Mazin was sitting in his room, not giving much thought to the hot night that made him pour with sweat. He was following a soccer match being broadcast live on one of the television stations when his mother came in and turned it off, paying no attention to his cries of protest. She informed him in an exhausted voice that she was tired of lying. She said she wasn’t his mother but his sister, that she was only five years older than him and that his father, whom he did not remember, was the one who had asked her while breathing his last not to leave her brother in need of a mother. Mazin was sad because he had lost a kind mother, but he was also happy because he had gained an older sister. “Do you know that I always wondered how my mother could be so close to me in age,” he asked, “and when I didn’t find an answer I always said God was capable of anything?”
Mazin felt the blood boiling in his veins. His body was tense and yearning for a lot of water. He rushed to the bathroom, took off his clothes, and stood under the shower, from which poured a powerful stream of water. His sister followed him, to let him know that she was tired of lying, that she was not his sister but a stranger and an orphan who had been raised together with him. She then welcomed her surrender to the water.