the things Farida had left at their house, and she also got her mother's name and date of birth from the marriage certificate, along with several other silly things the soothsayer asked for. Buthayna followed the soothsayer's instructions very carefully: she brought everything the soothsayer had requested. The soothsayer then set about creating the most powerful spell she could, with help from the secrets contained in the pages of Abdullah al-Hazred's Al-Azif.

As the full September moon shone in the sky above, the soothsayer withdrew to her private chamber and unlocked the ancient chest. She carefully removed and unwrapped the book of death's secrets, known as Al-Azif. She admired the binding, made from the tanned flesh of people who'd died in horrific accidents, and illustrations made with needles. She remembered the advice her father repeated every time he read a chapter from the book to her, revealing the secrets of death: “Never use this book unless it's absolutely necessary.”

She analyzed Farida's name with geomancy and discovered that she was, in fact, a descendant of one of the twenty lost angels, who were sent to Earth when it was created to help set things up and to help humans arrange their work so that they would have a specific mission in life. Twenty of these angels forgot their original allegiance and refused to return to Heaven when called by God. The Earth had seduced them and in its deficiency they'd discovered that eternity is frightening and painful. So they disobeyed the divine warning and married members of this misguided, inconsequential mortal species. Their descendants were a plague upon the earth, for they had inherited a corrupted, rancorous, jealous nature. And when their waywardness reached the point of no return, God twice ordered that they be destroyed: once when he wiped out Iram of the Pillars and once with Noah's flood. Now it was true that the descendants of the Twenty had lost much of their power, but they continued to transmigrate and become reborn, and they carried on from one generation to the next, infiltrating human society, undetected by all but those who possessed the knowledge of the Names of the Dead, which the author called Al-Azif.

The soothsayer searched for the right spell, invoking the help of a giant demon servant, a direct descendant of the genie who'd gobbled up the author of the book in a Damascus alley some thirteen hundred years before. She took the book in her trembling grasp, unaware that it was the last existing Arabic copy of one of the most controversial texts in history. Al-Azif, or the Necronomicon, is over 900 pages long and divided into seven chapters. It was written by a Yemeni poet called Abdullah al-Hazred—which, perhaps, is a corruption of Hadramaut—who wrote it after many years of solitude spent in the desert hunting the few powerful, if ostracized, genies and demons left on earth. They, the genies and demons, had been around a long time before God decided to cast them out and replace them with humankind, for whom he had a special affection. Al-Hazred, also known as the Mad Poet, had written a history of the deep past, filled with rich details, which hardly troubled those who believe in reason and those who judge their own five senses to be sufficient. He dedicated his peculiar life to searching for the legendary ruins of Iram and symbols of antediluvian worlds hidden here on Earth. He named his book Al-Azif, after the noises insects make in the night: the voices of genies and demons.

Abdullah al-Hazred's tragic demise put an end to his search for the descendants of the Twenty before he could complete it. In a Damascus market, a giant genie suddenly appeared right in front of him and bit off his head. The people in the market just watched in horror as the genie devoured his body piece by piece and from that day on, they couldn't stop trembling; they called this new illness epilepsy or “the point of seizure.” And it was at this “point” that the veil obscuring human vision was finally pulled away, or rather that the formerly invisible expanses of the mind were revealed, and the victims saw that the void is actually filled with the dead and the mutilated, with genies, demons, and other creatures, and that the mind would never be the same.

The book was full of supernatural wisdom that contained the key to life and the meaning of death. Incredible truths, such as that although the Earth actually rotates clockwise, some obstacle in our minds makes us think that time progresses from east to west. No amount of explaining or pleading can change the minds of the hoi polloi. Al-Azif explains that we are actually looking toward the past and not the future. The so-called future has happened already and it's the past that is yet to come. This is where religions get their dogged assurance about what is to come, and it is the root of a great error because the future has already happened and we are retrogressing in time. Only a few people have discovered this fact, but they don't share the great secret because the average person wouldn't be able to bear the shocking truth.

To the rational observer, the secrets of the book seem like no more than mere legends and tricks based on fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of time, but to anyone who possesses the gift of the sixth sense, and whose brain cells are not so easily duped by the other senses, the book is all truth. It is the knowledge, similar to the cosmic unity, about all that has taken place, or to put it more accurately, all that has yet to take place. Whoever possessed it possessed the key to understanding all supernatural occurrences, prophecies, and events throughout history. Yet those who owned incomplete or faulty copies were certain to suffer the most excruciating deaths imaginable. There was one copy in the Vatican, but it was incomplete and the priests were forbidden from reading it anyway. The original Arabic copy had been lost for centuries. It had once belonged to a Jewish family in Damascus, but they had it translated into Hebrew, and when they left for Palestine, they left the Arabic original with a silversmith called George Sahtout.

George Sahtout, the silversmith, had a clandestine affair with a Christian woman from the Hauran region for a long time and in 1954, after his wife died—from choking on an oversized piece of quince—they got married. Before he died, he gave his daughter a chest that contained countless antique bracelets and a necklace of emeralds and other precious gems, which were said to have once belonged to Bilqis, the famed Queen of Sheba. The chest also contained a mysterious book, filled with symbols for deciphering the secrets of the dead and bringing them back to life, and ways of commanding occult forces and invisible creatures to do one's bidding. The silversmith had taught his daughter, Sara, who later became known as the soothsayer of Kanakir, the secrets of the symbols, and he left her the book so that she could study it closely over the years to come.

Relying on all her training, the soothsayer wrote out a revenge curse on talismans with soot she made from the following ingredients: she burned a piece of lizard tail, which carried on twitching for hours, and when it finally fell still, she added some black pepper and a hyena's molar and ground it all up into a powder with some murderous ink she'd made from the skull of a stranger who'd burned to death—she'd dug up his grave and used his bones to make ashes that incited the dead's contempt for the living. With this soot, she traced symbols and letters and conjured up strange names and illnesses to torment Farida so that she'd leave Sarmada and never come back.

She slipped the amulets into Buthayna's trembling hand and also gave her back the ring and the ram. “Kill the ram,” the soothsayer said, “but don't let any humans eat the meat. Give it to the wild animals who live in the wasteland. All I want is for that she-devil to leave the village.” She gave the girl a vial of arsenic tincture and told Buthayna to wait for a week and if the spell didn't work to pour a few drops of the liquid onto Farida's food. Once it reached her stomach, she would lose all her evil powers.

Buthayna took the amulets and the vial, unaware that she was actually carrying a deadly poison, enough to kill a large camel.

Farida wanted to convince the Mansour brothers to come to her party, so she decided she'd just go over there and invite them herself. She put on a lovely embroidered dress that showed off her lightly bouncing cleavage, and even wore a little lipstick. She covered her hair with a gauzy scarf and brushed her long locks down across her shoulders. She made up a platter of croquettes and a pot of bulgur boiled with chunks of meat, and set off toward the old mill.

They were surprised to see her, to put it mildly. All five brothers were out in the field beside the house, hoeing the soil, so she set the things she'd brought down on the stone window sill and called to them. They stopped their work and eyed the strange woman curiously. Shafee, the youngest brother who was all of eighteen, had a twinkle in his eye as he walked toward her and smiled.

“Where do you think you're going?” His eldest brother Nawwaf called after him gruffly.

“To see who she is, and what she wants,” he answered and continued in her direction. He greeted her and had the feeling that he was seeing a creature from another planet. Something flew up out of the cage of his soul, which burst open and seemed as if it would never be closed again. The bitter veil that had covered his almond, endlessly questioning eyes disintegrated.

“What's your name?” she asked, velvet-voiced.

“Shafee. Shafee Mansour.”

“Wonderful. I actually came over to introduce myself and to invite you all to come for rice pudding at my place. You and your brothers, the night after tomorrow, on the Feast of the Cross.”

“Oh, but we can't!” said Shafee. She stared into his eyes. He felt that some strange bliss was sliding along that gaze and down into his soul, shaking him to the core. He didn't want it to end, but it did:

“No, but you can come,” she said.

“I'd love to. I'll try.”

“Shafeeeeee!” Nawwaf's hoarse, angry voice brought him back to his senses, and back out to stone-hoeing in the fields.

“I'll be waiting for you,” said Farida seductively, and then she turned and walked away.

Naturally, there wasn't a force in the world—not Nawwaf, or Nayef, or Talal, or Shahir, or all four brothers shouting at once—that could unglue Shafee's eyes from her rear as he watched it dance beneath her floral dress.

She needed help from the neighbors if she was going to pull off a real feast of rice pudding, grape molasses sweets, and pancakes dipped in the blue-tinged grief-milk, to feed all of Sarmada and advertise her skills as an expert herbalist. She bought three sacks of rice and borrowed ten cans of milk, and then made the crumbly cakes out of grape molasses, ghee, and flour. Some of the women took it upon themselves to tidy up the garden. Farida had borrowed chairs from the primary school so that the party could be extended out into the clearing in front of her house. It took the women two whole days to prepare for the party, during which time Buthayna came over, accompanied by Umm Khalid, to make up with Farida—sinisterly masking her true intentions. Farida could hardly believe it and she welcomed Buthayna like a sister. As Farida and the other women prepared for the big celebration, Buthayna monitored her anxiously. She saw her drink occasionally from a bottle of milk, wrapped in hessian to keep it cool, which she'd set down next to the water butt. Buthayna made sure no one was looking and then she poured a few drops of the soothsayer's tincture into the bottle. She made an excuse about having something urgent to take care of, and off she went.

As the rice boiled away in several large cauldrons, Farida took the hessian-wrapped bottle and poured it into the cans of milk. She stirred them up well, ever certain that the substance she'd drawn from Umm Salman's breasts would soon cure all of Sarmada of its pain. She poured out the whole bottle and then she boiled the milk, before adding it to the fluffy and bubbling rice. This she flavored with orange-blossom water and spices that spurred an appetite for life as well as for food.

The evening of September 27th was a turning point in the history of Sarmada. The village desperately needed someone who could restore a little life to the sad, scared place. Even laughter had come to be seen as a sin and the villagers prayed to God to keep them safe whenever someone let slip a foolhardy chuckle. After they'd seen how death could change a happy wedding into an unstoppable wave of funerals, they began to believe that they simply hadn't been made to enjoy life, or even to live it. There was evil behind anything that made you smile, so they decided that they preferred the stoic face of caution to the mirth of cruel punishment.

Farida, though, buzzed with joy, hurrying about as if floating on a smiling cloud. She gathered all the children around and passed out sweets and jingling coins. She took advantage of their excited anticipation for the Feast of the Cross and got them to build a big bonfire in the open space in front of her house, where she'd marked out a safe space for it, and she got them to go around to all the families who weren't coming to the party, promising them plenty more paraffin, firewood, and sweets.

At noon, the children ran after Atallah, the sacristan, all the way to the door of the old church. Everyone loved the witty, rash sacristan: he couldn't go a day without losing control of his tongue and then the insults would just slide off it. His last hit had been a running joke in Sarmada for weeks. When his son Michel came down with a bad case of the measles, Atallah got very worried and swore to God that he'd sacrifice one of his cows if his son got better. Two days later, the boy was on the mend, so he ran down to the barn and found his donkey laid out, dead and rigid on the floor. “Are you getting old, now, God?” he shouted to the sky. “You can't tell the difference between a donkey and a cow anymore?”

The children were so impatient to receive their holiday treat that the sacristan had to open the church door for them so they could wait for Father Elias. He stuck the heavy key in the lock, but it wouldn't budge. He tried turning it again, first calmly, and then again with unmistakable annoyance. He tried turning it to the left and to the right, but the lock refused to open. He was steaming; he looked right up into the sky toward He who sits on the Heavenly Throne and said, “So what's the point of all my praying, you son of a whore?” He kicked the door and suddenly the key turned. He looked back up at the sky with a smile. “It's obvious there's only one way to get you to do anything.”

Father Elias arrived a few minutes later, dividing a box of peppermints among the children and recounting the story of the Feast of the Cross as he did every year. “The Feast of the Cross is an old rite taken from the life of Saint Helena. One day, she had a vision and the Lord told her to go to Jerusalem to find the True Cross. Her son, the emperor Constantine, sent a 3,000-man attachment along with her and she passed through here, through Sarmada, on her way 1,800 years ago. When she got to Jerusalem, she searched and searched for the cross until she finally found it—along with two others—buried beneath a rubbish dump!

“But she had to find out which of the three crosses was the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified, so she took the three crosses over to a funeral procession that happened to be passing by. They passed the first cross over the bier, but nothing happened, and then they passed the second cross over it, but again nothing happened. When they passed the third cross over the dead man, he came back to life and went on to become a caretaker at the Church of the Resurrection. Having found the True Cross, Saint Helena built a great fire there in Jerusalem on September 14th—which we call the Little Feast—to signal that her quest was complete. Everyone who could see the fire lit their own fires, in all the villages, towns, and cities she'd come through on her journey. We lit a fire here in Sarmada, too, hundreds and hundreds of years ago and they saw it in Azra, so they lit a fire, and on and on until the signal got all the way to Constantinople on September 27th and the emperor Constantine learned that his mother had succeeded in finding the True Cross. That's the reason we celebrate every year with a big fire in honor of Saint Helena.” The children, inspired by the priest's entertaining story, took their sweets and coins and hurried off to prepare for the big celebration that evening.

Everything that happens in Sarmada is testimony to the power of forgetting: the meetings of the local branch of the Party, the educated young people from Damascus and their revolutionary zeal, every single one of them: the communists, nationalists, Nasserists, and Baathists. The only idea anyone had was to take the defeat in the war and recast it as a “setback.” Syria was swept up in a spirit inspired by Nasser's popular reinstatement and the dream of pan-Arab unity. Peasants and the esoteric sects took advantage of the climate to break out of their former isolation and join in the calls for change, reform, and revolution. Stillborn independence had given rise to decrepit leaders who transformed the Arab countries into entrenched dictatorships, which made Israel seem like an oasis of democracy in a desert of depraved barbarians and tyrants. Israel wanted nothing more than to keep these dictators around because its very existence depended on the Middle East remaining a patchwork of corrupt dictatorships and populations divided along sectarian lines.

Yet to Sarmadan passivity, politics seemed as if it were taking place on a different planet. The local intellect couldn't quite understand all the new terms or why people suddenly yearned to be free from economic feudalism and worn-out customs. Baathism had an easy time penetrating the mountains, including Sarmada, and the Syrian countryside more generally, because it appealed to the hopes and concerns of rural sensibilities. But still it failed to permeate the spirit of the place, the specific social character; no ideology—not Baathism, nor anything else—could ever truly master the human character.

Farida, who alone knew how to make a wasteland bloom, how to take her green thumb and cheer a place up, borrowed some chairs, and the women came to help sweep the open space in front of her house. They handed out servings of rice pudding, made with some of Umm Salman's grief-milk, which she'd also added to the dough for the pastries she'd prepared: olive and thyme, cheese and spinach, as well as a sweet variety. She even drafted the children to take pastries around to the houses of the people who weren't attending the party. As people gathered, half-curious and half-keen, the party took on a happy mood and something like a zest for life bubbled up to the surface, albeit tentatively at first. Then Nour al-Din picked up his flute and started playing and more than thirty young men got to their feet automatically and began to dance the Dabke. When Hasoun the drummer turned up with his famous darbuka, the party was transported to a whole other level. More dancers joined the Dabke lines and everybody ate up the rice pudding and the scrumptious pastries. Sarmada celebrated warily, trying desperately to forget the nightmare of Salman's nuptials. Girls were dressed up as if they were going to a wedding and all the different local dances were performed amidst a pandemonium that spread over the entire village.

After they'd finished the tasks Farida had asked them to do, the children began going around the village collecting cow chips, which were lumps of cow dung mixed with straw left out over the summer to dry that the villagers used to light their woodstoves. The children's shouts could be heard throughout the village and whenever an elderly woman or a young housewife gave them several cow chips and a bottle of paraffin, they would chant:

One can, two can, can this be?
This lady here must be a queen!

But for the cheapskates who were stingy with them, they had this to say:

That's all you've got, just scraps and rags?
I'm guessing, lady, you must be a slag!

The children usually got insults against their own mothers in return, as well as several buckets of dirty water poured down from the roof.

“Holy Spawn of Satan!” shouted Shaykh Farouq when he saw the strange sweets and pastries the children had brought over, and he forbade his wife and daughters from attending the “Whore's Ball,” as he liked to call it. Farida was definitely chipping away at his authority. She'd distinguished herself as a herbalist and all he had left was his special cure for the mumps: he'd scribble a few obscure phrases on swollen, lumpy faces with a ballpoint pen, recite a couple of Quranic verses, wrap a white bandage around the patients' cartoon-like faces and tie a knot at the top of their heads. Once the patient had recovered, he'd get a chicken or some eggs for his skillful cure of the painful swelling. This had earned him the nickname “Shaykh Mumps,” but the people of Sarmada never dared call him that to his face. He stormed out of his house, brandishing his cane, determined to put end to her party. When he arrived, he was appalled by the sight of the village children leaping about like monkeys, as they fed cow chips and wood into the fire. The extravagance of Sarmada's celebration absolutely shocked him. Salama had donated two sheep, which only encouraged the better-offs in the village to chip in with their own fleshy contributions, and soon the square was filled with the biggest barbecue the village had ever seen. Everyone who came brought something, just because they wanted to contribute to the banquet, and Sarmada had the time of its life. No one could've stopped the spirited exuberance that swept through the village streets. So rather than take his anger out on evil, corrupting, debauched Farida, Shaykh Mumps turned around and headed back home. He sat down on the porch and called to his daughter Joumana, “Bring me one of those pastries Farida sent over.”

“You came around just in the nick of time,” she said, handing him two pastries: one with sugar and grape molasses, the other with cheese and spinach. The shaykh took them and waved to his wife and daughters as they left for the party.

“Just don't be home late!”

A group of shaykhs came round to Shaykh Farouq’s house… “So, Shaykh. are you happy about what’s going on around here?”

“Be patient, Shaykhs. The people are exhausted, let them blow off some steam.” Shaykh Farouq’s large nose began to turn a pale red and his guests started devouring what pastries remained.

The party finally wound down. People were just too tired, too drunk, and too danced-out, and their clothes were suffused with the smoke from the big fire the children had lit; their every pore had breathed it in. The guests staggered homeward, drunk off a secret bliss. On the dusty trail leading to the graveyard, Sayil stopped and stepped off the road; he needed to relieve himself and simply couldn’t wait another moment. He listened to cicadas and crickets hissing in the night as he urinated, and with his last shakes, singeing tears began trickling out his eyes. Once he’d put himself back in order, he tried to carry on, but his eyes reddened and his tears began to stream as if he’d sniffed the most pungent onion. He couldn’t explain his sudden crying fit and for some reason he didn’t want it to end. He walked along the perimeter of the valley and then suddenly his stomach began to cramp and ache and his crying welled up from some unidentified pain, not because a mosquito had flown into his eye as he’d originally thought. He sat down, looking over the valley, and really began to wail.

For more than half an hour, his hot tears flowed and the sound of his blubbering reached the house nearby. Ghazi, carrying his shotgun and a lantern, walked in the direction of the sound and shouted at the weeper: “Who’s there?” Sayil couldn’t stop crying and couldn’t sneak off, but sobbed even more violently than before. Ghazi shone the lantern in his face and was horrified at the sight. He dropped his pistol and set the lantern down. “Sayil, what's wrong?” he asked, although there was no point. Sayil could only answer with more tears and louder sobbing. Ghazi grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders. He asked him again and again what was wrong—he was getting angry now—but got nothing except choked tears from the burly man wailing like a woman at the edge of the valley. Ghazi dropped his dogged interrogation and sat down beside him; he touched his eyes and felt that they, too, were wet with tears. He didn't quite know how, or why, but he began sobbing silently as well, and then sucking back the snot and moaning loudly. Ghazi's wife trembled with fear as she watched the specters of two men in the distance, their heads between their knees, weeping, nearly howling. She couldn't decide whether to stay and comfort her horrified children or to creep cautiously down to the valley's edge and see what the hell was going on. She wiped the tears from her eyes and walked back into the house only to erupt—along with her little children—into a panic of scalding tears.

Together the two men sat there, weeping, crying as they'd never cried before. When their eyes finally dried up, Ghazi was racked with nausea and could no longer hold back the urge to bring up everything in his stomach. He vomited, followed closely by Sayil, and then together they alternated between cycles of dry sobbing and disgorging that felt as if it might rip their innards apart.

Behind them, there wasn't a soul in Sarmada who wasn't sobbing or throwing up; the whole village had been poisoned—though whether it was the fault of the rice pudding or the soothsayer's potion, no one would ever know. Young, old, those who'd attended the party, those who'd stayed at home, they all wept and vomited that night as the contagion spread from house to house. The only person who was spared both bawling and barfing that night was Buthayna. She knew that this latest disaster was all her fault and she sat up all night in her room, listening to the weeping village. She finally nodded off at dawn and when she woke up not an hour later, she felt her eyes brimming with arrested tears, swollen, looking like pools of blood. She ran into her mother's room and found her praying, lost in the world of mourning dead, so she let her be and hurried out. The sight of the guests who'd not even made it home the night before filled her with panic as she watched them waking up, covered in vomit, laid out along the side of the road, howling in spasms. It was as if a plague had overrun the village. People were exhausted; their faces were ashen. She helped those who needed escorting home and then returned to her bedroom, where she locked the door and tried, but failed, to cry until about midday, when she finally fell asleep.

As Buthayna slept, mostly dreamlessly, disaster was sweeping the village. People stopped going to work they were so miserable. They sought out Shaykh Shaheen only to find him in a wretched state, squalid in his own vomit. The church door was locked and Father Elias was trying to settle his own sorrows with a mixture of herbal and chamomile tea.

The village reeked. For the first time since the locals got together and built a mosque, the imam failed to perform the call to prayer because he, too, was laid low with a sour stomach and sobbing. Every time he took a sip of water, it flowed out his eyes in tears of sin. Was this heavenly rage or earthly enmity? No one really cared. All they cared about anymore was putting an end to the tears. The cramps and vomiting they'd managed to ameliorate by not eating and only drinking water and anise tea, although the liquid instantly came back out their eyes and provoked feelings of yearning and loss that none of them had ever experienced. The village animals were also seized by anxious-making premonitions like those that occur before an earthquake or natural disaster. The cows broke out of their sheds and ran off mooing wildly, followed by the village donkeys. Meowing strays broke the Sarmadans' hearts, and if they hadn’t been so preoccupied with their own suffering, they’d have laughed at the dogs, who were going around as if blind drunk and howling as if they were really their cousins, the wolves. In the rocky wasteland, a pack of hyenas, comrades in misfortune, wrawled. Even the hens and cocks crowed at the afternoon sky and were silent at dawn. Animals foamed at the mouth and groaned, strangely, unlike anything anyone had ever heard before except out of a she-camel in heat.

Farida’s prize trees and plants shared in Sarmada’s uncanny descent into public lamentation: rose petals dissolved into drops of exquisite nectar that flowed like tears, and tree trunks burst open to ooze salty sap. Farida, who hadn’t eaten any rice pudding herself, wiped at the hushed tears running down her cheeks out of guilt and horror at what was happening around her. She didn’t know what to do: run away or stand her ground? She pulled herself together and tried to think of a solution. She made an herbal preparation, which helped calm her down, and began experimenting with a nettle and grief-milk infusion.

The village lay under an inexhaustible gloom that bubbled up out of the heart of the earth itself, out of the soil. The mania even reached the two lovebirds nesting on Farida’s roof, who warbled a heartrending song that sent anyone who heard them into a new fit of crying. Sarmada mourned. It writhed and beat its chest. The village, hollow and alone, was abandoned to its fate, left to contend with its rancor, acrimony, and distress. The village was cursed, but it didn’t understand why. It was being punished for some mysterious crime, and there was no hope—not even the slightest shred—of being saved from its trial. The village wasn’t in the least bit special; it was just an ordinary village in the east that had tried to carry on with as little change, hardship, and grief as possible; without ambitions or horizons, it was content to live with as few big ideas, wants, and visions as it could. The villagers did what their intuition told them to, never getting involved in questions of fate, not once understanding why God would want to make them suffer this affliction that was more than they could bear.

On the second day of tears, groans, and vomit, news of Sarmada reached the capital via three pulse traders from Deraa who'd come to buy chickpeas and lentils. They were terrified by what looked like a whole village of mourners. None of the lifeless, weeping, sighing Sarmadans would speak to them; after all, the only two people in Sarmada who could still speak were Buthayna and Farida, and they were both holed up in their bedrooms. The three traders got out of there as fast as they could and they told everyone about the unbelievable sights they'd seen. When the government heard that something serious had happened to the village, they sent forces to impose a quarantine and keep everyone out until the medical taskforce could investigate. The people of the mountains spread stories about Sarmada in fearful whispers and heaped curses on the place; they waited desperately for news.

A week later the medical taskforce arrived: an ambulance that broke down every few miles, three doctors and a handful of nurses, who all wore gas masks, which made them look like grasshoppers or locusts and did more to constrict their breathing than to protect them from the purported contamination. They entered the village anxiously and wandered around for hours, but then quickly wrote up their report and left. Their report was no more than a couple of sentences, quoted here in full:

This is the most beautiful settlement we have ever visited in the South. The inhabitants are strikingly healthy and hale unlike any other population we have previously examined. All the rumors we received about Sarmada were total nonsense; the village [they wouldn't even bump the village up to a “town” in the official report] is tranquil and safe. The residents must be some of the happiest and healthiest in the entire country. No further action required.

What had happened was that on the third day of the outbreak, Farida took drops of the antidote she'd prepared to every house in the village. All of Sarmada fell asleep at the same time and when they woke up they were cured. The plague was lifted as if it had never been, and so they rather shamefacedly set about cleaning and hosing down the absolute chaos they'd created. They were smiling again, but their faces were still a bit ashen. By the time the medical taskforce arrived, Sarmada had been up on her feet and buzzing around for days, and the visitors noticed the cheerful mood of the place as they entered over Poppy Bridge. The chief physician spoke to the villagers, who denied there'd ever been a problem in the first place, and upon finding no evidence, he determined there really wasn't any reason the taskforce should stay. They decided they might as well perform a routine inspection to make sure all the children in the village had been given the polio vaccine, since they were already there.

Some of the villagers just couldn't keep themselves from laughing at the taskforce, who soon realized it was because of their gas masks, and took them off. They went for lunch at the village elder's and they left the village touched by the serene, and vague, joy of the people and by their generosity and hospitality. A few weeks later, Buthayna went back to see the soothsayer of Kanakir and was shocked to see the woman had wasted away. The soothsayer wept constantly, collecting her glass-bead tears in several plastic bags, and she threw up every single thing she ate. She flew into a hysterical panic when she saw Buthayna, but eventually calmed down long enough to explain what had happened. She gave Buthayna a chest with the seven quires of al-Hazred's book and told her to keep it in a safe place until she could find a descendant of Dahiya bint Lahiya the Amazigh to pass it on to—and if she couldn't find anyone, to burn the book on a Friday under a full moon. “Watch out for that devil-spawn Farida! Look at what she's done to me. Now go, and don't ever come back.”

The soothsayer sat there waiting for her excruciating end—which came soon enough—and her village of Kanakir woke on a day in early December to find that the most talented soothsayer in all of the Hauran had had her limbs chewed off, her eyes gouged out, her chest torn open, and her heart ripped out. They burned her house down with everything inside to try to wipe out the terror that had seized them. And the crystal tears in the plastic bags sounded as if they were screeching in horror as they exploded in the fire that consumed everything it could.

Buthayna was too young to understand; she was only twenty-one and too young to cope, but all the same she scribbled down the name of the Amazigh sorceress so she wouldn't forget it and hid the chest away in the wheat cellar without even daring to open it. She bathed herself in cold water and went into her mother's room. She threw herself on her mother's chest and pleaded for help, but her mother was in another world, wandering through shadows of meaning, and didn't move a muscle. She had been transported to the realm of hushed consolation with her departed loved ones, where she knitted them woolen pullovers to keep them warm in the tundra of death. Buthayna wrenched the knitting from her mother's hands and pulled her arms around her, burying her head in her mother's chest. She tried to cry, but it was no use.

Riyad al-Fayez found me taking photos of Farida's decaying house. He worked as a taxi driver with his brand-new 2011 Mitsubishi Lancer; his graying hair and the etched wrinkles around his eyes couldn't diminish his good looks. “Get in. I need to talk to you.”

I desperately wanted to make up some excuse but he opened the passenger-side door insistently. “I want to tell you the truth about Farida.” I got in beside him. He told me what life in Syria was like, how unbearable it’d become, and he carried on telling me about all the latest news in the world of taxi drivers until I began to regret getting into the car with him. Suddenly he pulled over to the side of the road. “I was the first boy in Sarmada to go see Farida,” he said, and then he told me a story that confused sex with love and lies with truth. The only way I could shut him up was to turn on my mobile and go through the flood of texts I’d gotten. There was a text from Azza Tawfiq saying she was sorry we’d ever met and that she’d been trying to call me. I turned my mobile back off as Riyad drove and called up a bunch of his friends, telling them to come round to his house straightaway. “You’re going to get the whole story about Farida today,” he said, using his cigarette to light the next one, before tossing the butt out the window. He sped off to introduce me to the friends he’d made as an adolescent, who were going to help me understand the strange life of that enigmatic woman.

As Farida gradually settled into her seclusion, her body settled into something between a whisper of unknown desire and the fury of dangerous cravings, which gave her cheeks a mesmerizing blush. She was marked out by the secret envy of most of the other women in the village and people sensed an unusual danger coming from the greenhouse and its widow of misfortune. After the rice pudding party and everything else that had happened since she’d come to Sarmada, a suppressed disquiet bubbled up. People realized it was wise to keep their distance.

“Beware the flower that buds in rubbish,” exhorted Shaykh Farouq constantly.

The men of the village openly joined in with the women's condemnation, but out of sight and in whispers, their suspicious favors continued. She was assaulted by gossip and sharp tongues from every corner, but she simply defended her reputation with that rare smile of hers and her uncommonly sweet and inspiring demeanor.

And yet her blossoming body was of a different opinion. At night she was tormented by the feverish flames that lashed at her body, whose lifetime had been marked only by a few innocent, stolen kisses from a boy who'd rocked her fourteen-year-old world, and her wedding night, during which—you might say—she'd only had the tiniest taste of the feast of the body she'd been promised and never received, her dreams of a glorious life with Salman al-Khattar shattered by a single stray bullet. The whole thing was like some revelation that had come to her in a strange waking dream and completely taken over her life. She didn't want to be just some hormone-soaked teenager's easy lay, but some unidentifiable impulse drove her forward, toward those who still bore the last dusting of child-hood, as they stood on the precipice, ready to graduate to another realm, falling into a crushing abyss of fervid desire. No one tried to understand what they were going through, they just cursed and preached.

She decided to make her body the bridge to the other side, the crossing they were so looking forward to. She gave herself over to navigating the rugged tracks of silvery-white sexual desire, and, as if by instinct, she tracked down those outcast teenagers who'd never known a woman's body. She was fueled by her mysterious sweets, spiced with grief-milk now that she'd made certain that it wasn't the culprit behind the tragedy of the Feast of the Cross. She wound the first threads of her web around her first visitor, who was always passing by her shed whether or not he had a good reason. She called him over to help water the plants in her garden. She watched him: an early sprinkling of manhood above his upper lip, lust flooding his eyes every time she walked past. She gave him a sweet flavored with mint and sesame, and thanked him breathily for his help, her gaze burning him up inside.

He never left the roof opposite her house and she expertly absorbed every sign of his agitation. She filled every one of his fifteen-year-old fantasies. Riyad al-Fayez was that first adolescent; he was her first experience, through which she'd mastered everything she needed to ensure her unseen, unspoken role—although all of Sarmada would soon come to know of it, regardless of whether she'd tried to keep it secret.

She gave him no shortage of wet dreams and he found himself masturbating whenever he had any privacy, to the point that he began to look pale and drained, like a skinny, bigheaded sumac plant. She let him watch through the window of the shed, framed by flowerpots and foliage as she squatted in front of the washbasin, intentionally wetting her clothes and undoing the buttons. She'd undo a button for a moment and then button it back up, and then she rolled up her skirt, exposing her smooth thighs, white and faintly red, which then spread to his ears and pimples and beat at his dismal defenses.

Then she'd slam the window shut, crushing his desire and setting him pacing, carving grooves of turmoil into the mud roof. He was lost in a whirlwind of fear and angst, but he gathered all his strength, and the lover-boy finally decided that all those weeks of excruciating torment were enough to make him knock at her door that evening.

He looked pitiful: he'd squeezed himself into his younger brother's blue trousers and was wearing the shirt his cousin had bought at the secondhand clothes' market, reeking of half a bottle's worth of cheap aftershave, his Brilliantine-drenched hair looking shiny and comical, and his pimples all the more hideous for his pathetic attempts to pop them and then being smothered with Ideal acne cream. She towered over him lithely, casting an ethereal glow all around him. Everything he’d practiced before coming over evaporated in an instant, and all he could say was, “Can I have some water?” It took a superhuman effort for him to add, “cold water.”

“But of course.” Her magic voice tugged at his blood cells, mesmerizing him. She turned and walked into the house, swaying, and the rooftop Romeo beat his ingenious retreat. Still there was no escaping the bonds of her seduction. He stayed up that whole autumn night looking through her open window as she let her hair down to spill over her body in the greenish light. She massaged her breasts with wood-sorrel flowers and the shoots of other strange plants. She rubbed chamomiles under her arms and wild tulips and shy mint against her ivory breasts, smeared lushly green. He came down from the roof like a sleepwalker and followed solace’s path toward his destiny.

The door was half-open and two arms were waiting to grab him. Fingers as soft as bread-dough tickled the threshing-floor of his abdomen and wandered—herd-like—over the wilderness of his body. The fingers became stallions as they gripped his erection, his entire life changing in an instant. She squeezed him tightly as he fell to pieces. His shirtbutton caught the light and without thinking she tore it off with her gleaming white teeth, then she stripped off all his clothes and laid him down on his back. Her mouth moistened the straw of his innocence as the bee of his body began to dance. He was already about to burst as she lowered herself onto his erection and it had scarcely taken shelter inside of her when it frothed and foamed, ejaculating in irregular spurts and then dying out. He swarmed as if a whole colony of bees were stinging his very blood, and then shrank inside of her as if turning to nothing. His slackness slipping out from her tenderness.

Her hands reached out to touch him, disturbing his pleasure coma, and he'd been made a man in a matter of minutes. A half hour later, she shuffled him out of the shed and he was alone once again. He cried for his loneliness, wiped out from exhaustion and wild delight, wondering what had just happened. He wanted to crawl back into her arms, to get back the innocence she'd shattered with her seduction. He wanted to get back the button she'd ripped off his shirt, but she'd locked the door and her body. Her rule was unshakable and went into effect the moment he'd stepped out of the house: all the Sarmadan teenagers who attained their manhood in her shed over the surface of her intoxicating body had one chance and that was all.

One after the other, they came to see Farida and she marked them with her scent and tore a button from each of their shirts. She took their gifts coolly and gave them a never-ending list of chores: they built a wall around the house, tiled the roof, installed running water, built a chicken coop, painted the fence and the bars on the window. They performed tireless services—in secret, at first—and then openly with a good deal of pride and rivalry. Eventually it became something natural in the landscape. Her house was just like the majlis, or the church or the mosque: a place where people worshipped a lord who knew—better than anyone else—that everything was predetermined.

She was accepted for what she was. Sarmada could deal with her captivating presence as she transformed the teenagers from permanent pains-in-the-ass to a troupe of gallant, lightfooted poets. She acquired a strange kind of power over all the hormonal youths: she knew how to talk to them, how to advise them, how to listen to their souls and lift their spirits. They all obeyed the strict rule: no one could have her body more than once. She took a button from each one and showed him the door, sitting down right after he'd left to sew the button onto a large white veil, and she'd embroider his name—or a nickname she'd come up with for him—right there under his button, before going off to bathe her body—which was devoted to giving, not getting—in rose-perfumed water.

Yet she still waited for Shafee Mansour, the only one she herself longed for. She saw him hanging around outside the house, monitoring her every move, counting her lovers, never capable of walking in himself. One evening after midnight, she caught him lurking in the garden, but when she whispered to him, “Shafee, come in, don't be scared,” he turned and ran.

She started arranging her days according to his schedule. He'd come in the morning and wait for her to open the door, then she would just look at him until she'd got her fill. She felt as if her day only started when she got to see him, and then he would go off to join in the endless work dreamed up by Nawwaf to keep him and all the other brothers busy, struggling to forget spilled blood through hard labor. When they'd finished their stone-hoeing, they began tilling and seeding, digging irrigation canals and planting trees, building walls, chopping firewood, working constantly to exhaust their guilt and shame. For her part, Farida received patients and prepared the requested cures: for stomach ills and indigestion, for high blood pressure, for increased fertility, tighter vaginas and whiter teeth. In the daytime, the eager teenagers came over to help out and by the afternoon, she'd decided which lucky boy would be next. This routine sometimes lasted for a month or more, depending on her mood and the state of her garden.

“Shafee Mansour isn't like the rest,” she whispered over and over to herself. Shafee had those strangely sparkling sad eyes. He bore a too-heavy burden: he'd stabbed his own sister in front of the entire village and he’d never be able to shed the guilt and remorse. He was totally in thrall to his eldest brother Nawwaf’s authority and to his own contradictory emotions—he didn’t know whether to take refuge in God and wipe clean his guilt after shame had stained his family or to go to that abundantly feminine woman in the embroidered dress and dive into her curves until he drowned, to wipe away the stink of blood that still lingered in his nose.

He hadn’t slept since he first saw her, when she came to invite them round to her house for rice pudding. He tried with all his strength to drive her from his mind, but it was no use. He started going to her house every morning to wait for her to wake up so he could catch a glance to calm his anxious soul. It was true that they’d been spared the crying plague—except for upset stomachs—even though they’d eaten the sweets the children had brought over, but ever since that day Shafee had been unable to sleep. Not because of the sweets, but more likely because of the pain that stabbed his heart whenever he recalled her eyes and gentle voice. He returned in the evenings to pace back and forth, to catch a glance or a wave, and when she smiled his body ached, but the longing of his soul was eased. Nawwaf could see the signs on his youngest brother’s face and was struck by an old terror: he saw the same pallid confusion, the same moony insomnia he’d seen in Hela. If only he’d understood those signs when he’d first seen them, he’d have locked her up in the house or chased her lover out of town and saved his family the exile of spilled blood. He was worried about his youngest brother and every time he looked into his sweet, almost girlish face, he could see Hela.

On a bitter cold night in early 1970, an icy wind whipping through Sarmada, Nawwaf walked in from the parlor, wrapped in a thick fur, and heard his brother crying in his bedroom. It was love and he knew it. He burst into the room, cursing and grabbing Shafee by the neck, lifting him off his feet as if he were a pillow. He stared into his eyes and barked, “Who is she? I'm not kidding around: tell me who she is!”

Shafee was gasping for air, trying desperately to reach the ground with his feet. “It's Farida, Nawwaf. Farida.” Nawwaf choked on the shock and dropped his brother onto the bed. He was livid; he stormed out into the cold, his breath melting the snow, and rolled a cigarette. He inhaled the hot smoke voraciously until the cigarette burned all the way down and singed his fingers. He went back inside the house like a raging, bellowing bull, threw on his heavy coat and grabbed his shotgun. He threw open the door and saw Shafee looking wasted, like a misshapen pillow.

“Get up, you son of a bitch. Get up and get dressed.”

Shafee obeyed as if hypnotized and his brother grabbed him by the hand and dragged him over to her house. He rapped at the door with the stock of his shotgun, then knocked incessantly with his massive hand. He could hear a voice on the inside, trembling, cold and scared: “Who is it?”

“Open up, Farida.”

“Who's there?”

“Open up before I break down the door.”

“Give me a second.” She put on a heavy robe and grabbed the kerosene lamp before she opened the door.

Shafee was still a bit shell-shocked, chattering in the cold, and Nawwaf with his steaming breath looked rather like a snorting bull in the pale light of the lamp. He didn't want to drag things out, so he simply threw his brother at her. “Here, you whore! You can have him.” And then vanished into the icy darkness.

Back at the Mansour family home, Nayef, Talal, and Shahir were sitting there worrying, wondering where their brothers had disappeared to in the cold. Nawwaf came back alone and threw a couple of cow chips into the stove and lit a fire. He sat there staring into space and none of his brothers dared to speak to him, or even go near his silence, boobytrapped as it was with mines that the slightest whisper would set off.

They all sat there together silently, and when the wood began to glow red, Nawwaf stood up and took the hot coals out with a pair of tongs and set the blackened teapot down on top of them, before adding three more cow chips and some oak logs to the stove. “When winter dies down, we've got to move back to the old house. I think it's been long enough.” He sounded as if he'd walked in from another world, calm and resigned. Nayef and Talal nodded, but Shahir still couldn't shake his agonizing foreboding and, just as a log was popping in the fire, he blurted out:

“Where's Shafee?”

Nawwaf rolled a cigarette and took a deep drag. “At Farida's.”

Nayef was shocked into silence, but Talal jumped out of his seat:

“For God's sake! Why didn't you bring him home? Why didn't you just shoot him on the spot? Oh, that dirty little son of a bitch!”

“Hela's blood wasn't enough, Shaykhs? You want us to kill him, too?” he asked his enraged brothers. “I took him over there myself,” he said defiantly.

At dawn, Talal and Nayef walked out of the parlor, packed their bags, hugged Shahir wordlessly, and then left for Khalwat al-Bayada on Mount Lebanon. They were never heard from again.

After Hela's death, the brothers had found themselves condemned to remain unseen, so they became Nawwaf's shadow, and when they walked anywhere together, they stepped silently, matching his footsteps. Talal and Nayef had decided to become pious shaykhs, with white cowls, thick moustaches, and shaved heads, dedicating their lives to copying out manuscripts of the Epistles of Wisdom. But they still remained dedicated to their older brother; he was the one who decided which direction all their lives would take. It was a kind of strange submission that could’ve lasted forever if Nawwaf hadn’t done what he’d done. They couldn’t understand why. How could a family who’d paid such a high price for dignity, with their own blood, sit idly by as their eldest brother lost all reason and himself delivered their youngest brother into the embrace of licentiousness? It was too much for Talal and Nayef to understand and their consent would have meant that their five-and-a-half years of ostracism had been nothing more than a joke. Their bold objection wasn’t meant to insult their brother, whom they revered, and this was why they felt that all they could do was to go to the only place left where the saveable could be saved.

Shafee stayed at Farida’s for two straight days. He was nearly dead from desperation, torment, and the cold when his brother abandoned him to this love-charged woman. She took him into the warmth of her bed and held him until morning. He slept deeply in her arms and she chose not to wake him. She left him in bed and heated the place up. Then she brought him breakfast, not letting him get out of bed, and fed him—over his objections—a boiled egg dipped in ghee, and made him drink a glass of milk. She didn’t add any drops of griefmilk to it because she wanted him exactly as he was, under no influences at all; she wanted his tender heart, his unadulterated soul, and she understood why she was so drawn to him.

He ate and smiled, and then fell back asleep. He slept all day as she took care of her business and received customers wanting her herbs. She took care of all their orders and then she returned to him. She watched his face in the light of the paraffin lamp and saw that the drowsy clouds had all cleared away. She stood there, not knowing what to do, and for the first time, she was truly frightened: this boy's going to stay here! She'd never let any of her lovers stay the night before.

She wanted nothing more than for the overwhelming affection she felt for him to be transformed into mere desire, and yet she felt as if every fiber of her body craved him. She kept her nightgown on and slipped into bed beside him. He moved closer to kiss her, but she jerked her lips away; she didn't want anything resembling love to intrude on this night. She feared the torment of an infatuated heart, and kisses were the shocking, painful gateway to a land of simultaneous joy and hurt called love. She didn't want to fall for him, to love him, for it could never be undone.

He kissed her slender neck, whispering breathily, and she could only surrender. She usually had to guide her body-tortured teenage lovers, who'd yet to learn the secrets of unspoken desires or the difference between maternal and sexual passion and love. But he, she felt, was complete. He smelled unlike any other man she knew. His body was supple and strong: subtly sculpted, she felt as she ran her hands over his tight muscles. That's why she let him kiss her neck, and nibble her earlobes, and take off her nightgown, leaving her naked. That's why she let him celebrate every inch of her skin with his hot tongue, and suck her breasts—not ferociously, but gently, exciting her desire. He squeezed her breasts together and slipped both nipples into his mouth at once, sucking hard and biting, but stopping just before it hurt, and pulling away and blowing coolly as his saliva seeped into her skin. He continued down, licking at her belly, and then his tongue came into contact with her invisible, almost microscopic, pubic hair, causing it to stand on end. Her brain received mysterious signals, telling it to transmit quivering waves all over her body. He travelled down between her thighs, kissing her, smelling her, rubbing his face against her, and then he rested his chin against her pubis.

He was led by instinct and hunger. Her amulet's riddle deciphered, he brought his face back up to her pelvis, lapping at her, dipping his tongue inside of her, teasing her clitoris, rubbing his nose against the secret spot none of her young men had discovered. She was wet, she was fragrant, and she writhed. And then she came, for the first time in her entire life. He slid down to her feet, sucking each of her toes and licking her heels and calves. He was completely absorbed in discovering every spot on her body, its hidden secrets, and he was in no hurry for it to end. He wanted to go over—and down into—her every pore.

She was light in his arms as he maneuvered her into any position he felt like, but his erection was like stone when she reached out to grasp it. It wasn't overly large or unsuitably small.

She swooned as she knelt down in front of him, feeling his veins, holding his penis back as she ran her tongue down over his testicles and took them in her mouth. She dipped them in and out, and then she pushed him down onto his back and knelt over him like a cupola, staring at him with brassy eyes, and then, resuming her tonguing, she slid down his chest to his stomach and came to his erection. She licked the engorged head, and took it into her mouth. Shivers rippled through his entire body as she removed it slowly and held it, like a fluttering, placing light kisses on his jumpy veins, and then taking it back into her mouth. She swallowed it until she could feel his pubic hair against her lips. She wanted to give him what she'd been unable to give anyone else.

He entered her, lowering himself down on top of her as he looked into her eyes, which were glazed over with pleasure and fear. Then before she could say anything, he put her on all fours and entered her from behind. She didn't know how many times she'd come, but when he pulled out of her, she felt as if her soul were slipping away. He suddenly forced it into her ass, ignoring her pleas. “Stop! You're hurting me! Please stop!”

He could hear nothing over his own exhilaration as he rode her—in and out; it burned her insides. He moved back and forth between her vagina and ass as he repeated, “Farida, you slut. Farida, you bitch. You whore.” She caught a lusty fever from those words and she seemed to glow with pleasure. Her body, she felt, was finally being liberated from the worship of those teenagers who sanctified its motherly affection. The repugnant words set her free and added to her ecstasy. She longed to hear more and more; she wanted his force to blow straight through her body. Remembering the naive, empty words of love on teenagers' whispering lips, she felt her femininity was being washed clean of all that had clung to it. She felt the membrane of her innocence sloughing off the dust of desperate love. He was giving her everything he had stored up in his dictionary of filth, without embellishment or emotion, taking the body to this lit-up point as every atom burst open and was soaked with sweat and exhaled pleasure. The trembling never ceased. She reached peaks she'd never known. Images ruptured in her mind as it clung to extreme heights. She felt her soul dissolving, her body disintegrating, mixing with spheres of light, spurting, sea-foaming, overflowing with heat. Until it came time for him to come and he let loose a round of semen on her back and then grabbed himself tightly, squeezing it, biting down on his lip till it bled, and frantically lay her back down in her crib and yanked at her head to slip his flushed member between her lips before it exploded in her mouth.

Shafee erupted in hysterical giggling and filthy slurs as she swallowed his milk and nursed until gradually it withered. Only the erring, heart-twisting words her lover repeated could bring her back to reality: “Oh, Hela... Hela... You’re such a slut, Hela.”

He returned to his brothers the next day, exhausted but full. His face was white and bright, but clearly hiding something. There was a striking glimmer in his eyes that burned out as soon as he found out that two of his brothers had left and that Nawwaf was refusing to speak to him. His other brother Shahir simply slapped him and spit in his face. He wiped his face calmly and went to wash.

He came out to see Nawwaf and Shahir packing up whatever they could, getting ready to move back into the old house. He worked alongside them in silence; he was energetic and active. He went over to the old house and cleaned and tidied up the place. He threw himself into work like a madman, and every time his memory called up a scene from what had happened at Farida's, his energy increased, his body elated, and his eyes shone. There was no hiding it. His brothers were shocked to find that the old rundown house had come back to life and they could move back in that very evening. What made it even more poignant was that their youngest brother had a childlike smile on his face, which made them smile in turn, before they remembered themselves and stared down at the ground, erasing any trace of smiles, putting on masks of threadbare anger.

He was dying to get back to Farida, but he was blocked by the gaze of his brothers, whose unbearable censure never let up.

A week after the remaining brothers returned to the house, they invited the notables of Sarmada to a reception that would allow them to rejoin the life of the community. They slaughtered seven sheep and prepared twenty-one trays of mansaf, and then they slaughtered another seven sheep and distributed the meat among the poor. Everyone accepted their decision and the hospitality they were known for.

Shafee was watching her through the bushes, so she hid quickly. She started trying to avoid him. She was enforcing her rule—one time only, that was all, just like anybody else—but it pained her, too, not to have him.

She worried that love would lead them down a path from which there was no turning back and that he would consume her soul and the denuding of her body. When he said Hela's name, she was brought back to reality and she knew for certain, and sadly, that she couldn't love a damaged, pained adolescent who was condemned by himself and God and society to an eternal punishment because he'd murdered his innocent sister on delusional grounds known as “honor.” She refused all his winning attempts to see her and burned her memories down to ash so that it was as if nothing at all had ever happened between them.

It went on like that for weeks and then he made up his mind. He wrapped his gift in a bag and knocked on her door. She knew it was him, so she didn't open the door. He knew she wouldn't open up, but he wanted to settle his doubts so he could carry out what he'd decided to do; he knocked again and again, and again. Then he called to her through the door: “I'm leaving something for you here by the door. I just wanted to tell you that I'm leaving for good, but that I'll never forget you.”

He walked away from the house and hid behind the big cactus near the entrance. She opened the door a few minutes later and took the package inside. She looked into the void, but she didn't see him. She stared into the void; she could feel him nearby. She waved. It was the last time he'd ever lay eyes on her. The next morning he set out for Beirut, where he waited for the ship that would take him to Colombia never to be heard from again.

She opened the bag and found a transistor radio that he'd ordered especially for her. The brown radio was about as big as a tray of tomatoes and it would fill her life with news and songs until the very end. It was on the radio that she learned that there'd been a Corrective Revolution and that a new future awaited Syria. She didn't understand a word of it, but she started noticing as her adolescent lovers began parroting strange new words about liberty, unity, and socialism—all the brand-new Baath party slogans.

Yet there wasn't a force on earth that could alter the routine she'd established. She was like Sarmada: whatever was going on in the world marched along easily until it got to this volcanic plain where its seeds might be accepted, but its roots always failed to penetrate the ground. Four houses down, the remaining members of the Mansour family were working to win back their family's good name. Nawwaf didn't seem to care and he told his brother that he wanted to marry him off.

“Not right now, brother,” Shahir answered calmly.

Several defiant years later, dozens and dozens of teenage boys had passed through her house, but now she was showing signs of pregnancy; she could feel a child growing inside of her. Despite all her careful precautions, pregnancy surprised her and her new reality was unmistakably clear.

Every time she considered killing her fetus, she knew she wouldn't be able to forgive herself if she did. She also knew that accepting a fatherless child was too much to ask of Sarmada's abilities and sensibilities; it was impossible for a bastard to get along in a place so tied to its rigid rules. Thus she decided she'd choose a husband who wouldn't interfere with what she considered to be her divine mission. When one of her teenage lovers was talking to her about the mission of the Arab nation and its renaissance, she cut off his nonsense and said, “I've got a mission to do, too,” and kicked him out of the house to spread news of the miraculous body and its revelation.

Long story short, she thought it over and decided there was no one better for her than Hamoud, the crackpot.

By June 10, 1967, it was clear that the defeat was total. The loss of Quneitra and the Golan Heights combined with the occupation of Sinai, Jerusalem, and the West Bank—a defeat on that scale—was too much for the geography teacher, who'd believed all his government's lies, to handle. He didn't sleep at all on the sixth night; he stayed up listening to the radio and when he heard the announcement that Quneitra had fallen he chugged down half a bottle of straight arak. When he returned home from the local party meeting, boiling with rage against the enemies of Arab nationalism, he tried to turn his wife's body into the Arab nation. He stripped off her clothes and got started—no time to lose! He plotted a grid over her entire body with a black marker and began sketching a map.

At first, she thought it was just a fit of his uniquely mad lust, which she'd always enjoyed, for he never stopped thinking up new ways to measure and sketch maps of pleasure over her body's secret terrain. But he just kept on sketching maps of the Arab world. He was convinced that the solution to the world's problems lay in maps, which never lied, and that everyone should just keep to their borders and discover the treasures they possessed.

On that day, he transmigrated the souls of Sykes and Picot as he divided up the parts of his wife Ibtihal's body up into the territory of the former colonial powers. When he came to her vagina, he drew Palestine and looked at her as he shouted, completely naked himself, “You tricked us, you sons of bitches! You gave us everything and you took away the womb!” As he gripped the scalpel in his hand, he knew he wanted to kill international Zionism, and a terrified Ibtihal got up and ran into the bathroom and locked the door, and when he finally passed out on the bed from the defeat and his drunkenness, she ran away to her family in the north and never returned.

Hamoud lost half his mind after the defeat in the June War, and the party found they no longer required his services. He spent his days, shouting at the village: “Lock your doors! Don't leave anything unlocked. Lock your doors!” He wouldn't go to sleep until he'd gone around to every house in the village and made sure the doors were locked. Nothing made him angrier than an unlocked door someone had forgotten. Unlocked doors reminded Hamoud, the brilliant geography teacher and committed Baathist, of the night Ibtihal ran away.

It wasn't his geographic lust that'd scared her off, it was more likely that she'd just been waiting for the chance to get back at him for the awful poverty he'd put her through, since he was a member of the Baath who donated his salary to his brother Arabs from the Gulf to the Atlantic. He memorized the party's theoretical principles as if they were the names of God. He was overflowing with a fervor that could accept no alternative to the ineluctable destiny of liberty, unity, and socialism. He'd wanted Ibtihal to be his wholly committed, freedom-fighting comrade-partner and to discipline herself strictly for the sake of the cause of the Great Arab Revolution to come, but the aftermath of the June defeat was too much for his mind to handle—loaded as it was with thoughts of coming revolutions.

After going around to all the doors and making sure they were locked, he'd head off to bed, and in the morning, he'd get up bright and early to take care of the holy chores that Mother Nature cryptically sent to him. He shaved, washed in cold water—in summer or winter, it didn't matter—shined his shoes, put on cologne, gathered up his maps and great secrets, along with a big compass, protractor, and astrolabe, and set off for Wind Hill. There, he measured God's country and noted the signs until he reached the Salt Spring. He would sit there in the stream, lost in thought, announcing his peculiar daily prophecies, synthesizing signs and symbols, reading faint clues, jotting down his amazing five-line poems in a big book he called Uncovering Falsehood. He erased whatever he'd written every night before he went to bed so that the hidden evil forces wouldn't get hold of his secrets.

He knew when solar and lunar eclipses would take place, he was an excellent geomancer, and he spent most of his time doing complex calculations to determine precisely at what time God would wake up. “Our lives are a divine dream,” he'd say. “Everything that happens is a dream. And God's dreams only last three minutes. Every second is a million years, so it's not over yet. One day he's going to wake up and then everything will go back to how it started.”

He carried a book with him wrapped in the March 8, 1963, issue of the Baathist newspaper Militant; this was the day when the Baathists triumphed over the Separatists to rule Syria for an endless forever. For decades long it seemed entrenched and unshakable, but places have their own logic and maybe all it takes is one distant spark to burn the whole thing down. Sarmada got used to Hamoud and it wasn't as if he went around poking his nose into other people's business—aside from the doors, of course.

His garden was turned into a lab where he built his ridiculous time machines out of crates and cardboard and junk. His furniture was draped with dozens of maps that showed what lay beyond geography itself. “Everything has a unit of measurement,” he said. “Everything has a map, from galaxies to atoms. Anything that doesn't have a map is worthless.”

Over time, they discovered he had lots of amazing talents, and while it was true that the name “Hamoud the crackpot” had stuck, it was born out of the villagers' sympathy and their lingering respect for a man who was naturally both noble and crazy.

Farida knew exactly how best to lure him in. She'd known ever since he started coming round to her shed to make sure the door was locked. The evening after she'd decided that Hamoud the crackpot was the man for her—the man who could give the fetus forming inside of her a chance at life—she tied the door with a rope to keep it open and waited for him to come. She put on a thin slip so that the features of her body could draw in the topographically obsessed geography teacher, and she perfumed the house with very rare incense she'd been given by one of her teenagers who'd left with his family for Saudi Arabia. The boy had stolen some amazing Cambodian incense and presented it to the woman who'd given meaning to his adolescence. She burned the incense with some fragrant resin, turning the whole atmosphere of the house into one of seduction, and she added some of her own homemade incense, which gave off magic-mixed scents, which couldn't be compared to moments of basil, whispers of mischievous jas-mine, or even the rapture of wily damask rose. It was as if the scents were a language that spoke directly to Hamoud's mind when he turned up, as he did most evenings after sunset. He grabbed the roped door and yanked it angrily, but there was no use. He tried again with some force, but again he failed. She stepped out from between the ferns of green-tinged seconds, her perky breasts barely hidden by her lace slip, her alluring curls bouncing and flashing as they fell over her shoulders, her long neck, and her big eyes protected by arched, heart-snaring eyebrows. She called to him, parting those cherry-red lips painted with crimson lipstick, and her straight white teeth made him freeze stock-still in the face of this oncoming army.

His agitation-aching head begged him to run, but some hidden desire and his geographic curiosity ordered him to wait to see this convoy and the strange storm of scents it brought with it up close. Before he could even make up his mind, the perfume of incense, orange-blossom water, and other oils and spices that wafted from her body caused a little—maybe even too little to see—drool to form at the corner of his gaping mouth.

“Having trouble?” Her question knocked him down and the convoy of her body swept over him, every last detail of which was bewitchingly revealed.

She bent down over the knot on the door handle, three-quarters of her chest spilling out, and the totally defeated teacher's jaw dropped to the floor. She untied the knot easily and they both—the door and the teacher—jerked. She calmly shut the door, slid the bolt to lock it, and unlocked the gates to a geography the teacher had never known before.

She took him by the hand and sat him down on the sofa. She knelt down in front of him and took off his gleaming shoes and bright white socks. She undid his belt and took off his trousers, and when he saw her fold them carefully, he thanked her from the bottom of his heart. She stripped him down completely and took him over to her washbasin, which was really just a barrel she'd cut in half lengthwise. She sat him down in the water, on the surface of which floated troops of rascally chamomile, red poppy anemone, and clover flowers and began to bathe him. She scooped up the flower-embroidered water into a plastic bowl and poured it over his head, which was still brimming with Baath party slogans. This was followed by a ritual massage of his stiff shoulders that made the hairs on his shoulders stick up, and she continued lavishing him with her abundant affection, massaging his muscles, which had ached for a touch like this. She took him out of the pond of sweetness and laid him on his back in the bed of wonder. She blindfolded him with a silk scarf, but despite the overwhelming darkness, the lamp of his body lit up his docile vision, and he gave into her entirely as she massaged him with sesame oil that she'd pressed herself from seeds she'd carefully selected, then distilled the oil with a chemist's care, using all her talent and experience. His desiccated body sprang to life. It shook its every hungry cell, and he was overcome by a current that shocked all his muscles, and then they relaxed, and for the first time since Ibtihal had left, his erection sprung up. Farida fed him one of her grief-milk-soaked sweets, which he followed with a swig of wine she'd aged in casks. He could smell the hillside grapevines bathing in the drowsy sunlight, washed in clean breezes. The scent of the wine mixed with the scent of her body made it the best wine in the entire world. Ever since the mountains had produced an emperor of Rome, Philip the Arab, Rome had drunk the wine of Sarmada and the surrounding regions. He could almost hear nature trotting and history shouting as they slid over his tongue and a bitter taste filled his throat. He finished his glass, and she lay down beside him, burying his face, tanned with repressed anger, in her breasts. He began to suck on them and then to sob. He spent the first half of that moonlit night in tears. She was soaked in the irrepressible tears streaming out from his heavy gloom. When he was finally freed from the sorrowful showers of his bitter memories, from the ungrateful abandonment of a party he'd given his life to and a woman he'd been devoted to, Farida rode him with her abundant femininity and he was overcome with a forceful desire. As he erupted into her womb, he cried out, “I am al-Idrisi! I am al-Idrisi!”

She got off him and lay down beside him, kissing his overgrown, polo-stick-shaped ear lobes, and whispered to him—not to be nosy, but just to ask: “Who's al-Idrisi?”

“The author of The Book of Wonders for those with Lust to Wander.”

He stood up, striking a teacher's pose, and she sat down on the floor leaning forward onto the sofa, drinking her wine, and smiling as she listened to him.

“He was the first person to draw maps, unlock the secret symbols of the land and paint the seas; he drew connections between human life and the environment. Al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta and lived in Cordoba. He traveled to Syria to study and then he went to Norman Sicily to draw the first map that represented the world, or close to it. One second,” he said, reaching for his bag. He pulled out a stack of maps and carefully picked one of them: “Look at this map here. It's an exact copy of al-Idrisi's. Look how he drew the seven climes with all the countries and continents and the distances between countries, the routes and the mileage. His books on geography are a highpoint in Arab geographical texts, and in all of medieval science.

“Al-Idrisi died at the age of seventy-one, but no one knows where he was buried. I think he died while he was still at the Norman court in Palermo, Sicily.”

He continued demonstrating his wide knowledge, and she could only watch this amazing man, sometimes holding back her laughter and at other times with her mouth gaping in wonder.

“Al-Idrisi was followed by Yaqut al-Hamawi and al-Istakhri and Ibn Battuta and Ibn Majid al-Maqdisi; they all knew the earth was round before everyone else. They understood about lunar and solar eclipses and seasons and the earth's rotation and its orbit around the sun, with their eyes, their minds, and their tools, which I have with me in my bag.”

He was full of information and explanations. Farida was visited by every Arab geographer and explorer in an amazing exposition until Hamoud passed out. He woke up at noon the next day to the smell of frying eggs; he had a slight headache and his madness seemed to have disappeared.

“Where's Ibtihal?” he asked her with evident shyness.

“She died years ago,” she said firmly. “Come on now, no time to waste, breakfast's ready.” She brought over a tray festooned with cheese, yogurt, milk, honey, stuffed eggplant, radishes, and eggs sunny-side-up, as he tried to remember what had happened the night before. All he could remember was that it was day eight of the war! That the soldiers who passed by Sarmada had been shouting: “They wouldn't have occupied it if it weren't for the announcement that Quneitra had fallen! We retreated in a panic. They tricked us! The Israelis are cowards; they wouldn't have been able to move up if they hadn't announced the fall of Quneitra.”

He remembered that he'd drunk half a liter of homemade arak and that he'd been drunk up until this moment. Five years had passed since the defeat and he'd been lost in his own world. He'd only just snapped out of it, smelling the remnants of the incense, oil, and perfume. They lingered in his nose.

“I slept for a long time, didn't I?” he asked her.

“Not really. Only for four or five years,” she said, laughing gaily. “Come on, let's eat and then we can go register our marriage.”

He thought for a moment. “Whatever you say.”

She let out a deep sigh, from the worry and fear that had been plaguing her, as Hamoud ate silently. He caught sight of the compass leaning against the bolted door. That's strange, he thought. What's that doing here?