The Heart Is Made of Clay and Water

Mansour’s heart might as well have been a clay jug filled with water, which Kaaffa broke simply with her indifferent gaze. The water drained out and it would never come back. The earthenware jug could never be filled again. When, deep in the night, she began waking up in terror, crying that she had had nightmares meant to warn her, they could only have one interpretation: she must not stay with Mansour, he was beside himself. He would rip his sleeve off rather than remove it from under her head, to keep her from waking, curled around herself on the very edge of the bed.

When she arrived at her father’s shelter, now a divorced woman at her own insistence, her father slaughtered livestock and held a feast to celebrate the return of his beloved daughter. Once again, facing his young wife, he could right the balance. He and his daughter, Kaaffa—long ago orphaned by her mother, and who had now left her husband to return to her father’s embrace—sat again on one tray of the balance. His wife—so much in love with her own youth—and her daughters sat on the other tray. His equilibrium had returned. He began to sleep well again.

Mansour’s earthenware heart was put back together, but the water of life was gone forever. More than a decade later, when he married the daughter of the Sur merchant, he was an affectionate and respectful husband. Sometimes he even spoiled her a bit. But there was no life to it, no freshness, not a whiff of the passion that had pushed him to tear his own sleeves and to rub Kaaffa’s feet with whole bushes of rose petals.

No one knew what happened to Kaaffa after her father died. Sometime before, he had stopped racing with her on camelback. His voice still sounded out hoarsely as they sang together on those moon-filled nights. Now his hands shook when he patted her on the head. She rubbed his hands with warmed olive oil and sang little lullabies to him. And then he aged to the point where he could no longer tell the past from the present. He started calling her by her mother’s name. When he was paralyzed, no longer able to move at all, his wife had to keep him in diapers. It was a terrible blow to his self-esteem, which he had always worked so hard to maintain in her presence. He couldn’t find any means of preserving his pride, now demolished by old age and infirmity, other than by divorcing her. So he abruptly pronounced the formula for divorce. Without any fuss, she left his room and moved to the other end of the house with her daughters. Now Kaaffa was responsible for managing his old age, and his dignity, for the remaining days of his life.

When he died, Kaaffa left the compound. No one knew where she went.