Lilit knew Suleiman wasn’t sure how to approach her. She saw him lower his eyes when she chanced to meet him in the downstairs corridor, shuffle out of her way when she carried the brazier to his bedroom at sunset. After that first night, when she shared his bed as a sister or a child, he sent her to the latticed quarters upstairs and did not call her back again. So far he hadn’t touched her. At first she thought he was disgusted by her Armenian blood – she was an infidel according to him, after all – or by her bedraggled state when he found her. Perhaps he only bought her as a cheap servant. Or maybe he was ashamed, his desire blocked before the reality of her great suffering. Yes, that was it. He felt pity for her because she wasn’t normal any longer.
Often she thought of the initial walk home. He had said he didn’t mind her stink when she asked him. At first, though, he had no compunction in calling her a slave. This had been the pattern of the past weeks since that day: he would say something compassionate then follow it with brutal logic that left her cold. As with that first beating, coming directly after his kindness with the jacket, the way he pulled her to him in the street. Welcome home. And yet – his avoidance of her, his awkwardness in her presence, the passionate beatings then contrition, told another story entirely. She didn’t know what to think any longer.
She knew she’d regained some of her youthful attractiveness now. She had become plumper on a diet of spiced breads and pastries, sometimes worried she was even getting fat. She stood in front of the only mirror in the house and pinched her waist, made fists of flesh from her inner thighs. The older servants soothed her concerns, saying Muslim men liked their women to be squishy and soft as loukoum. Rosepink and powdered with sugar. They commented on her black lashes and coral ears, her wide, spreading hips. The master would be well pleased with her. They didn’t comment on her eyes; she knew they were afraid of the colour, and she tried to cover her face with her veil when she remembered. Only Fatima sat aside and remained silent.
Her hair was no longer cropped to the skull, although it was still far too short for a woman. Thankfully she had a large array of veils. She was given clothes and jewellery, even a pair of antique earrings the servants told her had been especially chosen by the master. She put them on before the mirror, screwing in the thick studs. Gold earrings. She remembered Mamma’s. Minas had taken them. Where is he now? She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she knew to concentrate only on her new earrings. She moved her head, watched the filigree glitter. From each stud dangled a scimitar, sharp and dangerous, tiny blades brushing at her neck. Her own curved knife-edge of desire.
She thought about Suleiman as she carried the brazier through the corridor to his bedroom, with the ginger cat shadowing her like a thought. For some reason the task had fallen to her to perfume his chambers each night with ambergris, living coals of fragrance. It was difficult at times seeing another woman from the household or even a tenant from Suleiman’s fields lolling on the divan. She knew the women were peasants from the baggy floral pantaloons they wore. Catching a glimpse of brown shoulder, an arched foot. Suleiman in an unbuttoned nightshirt. His lax belly, the chosen woman waiting for him to disrobe. If it was Fatima in the bed she didn’t even lower her eyes but invited Lilit’s gaze, challenging.
She convinced herself Suleiman didn’t desire her, that she would never share his bed. The realisation made her feel more discarded and worthless than she cared to admit. She was left spinning, lost without an anchor. She sat in the courtyard with the cat in her lap on most days, filled in her idle hours with the light household tasks assigned to her, polishing copper trays used for serving sweets, pruning the female date palm that stood over the central fountain, dusting the precious mirror. She looked at herself long and hard as she wiped the rag back and forth, and a sad stranger stared back at her. She was no longer the Lilit she thought she was. Yet who exactly she had metamorphosed into was another cause for anxiety. She was still growing, or being stunted inside; still in that amorphous, ugly state of flux between knowing and unknowing, past and present, exile and refuge. This was worse than being forced to leave home, worse than losing everybody, worse than being violated in the desert. She couldn’t exactly tell herself why it was worse, but it was.
It wasn’t until tonight, when Suleiman smiled up at her and said thank you as she placed the brazier on the floor beside his bed, when he clasped her bangled wrist and held her there, half-crouching, halfstanding over him, that she realised what his problem had really been all these weeks. He’s falling in love with me. It was impossible, comic and ludicrous, yet there it was. She was surprised to feel that she welcomed it.
She hovered above him in this position, light from the lamps all around illuminating the heat spreading from her chest to her face. She forced herself to look into his eyes and saw how they rested on her mouth, now moving over her cheeks, her spiky hair under the gauze veil. Not once did they travel to her breasts or her bare, goose-fleshed arms. My God, he is in love with me. He’s not sure what to do next. She sat on the bed beside him and with her free arm drew the veil away from her head. They both watched it puddle at her feet. It seemed to take forever.
She lay down beside him, stretching out the full length of her body on the bed. In her head the shame and hurt and violence of the other man receded, paled into insignificance beside the tender breathing of Suleiman beside her, a musical breath whose rise and fall and expectation she could feel pass from his body to hers. She turned toward him and loosened the grip of his hand from her wrist, guiding his arms around her.
‘Yervan,’ she whispered in his ear, and knew he thought she was murmuring some endearment to him in Armenian.
If I do this now Yervan will be alive. I will make it so. Yet she knew even as she made the bargain that she was only lying to herself. This wasn’t a sacrifice by any stretch. She wanted to do it.
‘Suleiman,’ she said, louder.
She felt him hesitate for an instant when he realised she was not a virgin. But his desire beat hot and deep now and was not to be slowed, and he took her with some of the painful love and hatred she felt for him already, the kindness and cruelty they shared. She breathed into her belly and held him inside her and his rising shudders jolted awake her memory again. Turk. Another Turk inside me. Papa. Mamma dead. Oh, Minas. But it was only for a moment. Suleiman arched above her and spoke into her mouth in a caress.
‘What is it?’
She closed her eyes and drew him deeper into her.
‘Nothing,’ she said in Turkish.
Suleiman gave her the Bible to read as well as the Koran. He taught her more careful Turkish than she’d ever known, and even classical Arabic, showed her how to wind the spangled veil over her face and breasts and leave her hands free to work, to cook, to pleasure him. To read the two holy books aloud, in those long evenings spent in the sky-filled courtyard amid the scent of water.
Sometimes they smelled burning and heard reports of Armenian deaths. Suleiman showed her newspaper articles discussing Talaat and Enver Pasha’s latest statement in parliament. La question Arménienne n’existe plus. The final solution – hall ve fasl – had been successful. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Did it mean the Turks would stop deporting the few Armenians that survived and repatriate them? The Armenian question is no more. What did that concede exactly? Acknowledgement of guilt? Or had they already killed enough Armenians to consider the task finished?
‘Many are still being thrown into the Euphrates,’ the old women muttered to each other in the market.
She turned her face away and the women spoke louder, knowing from gossip where she was from and to whom she belonged. Suleiman was always there to frown at them for her, to grip her hand with a careful, comforting pain. She had asked him many times to help her find Minas. After all, the work camp was not so far away. Surely Suleiman had some influence. But he looked afraid when she pressed him, telling her the authorities would punish him for prying, that her brother was sure to be dead already. It was not a work camp, he said. It was a camp of death.
Lilit stopped asking. She soon learnt to ignore any rumours and cultivate a sublime indifference to the public sphere. She concentrated instead on Suleiman and the moods of her growing body. Could there be a baby? Testing her belly for tenderness, learning to pad silently on bare feet through empty corridors with tea on the brazier, to wash the morning hush with songs of light. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. With her new languages came new voids, clean surfaces one couldn’t penetrate, rooms of meaning opened to the sun, bleached of significance then closed again.
Minas rummaged in his tattered pants. A girl studied him with a smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth, the skin around it pitted with tiny sores from the dry heat of the day and the wind and cold of those desert nights.
He looked up, noticed her bug-eyed stare.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Any food in there?’
He scratched at his testicles again, pinched and then held out something in his thumb and forefinger for her to inspect.
‘Got it. Just catching lice.’
She smiled, disappointed.
‘Eat it. Better than dead dogs and locusts.’
He made a face.
‘I have my limits.’
‘How long will they keep us here?’
‘Forever.’
‘What do you mean?’
A guard banged his rifle butt on the ground beside them.
‘Enough talking, little rats!’
Minas spoke, hardly moving his lips.
‘This is the end.’
Later that day while he roamed the camp looking for food, the girl managed to slip beside him. He barely registered her presence, intent on scouring the fence line for new grass, which he held to his mouth and sucked until his lips and teeth were stained green. In the distance, he was aware of Bedouin tribesmen huddled around their camels, watching the camp with what he could discern as a mixture of fascination and fear. He turned to her and pointed.
‘See those men? I wonder if they could help us.’
The girl wouldn’t look.
‘Them? What do they care about us? They’re Muslims.’
She nodded toward the centre of the camp. He was surprised afresh at the sores around her lips, her lank chestnut plaits.
‘A few women killed themselves just before,’ she said. ‘People are fighting over the bodies.’
What for?
‘Fresh food.’
He flashed his teeth at her; made a fast, exaggerated, chewing motion.
‘Should we join them?’
She laughed: a soft, strangled sound.
‘I have my limits too. So far.’
They spent a while combing the ground for more vegetation.
‘I love you.’
He looked around, startled.
‘What?’
‘I love you and want you close to me before I die.’
She looked straight ahead, licked her cracked lips with a violet tongue.
‘Please.’
He took her little finger in his hand and nodded.
Fatima caught Lilit undressing for bed one evening by the light of an oil lamp. Lilit blushed and backed into a dark corner, hastily tying her robe together over her swell of stomach. Fatima followed her, until she was wedged into a corner of the room with the other woman pressing against her.
‘Stop looking at me with those big round eyes. I’m in his bed tonight. So don’t even bother putting on any of your stinking ointments.’
She nodded, her eyes grown wider in alarm. Fatima came closer until her breath was rancid against Lilit’s mouth.
‘Don’t think I’ll ever forget, even if he does. You’re still an Armenian to me.’
Fatima left the room then, flinging off her veil so it trailed behind her as she flounced through the door. When she was gone and Lilit could no longer hear her rustle down the corridor, she untied her robe, watched it fall open across her stomach and slither down to the floor. She let herself follow its trajectory, sliding down the wall and squatting on her thighs in the corner. She rocked back and forth, some small comfort. She sighed; a broken, wavering sound. Why does such a mundane exchange make me shake so much? She splayed her hands open over her nude stomach and tried to quiet her fears with the faint human warmth from her child.
The next day, Fatima appeared distant from Suleiman at the morning meal. She and Lilit customarily stood behind him, one on either side, and waited until he finished before they could take a bite. Usually Fatima snatched morsels from Suleiman’s plate as she leaned over his shoulder, making them both laugh. Yet today when she sat cross-legged opposite Lilit on the rug, she ate little of her bread and even less yoghurt, her eyes downcast. Lilit also noticed her hands trembling, but Fatima walked about the house all day with a strained smirk on her face.
Suleiman took Lilit into his bed the next night and the night after that. He praised her pearl-skinned buttocks and the roundness of her wrists and ankles, circled by henna. She floated about the house in a jangle of gifts: silver jewellery, linen scarves fringed with turquoise beads, shiny packages of cherry-scented mastic. Fatima’s smirk began to smudge into a frown. At the end of the week she was so downcast Lilit forced herself to speak. She approached Fatima in the courtyard, where she stood by the main fountain looking into a swirling pool of water.
‘Fatima.’
She looked around, saw Lilit and frowned.
‘What do you want, slave? Go away.’
‘I wanted to ask you why—why it has to be so difficult between us. If only—’
‘If only you weren’t here!’
Fatima sat on the rim of the fountain and burst into tears. She put her head in her hands and convulsed, shoulders shaking with the force of her crying. Lilit knelt down next to her. This woman had finally become human. Not lovable, but human. She wanted to place a hand on Fatima’s shoulder, stroke her, comfort her. But she too couldn’t forgive the pain of the past few months.
‘Fatima, it’s not my choice to be here.’
When Fatima lifted her head from her hands Lilit recoiled at the spectacle of her face. She was a fearsome sight, tears and mucus and kohl combined to tragic effect.
‘I can’t have a baby. I’ll never have one. My first husband, Suleiman’s brother – he threatened to divorce me, before he died. Now you’re here, Suleiman will stop keeping me as well.’
Lilit looked around the silent courtyard, fearful of Suleiman hearing her. She heard herself hiss at Fatima under her breath and hated herself for lying even as she said it.
‘Does he love you anyway? I don’t see it. Does he love me? Of course not. I don’t think he loves anyone at all.’
Fatima gulped, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her veil. Lilit made herself come closer and put a light hand on Fatima’s knee.
‘See how he treats you already! Like a common concubine, not a wife. We should both be united against him, Fatima. It’s our only hope.’
Fatima leaned over, fixing Lilit with her stone-idol eyes.
‘Give the baby to me, Lilit. Then I’ll help you escape. You can go back to Armenia.’
Lilit lowered her eyes and nodded. She was no longer sure where she belonged.
Minas grew to know the camp and even respect its workings: the vomit-coloured sand, its erratic pulse of killing and torture and the few blessed hours at night of respite from terror. What gnawed at him was more than fatigue and the familiar grip of hunger; it was the constant mental strain of keeping alive.
Each morning at dawn the camp commander blared his refrain from a loudspeaker: ‘Armenians! The lice crawling on you are less vermin than you are.’ The prisoners picked at their sores, peeled the scabs off their wounds, exposing still more moisture for lice to feed on. Nearly all the inmates were naked, their clothes stolen by the guards or disintegrated into rags from the forced march through the desert. Minas had lost his trousers to another inmate weeks ago, trading them for an extra mouthful of gruel. Food was more important than warmth; that he knew. Yet he held on to his threadbare shirt, which still managed to hide the earrings glinting in his nipples.
With bared yellow teeth, the trained dogs were three-headed monsters guarding the gates of Hell. They watched the prisoners as if eyeing butcher’s cuts of meat. Minas supposed he looked like that now: red raw, shapeless, moving slowly if at all. He couldn’t see himself. He stared at the other prisoners and tried to imagine his own face in that man’s hollow cheeks, this woman’s sunken eye sockets. The formless fear he read in each person’s eyes, the downward scrape of mouth. A few of his teeth had been knocked out by a drunken guard, and he had taken to sucking at the inside of his cheeks like an old man. Some days he rubbed his hand over his jawline and the manly rasp of stubble always surprised him. He’d lost all perspective. He saw a boy his age attacked by the pack of dogs, and guards standing by and laughing. That night he thought about the boy with the curly hair he’d sworn at in the marketplace, so long ago it seemed. Maybe he was already dead.
Some of the inmates were more frightening to him than the dead. They seemed to have withdrawn from the present altogether, men and women drifting from sleeping block to morning assembly and back again in a trance. Sometimes he was tempted to steal their food rations; they seemed so passive – he was sure it would work. Yet he put it off, alternately fascinated and repelled. They didn’t speak, didn’t answer when spoken to. They didn’t make eye contact with anyone, indeed seemed not to breathe at all. The guards found it easier to kill them this way, no doubt. He wasn’t so upset at those times; it didn’t seem to matter if they were alive or dead. He almost welcomed the moment of disbelief, the swift dispatch. As if a favour had been done for them.
He’d been assigned a job these last few days. He was healthier than most of the other prisoners, one of the few young boys in the camp, and almost agile except for the blisters on his feet from the march. He had to help bury the dead bodies after they had been shot or knifed to death. Also those tortured in the interrogation centre – the only permanent building in the whole compound – with its barred high windows and twenty-four-hour lamps, burning, burning, a thread of fire glimpsed under the locked door. There wasn’t so much to learn from such broken and diseased prisoners, he assumed. But he knew the Turks continued interrogating each arriving convoy for clues to hidden cash, heirlooms, the undying myth of Armenian gold. Some of the corpses he carried were twisted in death-agony, others serene and pink, placid mouths smiling at the sky. Yet they were all heavy, even the children. Heavy with the weight of mortality.
He felt a mixture of shame and disgust for the corpses. Confusing, his divided sentiments. He dragged the bodies from killing floor to mass grave, wrists threatening to snap each time and nails bleeding. The guards whipped him on the back and sometimes around the face and never ceased to abuse him. He grew to admire them for it – they articulated for him the punishment he couldn’t inflict on himself: daily atonement for his guilt at still being alive.
Many of the older Turks were well disposed toward him, taking him aside to offer a bite from a hard-boiled egg, a cup of raki to fortify him. They asked him if he was tired, made him sit cross-legged at their feet. Some even commented on how beautiful a boy he was, so fair-skinned for an Armenian. They admired his glossy hair, the fineness of his eyebrows. He tried to smile through closed lips, ashamed of his toothlessness even among all this madness. One guard wiped the sweat from Minas’s temples with a clean handkerchief then sniffed at it, and he finally knew. He began to realise they expected sex in return for such small kindnesses, and he learnt to avoid them. Yet he knew, even as he did so, that it was only a matter of time before he would do the unthinkable.
He buried dark-haired infants who looked somehow like his sister, surreptitiously stroking the ringlets on their damp, flushed cheeks. He covered over warm-bellied women who reminded him of his mother, obscured their eyes, suffocated them in sand. He carried teenage girls in his arms, tried not to look at their gaping vaginas and limp, bloodsoaked plaits. He saw a younger boy killed for being too slow, with the spade he had held only a moment ago for digging graves. He saw the curly-haired boy again, but only on days when there was a particularly big burial. Mostly, from what he could see, the boy was adept at gaining favour from the guards, flirting with them and avoiding heavy work.
In the late evenings, after sunset, he returned to the inner camp and lay side by side with the pimpled girl. She always managed to seek him out. He was cruel at first, unfeeling and cold and reeking of shit and sweat and other, more sinister fluids he couldn’t wipe off with sand or fingertips of water from the bucket in the corner. The girl revived him, made him forget where he was for a few seconds, even a minute or two, in those rare times he mustered the energy to enter her. He knew he was being selfish, using her body for his own brief respite. But she surrendered to him, and in the dark he felt her thighs and belly go soft and her breath exhale out, out, out, until she was still and quiet and finally at peace beneath him.
At night he felt the memory of hope weigh down on him like a great white stone in his belly. It would force him to act. The voice in his head increased in volume, singing, startlingly erotic in its lightness, uncaring of his discomfort, spurring him on. He breathed into the girl’s ear.
‘I’ve decided to try and escape. Soon. Maybe even this week.’
Two bodies in the dark, hers against his, his pressed against some sleeping stranger, never sure if the person next to him was alive or dead by morning except for the mushroom coolness that gradually infected his own skin. The girl was alive, though, warm and pulsating against his cheek and thigh in the darkness, her hair sweat-damp against his neck.
‘How? Where to?’
‘Don’t know yet. But you must come with me.’
The desert temperature dropped at nightfall like the sudden closing of a door. Competing winds rose and flapped the sides of the tent in and out, like a giant animal breathing death. He could hear hyenas circling the camp, eager for the carrion it promised. The girl sniffed, as if the stink had only now penetrated her consciousness.
‘I can’t. They’d catch me and kill me. But first they would force me to betray you.’
‘You’ll die anyway.’
She leaned over and he felt the tiny pimples in contact with his mouth. His first instinct was always to recoil, but he opened his lips and allowed her to kiss him, her fingers on his back thousands of crawling lice, her breasts hot and slippery against his chest, her determination silent and painful to the touch.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Just let me die here.’
She slid on top of him, the weight of her body light, far lighter than the corpses he carried each day. He pulled her hair away from him so that her back arched and her face widened in the half-dark, hair slapping through his hand, mouth open in a soundless scream. Her bittersweet fullness of face, mouth agape in revelation – the presentiment of death firing her eyes.
Lilit readied herself over the coming weeks to escape. Fatima helped her stockpile dried figs and walnuts and find a waterskin, even made her a new set of clothes. A pair of loose trousers and a diaphanous shift, fitting attire for a slave readying to flee.
She thought of her nightly readings with Suleiman: Hagar and her wild-haired son, cast out into the desert. Moses and his tiny barque of reeds. She had no idea where she would go once she was out the front door of Suleiman’s courtyard. Fatima had given her a knife and a tattered map of the region she could hardly read. She also had a muslin pouch of coins Fatima had filched from the household allowance she was given each week.
She had vague plans of following the course of the Euphrates through northern Syria and back into Armenia. Of looking for Papa. She knew Minas was most probably dead by now, judging from the talk at the marketplace. Maybe she should go to Constantinople, lose herself in a big city. Become Turkish. Become anything at all. This last thought gave her a twinge of excitement and a downward lurch of remorse.
Days and nights passed. It was always the same: the daily morning trip to the market, which she and Fatima took turns at making with the servant girls. The baking of sweets, which they also took turns at doing week by week. Suleiman hired a cook for the meals and the baking of bread each day, but a proficiency in pastry-making was one of the hallmarks of a good Muslim woman. So she taught herself how to roll filo pastry and finely crush pistachios and dates, how to heat dark Marmaris honey until it poured liquid and gold. Almond puddings with saffron. And Suleiman’s favourite, kaymak of Afyon Karahisar, rich buffalo cream, boiled until solid enough to slice. Suleiman sampled each pastry equally from these trays, day by day, making sure he didn’t eat of the same woman twice in a row.
Much in the same way, Suleiman took turns at sleeping with them. She’d never have believed when she first arrived that she would crave his touch. And yet, there it was. Sometimes, late at night with the lamps dimmed by the servants, she could even close her eyes and imagine he was Yervan. Something in the mildness of his caresses alerted her to the similarity. Yet as the weeks and months progressed she no longer needed to imagine Yervan there beside her. Suleiman was enough. He had a way of inclining his head to the side when she straddled him, as if the pleasure was too much to bear head on. His body was opposite to Yervan’s, dark and slight, hair matted high at his throat.
She never believed she would be jealous of the nights he spent with Fatima, either. The servant girls and peasant women he cajoled with gifts, the occasional whore from the markets – she didn’t bother herself with those. She knew these dalliances were expected of him, even by the reluctant women themselves. But when she knew Fatima was sharing his bed she lay awake for hours in the women’s quarters and burned with frustration and desire. She undressed and picked at her faults, finding more ways to make herself beautiful for him. She cursed Suleiman on those nights, telling herself it would be best if she left soon, so this torture would end, once and for all.
There were some weeks Suleiman turned away from them all and slept alone on the flat roof of the house. He couldn’t breathe sometimes, he would explain to her. He needed the night wind and the stars. She’d read enough of the Koran by now to know he wasn’t being a good Muslim. His duty was to satisfy all his wives. And he only had two, not like the other men of the town who had four women to care for, as well as an ever-changing array of concubines. Then again, neither Fatima nor she was really his wife. She was bought and paid for, a mere slave, and Fatima was something else. A penance, perhaps, a hastily promised favour for a dying brother?
Yet she couldn’t shy away from the truth. It was Fatima who had a traditional wedding to Suleiman as soon as her husband died; she stood in the centre of the courtyard, swathed in sequinned veils, while the imam asked the customary questions of the assembled crowd. Suleiman stood aside and bowed at the end of each response, his heirloom dagger sheathed at the waist. Fatima had been carried to the bridal chamber on the shoulders of virgin youths, beneath the divan a broody hen for fertility. Suleiman was accosted as he made his way to her, scattering coins at the feet of well-wishers to bribe his way in. Fatima was the official wife. Lilit had no status.
When it was Lilit’s turn to go to the market Suleiman always went with her, the servant girls lagging behind with their bundles. Maybe he was afraid she might run away. Find other Armenian slave-girls to conspire with. Or talk to people, learn more about what was happening outside the fortifications of the old city. No fear of that. She didn’t want to excite his suspicions. Not now. She’d linger sometimes over certain stalls, fingering triangles of fabric or perfumed feathers from Africa, bottles of camphor and seed pearls piled in careless heaps. She would buy powdered orchid root for churning ice-cream, coastal sage for tea, the aromatic seeds of black cherry. Then she would invariably feel a tug on the ring slipped over her index finger. The ring attached to Suleiman’s hand on a long thin chain. In this way he kept her close to him.
Even with his suspicions, his shadowing, the brass ring on her finger, in bed Suleiman seemed not to suspect that she would soon leave him. Now she did only what was expected of her, not allowing herself to enjoy his precise attentions as she had in the past. She almost didn’t want to go at all. Life here was soothing, a faint lulling into apathy. Suleiman was slow and gentle in his night caresses, like drinking cool water. He sucked her through his mouth and nostrils, revelling in the smoothness and youthfulness of her body. She kept trying not to enjoy it too much, stopped herself from falling into his touch.
Some nights she wanted to tell him of the plan, confess everything. There were three more months to go before the baby was due. Maybe if she told Suleiman and blamed Fatima for the plot, he would banish her from his house altogether, leaving Lilit and him in peace? She knew she couldn’t tell. So she merely sighed, and opened her mouth and legs to Suleiman, stiff and wooden, paralysed by the fear of giving up her baby.