3

Buthayna

Should I call it quits and go? It was the hope of escape that had me standing on the roof, surveying the whole of Sarmada. What was waiting there in that silent, stoic village? What was coalescing beneath its stones and bricks and in the torment of its people? Anyone who watched the sun set during that fiery summer would have felt a great womb contracting, getting ready to give birth to new creatures and lineages the earth had never seen before. You could tell it was on the verge of erupting. The Hauran Plain and its spirits were reflected in the remnants of dried-out plants and harvested fields, yellow as if sickly, stretching across the surface of this poor, confused, forgotten place in the south. Here, power lies exclusively in the dried-up brush and chaff and all it takes is one match to set everything alight. Fire consumes everything; it consumes every last stockpiled drop of water on this earth. And all it takes is one breeze to make dust the ruler of the place. Dust covers faces, despair shows in their eyes, and the people are slaves to the most acute thoughtlessness.

One spark is enough to revive their desire for life. One clue from the place is all it would take to change things forever. Silent labor pains echo through the village, summoning up blood, and souls, and stones.

I couldn't go back to the way I'd been, but I couldn't go forward either. I was stuck between two worlds, two moments, two histories. The East that had produced three faiths was getting ready to produce a fourth and this time it was going to be a different type of energy that would overwhelm the entire world. A world that would reflect only itself and wouldn't stem from any one person. After we'd convinced ourselves that the earth was round, it was inevitable that we'd put up with anything, and thus we could no longer pretend to kick the bad apples off into the abyss.

Sarmada's the center of the world tonight, so, of course, I'm going to stay an extra day and listen.

I wrote those words in my notebook and walked back down, having had my fill of the Hauran sunset.

Sarmada had many names, “Mother of Trees,” “Windhill,” “God's Basin,” and all these names reflected the nature of the place and the character of its people: so modest they were naive, so excitable they were rash, so profound they knew all the different ways to be God-fearing.

It was also the setting for many jokes and anecdotes, most of which stemmed from the village's ancient trade in cannabis before it was outlawed. They used to grow it in the fields, process it, and dry it in their houses. It made the best hashish in the East, which they used to export to Beirut and Jerusalem. During the hashish harvest, the village was drowned in good spirits and constant laughter, not scowling like all the villages around it. Men and women, the young and the elderly, everyone took part in the hashish harvest and it was like a festival. After the authorities cracked down, people lost the sense of humor they'd relied on to endure the passing of time.

It was an ordinary mountain village in the Hauran and to excavate its memories meant looking for a gap in the layers of time. There was never any logical explanation for what happened, and everything that happened seemed illogical. But the truth, which the eye couldn't deny—and you'll see it if you have the chance to go visit—was that it was stunningly green, surrounded by olive groves on three sides, while the western flank was given over to a plain open to all possibilities.

Growing hash and getting high was something the villagers had always done and there was nothing that could stamp it out. In Sarmada, history had always stayed at the margins. The people never got involved in it except when it was time for an armed revolution. They didn't have much patience for nonviolent resistance—no matter how celebrated—and they weren't good at inventing demands, or listening to reason, but when they rose up, when they felt their very existence was under threat, they were unstoppable; they tore down everything in sight. And yet they never learned how to preserve the achievements of the revolutions they'd launched throughout history. The thing they really excelled at was biding their time.

They had the unshakable belief that their lives would be repeated, so there was no harm if one generation were lost. The thing about history, though, was that it usually took a place a very long time to know itself before it could submit, so time simply won through attrition.

Sarmada was made of basalt, lately invaded by cement, and nestled in a valley, which stretched down from the mountain peaks and split into two branches, which encircled and embraced the village as they continued down toward the Yarmouk valley.

Windhill was like a pillow the village rested against. The families who lived there were Christians and Druze who'd come to the mountains from the Lebanon more than three hundred years ago and the Bedouin were settled at the foot of it in an attempt to put an end to their nomadic lifestyles.

The village was ringed by groves of olive and fig trees, and when all the opium poppies were ripped out of the fields after the revolution, the land was reclaimed for wheat, barley, grass peas, vetch and chickpeas, encroaching into the Hauran plain, and parts of the dark blue, rugged wasteland of basalt rock were also cultivated, so the village took on the appearance of a heap of life surrounded by a jungle of blue rock, tinged with black.

The legendary Mother of Rams tree stood right in the center of the rocky wasteland, and there wasn't another green shoot among the silent stones in a radius of ten kilometers. The tree had become a place of pilgrimage for people longing to be fertile. They'd take the leaves and make a bitter tea out of them in the hope that it would bring their barren wombs to life. Sheep were slaughtered there and stories were woven around it, which all said that it was a blessed tree that fed on the blood of vigorous rams and would ensure the safety of a flock. The shepherds lavished the tree with their best rams whenever their flocks were attacked by wolves or other predators or if a deadly disease struck.

The tree grew in a frightening and desolate rocky wasteland and it took its name from the offerings slaughtered over its roots. Over time it came to mark Sarmada's imaginary outer limits.

The second famous tree was the pleasure-laced terebinth tree that stood on the edge of the valley. Stone-deaf Siman had looked after it for twenty-five years. It was an ancient tree that time had forgotten: it had survived the great volcano, three earthquakes, and more than thirty battles that had taken place nearby. The Turkish soldiers who'd been tasked with getting firewood for the Hejaz railway trains and had cut down and torn up a third of the forest on the mountain hadn't been able to cut it down. It was more than 4,000 years old, and owing to its great age, it grew new trunks, which then grew old and died and were replaced by others. But the mother tree remained there, fixed and towering, with sticky, moist clefts.

The inside of the tree was moist and smooth and warm, and Stone-deaf Siman found it was a much nicer place to see to his needs than the usual taking of matters into one's own hands. Then it occurred to him that he might profit from the tree. He built a brick wall around the tree and hung up a curtain of hessian sacks, and he became the tree's official pimp! He was the one who found the customers, looked after it, and pruned it.

The third famous tree in Sarmada stood in front of Mamdouh's shop. It was more than a hundred years old—a giant white poplar that stretched up far above the houses and became the preferred resting spot of all the migratory and local birds. On pleasant evenings, the bird chorus could be heard outside Sarmada, splitting apart, intertwining, a floating jungle expertly arranged by the birds themselves. Mamdouh the shopkeeper was worried that the tree's massive roots would destroy the foundation of his house, so, three ruined chainsaws and four days of backbreaking labor later, he managed to cut it down. Every evening for weeks the sparrows of Sarmada would circle the void, their chirping choked, and many of them found they couldn't sleep in any other tree.

As flocks of sparrows circled in the emptiness, frantically searching for their uprooted home and not comprehending how such a huge green tree could suddenly disappear, they began to spray their shit on the village below. They cheeped angrily in the sky above Sarmada for three whole days as Farida, stuck somewhere between alive and dead, gave birth to her child—her screams breaking through the lost sparrows' cries.

Hamoud stood on the roof of the shed, performing the ancient custom: whenever there was a difficult birth, the husband would jump up and down on the roof over the room where his wife lay to help with the birth of the baby. For three days, Hamoud danced a manic Dabke on the roof, covered in bird-shit and people's scorn, but the child was finally born, and when he heard its cry and the midwife and neighbor women ululating in celebration, he came running down like a crazy man, jostling at the door, and then running over to the shop to buy walnuts and sweets for the happy occasion. The women inside the shed began muttering the name of God. The newborn boy had two pieces of flesh between his thighs. Umm Dhiyab washed the baby and swaddled him carefully before handing him to his mother. “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked an exhausted Farida.

“A boy and more,” answered the midwife. “He's got two! Praise the Lord.”

“I'm going to call him Bulkhayr,” said Farida. “His name's Bulkhayr.”

Farida's shed saw two months of busy celebration and a pungent tea of boiled herbs was distributed to the people of Sarmada. The indomitably proud father carried his little boy against his chest and stayed up all night looking after him. He changed his diaper and cradled him. He told him stories about the great Arab explorers. He rubbed him down with olive oil and massaged his tender limbs. He did everything carefully and on time, and with a touching affection, as if he'd lost all hope of ever having a child and then suddenly been surprised by fatherhood.

It was undeniable that ever since Farida and Hamoud had been married, she'd become a faithful wife and given her husband all her loyalty and love. Out of a combination of guilt and a longing for purification, she lavished on him the abundance of her body and womanliness, and shut and sealed once and for all the doors and windows of her past. But still she'd never expected that he'd treat her child with such love. When she finally decided to tell him the truth, that the child wasn't his, she found he already knew.

On the day she'd decided to apologize and to thank him, the October War broke out and brought Hamoud's erstwhile happiness back with it, so she decided never to bring it up again, especially when she saw him climb up to the roof, watching ecstatically as the Israeli Phantom jets burned up near Sarmada. He enlisted in the army without a moment's thought and his enthusiasm took him all the way to the front line, where he joined the fighting over two days until the Syrian army reached Lake Tiberias. After the ceasefire came into effect on the Egyptian front, he returned with his division and took part in the war of attrition over eighty-one days, only to disappear again. He was most likely taken prisoner. After the war was over, he still hadn't returned. Some said he was dead for certain, while others who'd fought alongside him said that he was part of a group who'd all been captured.

The people of Sarmada were busy mourning their martyr: Shahir Mansour was Sarmada's only fallen soldier. He was buried in an august ceremony that included a few eulogies, and the people of Sarmada donated money to build a memorial for him at the entrance to the town before Poppy Bridge. The flag of Sarmada flew for the martyr that day, for he was the son of the great revolutionary Hamad al-Mansour, one of the heroes of Syria's struggle against French occupation and the flag-bearer who'd distinguished himself for valor in the Battles at Kafr and Mazraa. The crowd was quiet and questioning—a certain lingering question made them uneasy. The Mansour family was the most freedom-loving and independent-minded family in the whole of the mountain region and they took pride in their long legacy of repelling anyone who came and tried to impose their will and laws on them. Their ancestor had refused every last Ottoman edict and his grandsons had fought against Ibrahim Pasha and twice decimated his army. The martyr's father had been a wanted fugitive until the French finally left Syria and his uncle had taken part in all the great uprisings. How could the heir of a family that considered freedom so sacred bring himself to kill his sister, who wanted only the same right to choose her own life partner, and as a result was slaughtered like a lamb?

Two months had passed since the Mansour family's martyr was buried at Khashkhasha cemetery when Nawwaf went out of the parlor and let off a magazine of bullets to quiet the howling wolves. But when they went on howling even louder, he went up to the roof and started howling himself, imitating them, until the morning. After that he locked himself away at home, lost in other worlds, talking only to himself, and every time the moon was full and the sky was clear, he'd go up on the roof of the house and begin to howl.

With the blooming of her motherhood and breast milk, Farida was struck by a creeping fear, a painful shame, which she quickly shook off. She'd made up her mind: she was going to purify herself of any remnants of her past life. She took her son to the village nurse, whom everyone called Doctor Salem, and he examined the two tender pieces of flesh between the little boy's thighs and discovered that they were connected at the base. After a few minutes, he turned to her and said, “This is a blessing, not some kind of punishment. Don't you ever think of having one of them removed.”

She lived only for Bulkhayr and built her entire life around him. Her plants were no longer as lush as they'd once been, but the great joy she took in her baby caused her to withdraw from her cherished hobby. She decided it was enough just to have him circumcised like all the boys in Sarmada, whether Christian, Muslim, or Druze.

One day when she went to get some of the grief-milk cheese out of the store, she saw it had been infiltrated by worms. She threw the whole lot out and stopped making and selling her life-changing cheese and drinks mixed with the strange-tasting milk.

She went to the Hamza Majlis and asked the shaykhs to be inducted into her religion. She was refused time and time again and she couldn't find two shaykhs to support her initiation. To become a Druze initiate, there was a ritual: two shaykhs—two men or women—who were already initiates themselves had to sponsor her and take responsibility, in front of all the other shaykhs and God, that the inductee was pure of soul and had lived an unimpeachably moral life as required, and that they were confident that the inductee would abandon all traces of a worldly life. Unlike all the other religions in the world, there was no proselytizing. People decided for themselves when it was the right time to come into the fold because if they went back on their initiation, it was considered final and their requests for initiation would never be honored again. There was no set age for someone to be initiated into the religion and gain access to the six religious texts: as soon as a Druze man or woman had undergone puberty and was physi-cally mature, they were eligible—those who wished—to enter the religion. There's no rule that you have to be forty before you can become an initiated Druze, as the misinformed believe.

As for the people who didn't want to enter, they were never compelled or chastised, and they weren't even required to live by the religious laws. They were simply left to fill their own spiritual voids however they pleased.

After she'd tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the religion, Farida headed to the church and met with Father Elias. She explained to him that she desperately needed God and that she was ready to accept her faith, but the shaykhs wouldn't let her. She asked him for a favor, and the graceful priest answered: “I'll do anything in my power to help you, my child.”

“Do you think you could hear my confession? Maybe I can get God to forgive me with your help.”

The priest laughed. “But, Farida, you belong at the majlis. You're a Druze, my child.”

“Yes, Father, I know, but what's the difference between a majlis or a church or a mosque? Aren't they all houses of God? God love you, hear my confession and let me repent.”

Father Elias consented and took her over to the confessional. When they were finished, she asked him if he would baptize Bulkhayr, and he agreed.

That evening, Father Elias went to see the head shaykh of Sarmada and broached the subject of Farida. “Who's the father of her child?” asked Shaykh Farouq.

“He's from Sarmada, Shaykh,” said Father Elias. “It's better if we preserve her privacy and just help her. God's mercy knows no bounds.” Shaykh Shaheen agreed to initiate Farida in her faith, but on one condition: that she remain on the periphery, which meant that she'd only be allowed to read the commentaries on the Epistles of Wisdom, and not the Epistles themselves, until the fitness of her soul could be confirmed, and that when the shaykhs read from the essential texts of wisdom in the majlis, she would have to step outside.

The sight of Bulkhayr's little moon-like face sent Farida into raptures of a mysterious, soul-tickling joy, and she wanted nothing more than to be the sort of mother he could be proud of. She wore black in mourning for Hamoud, who'd disappeared into the fog of captivity or into an unknown and unverifiable death. Her life changed completely and became an unending stream of helping others and joining in their occasions, both happy and sad. Her healing herbs and potions were accepted now with great gratitude. The total transformation in her life could hardly be related to regret, which the men of the cloth would have preferred. “She's still got that bold look in her eyes,” whispered Shaykh Farouq to Father Elias, meaning she hadn't been broken, hadn't been moved by the required apologies and self-reproach to plead intercession from God's vicars on earth.

Her shed, shrouded and burdened with all those secret teenage rendezvous, threw open its doors to a new life. It had lost its former luster, but cloaked itself in something new. Sarmada was, after all, open to certain changes: young people in the peaceful village who longed for change and were affected by everything that was happening in Syria and the Middle East began to form cells. The farmers were surprised to find a bunch of communist youths volunteering to help them with the reaping and harvest. Those youths, with endless energy and enthusiasm for change, managed to win many farmers' hearts before the government set the Baathists on them and ruined their reputation by claiming that they were all godless infidels calling for sin and anarchy.

Farida was amazed at how her powerful desires had transformed, as though a cold cloak had fallen over her warm body, sending her into a kind of hibernation. The insuppressible desires lay dormant, and little by little she was transformed into an incomparably loving and gentle mother, even imprudently so. Had her desires disappeared or merely paused? She didn't want to know. She was too busy celebrating her motherhood and she left life to take whatever path it chose.

She didn't know that lust was like light, that it never vanished and could never end—or that it could even be inherited and passed on to that angel-faced boy. She'd deposited five years of delirious passion into his tiny body, where it grew, serene and untamed, and would soon break out.

Umm Salman al-Khattar died peacefully, leaving a nearly twenty-five-year-old Buthayna all alone in the big house. She'd grown up suddenly and the people who knew her could see how she'd matured. Her almond eyes grew seductive; her wheat complexion had given way to a bright and faintly ruddy whiteness; her body matured and filled out. She was engaged to marry her cousin Hussein, who'd immigrated to Venezuela. Once the October War was over and the soldier-sons of Sarmada had returned, in the company of one martyr and five casualties, one of which was Hussein, but without the captured or vanished Hamoud, Buthayna and Hussein al-Nimr got engaged. He left for Venezuela eighteen months later with the expectation that Buthayna would join him in the very near future.

One day he came and sat beside her as she was peeling and eating prickly pears and asked her to follow him somewhere more private so they could talk freely. “Buthayna, have you ever been in love?”

She answered with a virgin's bluster, “You think you're the only man who loves me?” Then, “So do you love me?”

Hussein laughed so hard she had to shield her ears from his famous guffawing.

“I fell in love with you just right now.”

He'd noticed the dimples appearing and disappearing on her glorious, smooth cheeks, and her slightly sad, but thoroughly bold face. He moved closer to plant a kiss on her cheek, longing to feel those alluring dimples, and she let him, but only for a moment, and then she pushed him away, the unmovable coquette: “Now have some prickly pear and behave yourself.”

She was deeply in love with Hussein and his departure broke her heart. She was infatuated with his smell, his sense of humor, his looks, his irresistible charm, the spark of lightning in his downcast eyes and the thunder in his laugh. The day he showed her where the bullet had destroyed half of his left hand, she took the initiative, for the first time, and kissed the old scar. She overwhelmed him after having starved his heart with repeated rejection. She smelled his sweet, permeating scent, she tasted his cruel, astonishingly soft lips, and when she slid her hand through the thick forest covering his chest, she felt the embrace of absolute security and she knew that she wanted to be with this man forever and ever.

His absence caused her days to lengthen and time to slow. She did everything she could to hide the void and blunt the edge of waiting. Although she waited for Hussein, after two years' separation, she'd forgotten what he looked like. And yet she had memorized that wild desperate look in his eyes and tried to embroider his features onto the faces of her pillows. But her most treasured bliss came when she saw the postman Nasser zipping along on his creaky motorcycle from Poppy Bridge to bring the village news of the half of their sons who'd left in recent years for Venezuela, Latin America, Libya, and the Gulf.

Nasser the postman would park his motorcycle, take out his famous chair, and plant himself down. He'd begin passing out the letters and most of the time ended up reading them aloud to the recipients in exchange for food or clothes or whatever the people had to give. He usually came to Sarmada, where half the houses waited in suspense, twice a month. With every letter, Buthayna lit a candle at the Mother of Rams tree and left a few coins, muttering: “May your blessings grow, Mother of Rams. Keep him and help him in God's name. I'll bring you a big ram, just let me get word that I'm going to join him.”

She lived for Hussein's passion-and-longing-scented letters. She watched over his absence by candlelight, and fought back dejection by making blankets and embroidering. And when on lonely nights she longed for him, she took the pillow embroidered with his sweet face into her arms and drifted off to sleep, remembering his silk-woven laugh, only to see him in her dreams and wake up in a sweat.

She learned to spin wool and knit winter sweaters with clever designs. She made baskets out of straw. She decorated the boxes in her house with muslin flowers. She embroidered her family's faces onto her white sheets, and she embroidered Hussein's face dozens of times: smiling Hussein, gruff Hussein, pensive Hussein. She fought against erasure and absence with her embroidery needle, but her hate for Farida remained, clear and distinct. She hated her in the very depths of her soul.

Farida, who'd tried in every way imaginable to make gestures of friendship toward the young woman, had given up and let her be, but she always kept her door open in case the angry young woman eventually settled down.

Farida could see that Buthayna was searching for something, anything at all, to settle her mind, like all those who claim to believe in God's will but deep down are fatalists and expect to understand death's tricks with nothing more than their cool reason. They search for an explanation, for reasons behind death's randomness and the mysterious policy by which it selects its victims. They want to understand its sickle, how it's able to cut down souls and conquer life.

It's an important and peculiar controversy, with shades of splendor and resentment. Death reaps and life sows. Death is real and life is but a passing moment. In Farida, Buthayna found both the cause and the causer and so drowned out the questions raised by death in the roar of hate for its cause.

At Umm Salman's funeral, Buthayna sat by her mother's head as the other women, relatives and non-relatives, wailed and mourned and eulogized the deceased. When they took the body to the men's section for them to pray over, Buthayna didn't scream or tear out her hair, she simply laid a kiss upon her mother's cheek and calmly said farewell. Farida was the closest to her out of all the guests and she held her tightly like a sister and walked her back to the al-Khattar family home.

The forty days of mourning passed uneventfully. Every evening without fail, Farida came to condole with Buthayna, to prepare food for those who came to pay their respects, and to help her with the housework. Six months after Umm Salman had passed and eight months after she'd last received a letter from Hussein, loneliness shrouded Buthayna's heart and she was exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot, her body sapped, and her mind cautioned that the worst was yet to come. Her troubled soul gave up on the solace of embroidering absent faces and clutching pillows stuffed with emptiness. The faces she'd created with her adroit needle had become sad and gloomy and began to disappear behind elliptical threads in which the images recurred infinitely.

Farida came to her and took her by the hand and led her back to the shed. She brought her an infusion of anise, chamomile, and thyme to which she'd added a few other herbs, and this put Buthayna into a deep slumber for a whole day and a half. When she eventually woke up, she saw Farida in a different light and when she saw Bulkhayr skipping across the floor of the shed, she was suddenly giddy and guilty. At four and a half, Bulkhayr was an unbelievably cheerful boy. Farida had let his hair grow out and it would stay long like that until he went to school as a vow she'd made at the Shrine of Shihan. That was the saint Farida had chosen out of a great many shrines to become the boy's protector and shield him from all harm.

“Beware the evil eye, Farida. Keep an eye on him and may God protect him for you.”

Buthayna was worried that her envious eye would curse him. He was a charmingly rambunctious boy and he had the kind of brilliant laugh that would scratch your heart. Between the delight of playing with Bulkhayr and waiting for the postman to come, the time passed in trepidation, over an undercurrent of sharp and stinging worry, her left ear constantly telling her that bad news was waiting for her.

The postman got to the big house in the evening. He was so experienced that all he had to do was feel a package to know what was inside. In all honesty, he used to open up the letters masterfully, read them and then seal them back up before he delivered them so he would know how much his tip should be, based on what the message contained. He handed her the letter and quickly left, and as she watched him disappear in the distance, she knew that bad news awaited her. When the postman ran off without even waiting for a tip, you could be sure that the news wasn't just bad, it was catastrophic.

She read the letter through once, and she needed all the strength in the world to go over it again. It was only a few lines long and began, “Dearest Buthayna”:

“By the time you get this letter, I'll be in America. The situation here isn't like you think. Everybody who said that Venezuela was a land of dreams was lying. I don't even know what dreams they were talking about. I'm exhausted, Buthayna, I'm completely worn out. After all these years, I still don't have anything to show for it. I'm going to go try my luck in America. I swear by God and the soil of Sarmada, that you won't leave my thoughts—not even for a moment—but I don't want you to wait for me hopelessly. You're free, Buthayna. Free from the moment this letter reaches you. I hope you find a good man that deserves you and that you forgive me. Please forgive me, Buthayna.”

She read the letter over and over again. Two burning teardrops welled up and slid down her flushed cheeks and she calmly wiped them away, hiding them with the rest of the letter, and from that day forward, her nights stretched mercilessly on without end. She took refuge in her mutilated solitude, rent by the mania of longing, desire, and frustration. She spread his letters out around her, stripped off all her clothes, and put his shirt on over her bare skin. She summoned the photos in her mind, rubbed bare by her imagination's thumbing, and placed a soft pillow between her thighs and sat there, bucking against it. She ran her hands over her body and let out a moan that broke through the stifling stoppage of loneliness and longing. She woke up the next morning and began to collect all the things that had anything to do with him: his letters, his gifts, the sweet photos he'd sent her, and then she lit a fire in the oven and threw in some husks. She made some dough and kneaded it and then she fed the fire with the souvenirs and sat there making loaves of bread from the memories that only days ago had stubbornly refused to be dislodged.

When she was finished burning everything connected to him, she was left with a stack of pitas, delicious flatbread, and manaqeesh with zaatar, kishk, and thick yoghurt. After she was finally done cooking him, or burning him, she took a few bites of those years of renunciation and shared the rest with the neighbors. She wasn't surprised to hear some of them say, “Thank you so much, Buthayna. Your bread's the most delicious of all.” One of her neighbors told her it felt as if a mysterious burden had been lifted off her chest.

She tried to remember his face, but she couldn't. She was slightly disconcerted to find that her memory held no duplicate image. “How could I have forgotten his scent? He's vanished as if he was never there to begin with.” She discovered that the way to heal the devastation of distance was to gather everything, chew it up, and give it all away. She exiled him from her heart, although in truth, she'd only disguised him. For a moment, she felt she'd been emptied of everything that had to do with him, blank just as she ought to be, renewed and awaiting the blooming days that she knew would come, now that the traces of that bitter separation had all been wiped away and the colorful trunk of her fennel tree-beloved had burned up in the oven's fire.

Her body was vigorous once more and the pores that had stifled her and drowned her body in an ocean of longing reopened. She wrapped herself in yearning's silk and took comfort in the vague hope that one day in the warm Caribbean sun, her body would uncover itself for her departed lover and thaw out from the torpor of frozen passion. But he was squirreled away inside of her, deeply rooted, and every time she destroyed him, he was born again. She was forced to ask herself a painful question: what did she want from him, a story or a child? If what she wanted was a love story, then, by all means, give it balance, give it color. Let the picture be distorted, let the joy sit uneasily; that, after all, is the circumstance of a woman in love, that's the inevitable result of his great absence and there was no reason why she couldn't shift her affection toward someone else. But if it was a child she wanted, then why not simply get pregnant by someone else? Why not simply marry whatever man would give her a child?

She arrived at a peculiar conclusion: a child is an ending, and every story begins with a potential child. She found her own wisdom compelling, and it seemed to relieve her of her anxious burden. She'd never once dreamed of being a mere womb for his child, but rather the heroine of his romance, and that realization took the faintest edge off the pain. She packed up some of her things and went over to Farida's shed. She didn't say a word about it; they just exchanged the latest village gossip as Farida lit the stove and made a pot of yerba mate, and then they sat there, drinking green cupful after green cupful of yerba mate flavored with lemon and cardamom.

With her veteran woman's eye, Farida could see how Buthayna had matured even as she tried to evade her glance, chipping in eagerly and washing down the floor of the shed as she sang, or to put it more precisely, keened funereally. Farida prepared her a herbal mixture to cure heartache and threw in a few special ingredients that she kept around for special moments like this. She wished she still had some grief-milk left. After the mixture had steeped for two and a half hours, she strained it and added a pinch of wormwood to heal the spasms of loss. She brought her concoction over on a wicker tray and poured it into a ceramic cup. She gave Buthayna a motherly, or big-sisterly, look.

“I'm not feeling well, Farida,” said Buthayna. “I don't feel at all well.”

“I know, my dear. I know. You'll feel better very soon.”

With her own hands Farida fed her a sandwich of thick yogurt and mint leaves and then told her to drink the drink down in one go. Although Farida had gotten rid of all her grief-milk, she still knew which herbs could cure a broken heart. In only a few minutes, Buthayna's tears began pouring freely. She let out all the anticipation, everything it had brought with it and everything surrounding it. She flushed it out of her heart's womb with those tears she'd locked away ever since the sobbing plague had struck Sarmada.

She cried until her eyes were parched. Her soul was bathed and stretched wide open to force out all those pillow-embroidered faces and to announce a new beginning. She ran home and rummaged through the granary. She pulled out the box that contained al-Hazred's book on the secrets of the dead and then she told Farida all the secrets that were hidden in the depths of her soul and how she'd almost killed everyone in Sarmada with the soothsayer of Kanakir's arsenic. Farida took the box of manuscripts and hid it in the chaff store to look through later; for now she turned all her attention to Buthayna, who took great comfort in her presence. Those were days of confession, sobbing, and purification for them both.

At the end of the week, the two women sat together in the evening after Bulkhayr had settled into bed and decided to have a sugaring party to get rid of their unwanted hair; a parallel means of washing themselves free of love's burnt-up gunk and being purified in the depilatory pain. Farida had suggested the idea in order to get Buthayna out of her bereavement once and for all, and also to make sure that the slate was wiped clean; she knew instinctively that two women could never make up and clear the air of the hatred between them unless and until they were naked together.

Farida heated up three potfuls of water to which she added lemon peel, quinine leaves, and mint as the bathroom filled with steam. Buthayna was making up sticky strips of beeswax, rose water, and lemon juice. “Do you have any ginger?” she called to Farida.

“Look up on the shelf.” Buthayna radiated joy as she ran her eyes over the stopped-up, long-necked bottles of spices arranged on the shelves, so she didn't even notice the suspicious looks she was getting as she ran her hands over the curves of her body.

Farida was watching Buthayna stealthily from the corner of the bathroom. She looked exhausted from making the depilatory, and you could clearly see her vigorously rising and falling breasts and protruding nipples under her yellow blouse. Farida felt a sudden frisson in her blood, and when Buthayna turned around, her eyes fixed on her full and supple bottom as it swayed. “Lord help me,” she muttered pleadingly. “What's wrong with you, Farida?” she snapped at herself, rebuking her mind for the surprise of her body's summons. Desire is blind and its true motives unknowable. She did a quick accounting and found she'd never—not once—longed for another woman before. So how come she'd suddenly fallen into this notion's grasp? How had it infiltrated a soul made pure by repentance and motherhood? She cursed herself, cursed the curse of the body until she finally let out something almost audible, warning herself: “Don't, Farida. Don't you dare. Don't even think about it.” She sat down and began to recite some supplications and verses that were supposed to drive away a husbandless woman's demons, although only she and her worried soul could hear her.

Buthayna broke in on her whispered prayers: “You'll help me, won't you?” she asked, undressing, getting ready to depilate her pubic area. Farida needed every last atom in her brain to turn down the temptation-soaked invitation and tear her gaze from Buthayna's vulva.

“No, I've got to cook something for Bulkhayr. I'll help you next time.” She didn't want to risk going any nearer the danger she'd sworn she'd keep away from, so she left Buthayna to get ready and to remove her unwanted hair and to spend the better part of the evening in the bathroom, where—kept company by her invigorating pain—she began to sing.

Farida snuggled her son and tried with every fiber of her being to expel the voice in her head that evening. She was awash in erotic dreams of Buthayna, which caused her to wake up panicked and damp. Her mood showed no sign of improving, so she finally made up her mind. She told Buthayna: “You've got to go back to your place. It isn't good to leave the house empty.”

Having won her temporary reprieve from loss, Buthayna seethed with life. She tried not to make a big deal out of being kicked out—Farida's surprising, and slightly cruel, request from out of nowhere—and as she was making her way back to the al-Khattar family home, she said to herself, “Farida's got a point. It isn't right to neglect the family home like this.”

Rambunctious Bulkhayr planted smiles wherever he went, but over time Sarmada's adulation evolved into cloying boredom. No one ever scolded him and every single thing he did earned him praise and affection. It was constant: anyone who saw him would either kiss him, or joke with him, or give him a treat, or buy him one, and anyone who'd been away would have to return with a gift for Bulkhayr. News about him was greedily sought after with the excuse that his father had been a war hero and a martyr, and a good teacher, to boot, and that he had done the right thing by all.

In all truth, though, he never felt the slightest bit exceptional, except that he had two penises and didn't know which one he ought to pee out of. Bulkhayr cheerfully entered the first grade shortly before his sixth birthday, dressed in the khaki uniform with the Baath-scout neckerchief and his leather satchel, which had once belonged to Hamoud the geography teacher, in hand. Farida, who was letting him go out for the first time unsupervised, found the house suddenly desolate, and she felt that the new life she'd embraced and gotten used to, and which had blunted her claws with the file of monotony, had begun once more to sharpen her feelings, to hone their ability to scar, but she kept on with her new life all the same.

Her extraordinary talent for optimism, for taking part in celebrations, and for conscientiously and generously giving her time and energy amazed everyone. She watched as the fruit of her womb grew up before her eyes and she was filled with cheeky pride as well as great misgiving, for when she peered into time's gaze, she could see how far it stretched and how unpredictable it was—its every moment both a beginning and an end. She could see that time was divided into two paths: one brought things and the other carried them away. Her own life was short and it was headed down a single path, now that she'd closed off all the portals to the past and blocked them with the tree of her passion, which she'd cut down and chopped up to fuel the fire of time. Yet as soon as she'd embraced an asceticism of the body, ridiculing it for its triviality, new inanities cropped up: how could she give him—this child embodiment of the past—the features of the present? Down which paths should she lead him? Up toward God and unity and the void or down into the secret underground where he'd learn how to confront what was found on the surface? She decided she'd wait until the time came and would deal with whatever was going to happen as it happened. She locked up the flocks of suspicion and all it spawned in her ribcage and, lo, the flapping ceased.

She was the first single mother in the area and a lot of people knew it. They cheered her for not having killed her fetus and managing to secure a cover story to allow him to forge a life in a place ill with fanaticism and shame. He once asked her out of the blue, “How come everyone else has a dad and I don't?”

“Oh, your father was a hero, my love, and he was martyred in the war.” She pointed to Hamoud's photograph on the wall, which had a shiny black ribbon round one corner of the frame. That answer didn't really satisfy him and he slowly began to realize that there was something different about him in addition to the thing between his legs.

Buthayna tried to calmly dismiss anyone who tried to get close to her; she couldn't stand the sight of any of Sarmada's men now that Hussein had forsaken her. Just the thought of her foolish Penelope-vigil was humiliating. She knew full well that he was never coming back and that she'd be condemned to wait her entire life, no matter how hard she struggled to escape, and she came to realize that the trenches desire ploughed through her body would no longer be fulfilled by self-pleasuring alone. But at the same time, she felt that her body would be wasted on the boorish men around her, so she embraced the idea of spinsterhood with an open mind.

One day when she saw Bulkhayr playing near the valley, she called to him and he ran over. She sent him to the shop to buy a few things, and he was an expert at running errands by now: getting a few coins in return, showing off how wonderfully fast he could run, wowing the adults with his record times. When he returned, flushed and panting, she asked him about school and caught sight of something angelic rising to the surface of his face, rustling awake her own sleeping demons. She didn't want the conversation to end. “What did you learn today?”

“We got to the letter ghayn,” he answered earnestly.

“So you know how to write the letter ghayn now?” she asked. “I know half the letters,” he answered with boyish pride. “I can write your name if you want.”

She smiled gaily and kissed him on the cheek, near to his mouth, and as she grazed his soft lips, she shuddered inexplicably, her body colluding stealthily. She grabbed a notepad and pencil and sat him down on the ground. “Show me how you write my name. If you write it right, I'll give you a sweet.” He began showing off his school skills and wrote her name out phonetically: Buthayn. After a moment's thought, he made it: Buthaynat. She laughed and changed the final letter to a silent T.

“I wrote the letter N even though we didn't learn it yet.”

Was it his innocence that drew her to him or was it simply the emptiness that had stretched cobwebs across the corners of her life? She watched his angelic face as he concentrated intently on the notepad, his fingers smudged with lead, and grieved for her brother who'd been struck down in the prime of life. What if this boy had been his son, would she have loved him even more? Or perhaps less? Where did an awareness of bloodlines or bonds, whether sacred or profane, even come from?

She arrested her troubled thoughts, faked a weak smile, and mumbled, “The N is very good. Let me teach you how to write the rest of the alphabet.” She took his little hand and drew a semi-circle, adding a dot up at the top. Then she wrote out a few words on his notepad: N, fire, women, light, and told him to copy them.

After an hour of tireless housework, she was finally done. As she was drying her hands, she was struck by a vague demonic anxiety, so she poured some grape molasses into a white bowl and licked her finger after wiping the rim of the jar. The sweet stung, or rather stirred, something inside her. She went back in and saw him, focused—as happy as could be—on copying the words one after the other.

“Finished!” he shouted. “I wrote all the words.”

He was a little diversion, both amusing and saddening her with his overflowing innocence and beauty. “You deserve something sweet,” she said, dipping her finger into the bowl. “Here, open your mouth.”

She placed her finger in his mouth and his lips closed around it. He began sucking on her finger, his eyes shut, the words being branded in his memory with the taste on his tongue, and it tickled her right index finger and caused blood to rush into her breast. She removed her finger, gave him a quarter-lira, and sent him on his way, driving out the ludicrous imaginings that had filled her head.

Two days later, he took his schoolbooks and homework and went to see her. She was taken aback by the sight of this rosy-faced boy, carrying a schoolbag bigger than he was and a worksheet blazoned with a jotted note in red: Well done and keep it up. He spoke to her confidently, but with earnest pleading: “I want you to teach me the rest of the alphabet, Auntie.” She found the combination of his angel face and intent affecting, so she sat him down on the ground and made him take out his pens and paper.

“At school, you get a ‘Good Work’, but here I'm going to give you a lick for every letter you write correctly.” And then she laughed but it trailed off into abrupt doubts:

What are you doing? Were you actually waiting for him? And if he hadn't come, would you have felt some great void that only this little rabbit could fill? Be honest, Buthayna, is it really true that the only thing that can change the uninterrupted desert of your life is a visit from him? Could you really bring yourself to taint his innocence? What's this gaping emptiness you're feeling, Buthayna? What is it?

Her own laughter took her unawares, and in its prolonged abundance, all questions and desires were curtailed.

He was busy carefully making his handwriting as nice as he could as he copied out the list of words she wrote on his sheet of paper, bringing his face closer to hers to smell her redolent, fragrant scent, and innocently watch her protruding, quivering breasts.

After he'd finished his assignment, she brought out the dish of grape molasses and dipped her finger in it. She brought her finger up to his mouth, but when he tried to nibble at it, she gently pulled away. He followed her finger as if hypnotized, while with her left hand she unbound her breasts and brought them out into the open. She brought her finger to her breast and splashed it with grape molasses as he, like a little puppy, followed the sugary trail and the bosom taste he'd been weaned from more than three-and-a-half years earlier. He stuck out his tongue, licking roundly a flawless letter M unlike any other. Once the wine-colored blouse had been removed, she could paint her hard nipple and say, “Have some molasses” in her best Arabic, mocking the tone of the teacher she was pretending to be.

He came nearer to the rosy nipple, which was doused in a liquid that obscured the glowing white, and he ran his lips over it and took it into his mouth, and then out. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice, the way it quavered. She dipped her finger into the dish and rubbed it over the other nipple. He grabbed onto them and begun to suck, moving back and forth between them. With an uncanny and unending patience, he crawled above her as she lay back against two pillows.

She began dipping two fingers and drawing circles from her breasts down to her stomach. He followed the sour scent of grape molasses, like a giddy wolf pup, licking unremittingly. She drew the alphabet across her stomach, first the letter A, and he repeated, “The letter A” as he licked.

With his tongue, he licked up the alphabet of her body. “The letter B: one dot under. The letter T: two dots above.”

She repeated the letters he'd learned that day by heart and tongue; the letters tasted of grape molasses in his mouth. The sticky liquid settled in her navel and, overflowing, ventured downward. She slipped off her khaki skirt and broke all the bonds of equivocation as she removed her panties—white with tiny blue hearts. The molasses spilt down over her loins and he went searching for the sweetness in the sprouting hair. It smelt like the wheat harvest and cooked molasses. He slithered down between her thighs and instinct alone led him to the syrupy volcano that awaited him. He started by tasting her labia, dyed dark by the grape molasses. She grabbed the back of his head and then he stuck his tongue out and plunged it inside her to take his virgin taste as his nose rested against her pubic arch. She tugged his hair and pressed him down between her thighs, pulling him in deeply. He devoured the moisture between her thighs, submerged down to the very dregs.

He wanted to penetrate her with his face, and with his teeth, and his tongue, and his nose that was buried in the trembling damp. She pulled him up and down and up again until his entire face ran with the sticky liquid flowing plentifully from between her thighs. He stopped suddenly and it was as if he were about to burst with laughter. He heard her fiery moans and asked, “Is everything all right, Auntie?” She seized the back of his neck and pulled his head back down between her thighs, grinding against his face, not giving a damn about the laughter that had turned to fear and unmistakable tears as his angel face was transformed into that of a pale, molasses-smeared lizard.

His first year of school went by and the grape molasses lessons continued, even though her irresistible instinct to possess the child gnawed at her and her dream of becoming a mother constantly lashed at her soul. She wanted a child more than she wanted a husband. It was a perverse desire that jarred the walls of her empty womb, demanding she fill it, and yet, at the same time, some enigmatic emotion led her to continue with the molasses lessons. She thought it over for a long while until in a single instant, her true feelings and motives became fleetingly clear. Was she really just trying to get revenge on Farida by corrupting her child?

She couldn't come up with a clear answer, but she resolved to stop regardless because her feelings of deadbeat guilt drowned the pleasure in sin. She screamed at him, escorted him out, and slammed the door shut behind her with a resolve she wanted her desire to take note of. He stood there on the doorstep, carrying his schoolbag, and pounded and pounded, bawling and panting and shouting: “Open up, Auntie! Open up! Please, Auntie, open up!” She put her fingers in her ears and refused to give in to the insistent wish to open the door and hold him and wipe away his tears and shower him with all the affection she had to give. It was pure torture until, eventually, he left. She watched his short, slouching form walk past. He would turn to look behind him and then carry on. The big schoolbag weighed him down so that he could barely manage it. She gasped when he stumbled on some rocks, but he got back up, dusted off his clothes, wiped his teary eyes, and continued on. That last sight of him etched itself on her mind and she clung to it for the next decade.

That evening she went to see Joumana al-Rayyash and told her that she'd agree to marry her brother, Saloum. She returned home and took a shower so hot it nearly scalded her skin. She didn't cry.

Before the wedding, Buthayna sat with Saloum al-Rayyash and looked with her scorn-tinged heart into his eyes, which flashed fretfulness every time he blinked. She examined his long, soft and unsettling fingers and embraced him silently, which flustered him more than it should have. His questions and conversation-openers all failed to drive away the mocking smile that made him so uneasy and so vulnerable to jest. But when he started telling her his stories, he was able to defuse her ridicule and make it into something more like listening. He wanted to put her fears to rest, or more likely his own, by telling her the stories of his noteworthy family. He wanted to be as candid as possible, in a way befitting a former communist, a high-caliber mathematics graduate, and an intellectual who supported the materialist theory of the world and historical determinism. Though when he spoke there was no hiding the petty bourgeois inside him, or to put it more plainly: he had all the traits of a liberal feudal lord and it made him the constant target of his comrades' criticisms, but he still managed to lure the broken-hearted Buthayna into listening. He didn't care what anyone else thought. All he wanted was to break down the barriers separating him from this sexy, strong and fierce woman who plagued his heart with the panic of hope.

After he got the chance to go to the Gulf, he couldn't give a damn about the accusations they tried to smirch him with: small-minded opportunist, free-rider, callow lefty. He walked out on the circles of communists and the enlightened after he made a point of order at a meeting, interrupting a raving comrade who was saying that “The Muslim Brotherhood and the government are both evil and we have to put an end to the most dangerous of the two. As it stands right now, the most dangerous evil is the Brotherhood because they want to turn Syria into an Islamic state, and they're going to wipe out all the esoteric sects because that's what their draconian authorities, such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Jawzi, have always told them to do. They have a long history of suppressing esoteric sects, which made great progress compared to the underdevelopment of classical Islam.”

It was sectarian scare-mongering dressed up in a Marxist critique and Saloum couldn't take the bullshit any longer. He placed his right fist against his left palm and rose to make a point of order. He demanded he be allowed to speak: “Comrade Lenin used to say that his fight wasn't with capitalism, it was with the lice infesting the heads of Russian children. I don't think our fight ought to be with the ruling class, or with the government, or even with America and the Arab reactionaries, and not even with Israel above all else, because everything we're fighting is connected and it'll all collapse once we liberate ourselves from within. Our fight ought to be with ourselves. Before we set up our coat rack and start hanging up defeats and excuses and theories about the future and evaluations about who's more dangerous than who, we've got to start with ourselves as individuals, as a party, or as cells in a progressive movement, and ask ourselves, ‘Where are we right now?’

“We turn a blind eye to illiteracy and poverty. We ignore individuals, and the rights of people and their dignity, and even life itself as a legal principle. Instead we agitate and call for resistance and sacrifice. Our fallen are ‘martyrs,’ just like in the religious code we're trying to uproot or tear down. Comrade, the retreat to religion is flourishing because there's no such thing as justice, and because individuals' sense of self and selfworth is equal to zero. When the earth is undifferentiated misery, heaven will thrive. When ideas are impotent and strange and naive and they have nothing to do with reality, well, then all people have left is magic, and heaven and houris. Or else they can only volunteer to become fuel for leaders' fires.

“Me, personally, I don't want to be anyone's sacrifice, not just so I can substitute someone new to oppress me and deprive me of my right to life and self-expression; my right not to be part of a group, but a private individual whose personal freedom is holiest of all; my right to break out of the sectarian flock, out of the party flock—it's just a different sect with a different vocabulary—out of the flock of the independent nation ruled by a colonialist whose eyes are only slightly less blue, out of the flock of God and those who use him and make up laws to control me and keep me from reaching out to Him if I want to.

“Comrade, if we should toil for the sake of the nation and good and freedom, then we should toil for love and freedom, for our rights and dignity. And beyond that, religious fundamentalism and dictatorship are two sides of the same coin. As soon as the Arab regimes fall, the fundamentalist lie will collapse, too. But it's not you all or the other Arab political parties that are going to bring down the regimes. No, you're all made up of the same ingredients. The regimes will fall because of something no one will see coming: when people stop using the imported language of others and discover their own. And when they do, they're going to leave the whole lot of you behind. You won't believe your eyes. You're the ones who want a revolution, but it's the people who are going to invent new forms of change once they find their own language again. The language you stole from them because you've never known how to talk to regular people.”

Despite the uproar from his comrades and their attempts to interrupt him, he carried on pouring out everything that had pooled in his heart over all those years of pathetic, wasted pain and rage. He shouted at them, “Your hate for the dictator runs so deep, it's blinded you and now you're beginning to resemble him. Dictatorship has corrupted us all, and more importantly, it's driven a wedge between us and our people; it's separated us from ourselves. Not to worry, though, another generation will give birth to revolution. It definitely won't be us. We're just a bunch of hollow hacks. We're full of self-loathing more than anything else.” He left before they could kick him out.

He began writing love poems to Buthayna, although she'd already turned him down a number of times. Comparing him cursorily to her manly Hussein, she found him a university kid, who had a different way of talking about Sarmada, and she could never tell whether he was happy or sad. He was outwardly fake with people and he was torn between his cultural elitism and his true nature, which she could discern as he went on talking. He shared some snippets from the history of his family, who were famous throughout the mountain region, pairing truth with the incredible, but ultimately it was one of those Sarmadan tales that provided the village with its uncanny talent for telling its own story and gave anyone who encountered it the freedom to tell it as he or she pleased. The truth was that Saloum's story had managed to grip even conceited Buthayna's attention, so she turned to look up at Windhill, her eyes full of the sarcasm she marshaled so well, tinted by a mysterious glimmer. Behind the hill lay the Mountain of the Bearded Shaykh; it got its name from the abiding snow that resembled an old man's bright white beard and shined back at her. She turned to look at him, imploring him to tell the story and everything else he'd been unable to say before. As Saloum's sadness-troubled voice spilled out on the roof of the al-Khattar family home, the dish of grape molasses went untouched and the cup of yerba mate was sipped at only once because his hands were busy wandering through the air as he began to remember.

The story goes that al-Bunni, Saloum al-Rayyash's greatgreat-great-grandfather, was mad about hunting and he set off one snowy morning, concealing a wounded leg that had begun to suppurate. He took his rifle, saddled up his horse, packed provisions for seven days, and headed westward toward the rugged ground. Al-Bunni, whose infamy reached all the way to Istanbul, had cost the Ottoman garrison more than fifty Janissaries and years of wounded pride, until they finally decided to appoint him the unofficial chief of the area from the northern edge of the rocky wasteland all the way to Hebariyeh. Sarmada became a symbol of anti-Ottoman rebellion: Sarmadans paid no taxes and their sons never served in the Janissary Corps. He opened up his home to the hungry from across the Levant during the famine and its rooms became shelters for refugees, help-seekers and those who were wanted at the Ottoman gallows from all over the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. He was big and tall and had the kind of handlebar moustache a falcon could perch on. He was a hyena hunter, a friend to wolves and a tracker, and he knew the deserts of the Lajat and its trails. He had memorized the secrets of the great rocks and their hiding places. He couldn't stomach settling down in one place, and no sooner had he turned up somewhere than he'd be heading off again, and he only ever stayed put when someone came to him to plead for protection or when a guest had nowhere else to turn and was forced to take refuge with that taciturn, irascible, crack-shot rebel. He had kohled eyes and plaited hair hanging down over his back and shoulders. He never shirked a raid, or threat, or point of honor no matter where it might lead him. He was accompanied by a troop of roving kohl-eyed, plait-haired riders who were greeted with prayers and ululations in all the deserts and villages of the mountains they visited. They symbolized the bold streak of independence that ran through the Lajat.

Al-Bunni wasn't looking to get his hands on power or a covenant by rebelling against every last outside power that tried to interrupt the harmony of the place. He already knew he was the last male in his line. Nevertheless, he wanted to solve the riddle, or at least to break it down so he could understand why and maybe decipher the code before his nebulous destiny came to a dead end. That same destiny that had nursed him as a baby—his family's highest priority, a priority that couldn't even be discussed until he was weaned at the age of five, having sucked the breasts of six wet-nurses dry.

“He went in the direction of the Zatiri Springs deep in the wasteland of the Lajat,” said a shepherd, answering al-Bunni's wife, Mitha, whose heart had been heavy for days. She was, of course, perfectly used to his habit of coming and going and she understood that nowhere on earth felt more like home to him than the back of his purebred horse, Kaheela, which carried him over the wasteland's rocky carpet and through the boulder-wilderness to the distant borders of his longing. Thus she steeled herself for many teary years and wept for al-Bunni until the coal-black of her irises leached to a blue-green. The shepherd recalled, “We were together, me and al-Bunni, and he shot at a falcon. He did exactly what his grandfather did years ago, but the only way to catch a falcon is to trick it and if it does end up getting caught, it’ll raise its head high and plunge its sharp beak straight through its heart. It refuses to grow decrepit, so when it starts getting old, it circles up and up in the air toward the sun and then comes barreling down in a suicidal free-fall.” The shepherd was showing off his knowledge and his conversation drifted off course, wading through details that meant nothing to a pregnant woman whose husband had disappeared in the enchanted rocky wasteland.

As Mitha listened to the shepherd’s story, her eyes filled with tears, but she stopped her sobbing momentarily when she heard him say that he’d heard al-Bunni talking to the falcon and that he’d washed out its wounded wing and cared for it over those three days, and then poured gunpowder on the wound and cauterized it with a glowing knife blade, and then let it go. It flew away after circling around al-Bunni’s head several times. It dropped him a feather it had plucked out of its breast, and he grabbed the feather and waited and then another feather fell, and a third, and then a fourth. “I heard him say, ‘Fate’s given us another chance. We’re going to have sons,’” said the shepherd.

“What else did he say? Do you remember? How did he look? Where did he go?”

“That’s all, I swear. He told me to go back and he stayed in the wasteland.” Mitha suddenly remembered her old fears of al-Bunni being the last in the al-Rayyash line. The exact same thing had happened to his grandfather, except that he’d killed a sacred falcon during the glut and the birds had prayed that his line would be wiped out. Al-Bunni was the last of his line according to those who knew the secrets. “It has to be a sign from God,” she said to herself. She crossed through a bemusing wasteland, over obscure deserts, following a heart accustomed to loss. She took a pinch of salt and made for the spring. The same spring that Azza Tawfiq had known about. The spring that was the last thing Hela Mansour ever remembered. She threw the silver grains in, repeating her wish: first that she would have a son and then that the one who'd disappeared would return, but only if that were possible, because she had a hunch that the power of the spring was only ever enough for one wish.

Al-Bunni disappeared, or to be more precise, he followed the example of his forefathers: when they felt death drawing near, they set out for the faraway deserts and died there, graveless, offering their bodies up to the scavenging animals. The old wound in his thigh had been torn open once more and gangrene was consuming his body. He didn't want anyone's pity; he couldn't stand to die surrounded by other people's humiliating compassion. He didn't want anyone to see him in pain or wasting away. He'd lived as a free man, outside the jurisdiction of natural laws, and he wanted to die just as he'd lived.

Mitha, who was pregnant, gave birth to Shrouf, who begat Qoftan, who begat Shaheen and Shaheen married a woman who was called Saliha al-Kanj. She gave him four daughters, Fatima, Sara, Maryam, and Rahma, and he continued to wait for a son, but in vain. Five sons were snatched away by death before their third birthdays for reasons that maybe the holy birds knew, or maybe the soothsayer of Kanakir could guess, so Saliha al-Kanj turned to the woman who possessed the power of the birds for help.

“Please. You have to help me. I want a son who will live.”

“It's all in God's hands. You'll have a son only if it's your destiny.”

“I've tried every remedy and offering. I've gone to every imam and soothsayer, but there's no use: we haven't had a boy despite all our trying. We don't want the family line to be cut off.”

The soothsayer examined her fresh face and blue eyes, and began to think. After a period of silence that to Saliha al-Kanj seemed to last a lifetime, she spoke: “A son will come. Give him a name with the word God in it, have him baptized in the Christians' font, and take him to the shrines of six Druze saints, so that he shall survive.” Then in a rasping voice, with manufactured piety, she added, “God willing... Go on, now, madam.” As Saliha al-Kanj rose to leave, she called to her “O believer…”

“Is everything all right?”

“When the boy comes, don't let him out of your sight for a moment. A moment's distraction and it'll all be over: forget about day and night, forget about the bathroom and the call of nature. Don't take your eyes off him, not for a moment. He must be protected from death by wakefulness, there can't be any dozing off or distraction, and he must remain purer than pure. He shall be watched and pure and clean, free of the slightest indecency, free of even a single sin. And then as soon as he reaches puberty, find him a wife. You mustn't forget. Now, go.”

Saliha al-Kanj gathered herself up and left. A secret bliss moved within her, and with her every exhalation, worry flowed out on the breath of fear. Izz Allah arrived to a chorus of prayers and was carried from Sarmada's baptismal waters to the Druze shrines. Saliha raised him God-fearingly: matching every inch he grew with an offering, starting with the Mother of Rams tree and then taking him to the shrines of Ammar ibn Yasser and the venerable Abed Mar and Shaykh al-Balkhi, the great Sufi, and then to Ayn al-Zaman and the grave of Abel and the tomb of John the Baptist in the Umayyad Mosque and the Mosque of the great Shaykh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi. Every six months she offered a sacrifice and divided it up among the shrines, which she visited barefoot and bare-hearted, imploring God's saints to protect her only son.

The boy remained under constant surveillance the whole time, showered with love so implacable it was manic. It turned into a pitched battle between a desire for life and the power of death, which Saliha had fought all alone in the beginning. When sleep began to weigh on her eyelids, she'd assign her two daughters to watch the boy, only to wake up in terror after a brief nap. He grew up happily, and her insomnia grew along with him, until people started calling her the “Two-lifer” because she never slept, neither at night or in the daytime. Saliha al-Kanj had accepted the wisdom of the soothsayer of Kanakir: death comes when your back is turned. It slips through negligence. People don't die when they're being watched. Death only comes when everyone is distracted. Her neighbor Umm Saeed told her about her husband and confirmed the fortune teller's wisdom: “He asked for some water so I walked over to the water jug and came back, but the depositor had already collected his deposit! Dear me! I turned my back for just a moment and he was gone. He died thirsty. God keep you, Abu Saeed.”

“I swear by the five cosmic principles, the soul departs in silence.”

Zolaykha al-Joudi stepped in to cut off the mindless conversation: “Is that the same Abu Saeed who we mourned with the dirge that went:

An old man has died,
And the village mourns a life,
We've lost poor Abu Saeed
who fucked donkeys before he had a wife.

These never-ending conversations helped Saliha al-Kanj fight back the ghoul of time until the family heir was all grown up and the curse of the sacred bird had been broken. The people of Sarmada continued to visit the al-Rayyash family and pass the time, and they even organized supervision shifts to help Saliha protect her child from stealthy death.

The plan succeeded and Izz Allah was rescued from the claws of prophecy. His younger sister, Rahma, was taken out of school before she’d even finished second grade so she could make sure that her precious brother went on living, shielded by secret amulets, the name of God, and bloodshot, deathdefying eyes. As soon as Izz Allah had entered his sixteenth spring, he began to consider his marriage to Futoun al-Hamad. She was fifteen, just returning from high school, carrying a leather schoolbag decorated with colorful buttons and embroidery. She had her braided black hair up in a ponytail and if you’d stretched it out, it would’ve just about reached her knees. Her face was white, tinged with red and innocence. She had a sharp, impudent tongue that would cut anyone who dared go near her pride. The thing Futoun found most hurtful of all, though, was not being the first at something. She used to lead a gang of boys and girls and would challenge them to different contests: jumping, jumping with your feet tied together, swimming, and so on. She was the first girl to wear a short, knee-length skirt and a tank top in Sarmada, and everyone made excuses for that girl. She got away with things that no one else could get away with.

“What? You think you’re Futoun, Jabir’s daughter, now?” The adults asked when one of the girls did something that broke with convention or wore something that exposed part of their legs.

It was because she was known to be a spitfire and also because she was the eldest grandchild of Abu Jabir Hazim al-Hamad, one of the great revolutionaries and someone who understood the Nakba through and through because he’d fought alongside Izz al-Din al-Qassam and then during the General Strike in 1936 and had been promoted to lieutenant in the Arab Liberation Army. He was held as a political prisoner throughout the period of unification with Egypt because he quickly realized that Pan-Arabism was just a naive dream that meant nothing in the real world and that what unified the Arabs couldn't be legislated into a distorted union. Hazim al-Hamad showered his granddaughter with affection, or to quote: she was the only person who could touch his wounds and she proceeded to set down—on eleven cassette tapes—the memoirs of this man, who died aged nine years older than the century. He told her the secrets of the Nakba and cautioned her that the Syrian people could never unite with others, no matter how noble the intentions.

Returning from school, Futoun's feet were wet because she'd cut across the swirling valley with Ismaeel's son, Na'el, the boldest boy in the village. She was in a foul mood because she'd been unable to jump more than three rocks—and he'd seen this with his own eyes. When she couldn't stand his teasing anymore, she grabbed him by the jacket, jostled him, and dared him to go on mocking her. When he tried to defend himself, she slapped him, and when he returned the slap, she grabbed a rock and hit him. His clothes were covered in blood. Then she cursed at his sister when she tried to rescue him from her lunatic claws.

When she returned home, she tried to hide her face, made red by the slap, and her hands, which were soiled with mud and Na'el's blood, but her eyes were busy trying to figure out what was going on. Her house was full of strangers and Khayzuran, one of Izz Allah's female relatives, welcomed her with ululation, congratulations, and blessings. Years later, she told her son about that day, which she'd never been able to forget.

“Little by little, I began to understand what was happening: they'd decided to marry me off. The weird thing was that I didn't object or throw a fit. Of course, they'd already put together a bribe to shut me up: a trip to Damascus to eat ice cream at Bekdash as well as some new clothes, including two skirts that fell above the knee with hems made out of transparent muslin made to look like flowers and three tank tops, along with two tins of Haurani semolina cakes.

“But it wasn't the bribe that got me to go along with it all, or the fact that my grandfather Hamza had agreed to it, or my father's silent congratulations. It was just a strange desire to have a gold ring on my finger before all the other girls in the village. I just had to be first.”

The wedding took place six months later. At first, she thought the marriage was just one big prank and that it would soon be over, but eventually the temptation to discover what the world of the body was about, to get answers to forbidden questions, to know the amazing thrill she'd heard so many of Sarmada's young married women talking about, eased and encouraged her acceptance.

The bride was brought to the wedding on a white horse like a princess, wearing a fez adorned with gold coins and over it a gauzy white headscarf, and a dress of velvet decorated with natural silk. Every last girl in Sarmada was jealous of her. The wedding was attended by all the different mountain communities and was a mix of Islamic, Druze, and Christian rituals.

It was only when she arrived at the gate of her new house and Izz Allah helped her down from the horse that she realized exactly what she'd gotten herself into. She wasn't on her way to a palace of airy pleasures, but rather to a den of acts antithetical to her innocence. She missed her friends and her games. She wanted to turn back, to put an end to the exhausting hubbub, to run away from all those celebrating guests, to take refuge in the nearest wheat field and outlast whoever came looking for her. But Izz Allah had already walked over to help her down.

She pushed his hand away and said as loudly as she could, “Move your hand, you piece of shit. I can get down myself!” The sentence froze the young, seventeen-year-old groom, who’d been afflicted with this truculent girl, to the spot. He was paralyzed with embarrassment and found he couldn’t retreat from the guests’ eyes.

Then Khayzuran shouted, “Slap her toothless, the little bitch!”

Futoun gripped the horse’s halter tightly in preparation for setting off far away and answered her, “You! Why don’t you eat shit, you whore?”

Those were the last two insults she ever said in public.

Izz Allah failed his exams for the third time because he discovered that the topography of Futoun’s body was more deserving of his attention than the geography of the Arab world in his textbook and that her dizzy-making singing was easier to memorize than the rules of Arabic poetry.

Saliha al-Kanj imposed a tough regime on the new family. She was anxious for an heir and wanted Futoun to get pregnant straightaway, so she set down a strict diet and subjected her daughter-in-law to monthly examinations. She was constantly asking about her periods and making certain for herself that they were, in fact, doing “it” on fertile days. At the end of every monthly cycle, she waited with bated breath for the girl to be late, but she was always disappointed.

She forced Izz Allah to eat honey mixed with asafetida and nuts and she prepared him special dishes that were supposed to boost fertility. She held the headstrong girl to a military schedule of eating, drinking, sleeping, laundry, and bathing, until the young couple got totally fed up and decided they’d confront her together. Futoun was the catalyst, of course.

When they went into Saliha’s bedroom, Izz Allah began stuttering and stammering, but she just gave him an icy look that froze his hands: “After you have a son, you can do whatever you want. Until then, not another word. Now go to your bedroom, you two.” They withdrew, holding onto each other for support and fighting back their disappointment, al-most breaking out in laughter.

It took three years of carrots, sticks, abnegation, and chafing under the strictures of Saliha's regime for the first signs of pregnancy to appear. Saliha was fed up with this girl, who needed re-raising from the start, and had begun to worry she'd made a bad choice, but her patience finally paid off, and then she even let up a little bit and on her insomniac nights recalled the story of al-Bunni and the bird curse. Futoun's motherly instincts caused her to give into Saliha's indomitable strength. She kept to her south-facing bedroom, prevented from receiving friends. The tyrannical woman's rules were clear and they applied equally to her husband, the descendant of al-Bunni, who was confined to the parlor; he was more like a figment of the imagination and no one paid much attention to him. He was only allowed to attend to the fig orchard, to harvest, and to make prognostications about the intentions of the clouds: would they rain heavily this year or would they head westward to the Mountain of the Bearded Shaykh?

Saliha, who'd crushed her own husband under her thumb, understood that if he didn't have a system and priorities and a job to do, the family would fall apart, which was why she'd imposed her tough regime on everyone. Even her poor daughter Rahma, who'd been taken out of the second grade to look after her brother, when her job was over, when Izz Allah had finally escaped death, was surprised to find herself consigned to the ranks of the celibate. She ascended to the first echelons when her mother turned away the only suitor who'd ever dared to ask to marry her:

“We don't have any daughters for marrying.”

The excuse given was that the boy's father had collaborated with the French. Anyone who even considered Rahma had to make allowances for her fearsome mother, with her uncanny memory of all the mountain region's lineages and ancestral foibles. None of the potential daredevil suitors could pretend to be free of any of the disgraces committed by their forefathers and preserved in her unholy memory.

It was true that the other three daughters had miraculously managed to escape spinsterhood, but Saliha gave her sons-in-law more than enough grief and humiliation as she revealed to them every false step on their family trees. When Saliha finally realized that things could never move forward this way, she loosened her prohibitive conditions, but Rahma had already been to the mountaintop of her solitude and decided to carry out the mission that had been chosen for her: she vowed to look after her brother and his family. “I don't want to get married,” she told her mother. “I want to help raise my brother's children.”

Thus Rahma exited the domain of categories. She lived on as little as possible. She made her living from her Singer sewing machine, gave her love to the animals and hens, and shared her capacity to rear with everyone in a ritual that bordered on the sacred. Rahma never changed. She stayed in the same clothes for decades, kept to her old familiar routine to this very day, her same gentle spirit, rather like a saint. She never left the environs of Sarmada, an area of twenty square kilometers, except for twice in her entire life. Once to work as a maid in Beirut like a lot of other girls from the mountains during the unification with Egypt, when the country was plagued by drought, locusts, and the secret police, and the population was subject to poverty and hard times, worse than anything the mountains had ever seen before in their entire history.

She went to Beirut, but she couldn't remember anything about it except for how she'd broken the china. She cried for hours and told the Beiruti lady of the house, “I wish it was my hand that broke, ma'am, and not your china!” The woman didn't say anything, she just turned and walked away. Not three seconds had passed before the flutter of pity felt for teary-eyed Rahma had worn off; this girl had come from the south of Syria, along with dozens of other girls under the age of seventeen from the Druze and Alawite Mountains to work as servants in Beirut’s mansions and villas. To help their folks, tormented by drought and Nasser’s informants; domestic spying was the only idea that took root in Syria after the catastrophe of unification was over.

These were the people who’d become famous for their boundless generosity in the days when Ottoman tyranny drafted the people either into the military or hard labor and they were besieged by Janissaries and locusts. God was angry at the Levant. The mountains remained, thriving and fawned over by the Turks. They continued to enjoy the freedom to shelter those who asked for protection from Ottoman tyranny, and thus the mountains turned into a thorn in the side of the Sublime Porte and the focus of constant and merciless handwringing. They spread rumors about the people who lived there—what godless heretics they were. And their enemies even got bribe-inclined shaykhs to issue fatwas excluding the Druze from the communities of protected minorities and making it a sin to eat or drink with the Druze. They wanted to tie the area up in a sectarian conflict to disturb the cozy hospitality afforded to refugees and fugitives from the rotten justice of the Turks.

When famine struck the Levant, the parlors of the mountain houses welcomed people fleeing from Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, the Hejaz, and other parts of Syria. They fed and clothed them, and shared all that they had with those who’d come to the mountains seeking help. They opened their doors to people regardless of sect and offered safety, food, and solace. The mountain region saved more than 50,000 refugees from famine, disease, and Janissary corps impressments. But eventually those memories were squeezed out because Sarmada, like the rest of the mountain villages, only ever talked about the tragedies that befell them. They never bragged or patted themselves on the back, and everything was forgotten after independence.

The mountains gave up 2,231 martyrs, many of whom were killed defending Damascus, Hama, Idlib, Talkalakh, the Beqaa, the Hauran, Marjayoun, and Rashaya al-Wadi, while the rest of Syria combined only gave up 1,800 martyrs in the struggle for independence. After independence was won, the leader of the revolution, who was a son of the mountains, simply returned to his fields to eat from his own harvest and to wear what he wove himself. He returned home, renouncing power and politics, and opened his parlor up to anyone in need.

So why then did someone who'd helped to write the history of his country with his own blood and toil have to watch as some of his daughters found nothing for their futures except to go to Beirut and work as maids? When they asked Sultan Pasha al-Atrash what he thought about the government of independence, he had only one thing to say: “It makes you long for the days of the French occupation.”

Rahma had shouted with the crowd of villagers on the border of Sarmada for hours when Nasser came to visit the mountain region in 1960:

Hey Gamal,
look, we said,
you can take our men,
but give us bread.

She'd expected the inspiring leader to do more for the people who believed so earnestly in him and his vision.

Nasser waved to the crowds, and he did actually take the men, but to prison. And his corrupt regime managed to leverage the isolation and poverty of the sons of the revolution so they had no choice but to send their daughters to Beirut to work as maids, and the government brought them drought and snitches, but you know, the bread, it never came.

Saliha, who'd only very reluctantly agreed to let Rahma go work in the mansion of a well-off relative, didn't sleep for an entire week, and then she made up her mind. She went there herself, broke into the mansion—not giving a damn who was home—and dragged Rahma back to Sarmada. It was the first time in her life that she had allowed her affection to show in public, and she squeezed her daughter tightly against her chest. She brought out a few gold lire she'd been saving up for times like this and supported the family until the drought passed.

The second time Rahma left Sarmada, she disappeared for twenty days and no one had a clue where she'd gone to, but then she just turned up again with a self-assured smile and a vague caginess about where she'd been, which she never disclosed. The thing no one knew was that she'd gone to return something to Hamza's family that her father had entrusted to her; it was something he'd been given on the day of the famous battle of Musayfara. Hamza al-Yusuf and five of his sons were flag-bearers that day and they were all martyred in battle. Before Muhanna breathed his last in the arms of his friend Shaheen, Rahma's father, he gave him a rosary and a silver ring with a precious stone, and asked him to give them to his wife. Shaheen was wounded in the battle and fled from the mountains to Wadi Sirhan with a group of fighters who rejected any talk of amnesty and remained there for ten years until the national government took power. Only then did he return, and with his companions searched everywhere for his comrade's widow, but he failed to find any trace of her, so he held onto the rosary and ring and charged Rahma with returning them to their rightful owner. And that's exactly what she did, although she kept the secret to herself. She traveled to the Eastern District and found his wife Mudallala and her son Hamza, whom she'd named after his martyred grandfather.

Rahma gave her what she’d come to give her and returned home.

Rahma’s twenty-day disappearance gripped Sarmada and a whole saga’s worth of stories were woven around her absence. No one could even bring themselves to think that Rahma had gone to meet a man, and so Sarmada greeted her absence with consternation and it kicked their imagination into overdrive. The disappearance of a woman with such a great, though unnoticed, presence, unless caused by her death, is bound to cause a disturbance in the lives of her fellow humans, and the animals and even the plants around her. But the last person to see her could tell that she’d followed al-Bunni’s old trail and disappeared.

When she returned, life filled the house and questions filled their eyes. The smell of manure wafted off the burning cow chips. The troughs of the bay cow and the donkey were filled with moist grass and brittle straw, and the boughs were trimmed on the giant mulberry tree, which had been planted back in 1927 when the foundation of the house was laid by Abu Aboud al-Dhib, the most famous builder in the whole of the western district and the father of Aboud Scatterbrains, who would die of a heart attack caused by intense joy when Farida agreed to marry him.

The floor of the house was made from salvaged Roman bricks that dated back two millennia. Some of them still bore the markings of the ancient temples and the figure of an ancient Roman deity looked out from the mortar where they made their kibbeh. Out in front of the house was a vegetable patch, in the center of which stood the young mulberry tree. They used to raise silkworm larvae on its leaves in the first half of the century before synthetic silk infiltrated the market and wiped out the venerable trade. Her every morning began with the call to the dawn prayer coming from the direction of the Muslim village of Busur al-Hareer and then she’d put on her gauzy headscarf, repeat the name of God a few times, mutter some prayers, and get up to attend to her chores. She let the lambs out and fed the cow. A lamb would butt her playfully and she'd slap his face in jest: “Just wait for the Feast of the Sacrifice, my little kebab. Please God make its tail big and fat for our sake!”

She picked up the pace and lit a fire in the stove: “Dear Lord, the dough snuck up on me! It's already risen.” And then she began to bake her delicious rounds of bread on those dewy mornings.

Singing, bleating, and the music of life filled the air as the day broke and the bread browned. She went over to the cow and washed its udders, and then the sound of milk crashing in the pan could be heard along with her mumbled blessings and “in the name of God”s. She swept the floors of the house, let the grazing animals out to graze, and all the while kept up her constant conversation with the many animals.

The wait for rain had gathered all the children together to begin the rites of rain-summoning. They carried ceramic dishes from house to house and were joined only by widows, whose prayers were heard more loudly in the highest heaven than the prayers of married women, and they repeated:

O mother of torrents, inundate us!
At the shaykh's house, accommodate us!
If it weren't for him, you'd still await us!
He's always happy and willing to fete us!

And they followed that with another poem:

O mother of torrents, O Salman,
Water our thirsty plants!
O mother of torrents, O Shibli,
Water the plants till they're dribbly.
O mother of torrents, O Dayim,
Water our plants till they're slimed.

Only a few days later, the downpour arrived.

When the rain came, out came the wild radish and gundelia and cockscombs and mushrooms and chamomile and mallow and chicory. And the harmony of the modest, not very green, but very rich place was recalibrated, for no man wronged nature and nature was never stingy toward man. Rahma herself was part of this symbiotic system, of the trace of goodness running through the place, because her unique smile was key to getting the rams ready for slaughter. It almost made her smile to watch the cycle of nature unfold, to see the old Torah rituals repeated on the day of the sacrifice of Abraham's son. The ram bleated with extraordinary resignation as she went up to it and wiped its face, looking deep into its eyes, confirming the firm bond between the two despite their contradictory fates: the gleaming calm in the eye of the sheep and Rahma, who could see straight through into the heart of things and understood in her expansive soul the forces of nature and its awesome cycles. The only time she found she couldn't look into an animal's eyes was the day Princess fell to the ground after the men of the village had failed to lure her down from the edge of the cliff, and yet still she sharpened the cleavers and handed them to the men and watched as the beloved cow fell to its death.

“Izz Allah's my father and Futoun bint Jabir's my mother. I was raised by my aunt Rahma and I'm the last in the al-Rayyash family line.”

Saloum looked into her eyes and continued: “Buthayna, I know a lot of what I'm saying sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I wanted you to hear it all before we get married.”

Evening had settled over Sarmada and an agreeable silence washed over them as they sat on the roof of the house. She looked at him through a veil of darkness pierced by the rays of the setting sun as he squirmed ever so slightly. She had only one thing to say: “When are we leaving?” He couldn't believe what he’d heard! He was so happy and all he wanted was to hug her and carry her and fly away with her. She stopped him, gently: “There’ll be time for that soon enough.”

Two weeks later, in the summer of 1979, they were married and they left in September for the Emirates, where he was to begin work as a teacher on assignment. They had a small party with some relatives, and Buthayna told Farida she wanted her to hold on to the house keys for her: “If I don’t come back in fifteen years, sell the house and donate the money in the memory of my mother and brothers.” She left her a declaration of power of attorney and the deed to the house to see to things. She wanted to leave and she didn’t want to take any desire to return with her, so she scrubbed Sarmada clean of any trace of herself, or in her own words: she did all that so she could try to bury her memories, as if this were some kind of funeral that would help her prepare for her new life. The night before they left, a flustered Farida paid her a visit. “Beware of al-Rayyash’s son. He might not be able to produce an heir.”

“If it’s my fate, I’ll have a boy,” said Buthayna as teary-eyed Bulkhayr stood by the door, his heart experiencing its first ever loss, and the one it would never get over.

In addition to Buthayna’s hasty marriage to Saloum al-Rayyash, her departure for the Gulf, and the abrupt cancellation of the molasses lessons, Bulkhayr also came down with measles. He was laid up sick in bed, his body consumed by fever with his skin attacked by a red rash; it broke Farida’s heart to see him like that. She stayed up three nights in a row, preparing solutions and herbs, changing his cool compresses, listening as he deliriously recounted memories of the grape molasses and his auntie Buthayna, inconsolable and confused, his heart broken. Despite all her talents, Farida failed to find a combination of herbs that could drive the fever out of his young body and her old fears began to slip back in through the pores of her mind and demolish her fragile sense of security. The only thing that helped to hold her fears slightly at bay was Bulkhayr's recovery, although profound sadness still caused his eyes to glaze over, and he was morose and silent. His beautiful smile disappeared, as did his former vigor and love of life. Most of the time he sat there withdrawn with his thoughts elsewhere.

His days passed by calmly in the midst of all the amazing and frightening changes taking place in Sarmada: the arrival of electricity, the asphalted roads, and the transformed look of the place. All it took was one government initiative and the roads of a new life broke through the desolate tracts of basalt and boulders, and electricity began to stretch its way to the towns and villages. Something was changing in that village as it stood on the brink of new expectations that broke in on it forcibly, as all its ancient features faded and finally disappeared. It was as if one final round of governmental punishment had managed to infiltrate its innocence and begun to tame the place and strip it of its long-standing and deep-rooted character.

The villagers were waiting for new things to take place in their new lives, but they could never have anticipated how great the transformation would be; when the new patterns of life arrived, it was like another world. They received a surprise visit from the regional police, who gathered up all the weapons in Sarmada, and who would later take anyone carrying an unlicensed weapon to the infamous Tadmor prison, which would become permanently branded in the Syrian memory as the place where people were subjected to terror and their lives destroyed. The government, which remained on the outside, planted eyes and spies and people with nice handwriting who tried to outdo one another with the reports they wrote about the odd vagabond or transient vagrant, who they then rounded up and sent off to the various branches of the secret police. There the delinquents and their write-ups would be processed at dawn and escorted down into the chambers of torture and intimidation.

Even one of the police chiefs, who'd finished his service in the mountain region and was being transferred to a different district, said jokingly, during a farewell party that the people of the mountain were compelled to throw for him, “The mountains don't even need the secret police or any security force, really.” When they asked him what he meant, he explained gloatingly, “Because people with good handwriting” (a euphemism for informants) “are everywhere—God be praised. The government doesn't even have to bother hiring spies, you people do all the work yourselves!” All the mountain elites laughed disingenuously, flattering the most corrupt one of all.

The village shaykhs could see the transformations were killing off their authority, which was already in freefall, so they began to warn the people about the signs of the end times and the apocalypse, and Shaykh Shaheen, who had become head shaykh after Shaykh Mumps—Shaykh Farouq—labored tirelessly to decipher the symbols in the Epistles of Wisdom. After a long period of seclusion, he made an announcement to the villagers: “We are in the middle of the phase of exposure. This is the last phase of life. The resurrection draws near. There can be no doubting it, for it is said that a millennium shall pass, and not two, and that means that the resurrection will take place before we reach the year 2000.”

A smart aleck retorted: “That's all fine, Shaykh, but do the Epistles of Wisdom work on AD time or AH time?' Shaykh Shaheen stormed off, muttering strange words past a mocking crowd of open-minded youths.

The people of Sarmada felt that they could no longer remain the masters of their own lives, that the future would change everything, and that they simply had to go along with it, and abandon 300 years of independence, chivalry, and an innocent way of life. They were undefeatable when it came to repelling clearly identified, hostile outsiders who intruded on their lives, but a government as secretive as this one didn't even stir up the slightest dust.

Bulkhayr and his only friend Fayyad watched what was happening around them with disbelief. Suddenly they heard a thundering sound: “Explosion! Run!” Now that the basalt boulders had been laid with dynamite, the children shouted that sentence over and over again that autumn and the windows rattled.

Then electricity poles were erected at regular intervals alongside the first asphalt road to cut between the houses of the village and connect it to the main road that traveled between the mountains and the outside world. The roar and racket of the huge machine that crushed the rocks and smoothed the asphalted road startled the donkeys and grazing animals as it approached and all of Sarmada, every last soul, went out to watch the huge iron beast level the earth. When Fayyad asked, “What's that machine called?”, one of the workers answered haughtily:

“It's a steamroller.”

Something peculiar happened to the steamroller just two weeks later: all its screws and anything else that could be removed were stripped off and it was just abandoned there. It remained as a massive metal shell squatting in the middle of Sarmada for twenty years, until the government finally decided to remove the wreck and repair it.

Bulkhayr just barely passed first grade and ran aground in the second, causing a great deal of bewilderment and frustration. His teacher, Ibtisam, had predicted a bright future for him at first, and gone so far as to record it in her grade book, but the outlook soon deteriorated and he became the laziest student of all. The great void—no, better, the crushing abyss—that the molasses-tutor had left behind her caused him to lose any interest he'd once had in school. The boy who'd once dazzled his teachers and classmates with his enviable reading and writing skills and his precocious vocabulary suddenly lost his passion and reduced his teacher to a temporary period of soul-searching: how could this boy, who'd been near geniusspeed at learning, memorizing, and arithmetic, forget everything so quickly and without any forewarning? She blamed herself for pronouncing him gifted too hastily—for being taken in—and then cured his scholastic deterioration with that old Syrian standby: she sent him to the back of the class. There he shared a desk with the most hopeless student ever to enter Sarmada elementary, Fayyad al-Hadi, and the two of them would sit there, paying no attention to the reading and its boring characters like Basem, Rabab, and Hamid the industrious farmer, or to the Baath-scout cheers, or the solemn celebrations of Our Father the Leader and the Mighty Baath, or the curses hurled at Camp David and the Arab collaborators, and the rest of the rubbish they stuffed into the malleable minds of children. Later they would learn to revile the government of Iraq and its bloodthirsty leader, though the naive children couldn’t under-stand why people would say such things about a sister nation like Iraq that was ruled by the same Baath party, or how it could be worse than Israel as their teacher insisted.

Of course, Bulkhayr and Fayyad couldn’t give a damn about all that crap, and they didn’t even bother to move their lips or pens as they were meant to. They had better things to do—things that were more important to them than songs, revolutionary cheers, reading lessons, and the revolting things they had to memorize. Bulkhayr was still suffering from a painful loss and Fayyad from runaway fantasies of leaving Sarmada and going to Beirut, the city of his dreams and desires.

Workers shouting in warning “Explosion! Run!” shook Fayyad al-Hadi from his overpowering daydreams. His friend Bulkhayr was his only consolation. Bulkhayr, who was still tormented by the bitter terror of love that Sarmada drowned him in. All the men and most of the women in the village were tender and forgiving. They showered him with gifts and attention, but their exaggerated love felt almost stifling. Fayyad's situation was the complete opposite: for him, it was unanimous rejection, denial, and rebuke. But the two boys discovered together that cloying love and blind hate had united them in a unique friendship.

They felt that some mysterious common denominator linked their two destinies, so they spent every day of their dull childhood together and refused to let anyone else tag along, except on adventures. They impatiently waited for Farida to deliver what she'd promised Bulkhayr: a black and white Syronix television. The appointed day finally came and a big truck pulled up and dropped off three bewildering contraptions. Bulkhayr spent three whole days asking his mother questions like:

“Is that the refrigerator?”

“No, my love. That's the washing machine.”

“Is that the television?”

“No, dearest. That's the refrigerator.” Until Saeed the blacksmith, who'd become an electrician in the meanwhile, came over to Farida's house and connected them to the grid. And on that same Thursday evening in the spring of 1980, an antenna went up on the roof of the shed, and after his mother had gone to the majlis for Thursday prayers, Bulkhayr and his friend watched the Egyptian film Not Twenty and Already in Love on Israeli Television's Arabic hour. As the film ended, a one-sided love story began, starring Fayyad and the leading lady Yusra, and from that day forth, she swept through his life like a hurricane. He was instantly infatuated and even the direction of his dreams changed from Beirut to Cairo! He went on to cut out all her photos and stories about her from magazines and newspapers, to see her films, and to hang on her every word, her every whisper. He even used to close his eyes during certain scenes because he couldn't stand to see her smothered by an actor's kisses.

They entered sixth grade. Fayyad was considerably older than the rest of the students because he'd started school a year late and failed the first grade as well as the second, where he'd met Bulkhayr. Mr. Zaydoun, the school principal, cursed the idiotic idea of compulsory education and decided he'd simply pass the boy until they were finally rid of the jackass—his preferred name for Fayyad. Of course, for Fayyad, school was nothing more than a place to sleep and hang out with Bulkhayr. He lived with his partially blind grandmother and worked from time to time with Saeed the blacksmith, and later electrician, in his shop. The bright light of the welder had damaged Fayyad's eyes, so he now had trouble making things out at night. He spent his precious free time with Bulkhayr, constantly coming up with new ways to annoy Sarmada, although it always ended with the villagers overlooking Bulkhayr's involvement and taking all their anger out on Fayyad.

They went on walks every day through the rocky tracts, fantasizing about running away together to somewhere some day: Bulkhayr to Damascus and his longed-for dream and Fayyad to his sweetheart Yusra in Cairo. In that hopeless place, their friendship deepened, as did their thirst for revenge against the tyrannical school principal and his punishments. They were just on the brink of puberty at that time. Zaydoun, the principal, was one of those who ate up everything the Baath put out and then got indigestion for it. His first child had Down's Syndrome and his second was mentally retarded and this caused him to turn the school into a merciless military regime. All the elementary school students were frightened of him and he had spies who infiltrated them and reported back to him—even during the summer holidays!

He forbade the children from swimming at either the western or the eastern ponds and he invented punishments for every student who got less than seven out of ten in their exams. The lazy students who failed to do their homework or did poorly in their exams had to line up in front of his office so he could brand their supple cheeks with a marker: Lazybones. Instead of playing during recess, the lazy students were made to clean the toilets or to line up in a ridiculously long singlefile chain and march around the athletic fields throughout the entire sports lesson or recess, led by none other than Fayyad al-Hadi, while the entire school laughed at them. “Train of lazies!” Fayyad would bellow, pulling the others along as they held on to one another's waists behind him and repeated: “Choo choo!”

Zaydoun ran the local party and the “yellow” school, so called for the school's dingy color, with a martial, “take no prisoners” spirit, cursing the power that had sent him apes to teach instead of children. He even started railing against UNICEF of all things because it was an organization specifically devoted to caring for children and he cursed it every morning along with everything else that had to do with kids. He used to beat the children sadistically: he'd rap their hands until they burned and he never hesitated to have them hoisted up and whip them on the soles of their feet, or to slap them, or squash them underfoot, especially during the Baath-scout classes where they were supposed to learn marching drills and the meaning of discipline. He planted the germ of loyalty to the pioneering party and Our Father the Leader in their little minds and woe to those children who couldn't get their heads around the proto-military maneuvers or the right replies to the scout cheers that glorified the mighty Baath.

Over time, the two best friends got used to being lazy and the slur stained onto their cheeks didn't bother them anymore. They took the ridicule in their stride and delivered it right back, twice as bad and totally shameless, and if anything, all it did was exacerbate their natural devilry. They dug skulls up out of the cemetery once they figured out they could sell them to Jawdat, the hopeless medical student. He paid them twenty lire per skull and then he sold them in Damascus for fifty. So the two of them became a pair of regular old grave robbers. They stole electrical wires and made fully functioning toy cars out of them, which they then sold to the other kids, or they worked as lookouts for the guys hunting lost treasure among the valleys, stones, and wasteland. They learned how to set bird traps, how to make catapults and slingshots, and how to steal chickens out of coops. They were pros at marbles, at training the donkey foals to thresh, at collecting mushrooms and making paper planes.

One day they got punished by Zaydoun and his colleague Mr. Four-Eyes—their special name for the teacher otherwise known as Khalil the freak, a hard-line and humorless communist who wore thick glasses. He was constantly disgusted by everything around him and never stopped ridiculing the two boys for being totally worthless and unserious. Khalil was the big intellectual whom the security forces had forbidden from teaching anything but elementary classes because they wanted to limit the influence of teachers with deviant political views. On the day the boys were punished, the two men were unanimous in their rage, though they each had their own reasons. They reprimanded Bulkhayr and Fayyad because the boys had gone and terrorized the entire village: they'd smeared themselves with black soot and dressed in sheepskins—they were still half-naked—and walked around knocking on people's doors and shrieking at whoever answered. They didn't even think twice about scaring the two teachers after midnight, and they capped off their insane night by scrawling mocking slogans onto the victory arch that hung over the entrance to the village. Next to where it said “One Arab Nation, One Eternal Mission,” Fayyad climbed up and wrote: “Principal Zaydoun and Mr. Four-Eyes will suck you off for a kilo of limes.” They ended up writing that sentence all over the place: on the walls of the school, beside the main bus stop, on the walls of the party office and on either side of Poppy Bridge.

When the village woke up to that effrontery, the slogan began to circulate in whispered mocking as they secretly saluted whoever had written it. The whole of Sarmada was fed up with Zaydoun, who stuck his nose into every last thing. Sure, he'd planted trees around the village and done some good things, and he'd arranged for a bus link between Sarmada and the city, but he'd also forced the Baath onto the docile village. He was the one who collected the memberships and made sure everyone attended the Monday meetings. He was always saying, “The Baath comes first. Don't anyone think they're more important than the Baath. The Baath's more important than God Himself!” Because he had a close relationship with the secret police, and because he wrote precise reports for them about what was going on in the village, and because he paid bribes to those higher-up in the party and put on regular banquets for the mountain region's party leaders and political police, he'd been able to foil any attempts to push him out.

Khalil the communist, on the other hand, had cut himself off from the rest of the village after he'd discovered he was infertile and incapable of impregnating his wife, who decided that what she wanted was a divorce, but not because he couldn't make her pregnant, no, rather because he was always so miserable and so contemptuous of everyone and everything. After the divorce he withdrew. He no longer took part in any of the holidays or festivities; it even got to the point where he began to resent his younger communist comrades. He looked down his nose at them to compensate for his inferiority complex and emasculation, and eventually, he became intractable, rancorous, and intolerant; he was unable to forget, let alone forgive the tiniest slight, and even bore a grudge against a comrade who'd failed to return a greeting when he'd been lost in thought.

Khalil's sole accomplishment was a polemic he'd published on the class conflict between landowners and peasants, in addition to some poetry, which was boring but wholly engaged with the “big issues” and copied the style of socialist realism from the writers of Moscow and the Soviet camp. The communists who were part of the government and the National Progressive Front had a lot to say about him, as they usually did. After all, these were the people who'd agreed to become regime lackeys in exchange for access to the Ministry of Culture, one of the country's few cultural pulpits, and they accepted those jobs as a sort of bribe that sapped them of their revolutionary enthusiasm for change.

They were content with the perks of the Writers' Union, which was essentially a place where the intellectuals were kept, where they could bleat their slogans about resisting imperialism and the oppressive Zionist enemy while at the same time praising the rulers who'd taken a stand against liberty and liberation and instituted the harshest, most illegitimate, and most repressive regime in the history of the country, indeed in the history of the entire region.

They eventually reduced culture in Syria to one color and shape, especially after the death, imprisonment, and exile of the communists who'd refused to sell out so cheaply. Only a handful remained—all friends of Khalil—and they elevated whoever they felt like elevating and snootily cast out anyone who couldn't insinuate himself into their little group and its gatherings.

The scabby leftist culture-claque needed to recruit someone from the mountain region so they could pretend to be antisectarian and plural-minded nationalists. Khalil was exactly who they'd been looking for, and they promptly proclaimed him the “Neruda of Syria.” The people of Sarmada, on the other hand, took great delight in the graffiti attacking the two most despised men in the village. As usual, they went easy on Bulkhayr and his punishment was limited to a verbal dressing down and six raps on the knuckles with the edge of a ruler, but Fayyad, well, now he was hauled up onto the cabinet and had his feet whipped until they swelled up, as if he were a war criminal. As you can well imagine, the punishment didn't put the boys off, it just made them more careful.

The boys spent their days wondering about the one question that plagued them constantly: how could they pass the hardest test of all? The one that would allow them to put aside childish games and join Sarmada's gang of young men?

Before they could take the next step and join the older boys, they had to undergo the ritual that marked the transition from childhood to young-manhood. It took place at the western pond, where the last of the water in the valley pooled in a large depression. There it remained throughout the summer, the perfect place for the children to swim and play. Fayyad and Bulkhayr, who were both dying to join the village gang, would have to put on a show for the older boys. But when the time finally came, Fayyad had second thoughts about masturbating in front of all the other boys. They only had one chance to prove that they could ejaculate—that they'd become men—but if they failed, they'd be bullied relentlessly, so Fayyad decided he wouldn't take part. Bulkhayr stood by his friend and also refused to perform, though he had to fight back his rage when they were subjected to Ramez Donkeyshit's jeering abuse—and yet Ramez still let them watch the induction ceremony of the other three boys who'd come to the pond.

The pubescent boys stood in a row in front of the crowd and then the show began: they took off their trousers and sat down on the bank of the brackish water, and then as Ata the impish storyteller told them about his experiences with gypsy women, the boys began to play with their dainty privates. Ata repeated the same story, adding constant embellishments, calling to mind how the gypsy woman smelled and how he attained the deepest depths of pleasure, sliding into a moist, velvety vagina and thrusting feverishly into her behind as she cried with delight. He threw in all those details and a lot more. Every time he told the story, he added a few scenes he'd seen on Israeli television, which broadcast “erotica,” although that was just what people called it, in truth they were just comedies that didn't have the hot scenes edited out. The story grew only more passionate as the fists gripping the strained members shuttled and shook ever more fervidly, and the boys were lost in their own imaginations, horny and holding back moans, and then the older boys were suddenly cheering and their task was complete, and that wide new world they'd been dying to get into finally welcomed them.

Ata stood up and congratulated the boys, and then he performed the last rite. He cut the stem of a yellow-flowered plant called milk thistle and gave a few drops of the golden, alkaline sap to each boy and made him rub the stinging drops on his penis to make it grow—so it was said—but actually only to make it swell and to make the boys suffer days of unbearable pain, with tears in their eyes but stupid proud smiles on their faces.

Bulkhayr tried to get Fayyad to go through with the performance because if he didn't prove to the older boys that he was able to ejaculate, he would never be allowed to join that other world, or get to go on trips to the brothels in Damascus with the gang, or accompany them on raids of gypsy women, or listen to the adults' sex-soaked stories, or learn how to ride Ata's motorcycle for almost no money at all. He'd be just a boy for the rest of his life, forbidden from taking part in that other, unseen side of Sarmada. But Fayyad was scared. He told Bulkhayr that what had happened to Essam, the son of Mamdouh the shopkeeper, had scared him, and he was worried that it might happen to him—that he, too, might fail the test, and then the older boys would start to molest him and treat him as if he were a girl.

He was entirely right, of course: their burning passion had them raping farm animals and just waiting for someone like Essam they could penetrate. In the end the only thing Essam could do was dress himself in a hood and loose trousers and become a shaykh who never left the majlis, putting an end to his worldly life, and saving his ass too, because no one dared lay a hand on a young shaykh who was protected by the Holy Spirit, the five cosmic principles and God Himself!

Fayyad began testing his penis in private while looking at pictures of the actress Yusra because that small erection was his key to a greater world. Then Bulkhayr happened upon the solution when he discovered that the boys were also allowed to prove their manhood at Stone-deaf's terebinth tree.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked Fayyad.

“No, I'm going to go on my own. I'll tell you what happens later.”

From far away, Sarmada looks like it's stripping off its clothes after a warm summer's day, getting ready to await another morning. My camera snaps shots, panning wide frame over a landscape of seduction and mystery. Yes, I lived here once, but now it's as if I'm from somewhere else. The sleeping village offers its dreams up to my waking mind and my wakefulness selects only what agrees with my memories to form a new landscape. I wondered whether Azza Tawfiq would ever see what I saw. Would she ever hear behind the sounds, or deep below them? I needed to speak to her. To ask her once more: Are you sure you're Hela Mansour?

If you want to really know yourself, you should stand stark naked in front of the mirror and get dressed very slowly; then leave. The last impression is the final impression. There's nothing deep down. Everything that happens rises up to the surface and is then spun off into new words. You just have to know how to gather them all. Learn how to write them down. Anyone who says we have to take advantage of time belongs to the machinery of work in contemporary life. To take advantage of time is to take advantage of others. Here in Sarmada, I discovered that time has no value. Only place can have value. Finding the right place: that's our precious mission. Time, we can't do anything about. Have I suddenly come down with a case of endings and over-withs? No, not yet.

Stone-deaf Siman will take over the story, for the novel can end only in silence. Thus I, too, shall be silent now.

The ancient tree stood in the quiet and tranquil wasteland and it was Stone-deaf Siman who'd discovered that the tree provided an incomparable means of proving manhood. The tree became a site of pilgrimage: fertility-seekers flocked to it from all across the country and picked its leaves, which they would steep along with chamomile, rosemary, and colocynth, to make a tea that would increase their fertility.

Fayyad entrusted his fate to the blessed tree, which people said was actually just a woman of immense sexual appetite, profoundly lustful and debauched. She was never satisfied, one time she even slept with a whole division of the Nabatean army without so much as blinking. She lived in this same spot more than 2,100 years ago, an Ishtarite woman with divine breasts and a voluptuous rear. She’d originally been abducted by a genie, but the king of the genies took a liking to her and he married her instead. He had to throw her out after a while, though, on account of how lascivious and fecund she was. She’d corrupted the entire underworld, so she was sent back to the world of men with her fragrant vagina whose musk made humans swoon. She went on living like that, a slave to desire, until she was slain by a eunuch’s axe and was transformed into this peculiar terebinth tree.

Stone-deaf Siman, who’d been the first to discover the tree’s capabilities, planted a hedge of cypress trees all around it and began to work as the tree’s pimp. He was probably the only tree pimp in the entire world, as a matter of fact. Soon the tree’s supple crevices and the hot resin bubbling up from its giant trunk made it the village boys’ favorite destination. To guard against surprise scratches, Siman had purchased a couple of kilos of off and putrid petroleum jelly and filled the suitable crevices. The shaykhs tried to spread rumors about him, that he’d been struck deaf and dumb once he’d started pimping out the tree and corrupting the young men in the village, but none of that mattered to Fayyad as he proudly and gaily regaled his friend with a full report of his experience.

“I paid Stone-deaf Siman, the guy who guards the tree, three-quarters of a lira that I’d managed to save up in small coins, and then I dropped my trousers and took out my dick. I tested one of the holes with my finger. It was moist and sticky, so I stuck it in slowly and closed my eyes. It felt like the tree was blowing me. I wrapped my arms around it like it was Yusra, my sweetie. I could hear her whispering to me in Egyptian Arabic, she was saying, ‘Yeah! That’s it! You’re driving me wild! Oh, baby, oh, Fayyad!’ And then I busted inside the tree. The deaf guard was watching me the whole time and when I finished, he walked over and made sure that I'd actually come inside the tree. Then he gave me a thumbs up, like he was saying ‘Mission Accomplished!’”

Bulkhayr laughed. “The deaf guy's still giving you a thumbs up. The whole of Sarmada's going to start treating you like a man from now on.”

To make it official, Fayyad brought Stone-deaf Siman down to the spring with him. The boys had all gathered to find out the result from a few signs, and gestures of the head and hands, and then finally he gave Fayyad the all-okay sign with two thumbs straight up, and they understood that Fayyad had made it into their world. At that point, loony Safwan taunted from the crowd: “So what about you, Bulkhayr? Or is it still too soon for you?”

Without answering, he dropped his trousers, stripped off his underwear, and revealed two penises, each more than seven inches in length. Some of the boys ran from the terrifying sight, while others watched, jaws gaping, as Bulkhayr wanked one of them furiously until he came and then moved onto the next one and finally completed the ritual of public masturbation in the midst of much cheering and singing from the others, who immediately elected him leader, despite his youth. He hadn't even turned twelve yet.

The school trip would change both their lives forever. Principal Zaydoun had decided on a field trip to the famous shoe factory in the city and then to the top of the mountain to look out onto the miraculous meadow, where if you pour water on the road, it'll flow from low ground to high and where if the bus were parked at the bottom of the slope in neutral and the brakes were released, it would roll upward. This bemusing experience mystified the people of the mountains and visitors and, as is to be expected, plenty of apocryphal stories were invented—creatively, but illogically—to explain the vexing phenomenon.

Of course, no one bothered to listen to the geologist as he tried to explain that it was all just an optical illusion and that the ground elevation wasn't as it seemed, and so the legendary explanations continued. Sarmada had a knack for, and sufficient practice at, taking something like that and turning it into a reason for faux-excitement, which spread from student to student as they awaited their upcoming trip.

Their itinerary took them from the meadow vista to the Roum Dam—an achievement of the “blessed” revolution—and then onto the woods outside Kom al-Hisa, where they were going to have lunch. After lunch, they would visit the distillery where arak and wine were made, and finally end up at the shoe factory. The principal had contracted with Suhayb the bus driver to hire his big Scania bus for the trip.

What Bulkhayr and Fayyad didn't know, though, was that the principal had hatched a conspiracy to change the departure time from seven to half-past-six so that they would miss the trip. It was really Fayyad the principal was after because he didn't want that idiot ruining the trip with his mischief. A half hour before the journey was scheduled to begin, the principal gave the head scout boys and the bus driver strict orders not to let that lazy waste of space onto the bus under any circumstances. He wanted to make it look like it was all the students' idea: “Do you lot want Fayyad coming on your trip?”

“No, sir!” answered one of the students who'd had a taste of the troublemaker's fist. He was joined by the others, who were caught up in the thrill of exclusion and the validation of their principal's smile, which they only saw once every few months. The whole group had been turned against Fayyad and they were feeling pretty proud and pleased with themselves, as well as obviously being quite surprised that their legendarily heartless principal was scheming with them, bucking them up even, and that he’d promised them an unforgettable school trip on the sole condition that the little miscreant be left out.

“Don’t worry about it, sir. We’ll see to it he never gets on the bus.”

“It’s all up to you,” said the wicked principal. “You lot need to make a decision: do you want him on the trip or not? It’s not my problem.”

They listened so closely that the morning drowsiness was wiped from their eyes, then they divided positions among themselves and one of them armed himself with the principal’s cane. Two of them hung onto the back staircase to fight off any attempts to latch onto their long-awaited journey and the biggest and best kickers stood by the door to keep him from getting onboard under any circumstances. As the bus was about to set off, Bulkhayr and Fayyad appeared in the distance, out from behind the ruined steamroller that squatted in the middle of the village, and they began to sprint as quickly as they could. Bulkhayr got to the door first and the students who’d been appointed as guards grabbed him and pulled him onto the bus. But when Fayyad reached out, expecting to get the same help, he got whacked on the head with the principal’s cane and he had no idea why. He backed off and tried to climb up the back staircase but they kicked him away and he stumbled, falling into the thorny bushes alongside the asphalt road, which looked to him like a black snake swallowing the bus up until all he could see was the sooty exhaust and that, too, began to dissipate. In the midst of a resoundingly silent morning pierced only by his staccato, wrenching sobs, he stood there and wept in the brittle emptiness. He implored them with futile cries, but the speed of the bus and the ecstasy of their principal’s complicity had made them into cruel and rabid little brutes. They stuck their heads out of the bus windows and pointed and gestured rudely, mocking the cry-baby who was running after them. Bulkhayr tried to stop them, but he got a punch to the face and a bloody nose for his trouble. He wanted to get off and begged Suhayb to stop the bus, but there was no point. So he started cursing at the students and trying to push past them to the back door, hoping to jump out and run back to his friend, but they held him back and knocked him down to the ground, where they kept him until the bus was far enough away, ignoring all his taunts and threats. The principal, meanwhile, was busy chatting to Ms. Camellia, reeling off his really quite impressive track record of imposing discipline on the students and the village at large, while she, for her part, tried to fake a bland smile as she wondered just how she'd managed to forget her maxi-pads on the counter at home and hide any signs of the abdominal cramps that accompanied her period, which had come that very morning and taken her by surprise.

The only available outlet for Fayyad's vengeance was the flag that flew high above the school, so he tore it to shreds in a blind rage. After he'd returned, panting from his failed attempt to catch up with the bus, he sat down against the wall of the school, fighting back the tears that lit a fire in his heart and left him cursing the moment he'd ever been born into that shitty little village. He caught sight of the slack flag—the only moving thing he could see—and so he climbed up to the roof of the school and knocked down the flagpole, and then rabidly ripped the flag apart.

This was the flag that had greeted him every morning for eight years. The flag he'd revered. He used to think that saluting the flag was a duty, that it wasn't even negotiable on chilly or frozen mornings, irrespective of stomachaches or stuffed noses. He'd always felt a special affection for that piece of cloth. Not saluting it was unthinkable—an act of treason, beyond the pale. It was exactly like the Baath party slogans he'd memorized and taken to heart, even though he didn't understand a word of them. The teacher who stood in front of the students and pierced the disciplinary air with his booming voice told them that they were being called on to help build one grand and unified Arab socialist society and to defend it, and Fayyad would raise his right hand as if swearing an oath—proud that his own husky voice was loudest of all. Tearing up the thing he'd loved most at the school was like taking revenge against all those brutal years, and it marked the end of a childhood that had been rather late in ending.

Back on the bus, the students danced with the glee of a mission accomplished, but their joyous racket was beginning to annoy the principal, who, after all, was trying to have a conversation with the new female teacher. He interrupted himself to shout at them and thereby regain some of the dignity he'd traded away that morning. The students all returned to their seats and only Bulkhayr was left, raving and cursing, not giving a damn about the principal's authority. Bulkhayr sprung to his feet and punched the boy who'd punched him and the one who'd thrown him down on the ground. The one who'd covered his mouth and held him down got kicked in the balls. Principal Zaydoun was livid and couldn't control his tongue as he unleashed a torrent of abuse on troublemaking Bulkhayr, who would later come to see that moment as a fork in the road of his life.

“Sit down, you little bastard! You pathetic son of a whore, you don't even know who your own father is, and now you want to start acting tough and making threats. Trust me, you better sit the fuck down before it's too late.”

There was a heavy silence followed by giggling and snickering from the students who couldn't believe they'd just heard those words come out of their principal's mouth. Then it was absolute pandemonium as Bulkhayr lost control: he threw himself onto the bus driver and tried to wriggle his way into the driver’s seat, until the driver was forced to stop the bus. The principal literally kicked the boy off the bus and then they continued on their exciting educational journey.

Bulkhayr was covered in dust. The bus let out a cutting honk as it carried on into the distance and the despondent boy turned back. He was only a few kilometers from Sarmada, but it felt so far away he thought he’d never get back and he desperately wished there was somewhere else besides that wretched little village where he could go and seek permanent refuge. His head began to fill with uneasy fantasies, but they were soon interrupted by a military tractor trailer hauling a broken-down tank, or perhaps it was an army truck with the sides torn off. The air seemed to pulse with a clamor and dingy smoke that he breathed in quickly. Meanwhile his memory was busy gathering up every last hushed whisper, every suppressed wink, and assembling them in an appalling picture of the truth: he honestly didn’t know who his father was. He was a bastard, and his mother was just a whore, and everybody in the mountain region knew it, everyone but him. All the love and good feeling he got from everyone in Sarmada was only because all the villagers thought he might be related to them.

As Fayyad was busy tearing the flag atop the school to shreds, Bulkhayr scratched through the veil that’d been wrapped tightly around his eyes and watched as his world began to fall apart. He reached the shed after two hours of dejected walking, and Farida was surprised to see him home so soon. She sent away her patient, who’d come looking for help with flatulence and intestinal bloating, and wiped her hands on a white rag. Bulkhayr was filthy and his face looked sick with the poison of unvarnished truth. Her heart began to beat frenetically, her hands trembled and a bitter distress consumed her. He stood in front of her and stared straight into her eyes. Then clenching his fists, he asked a question that she

could never answer: “Who's my father?”

“What's wrong, my love? What happened?” she asked; his pointed question had nearly reduced her to tears. He'd finally found out, but she wasn't ready for that yet. She had thought there would still be time before she'd have to come clean.

“Who is he? Tell me who he is.”

“What's wrong, dear? Tell me what's the matter.”

“Answer me,” he said, cutting her off. “How many times are you going to make me ask you? Give me an answer. Who is my father?”

Her voice stumbled on his insistence and she thought back over all the houses in the village, every memory a pinprick. She wanted to slap him, or maybe hug him, but the only thing she could bring herself to do was to grab the broom, pour some water out onto the ground, and begin to sweep the porch, submitting helplessly to the tears that overwhelmed her. He was still standing there, looking as if he'd aged ten years in an instant. The place grew silent: first the sounds in the distance died out, then the rustling in the trees. The village was still; he couldn't even hear the broom sweeping against the ground anymore. The only thing that remained was a buzzing, which appeared yellow-colored somehow; the sound itself seemed yellowed and it surrounded him. He went into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

The next morning, he was still clothed in that yellow buzzing. He couldn't hear the police cars that came to take Fayyad away after they'd been tipped off by Principal Zaydoun. He'd worried that the destruction of the flag had been the work of more than one culprit, and he even had to defend himself against some of the villagers who attacked him for being so underhanded and manipulative. Kalashnikov-wielding forces dressed in uniforms with stripes and shiny medals stormed into Fayyad's bedroom and dragged him away to the investigations bureau as if he were a war criminal or worse.

He returned to the village nine weeks later to find that Bulkhayr had regained his sense of hearing, but that he could no longer see the color yellow; he could only hear it. Bulkhayr came to see him at his grandmother’s house. They sat across from each other as his nearly blind grandmother cried tears of joy and got up to bring them something to eat. Fayyad looked broken—as if he’d be broken forever and his spirit simply couldn’t be fixed. Bulkhayr wasn’t able to find any words of consolation—not for his friend, or for himself—and so he left him wordlessly, alone in his despair, and he wasn’t at all surprised when Fayyad ran away a few days later. No one heard from him after that. Not a single message came for twenty years, not until 2006.

Everyone was celebrating the birth of “a new Middle East,” but it was born seriously deformed. In Iraq, death was serving up cheap daily specials, and Lebanon, the only Arab democracy, was a running joke. Who killed Hariri? It was just another question to add to the long list of history’s unsolved cases, which stretched all the way back to the Caliph Uthman and his tunic. The 2006 war on Lebanon had left everyone in a difficult position because the winner hadn’t really won and the loser hadn’t really lost. But it was especially bad for Sarmada, which watched Fayyad al-Hadi on their television screens returning from Lebanon after the war, reaching the border, and then the village itself. He’d come back from the depths of some faint, forgotten past. The collective memory of the village kicked into gear and the details reappeared instantly; he became the talk of the town and everyone remembered his name, and remembered to say a prayer of mercy for his poor grandmother, who’d died cold and alone. They organized a grand homecoming for him with songs and ululations and festivities and the kind of high-brow, pulpit poetry you sometimes get. Everyone talked about him as if he’d been a close friend. His old principal—who’d been appointed mayor—praised him for his heroism and selfless devotion to his village, even as a child, and he mentioned how the boy had strived and toiled from earliest youth, and he explained that he took personal pride—the principal, that is—in having taught the boy about dignity and patriotism.

But to tell the truth, Fayyad didn't hear any of that. He was in a wooden box draped with the Syrian flag, lying in his lovely coffin. He'd been returned to the village as part of the famous initiative between Israel and Hezbollah to exchange prisoners and the mortal remains of martyrs. He was taken to Lebanon first, and then, after all those years, back to Sarmada. Today, his old elementary school in the village is named after him. There's a huge sign out front that reads “Fayyad al-Hadi the Martyr Elementary School,” and that same flag still flies over it.

What with Fayyad running away to Lebanon, and his own choice to punish his mother with silence and to cut himself off from everyone in Sarmada, there was nothing left for Bulkhayr to do but take walks through the rocky wasteland and lock himself away with Hamoud's books. He'd rooted the books out of the attic. All together, they amounted to about seventy books printed in the 1960s, faded and smelling of moths, and the leaves of some still hadn't been cut open, which meant they'd never been read. He dusted them off and found they helped to take his mind off things. The first book that stoked his appetite for reading was Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. On the first page he found a line in nice, clear handwriting: From the library of Hamoud al-Ayid. He felt like erasing it, the name of his hypothetical father, and writing his own name there instead. The sudden realization that his surname would never be al-Ayid made him shiver.

He devoured those seventy books in less than three months and he decided he’d enroll in the middle school in the neighboring village. He didn’t want to carry on at the school in Sarmada. He couldn’t bring himself to deal with any of the villagers anymore, so he went to the middle school in the neighboring village of Minzar. He had to commute eight kilometers a day by foot through the paths in the rocky waste-land, entertaining himself by remembering the plots of the novels he’d read and contemplating the forest of stone and all the different shapes it took.

He was silent at his new school, obstinately so, and quicktempered. When some of the older boys tried to test his mettle, he easily bent one of their noses with a savage punch and they all stayed out of his way after that. He sunk into the school library and he didn’t have any friends except for the few boys he exchanged books with. One of them was a tall borderline dunce whose father had a huge library and collected books merely for decoration. The other kids were always trying to beat up the tall boy and Bulkhayr stepped in to protect him from the older boys a couple of times.

Bulkhayr figured it was a gesture of thanks and loyalty when his new friend Faris al-Khateeb gave him the collected works of the poets al-Mutanabbi, Abu Ala al-Ma‘arri and Abu Nuwas, out of which he memorized dozens of poems, but the truth of the matter was that Faris had seen the two willies dangling between Bulkhayr’s legs in the bathrooms at school and something about that interested him, attracted him even. He decided to shower Bulkhayr with books because he knew that it was the only way to build a relationship with him, to grow close, and he even risked inviting him over to pick some-thing out of the great big library at home for himself.

Bulkhayr leapt at the invitation. No one was home, so Bulkhayr could take his time picking through the books that Faris’ father, the high-ranking military officer, had collected to round out the prestigious accoutrements the well-off were meant to have. Every time Bulkhayr found a book that interested him, Faris would take it and stick it in a big bag until the bag was bursting with books. Bulkhayr couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed afterward about this excessive generosity. They went and sat together in Faris’ room and drank the tea Faris had prepared. Bulkhayr was uncomfortable; his friend was being a bit too fey, leaning a bit too close. Faris put on a cassette of the Concierto de Aranjuez and tried to put his hand between Bulkhayr’s thighs. Bulkhayr stood up angrily, and when Faris tried to get him to stay, he smacked him, knocking him to the ground, and stormed out, fuming and slamming the door behind him, partially ruing the bagful of books he’d had to leave behind.

In addition to plowing through books, he also went on long hikes through the wasteland, where he spent hours upon hours examining the huge basalt stones and the wasteland wilderness, tracing the not-so-distant past when the people of the area finished off the forces of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in a battle in which whole divisions of Janissaries and French mercenaries were wiped out.

To him, the wide, wild wasteland was the most familiar place in the world, and he eventually started taking a small tent with him and a bag full of Hamoud’s supplies, and even blazing a few short trails himself. That wilderness was where he thought and matured; it was where he learned his silence and toughness, where he’d regained the peace and tranquility he’d lost. His trips began lasting several days, which he’d spend lost in thought, communing with the rocks and the humped boulders and the august and immovable stones. Time meant nothing to him when he set his tent up and lit a fire beside the flowing springs or on the edge of the forest that lined the mountains and encircled the massive rock formations that lay just outside Sarmada. His hikes eventually took him deep into the heart of the Lajat. He'd sit for hours among strange ruins, enjoying the silence, contemplating the spirit of the basalt and all its shapes, its peculiar formations and figures, under a clear open sky and a bright sun, breathing in the pure air and all the scents of stone.

The wilderness of the wasteland was tamed in his contemplative mind and he began recording his first dense vignettes in a special notebook, which he'd titled Transformations of Basalt and Sunlight. It made him drunk with joy to record the lives of the rocks and their shapes, their relationship with the rain and the sun, their colors, how they changed over the hours of darkness and light, their breath as they soaked up the sun and swallowed the plants growing on them, how water collected on their surfaces after a downpour in little pools topped off by fleeting sparrows or cicadas and other bugs come to stay. This seemed more perfect to him, these worlds opened up to the deep blue sky of day, pure and proud beneath the stars, which were like freckles on the sky at night.

In his notebook, he wrote about one rock that was pregnant with small pebbles. With words, he painted a picture to show how the earth drank the milky liquid of the stars from the mouth of the moon. He wrote about the foolish pebbles that wouldn't be budged from beside a pool of water for more than 290 years and were absolutely covered in the droppings of thirsty sparrows. He recorded the whispers of silence in sentences that bulged with the ups-and-downs of the pock-marked face of a furious boulder. He absorbed the rocky insomnia and whispering solidity, he watched as the silt fermented and the pot-bellied boulder seemed to waltz. He committed the smells of the place to words, recording the nitrate-laden breezes in a poem he called “A Dictionary of Zephyrs and Abrasions.” He was overjoyed when he unlocked the language of basalt and its scent. He and the stones became one and then he could turn them into new words, which oozed energy and shine. His overpowering desire for discovery pushed him toward Hebariyeh, that magical spot in the mountains, so he made up his mind to go set up camp there.

It was evening by the time he arrived. He found a bearded man absorbed in prayer beside some ruins. The man had reclaimed a plot of about fifty square meters and ringed his garden with some strange stones he’d found; he also had a goat and a few chickens. The old man welcomed Bulkhayr and invited him to stay the night. Bulkhayr told the old man that he’d heard a great deal about Hebariyeh and that he wanted to find out the truth for himself. Was it really the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah or just some settlement that’d been taken unawares by a volcano 5,000 years ago?

“Neither,” said the old man. “Here, they used to make graves out of leftover corpses. I bet they must’ve had to collect hundreds of corpses from all over the region. They heated them up with the rocks, at temperatures between 600 and 1000 degrees Celsius, so the bones mixed in with the rocks, as you can see. But no one has any idea why. Were they making sacrifices to the place? Or was it some primitive ritual having to do with ancient idols?”

Bulkhayr took a look around him. There were several huge stones with protrusions that were quite obviously joints, and palates and jaws complete with teeth. He could see fragments of bone, and crimson dirt, and lime, as well as stones inlaid with vertebrae and skulls. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and he was the one who’d memorized all the stones and different basalt shapes in the Lajat. But here were seven square kilometers of boulders, rocks, and pebbles formed from the bones of humans and animals and from parts of trees that had been carbonized and cooled and preserved in strange and inexplicable shapes. He was completely taken with the place and he started leaping around like a maniac, looking, peering, poking, examining, recording, cheerfully collecting whatever small stones and scraps of metal he could get his hands on until darkness swallowed them up. The old man lit a fire and they kept each other company till the morning. Bulkhayr recited poems by Abu Nuwas and Abu Ala al-Ma‘arri, as well as some four-liners he’d written himself about geological revelations, and the old man recited mystical poems by al-Hallaj, al-Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi for him until daybreak. He woke up sluggishly and climbed to the top of a short hill and looked out over the crematory, the pit of massive stones. The layer of moss that had grown over the stones was soaked with dew. As the sun rose, the scene was transformed into a symphony of stunning colors and the first threads of dawn trickled out onto the freshly washed stones. The boy’s forsaken heart was moved and—for the first time in his life—he understood that special, secret tingle that the place inspired.

He stared at the rocks closely and saw that they possessed human features, faces. Some were crisp and distinct, others were disguised and dulled; some were lofty and fixed, others hidden and vague. They seemed pliant, and changing and synchronized as the dew began to gleam in a bath of light poured out from the fresh sun, and the desolation became a jungle bursting with color and the buzzing and chirping of insects. The perfume of those millennia still stored up in that virginal, untamed place emerged.

Places had their means of self-defense, too, he felt, just like primitive beings, and if he only listened and looked closely enough, he could liberate geography from its suspension. Place was no more than frozen time. And time was only flowing place. This was the paradox that gripped his heart and allowed him—for the briefest moment—to understand that anyone who came across this patch of earth was fated to resemble it, to bury his emotions beneath a stony, blood-red screen and to let them out only on mornings like this one.

He understood for the first time and forevermore that what kept the people here wasn't sectarian feeling or a sense of community, it was the spirit of the rocks, the virgin sentiments stored deep in the rugged wasteland, the secrets of the basalt. He felt the spirits of those whose corpses had been burned appear. He could hear them muttering, their footsteps. The dreams of people who'd performed their duty and returned to their rest appeared fleetingly before his eyes.

True nature can't just be some spindly plants, and forests, and sand. It was rock and metal that had come together with unparalleled symmetry in order to put disorder straight. Nothing can be built if there's no solidity, nothing, not souls, not cities. The soul of a city is usually derived from the type of stones that are used to build it and relationships are formed based on the type of metal people use to shield themselves against nature.

As the sun rose up in the east, the dew dissipated in the driving heat. He didn't resist his conscience when it suggested that it was time to return to Sarmada. He didn't even think of the old man: whether he'd really been there or was a mere hallucination. He found a shady refuge from the midday heat and dozed off, watching as the history of the place played out before his eyes in a smooth rendition that led him—when he woke up—to the moral of the story: we're going backwards. We're walking back toward that first drop of primordial sperm. The future is nothing more than a past that's been achieved. That idea would gnaw at him for the rest of his life and lead him to venture into worlds no one had ever seen before.

Farida, who'd gotten used to his silence over the past four years and whose every attempt to get him to speak to her had failed, gave in to fate, as usual, and waited patiently to see what it had in store for her. She was nearing fifty, but her face was still vibrant and there were no wrinkles around her eyes. She wasn't carrying any excess weight. She still had her lovely, long figure and she still gave off that old scent of tantalizing femininity. She started working even more in order to improve her finances. She’d slip Bulkhayr’s allowance between the pages of his books and she’d leave his meals out in the kitchen for him. On many nights, she’d sneak into his bedroom to study his round, handsome face and the fair beard that had begun to appear against his tawny skin, and she wished more than anything that she could look into his emerald eyes.

Who could be his father? she once asked herself. The question exhausted her soul because her memory didn’t just bring up all those old teenage faces, but also a powerful taste of the dangerous desire she thought she’d long since forgotten, and she could feel herself slipping into its grip once again. She couldn’t resist: she masturbated, though her orgasm was mixed with the bitter taste of sin, and it made her swear—not to God—but to the photo of Bulkhayr that hung in her bedroom that she’d never go near the threshold of pleasure again. Then she stuffed a rag in her mouth and heated the cast-iron ladle she used to roast coffee until it glowed red. She placed it between her labia and calloused her clitoris and then she passed out from the pain.

That was in the first year of his spurning and with time, she grew used to his silence, learned to deal with it, and it was enough for her just to know that he was in good health.

When Bulkhayr returned from his trip to Hebariyeh two days later, Farida was sitting by the door of the shed, drying out wreaths of damask roses. She looked up at him and saw that the old unrest had left his face. She couldn’t believe her ears when she heard him say, “Hello,” in a faint voice, clear and full of warmth, and she smiled for the first time in years.

Buthayna returned, divorced, during the spring vacation in 1989. She arrived at Farida’s with two big Versace bags, wearing Dior sunglasses, her hair dyed fair. She raised her sunglasses on her head, revealing eyes like crystals, free of wonder, free of sadness. Her round face, her white teeth, her lips a little less red than before, her wide brow, her chest a little more full. In an instant, Bulkhayr recalled every single detail of her body and he waited for any sign from her to signal that indeed they had some shared history, but nothing came. He broke out in a cold sweat when she came up and kissed his cheeks. He took in her scent, faint agarwood from her incensed clothes mixing with some newfangled perfume that smelled of cloves. She seemed to be disguised somehow, or artificial; she’d lost that old fragrance she’d had stored up in her pores. She commented on his height, “Good lord, you’re all grown up now!” and she wasn’t exaggerating. She took out a white shirt she’d brought as a gift and said, entirely neutrally, “I hope it fits.” He took the present indifferently and wondered: could she actually have forgotten? Had what happened between them been real or just some ambiguous escapade he’d embellished in her absence? These Borgesian questions and a creeping doubt engulfed his mind: was his affair with Buthayna just the product of a playful imagination?

His only consolation was that he’d soon find out for sure, as she’d come to stay with them—for a month or more—seeing as her own house needed renovating after having been chewed up by waiting and stripped bare by emptiness. In a matter of days, he’d know whether he still had a foothold in her affections. He couldn’t go out into the wasteland to clear his head as he usually did, so he went up to the roof, eaten up by his worry and consternation. Could his first love, the one he’d waited and pined for, really be so thick?

He let out a scream for no reason at all up on the roof of the house, confusing the farm animals around him, while beneath the roof, Buthayna thanked Farida for her hospitality and told her all about what had happened to her in the Emirates.

As soon as she'd gotten to Dubai, she was struck by the stifling humidity and boredom, the smell of spices and the reek of frying curried fish. “From the moment I got off the plane it was like that smell was stuck to me. I felt like it was coming from my own body,” she explained to Farida. Saloum was gentlemanly and affectionate, but he was never there. He was a faceless husband. A week after she'd arrived in the Emirates from Sarmada, she realized that the emptiness, the loneliness, the confinement, nothing had changed.

Her only task in life was to wait for her husband to return from his job at the school and there was nothing to pass the time except for a few meager friendships with other teachers' wives. They barely got past small talk, which made the loneliness seem a perfect heaven compared to the constant assault on her privacy and the foolish questions and gossip about every last thing. It was inevitable that she'd keep them all at arm's length. Her days there were written in sentences of words dotted—just to pass the time—with sickly dreams and Saloum was the typical migrant laborer, living by the creed: “Sun's down, count the cash!”

As the years went by and Saloum al-Rayyash's financial situation began to improve, he was able to open a small restaurant, and he would go there to supervise after he was finished teaching for the day. Slowly but surely, they ended up seeing each other only in passing. Buthayna wasn't demanding, she didn't throw fits. She wasn't the type to moan about her own deterioration, or to complain about anything at all, for that matter. She found ways to mask the void: stringing bead necklaces, honing her old embroidery talents, and watching television, but her womb, it stayed empty.

She didn't get pregnant and she didn't ask for anything; she was serene and happy to go along in whatever direction life took her. She docilely accepted her fate every time but one. “We have to see a doctor,” she told Saloum and so he took her to a women's clinic, where they ran some tests. He went back that evening and returned home with the results.

He delivered the news calmly: “You're not able to bear children... but that’s my fate and I’m not going to gripe about it.” She spent several weeks trying to convince him that he had the right to have a son who’d inherit his bird-cursed family name. They went for a second test, and a third, and every time he came home more loving, but with the same result. She was barren and there was nothing they could do about it. She was even coming around to Saloum’s suggestion of adoption when she suddenly had a bout of acute stomach pain and went to see her Iraqi physician, who insisted on running a whole series of tests.

She called Buthayna at home and told her a different truth: “You could give birth ten times over. Have your husband come and see me.” Despite several long and contentious arguments, Saloum refused to go and submit to any of the doctor’s tests and Buthayna realized from his constant foot-dragging that he was the one who was infertile. She gathered up her things and decided she wanted a divorce.

“You know if he’d only told me the truth, hadn’t run away from it, I’d have stayed with him. But he lied to me. He lied to me and manipulated me, made me feel more grateful and guilty than I could stand. Everything after that was a lie. Anyway, he didn’t put up a fight, he just had one request: that I keep it all a secret because he’s afraid of the way people in Sarmada talk.” Buthayna then asked Farida to swear on Bulkhayr’s life that she wouldn’t tell a soul.

“So what are your plans then?”

“I’m going to go back home! He gave me enough to put my life back together and last a few years without needing anything from anybody. And he promised he’d send what he could.”

The sight of her smooth, ample body hit him like a full-scale military attack and his erection was killing him. Nothing, absolutely nothing else mattered. He didn’t miss a single chance to touch her. He used to surprise her when she was stood at the sink; he’d rub the back of his hand over her butt and disappear before she’d even turned around.

Three-quarters of his day was spent prisoner to an erection that just wouldn’t abate. He watched her, when she moved and when she was still, but his eyes wouldn’t meet hers. He tried his hardest to stop, but it seemed there was nothing he could do. It happened again and again: he barged in on her, pressed himself up against her; he didn’t miss a chance to get close to her flesh.

She found this distressing at first, but she never tried to tell Farida. She pushed him away with all her insistence and might, but there was some satiny contentment muffling her fears, something tickling about the dangerous game played by a divorcee in her thirties and an adolescent on the verge of sixteen. He rubbed at the bristly edges of her empty days, tempted sin, kindled her memory and lack, and somehow this put her at ease, kept her from confronting him. She blamed herself. She blamed her soul. She was even more anxious to see how renovation on the house was coming along and she paid the workers more to finish the job quickly. She was worried she might grow weak. She didn’t want to venture down that path with an unruly teenager as it would only further confuse her already traumatized spirit.

She snapped at him the next time he squeezed her ass as she was sweeping the floor. He'd squeezed her harder than usual and it made her nervous. This was something she hadn't seen coming. He'd let her get used to the light touches that left no trace, giving her a shiver and disappearing in the blink of an eye, but it was different this time.

“Bulkhayr, stop it! I need to talk to you.” He stopped and turned to look at her. “Next time you touch me, I'm going to cut off your hand. The only reason I put up with you is because I know you're going through a hard time right now. Do you understand me?”

He stood there, trembling, and as she stared into his eyes, she couldn't help but pity this being who was being tortured by his own body. His eyes welled up: “Forgive me, Auntie,” he said, heart-breakingly.

“You're forgiven,” she said and turned around, abandoning him to new bouts of devastating anxiety.

Those fantasies had been with him for many years and they would still come to him every once in a while. He was chronically frustrated, storm-battered by his body, which swept away all wisdom before it and knocked him down over and over again. He lost the brittle peace he'd got from Hebariyeh. Unabashed desire fled its confines and became his overriding concern, his focus, his constant preoccupation. He couldn't concentrate on anything and his thoughts were filled with all the women he knew, kin and non-kin. He made a hole in the bathroom door, forgetting his plea for forgiveness, and invaded her private nudity, panicked lest Farida should sneak up and catch him as he watched. But the longing he felt for the sight of her naked body fixed his eye to the hole as he watched her undress. He watched as she muttered a few prayers and the name of God, before pouring the water over her body and rubbing herself with laurel soap. She, too, was thirsty with want and loneliness and tormented by the pleas of a body that wouldn't let up.

When she spotted the peephole, her face flushed and she fought back an explosion of anger. She slapped her clothes on and bolted from the bathroom: “What do you say I tell Farida what a little bastard you are?”

“Whatever. I don't give a shit,” he answered with wounded pride. “I need you and it's killing me.”

She didn't know what to say to that. She could feel her last line of defenses beginning to crumble under the pressure of his caddish insistence. “You're nuts. I'm like your mother, kid,” she said, looking into his emerald eyes, knitting her arched eyebrows, squinting as her own dark eyes filled with disappointment and pique.

“But my mother didn't feed me molasses when I was little,” he said defiantly. “All my mother ever did was feed me shit and bring me into this whore of a world.” And then he stormed out and slammed the front door behind him.

He went into the wasteland for three days, spending the night in the basalt caves, walking among the rocks, imitating the howls and shrieks of the wolves and wild dogs. With the arrival of spring, the rugged wasteland had become some kind of miracle for the eyes. The sky was suddenly gloomy with spring clouds and in the west, a storm began raining down while the sun still shone on the eastern part of the rocky tract. He felt bliss pricking his face—a velvety drizzle washing his loneliness. He stripped off his clothes and stood there naked, spreading his arms to the rain, as the sunlight that fell across his body was washed with drops of purest water. Two jackals hid behind a rock in the distance and watched skeptically as this naked human and his two sizable penises were bathed by the sky.

Farida told Buthayna about the torture he'd put her through, how he used to greet her with a heart-wrenching silence. She told her how she was willing to give her life for him, but that she didn't know what to do. “He won't talk to anybody anymore. He doesn't relate to anyone. It breaks my heart. Every time he goes out into the wasteland, I count the days he’s gone by the minute. I can’t stop him, I can’t talk to him. When he comes home, he locks himself in his bedroom and he just reads and reads for days. Sometimes he’ll go two days without even eating.” She confessed to Buthayna that the Epistles of Wisdom had helped her and that she’d put her fate in God’s hands—she’d even swapped her old diaphanous, fine lace headscarf for a thicker one to signal her increased piety—and that the only thing that settled her soul was reading the Blessed Epistles, and she told her how she’d cauterized her desire with the searing iron ladle. The only good news was that business was booming and she’d been able to an add an extra room to the shed, which was where Buthayna slept.

When Bulkhayr returned home, he disappeared into his silence, leaving the women to whisper to each other the secrets of their hearts. There was a knock at the door: it was a warning about his school absences and that he was in danger of being expelled if his truancy continued. He tore up the warning, not minding the messenger who’d delivered it, and slamming the door in his face. He went into his room, picked up a dingy book and began cutting the leaves with a ruler. The book was a biography of “Rimbaud, the vagabond poet” told grippingly by Sidqi Ismaeel. To Bulkhayr, just the name Arthur Rimbaud gave him a thrill every time he read anything by or about him. He devoured the book in one evening and then he read it again the next day. There was some sort of life force coming from the poet’s death so to get it out of his head he picked up the novel Madeleine, or Beneath the Linden Trees by Alphonse Karr as adapted by Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, and for the first time in his life, something he read brought tears to his eyes. He was sobbing when Buthayna came into the room. She saw him reading, the tears staining his face, but he hadn’t noticed her come in. She hesitated at first, and then she stepped forward. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

He looked up and quickly wiped the tears from his face. “Nothing. It's nothing, I've just got something in my eye.” She ran her hand through his carob-colored hair. She wanted to embrace him, to squeeze him against her chest, to drown him in the abundance of her soul, the springs of her compassion. But she did nothing of the sort.

She merely ran her hands through his hair and whispered hoarsely, “I want you to know you're my everything.”

She didn't lock her bedroom door as she did every other night to forestall his rash offences, she just slipped into bed after she'd perfumed herself and dressed in a thin slip. Her heart beat a drum of anticipation. He opened the door slowly and she shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep, as the faint glow of the nightlight fell across her face. He moved toward her on tiptoe and slid under the blanket into bed, settling behind her without touching her. She could hear his shallow breathing. He reached his hand out and placed it on her shoulder, and then he moved it up to her hair, rubbing it, inhaling the long-awaited scent. She let him, she didn't want to startle him. He brought his hand to her lolling breast as she tried to breathe regularly, pretending to sleep, while his hands woke every dormant cell of her smooth and sculpted body. When he tweaked her nipple, she pushed his hand away with faux annoyance and turned to face him. “What do you think you're doing, kid?” she whispered.

“I've missed you.” His lips moved as if in prayer and his hands fell silent as if in preparation for another set of bodily devotions, as if gathering all their strength before invading seduction's lairs. She rolled over onto her back and he covered her lips with his own, and in their untamable kiss, saliva poured daintily from mouth to mouth, mixed, and their bodies lit up. Hands were loosened from dewy memories and set free to roam among the resplendent, gushing gardens of her body. His fingers began to climb her ivory thighs like a flock of hungry goats, jumping excitedly over her grassy plain, rubbing with the calm deliberation of a seasoned reaper, slipping past her labia down into the hot liquid valley, and then gliding over her excited clitoris.

She grabbed his hand. She was determined to stop him; he'd gone way past the limits of what she'd wanted, and quickly. She thought it would be a romantic night: that he would encounter some of her body and a lot of love's whisper. She could never have imagined how bold and rash he'd be. She was about to push him away and jump out of bed, when he whispered with all the longing in the world, “I'm begging you: let me put my hand there.”

All her defenses collapsed in a single moment under the hail of that reckless torrent of emotion, that passion. This was a moment that would never be repeated, she thought, as she held his hand back—a moment that would mark the rest of her days forever. The fire would consume her unless she put a stop to this foolishness.

Desire won out, that howling anticipation in her hand as she waited for his youthful fingers to feed her his flesh and his blood and his heat. Rather than push him away, she wrapped her hand around his and eased it back down into her moist sex. She gave him free reign over all her entire body without obstacle or reservation, and in a voice that resembled a pure spring, she whispered, “Don't burn me with your fire,” borrowing a line from an Egyptian film she'd seen in the Emirates.

His hand learned the meaning of moisture in bloom; it discovered the secret of woman's dew. Her hand reached out to grasp his animal erection and when it did, the shock of his two penises made her shiver. She stopped everything. “Wait a second, wait a second,” she whispered, sitting up. She wanted to see what she'd felt, so she threw off the covers and pulled down his pajamas and her heart almost froze when she saw them, sticking up, pulsing together. She took them in her hands and tried to stifle her giggling, and then she was overcome with an insane lust. She must've come a dozen times and almost fell to pieces from the constant trembling. He only noticed because she was moaning beneath him: he had one of his penises inside of her and the other rubbing against her, nearly reaching her navel. “Don’t come inside me. Don’t come ins...”

Her night had drifted toward the epitome of forbidden bliss. There was too much fragile stealth and the body opened wide to its farthest possible limits. She took him into the bathroom with her, defying any latent fear that they might be caught in the act. She bathed him: scrubbed him like a child and soaped up his two slender penises. Then she squeezed toothpaste onto them and massaged them with water and he could feel all his apprehensions diffusing mintily in the desire-sated air. It was like a rite of worship. She knew that the pleasure she’d experienced was unlike anything a woman could ever hope to attain and that it would be absurd to give up this immense gift no matter what the justification. She kneeled down and began to kiss them, nibbling at the two heads, taking one into her mouth and sucking it while her hand milked the other. She brought them to climax and he knew he was about to come and tugged at her hair, but she clung to him and he came. She swallowed. She licked at them and took them in her silky mouth, washing away his semen, like the placenta of an animal that had just given birth, until they died down between her lips. He looked down at her, his face marked by a few red pimples, and watched her ministrations, grinning like a lizard basking in the sun after a downpour. He was nodding in one continuous, harmonious movement and then her voice brought him back to dreadful reality.

“Did you enjoy that, you little pimp?”

On the other side of the door, eavesdropping Farida held back her tears and then skulked, broken, back to her bedroom.

She wept silently until her anger was exhausted, and she submitted to all that had happened without daring to confront them.

He was beaming. Buthayna had set him alight, given him something besides solitude, and they started doing it every chance they got. They were drunk on a bottomless love. They started avoiding Farida, whose face had begun to contort with the signs of devotion to God, faith, and the holy books. She was constantly going to the majlis to worship and tidy up, tending the carpets and the candles and the incense. It was like her second home. She was escaping from what she knew was going on in the shed, from an atmosphere heavy with desire, and old feelings that roared to life when she recalled them. After a month of madness and burning lust, Buthayna's house was ready.

They had more freedom now. Although they'd lost the pleasure of stolen moments, they were able to open their relationship up to manic lust. He went to see her every day and would occasionally stay for three days straight. Nothing kept him from visiting except for a sudden impulse to go out into the wasteland and howl, or the compulsion to read a new book, as well as learning how to drink arak. He occasionally put on his school uniform: fatigues with a tenth-grade insignia, and set off—not to school—but rather out into the wasteland to clear his head and hone his body on the unique basalt and its radiant energy.

After six months and with the beginning of eleventh grade, his passion began to fade. Buthayna could see he was constantly lost in thought, intermittently silent and distracted; he was more interested in drink and drunkenness than in her. He began repeating phrases, poems, and passages that she didn't understand at all; it seemed as if he was suddenly bored with everything. He was no longer the lusty teenager he'd been—the rocky stud. He was more tender and liable to be scratched by words. She didn't know what to do about him: the further he drifted, the more she craved him.

She finally realized her dilemma: she was used to the idea of a foolish, doomed romance. She'd been certain that he'd grow up and leave her. She'd been expecting some girl his age to snare him with her charms. She never dreamed that she'd lose him to a fusty old weirdo called Arthur Rimbaud, who seemed to spout never-ending nonsense!

Meanwhile, his mother was heading down an entirely different path: a shaykh, who was a great scholar of the secrets of the Epistles of Wisdom, had proposed a Seeing Marriage to her, which was a kind of marriage between a Druze man and a Druze woman who would be companions in every regard except that their relationship would remain entirely celibate. They would share the burdens of daily life and the secrets of the faith and immerse themselves in the spiritual together, renouncing the body, suppressing the self and its fire with their cool reason, in order to achieve knowledge of the true self and the universal intellect on an eternal journey toward the distant essence within each human being.

Farida knew she had to ask Bulkhayr what he thought, but he just snorted and said, “Do whatever you want. I don't care.'” He sank back into the gloom of his own private meditation. The words of the wild French teenager and his call to tear down the senses in order to create a new vision filled him with terror. The mysterious sentiments transmitted by a soul convulsed with a wisdom induced by dread made him feel as if he needed a new alphabet—a new trailblazing, exotic language that had roamed the expanses of instinct. He wanted to know who this person was whom he was accompanying; he wanted to understand Rimbaud's soul and body before they'd been tamed.

He felt Rimbaud's translated soul pushing through the sophistry of vague pronouncements, flashing in his moist, raw insides. He touched lights that would open up to him in his own mind's eye in the form of golden roosters crowing for promised dawns, which the sky sent down in floods of wine. He felt he had everything and that his mind was expanding widely, pushing him beyond his narrow confines and the ordered world of Sarmada. He saw that he would need a new language in order to realize his desires, so he started to learn French. The letters didn't curve and swoop like Arabic letters, they didn't have the same explosive force that comes from dotting. Arabic letters are arched and pliant. They can bend and twist in a way that other scripts can't. The letters in French were open; they had no sanctity, no great secrets, but still they unlocked new horizons and new lands that he couldn't even believe existed, and it made him smile whenever he said them. His mouth would gape, making it seem as if his scowling face had been wrenched open. Not to mention that this was the distant and seductive colonial voice, and yet he couldn't quite understand how it could be that French imperialism had left nothing behind except for a few words that had crept into their daily conversation, unlike in Lebanon or the Maghreb. As he repeated the French words into the voice recorder, he discovered that speaking French made people look as if they were always smiling or, as was more likely, that they were telling a joke, so that you could never tell when they were being serious.

It was something Arthur Rimbaud had said—or had he said it? It was hard to know anymore: “the body a treasure to waste.” Buthayna didn't get it; she thought it went too far. She knew that all she wanted was for the body of this tanned adolescent to help extinguish the thirst of her own unique body and its ardent rhythm. But he had another passion in his life and it was tugging him away.

The words he'd learned on Buthayna's body as a child still stung with desire and molasses after all those years, for he was the only student in the world who'd learned to read and write with his other senses. The words themselves began to enchant him, to steal him from Buthayna's embrace. She could never have imagined that her teenage lover would sink into her, perfumed with book dust, repeating strange words in her ear. Once when he broke out in a raving fantasy, she realized she hadn't anticipated any of this and that she was beginning to lose control. She was no longer the older guide whom the crazy young man had seduced and whose parched heart he had scorched. And yet she was comforted by the vague assurance that no woman on earth could have resisted going to the furthest limits of madness if they'd met this alluring rake. He was bursting with wicked ruinous lust and a devilish passion that couldn't be resisted.

These thoughts came to her as she lay there, completely naked, wading through a mire of unease as he melted bars of chocolate in a copper coffee pot over the leaping blue flame of her gas stove. He brought the coffee pot over to her and dipped his finger into the hot dark liquid. He began to drizzle the chocolate onto her lambent-white belly as her body seized in pleasure and pain. He traced the burning dark-chocolate letters of the French alphabet across her polished, twitching skin, and when he'd finished writing out the vowels, he leaned to lick them off. Old memories were brought to mind and new ones were forged as he licked the chocolate off her body and then he whispered to her, “Did you know that letters have sounds and scents?” She laughed at his inappropriately timed linguistic theories, which broke in and interrupted her pleasure. He stopped his licking and recited a poem by Rimbaud on vowels that he'd memorized in translation.

A: Black, E: White, I: Red, U: Green, O: Blue, the vowels.

One day, I'll explain your coming births:

A, black velvet coat of gleaming flies that buzz and dive round heartless smells, Gaping shadows; E, innocence of steam and tents, proud glacier spears, white kings, shudder of ombelles...

He recited, stretched out beside her, how the poet had tried to give the letters new meanings, images, spice-tastes, lights, and colors.

“I don't understand a word,” she said coquettishly. She moved closer to nibble at the base of his neck and lick his lips, but he pushed her away roughly.

“You know, all we ever do is sleep together and you're always making different noises, especially when you're coming like, ‘Ahhhhhhhh,’ or sometimes ‘Ee ee ee ee ee.’ Lots of times you just say, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Can you explain what they all mean?”

“Stop it! Shame on you. You're embarrassing me.”

“Seriously, tell me. What makes all those sounds different? Isn't it weird that you can make those noises when you're panting and you know exactly what they mean, but then when we write them down and read them off your body, all of a sudden you can't understand? I swear you'll never understand a damn thing!”

She held back her laughter when she saw he was being serious and that his questions had been meant to mock her limits of comprehension. She tried to stop him, but he knocked back the glass of arak. He stood up, still completely naked, and started spouting the words of someone a lot older than he was, gesturing and making faces, as if he were in front of some notional audience. “They're the first sounds: nature's unadulterated sonata. They're called ‘vowels’ because they're in all the vows us sick people make. They're there in the first cries of birth, they're there in our last screams of pleasure. They're what give us everything pure and clean. They're how we get terror, and fear, and lust, and pain—the will to endure. They're the vocal code to reproduction. If we can unlock their meanings, we'll be able to explore the secret of humanity, the depths of our first language, when everyone used to make the exact same sounds to talk about precise and unambiguous things, which didn't have names most of the time, but could be felt—sensed.

“Rimbaud tried to capture them, to categorize them, to give the alphabet back its glory. But the problem was that his language was holding him back. French was too narrow for his passion and that's why he had to break away from it. Yes, he broke away from his language. He tried to invent a new language in which the words had scents and characters. He gave them shapes and colors they'd never had before, but French didn't help him. That's the real secret behind his silence: his language couldn't contain his soul.

“After he'd destroyed his senses, his experiences could no longer be expressed in words. If he'd known Arabic at the time, he could've invented a new sacred alphabet and become a prophet in the East. Rimbaud wanted to be a son of the sun so he studied Eastern wisdom, the spring and the source. He went to search for another explosive energy, preserved in language, in the letters themselves. He had a hunch that it was here, in the East, in our language, in its magic and mystery and shades. That's why he abandoned poetry once he'd used it to get rid of all the toxins he'd inherited from his forefathers over millennia, and slipped off to go look for a different kind of meaning—something less dangerous than words. He exposed what mankind had tried to stamp out. He untangled it. He strangled it. He extracted all the deep longing for freedom, for an awesome trust between life and one's self, for contact with the great poetic being, the creator of the world.”

Her jaw dropped as she watched his clouded eyes darken while he let out a flood of words and thoughts. She was worried about him as he stood there, sweating, speaking not to her but as if to someone else. His thin, naked body moved about the room and he spoke hurriedly as if he were reading from tablets he couldn't see through eyes caked with too much sadness and earnestness. It was an unimaginable and illuminating moment and it was then that he began to be aware of the threads running through his life.

She was struck by his ideas. They threw everything she knew into doubt. They yanked her from the complacency of her intellect and femininity and she felt like slapping him, or hitting him, anything to stop this lunacy. But then, before she could even reply, he left; he left her there naked and decorated with French chocolate vowels. He gathered up his books and notebooks and walked out. She felt a sin-tinged remorse for those times she'd made him learn to write the letters with his tongue and taste them with his lips. She felt that she'd finally come to the last chapter of the transgression that still tormented her. She decided that she quickly had to regain her real life, to return to her senses, but there was still something vague that gnawed at her, that wore her out. She desperately wanted him to come back one last time, for the final hoorah that had been too long in coming.

He began to drift further and further away, even to run away from her. The roles in their old struggle were now reversed and now instead of her fleeing his constant harassment, it was him running from her, sinking deeper into a thrilling world of words brought to life in the pages of the devil's books—that was Rimbaud's nickname. Could words really have such power? She knew that magicians used talismans to get the genies to submit and to serve, and that repeating certain words could bring on disasters or stave them off, but she'd never entirely believed in those myths, even back when she'd gone to visit the soothsayer of Kanakir. She watched her little one, her sweetheart, the companion of her loneliness and the quencher of her thirst, the giver of meaning and bringer of light. She could see him departing her bodily heaven for a wordy hell. She was tormented by worry for her boy and she felt indescribably guilty. Despite the premonitions of danger and the distress that left her lovely face ashen, she decided with uncommon intelligence not to object, but rather to go along with this lunacy. It was nothing more than a youthful fit; one taste of molasses was all it would take to bring him back from his chocolate fit. She took comfort in her reasoning: he had to be allowed to taste another flavor before he could realize the value of what he had. But aside from the body and its logic, her heart was still in thrall to that sixteen-year-old boy whose eyes had turned black.

It just isn't fair that we're forced to wear out our trousers on the chairs at school. Yes, it was most likely Rimbaud who'd given him the idea that school was the exact opposite of what his heart required. He longed for the chance to flee far away, somewhere outside this thicket that annihilated every last desire. In the translated melodies of Rimbaud's poems, he found his devotion and his course. It would lead him through life, on his intoxicated quest for great answers. He copied out Rimbaud's French expression: “Yes, I've shut my eyes to your light, and you are all phony negroes.”

A peculiar energy filled his soul. School was a deathbed and home was a wide grave. The village on the mountain's edge was drowning in its eternal silence and amazement, colluding in its historical fate, turning into a chicken coop on the farm of the nation. He had no reason to stay.

Early one morning, he woke up, quietly and calmly, went into his mother's room and stole a thousand lire from her handbag. He packed a small bag with some pointless things, put on his shoes, and walked out of Sarmada in the direction of Damascus, where eventually he would fall into a hysterical madness that no one would ever hear about.

He never returned to Sarmada, except on the evening on the day Farida was buried. He came limping on an artificial leg, sallow-faced and weighed down by a crushing emptiness that no human being could hope to bear.

So it was up to me to bring an end to the shedding of Sarmada's memory and put all the pieces together. I, Rafi Azmi came to Sarmada a few days ago to discover a village that I hadn't known and stories I'd never heard before—or as I've been told, stories I hadn't listened to well enough the first time. It's up to me to conclude things, to stop writing the stories if only because otherwise they'll never end, and to make a quick round past everyone to make sure they've played their parts and left, or to discover that they're still waiting, ready to fill in any odd role.

Buthayna had a breakdown after Bulkhayr left. A few weeks later, she went to visit Farida and her new husband at the shed and asked if she could go into his room. She breathed in his scent and took some of his clothes. She cried that he'd gone away and she knew that she'd lost him forever. Before she left, she spotted the chest that she'd been given by the soothsayer of Kanakir. She pulled it out from under a pile of books and asked Farida if she could have it back. Without waiting to hear the answer, she left, taking the chest home with her.

At home, after a second bout of mourning and smelling his clothes, she broke the lock on the chest and took out the leaves of the book Al-Azif. She looked through it. She examined the drawings and symbols and letters and words. She felt as if the words were destroying her and she surged with anger. She took the sheets and used them to light a fire. The villagers tried desperately to put it out, but there was no use and the blaze and its fiery tongues burned all night, turning the house to ashes. There was no trace of her body. That fire was like a prophecy that would burn the place and usher it to its rebirth, although no one knew when. On that flaming night, the full Sarmadan moon glowed a fiery red, as if it were a keyhole or a magic eye through the heavenly gate.

The shaykh found he couldn't bear being married to Farida, not as if they were sister and brother at least, and so he ran away to the monastic isolation of the mountains to safeguard the oath he'd sworn to uphold. He wore himself out with hard labor and lashed his back with a whip that he'd made himself out of electrical cables, in the hope that pain and punishment would kill the desire he'd failed to suppress. Farida, for her part, locked herself up in the shed after the divorce.

She locked herself away just as her mother-in-law Umm Salman had done years before and her breasts began to grow larger and larger, transforming her suppressed desires into green breast milk. Then she suddenly had the realization that most of those special herbs that were prescribed to promote the production of breast milk and treat despair were nothing more than dried-up opium and poppy. She sliced her nipples open and out flowed blood mixed with the green milk, which she bottled and stored with her straw.

She devoted herself entirely to contemplation, silence, and prayer, and fell deep down into a well of forgetting until this very evening.

Salama found the bottles, brought them back to his house, and asked me what I thought he should do with them.

Today was the day I heard a voice announcing her death over the loudspeaker. The people of Sarmada ran over and improvised an abbreviated funeral but the shaykhs refused to pray over her body. I felt that I'd gotten Sarmada back and that I was finally finished with it, all in the same moment, and that it was time for me to leave.

I said goodbye to Salama without giving him an answer about the bottles of milk and was preparing to leave. I turned on my mobile and called my boss in Dubai to tell him that I'd be in Damascus by tomorrow and that I'd make up all the work I'd missed. I looked to see if there were any messages from Paris, but there weren't. I called Dr. Azza several times but her phone was turned off. I had the feeling that I never wanted to see her again, or even speak to her. I would just publish everything I'd recorded and send her a copy. There wasn't anything I could tell her.

Just as I was coming around to this surprising outcome, a stolid man with an artificial leg walked up. I swear to God he looked like Long John Silver from Treasure Island, the children's book. I nearly broke out in a smile as he got closer and it occurred to me that all he was missing was a parrot. As I studied him, I could see that he was an expert at ignoring questioning eyes. He was that rare breed of human being: dignified and mysterious, but spirited nonetheless.

He greeted Salama by name and then asked, “Where did you bury her?”

Salama pointed him in the direction of the grave, outside the village limits, and told the inscrutable stranger that he was planning to move the body to al-Manabi, Farida's hometown. The man left him and headed toward the shed.

Outside a crowd of villagers had gathered, in a quiet, curious circle, interrupted by repeated whispers: “It's Bulkhayr, Farida's son!”

He came out a little while later carrying an old, carefully knotted bundle and walked up to Salama. “Did you wrap her in a winding sheet?” he asked bitterly. Salama's head drooped sadly and he leaned down to pick up his shovel and walked off, without answering.

Bulkhayr unwrapped the bundle in front of the silent crowd and took out a wooden toy wrapped in old rags, a jar of kohl, a bottle of perfume, a toothbrush, a triangular amulet, perfumed soap and a neatly folded white veil. He unfolded the veil and held it up in front of the crowd. It was embroidered with colored buttons of different sizes, lined up all along its edges, and beneath each button, she'd sewn the name of its owner. Some were two-holed, others had four holes, sewn into the chaotic order of that bright white winding-sheet, which began to shine and glimmer in the fading sunlight. The voices began quietly at first, and then slowly grew louder and louder: “God rest her soul! God rest her soul! God rest her soul!”