But her corpse wasn’t the first dead body I saw.
The ghagariyya. The gypsy woman—that’s what we called her. Hers was the first dead body I saw. Sometimes the memory of it comes to me, like a whiff of rotting flowers.
The travelers’ tents sat on the outskirts of the village. The gypsy woman arrived in our garden wearing a big silver nose ring from which dangled little crescent moons and stars. Her hand outstretched, she intoned, over and over, “Sahha bibiyya sahha bibiyya.” Some dates for me, lady. . . I was very little when I heard her say that. I was rocking back and forth, standing on my grandmother’s feet while she swung me back and forth. My mother muttered, “Filthy ghagariyya.”
“Filthy—?” I repeated. My grandmother’s elbow gave me a sharp poke and I didn’t say anything more. A fading smell of old flowers, the distant memory, my grandmother’s legs and feet that formed my little swing. My mother, after she took back the plate from which the woman had eaten the dates, scrubbing it seven times, the final time with dirt. Yes—my mother had counted, and I swung once for every number. Seven swings, and my grandmother’s arms were tired, and my mother inside stopped scouring the plate.
The skin on the traveler woman’s hand had been cracked, and there was a green tattoo on her chin. I was very little, and I don’t remember whether it was my mother or grandmother who slapped me afterward when I said I wanted a necklace of colored beads like the one the gypsy woman wore.
Leaving our property, the woman plunged her bare feet into the pebbles. My sister, Sumayya, motioned at me, and the two of us followed her. We could stay far enough behind the woman, whichever alley she turned into, so that she would not see us. We avoided planting our feet where she had put hers down, because Sumayya said that filthy meant we couldn’t touch anything she had touched, not even the dirt itself. We waited for her, lurking behind the doors of the houses she entered. She always came out either holding dates or with her clothes somehow looking dirtier than they had when she went in. She was a very long time in the house of Hamid the widower. So long that we almost forgot all about her, as we went about chasing other children up and down the lane. Finally, she emerged, pulling her headscarf tighter around her face, as she gazed down at a shiny coin in her hand. The ringing sound that the stars and crescent moons made as they collided against one another attracted me, and her beads looked as though they were lit from within by tiny lights. But I was afraid to tell Sumayya that I wanted a string of beads just like that. Sumayya might hit me, too. The boys called out to us. Sumayya dived into the band of boys who were from our immediate neighborhood. She pushed up her sleeves and ordered me to go home. That’s because Ulyan and Fattoum were on the other side and they would beat me. Sumayya said she wouldn’t be able to fend them off, because she already had to face up against some types who were more menacing than Ulyan and Fattoum. So I went home.
It was days later—or maybe it was hours later, I don’t remember, since when one is a child, time does not really exist. It was nearly sunset, I do remember that very clearly. And it wasn’t like the vanishing smell of dead flowers. . . it was a clear, pure sunset of beautiful tones, like colored beads. It was a sunset in which the men were gathered for prayer at the mosque, while the women, at home, were bent over their preparations for dinner. And the children discovered the dead body.
The clear, beautiful sunset and the dead body. My memory of that day. The gypsy woman with the green tattoo and the big silver nose ring, lying there, eyes fixed and blood pouring from her chest. The children squatted down, stirring the blood into the dirt, making little balls and wads, but I didn’t move. I saw the colored beads from her necklace had rolled loose, the string broken. The beads sat near the woman’s neck and I didn’t dare to go over and pick them up. I don’t know how long it was before any grown-ups came along that little back way or when they chased away the children. Did they give them a severe scolding for making balls out of dirt and blood? Did they get angry because the children had been so engrossed in their games that they didn’t bother to tell the adults right away? I don’t know, I don’t remember. Now, memory becomes a vanishing fragrance, this memory is gone, and this is where the pure, calm sunset fades into nothing.