She was standing in the kitchen when he came home.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, not yet concerned. Sometimes his wife hired a village girl to help the new maid with extra cleaning.
‘Well?’ he demanded, placing his briefcase on the table. ‘What’s your name?’
She merely looked at him with her frightened green eyes. They were huge in her pinched face. Her narrow shoulders slumped. She was so slight she might have been blown in through the doorway by a breeze. She had no hair to speak of, just a badly shaven mat, her scalp showing in some places.
‘Don’t you speak?’ the man said. He was growing impatient. The maid’s absence annoyed him. The vision of his return home had altered. He had wanted his Pepsi brought to him while he watched television, and he would put his feet on the ottoman and change the channels when he felt like it. He had installed a new satellite system that, as he liked to joke to his business friends, defeated all fronts in the war.
‘Has my wife taken you on?’
After a moment, the girl shook her head.
‘Where d’you come from?’
She looked bewildered. She had bruises on her arms and legs. Maybe she had been lost.
‘You don’t know where you come from?’ he rephrased.
She shook her head.
‘You don’t speak?’
She did not respond.
The man had an idea. This would teach his wife for not adequately instructing the new maid. ‘Do you cook and clean?’
She nodded uncertainly.
‘Are you available to work?’
She made no sign that she was not.
‘Then I’ll take you on. Bring me a Pepsi when I’ve settled in the television room. They’re in the refrigerator.’
He changed into loose trousers and a T-shirt and went to the television room. First, however, he stepped onto the veranda and examined his satellite dish, which towered over his opulent house and could be seen from any part of the village. It appeared flawless. It was perfectly round and shiny as when it had been installed two weeks before. Satisfied, he went inside. He settled on his easychair and placed his feet on the ottoman. He clicked the television on with the remote control and sighed. He had a good life. Despite these past difficult years of civil war, he had achieved a contentedness that few could boast. He had three handsome boys, a big house, cars, more money than he knew how to handle.
The girl came in with a Pepsi balanced on a tray.
‘Ah, you’re used to this,’ he remarked happily, not thinking that most girls are taught to use trays, while boys are taught nothing about delivering food and drink to guests. ‘My wife will be happy with you.’
The girl stood there. Her cheap trousers were torn and her short-sleeved blouse was grimy. She wore plastic sandals.
‘My wife will give you clothing when she returns,’ he said, feeling beneficent and enjoying his intrusion into household affairs, about which he knew nothing and which now seemed a mildly challenging game. ‘And you can sleep in the shed outside. There’s a pallet there. Let’s see, what else?’ he mused. ‘Ah, you may eat meals in the kitchen. What, I don’t know. And I’m sure you will have a day off now and then, but otherwise you should be here at all times.’
The girl remained where she was, hands behind her back and chin lowered. Her green eyes were fixed on the television screen.
‘What else do you need?’ he said, growing impatient. ‘Is it your pay? My wife will decide that. I can’t go that far!’ he laughed.
Still she stood there.
‘Go!’ he barked, and she fled.
‘What do you mean, you took her on?’ his wife hissed. She was a slender woman who wore Armani outfits and heavy gold bracelets. She had been more beautiful when they married.
‘I saw fit,’ he said.
‘You have no knowledge of these things!’
‘She’s our new maid!’ he insisted. ‘Don’t argue with me!’
‘We don’t need one. And where’s she from? What’s her name?’ his wife battered him with questions. ‘Why does she have those marks on her? Who shaved her head? Why won’t she speak?’
The man stamped his foot. She glared at him with her red lips clenched. He glared back.
‘She’ll probably never leave,’ the wife said cautiously. ‘Then she’ll get pregnant with one of the village boys. Do you want a scandal on your hands?’ she asked, gaining new momentum. ‘What will people say about the little bald girl in our house, pregnant, unmarried? How will we get rid of her then? You want to cast out a pregnant girl?’
He stamped his foot and her mouth closed abruptly.
After a moment she said: ‘But I’ll have to dismiss the other maid.’
He glared at her so fiercely that she did not speak again, but left his television room, her high heels clacking on the marble floors.
The girl washed his feet with warm soapy water, softening the skin so she could pick out the corns that made him ache so. She had been with them a week.
‘I like you, No-name,’ he said. ‘You do your work, you don’t complain, you listen. My heart is heavy today. My children are unhappy. They’re in school in Paris. Do you know where Paris is?’
The girl did not respond. Of course she did not know, the man thought, and this made him feel piteous.
‘They are behaving badly in their school and the school wants to expel them. Expel them, I said? I was on the telephone with the headmaster, you see. Expel them? Don’t you know there is a war on and they need to be away? How can you send them back into this danger?’
The girl patted one of his feet dry, then settled it on her lap and began picking at the corn with scissors. She frowned as she did this, as if concentrating very hard not to harm him, and he was moved. She looked better now, at least physically, and this was because of his thoughtfulness at taking her in.
‘Look at you. You see? Had I not sent my children away they could very well have ended up where you are, depending on luck and the generosity of strangers. Few people are generous. You were fortunate when you walked into this house.’ He smiled at her, but she was occupied with his corn and did not interrupt her work to show she had heard.
He fell silent for a while, his thoughts drifting during the not unpleasant sensation of having his feet handled by her small fingers. The new notion of his children having escaped the fate of the girl became more and more interesting to him. ‘It is remarkable,’ he said at last, ‘how people can go from one place to another in their lives. The proverbial rich man suddenly loses all his fortunes and becomes a beggar on the street. Or the common whore gets lucky with a lottery ticket and becomes the toast of the town. Life,’ he said philosophically, ‘is unpredictable.’
The girl put his foot into his slipper and placed it on the floor. She gathered the napkin with the corn clippings by closing it one corner at a time and then deftly rolling it into a tight little ball. She threw the towel over her shoulder, picked up the scissors and the tub of soapy water, and left.
The girl’s hair was slightly longer and the bald patches were gone, and they had discovered that its colour was a rich brown. Because her face was filling out and she now moved with more ease and grace, her appearance became important where it had gone unnoticed before.
‘Are you Muslim or Christian?’ the wife said. ‘Maybe you are Druze.’
‘She must be Christian,’ the man countered. ‘Look at those green eyes. No Muslim has such green eyes.’
‘If you’d ever gone south, you would see that the Shi’a children have eyes like emeralds,’ his wife said triumphantly.
She had only been to the south once, as part of a day trip to visit the United Nations posts, but the man was too tired to point this out. He worked hard all day.
‘It doesn’t matter what she is,’ he said. ‘She’s still a fine maid. Better than the Sri Lankans.’
‘If she’s Muslim we could have problems.’
‘How will anyone find out? She doesn’t even speak to us.’
The wife admitted that the likelihood of the girl talking was slim, and so she gave up this concern. But she kept a secret eye on her. The girl had been so starved and shivering when she arrived that they had imagined her age to be younger than it was. She was prettier now, even though her expression hardly ever changed. Her bosom moved beneath her shirt when she walked, and her cheeks were plump.
The man looked for the maid because his siesta had been interrupted by the heat and he wanted the cool grenadine she made so well. She was not in the kitchen corner on her stool, nor could she be anywhere else in the house since those areas were forbidden to her except on cleaning day.
He stepped outside the kitchen onto the vine-shaded patio where they dined in the evening. Her shed stood behind this enclosure. He heard a sound and went to the shed and opened the door.
The girl was curled on her pallet with her knees to her chin, sobbing quietly. The man, disconcerted, put his head in to make sure he had seen correctly.
Her eyes met his and she leaped to her feet like a grasshopper. She wiped her nose.
‘It’s all right,’ he said nicely. ‘You can sit down.’
She hesitated, her fear evident.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Sit down.’
She sat with her legs together and her hands on her knees. He settled beside her and smelled the olive oil soap on her skin.
‘Why were you crying? Is it to do with whatever happened to you?’
Mucus was running from her nose and she ever so slowly raised her hand to wipe it away, as if trying to conceal this movement. Her fear induced in him a wave of need to give, and so he handed her his striped handkerchief.
‘Go on, take it,’ he said.
She took the handkerchief but did not use it.
‘What happened to you that you came here and now you cry like this in your bed?’ he asked. He wanted to know. The question had been bothering him since she arrived, but it was not until now that it surfaced so demandingly. Enough was enough. ‘Answer.’
The girl stared straight ahead, and he saw that her shoulders trembled. He touched her shoulder and she made one jerking movement, much as a bird will dart inside one’s hands before stilling itself, for every feather is in contact with the surface of its cage and it knows it cannot fly away.
‘Why are you afraid of me?’ the man asked irritably. ‘I’m your helper. I’ve given you a house and food and easy work. You’ve got better under my care. Why won’t you speak?’
The girl looked at him blankly. Her hands clenched each other in her lap, and the sight of this oddly reminded the man of the complex wires inside his satellite dish.
‘Make me a grenadine,’ he said, getting up. He wanted her to appreciate that he had stopped his questioning, but she did not appear grateful, and this annoyed him.
She followed him from the shed, her feet padding soundlessly in the dirt.
The guests laughed and drank and the girl hurried back and forth between the kitchen and the patio, bringing and taking as was demanded of her.
‘She is a good maid,’ the wife remarked. ‘She never fusses, and of course is never on the telephone like those chatty Sri Lankans.’
‘It’s good to keep the economy inside the country,’ one of the guests said, a businessman wearing relaxed tan slacks and Polo shirt. ‘Those Indians send all their earnings home.’
‘Where did she come from?’ asked his wife, an Italian who had lived here for years. ‘Perhaps her family is looking for her.’
‘She won’t speak.’
‘Won’t speak!’ the Italian exclaimed. ‘How unusual. Perhaps she is mute.’
‘She has a tongue,’ the businessman remarked.
‘Well, now, how do you know that?’ his wife said.
‘I saw her lick her lips earlier.’
The two men laughed merrily and the Italian darted frowns at her husband. The evening was pleasantly warm and the scent of the grape vines above them permeated the air.
‘No-name!’ the man called. ‘Come here for a moment.’
The girl came to the patio, her hands behind her back. Her hair, which was growing quickly, was proving to be curly and thick. She wore a white blouse and patterned skirt that had been handed down from an Ethiopian who worked for one of the wife’s city friends.
‘Our guests want to know why you won’t speak!’ the man said grandiosely. ‘Perhaps now, at last, you will?’
He felt badly then, because the girl’s eyes widened with fear and she shifted her feet miserably. Even his wife, who disliked the girl, gave him a reproachful look.
‘You have no imagination,’ she said to him. ‘You,’ she waved at the girl, ‘go back inside.’
Afterwards they spoke of other things but periodically fell into uneasy silences, for the girl’s mysterious story, clearly not a palatable one, had intruded on the dinner and poisoned their enjoyment.
The man came to the shed again and sat on the pallet with his legs crossed. He was wearing bright new tennis shoes and kept stroking the design on the side. The girl was sitting up smoking a cigarette rolled with paper. She smoked quickly and with great, deep breaths, filling the small area with pungent clouds.
‘I keep thinking of your sadness,’ the man said. ‘I wanted to know what had happened to you, but since the other night when I challenged you before our guests I have changed my mind. There is something mystical about your silence.’
He gazed at the girl to communicate the depth of his change of heart. She smoked, obscuring her face behind the clouds. Her green eyes showed less fear, as if she felt protected behind this screen.
‘It makes me feel poetic. Here you are, so silent. I wonder what your voice sounds like? What your accent is? And yet I don’t need to hear it. I feel I know you without words. My wife uses too many words,’ he chuckled, giving her a conspiratorial look. ‘You know this, I’m sure. She uses words like the soldiers use bullets.’
The girl leaned over the side of the pallet, extending her long, slender arm to tamp out the cigarette in the dirt. The man kept his eyes on her movements until she was still again, her arms folded across her belly.
‘May I touch you?’ he asked politely, and he put his hand on her knee. It felt like a small, upside-down bowl. ‘You don’t need to speak,’ he admitted. ‘I like your silence. It surrounds me like fresh water.’ He paused, impressed by his own fancy. He rarely felt such eloquent emotions.
The girl had begun to tremble and her lips disappeared into her mouth, whitening the skin around them.
‘You must not be afraid,’ he soothed. ‘I’m a good man. You’re like a daughter to me.’
He removed his hand, and the girl’s face relaxed.
‘You see?’ he said, pleased.
But the man, later, could not take from his mind the feel of her knee inside his palm. He lay beside his wife at night, fretting. He pictured the girl in the dark shed, curled beneath the blanket. He pictured her arm reaching out and down to extinguish the cigarette. He pictured her in the kitchen, moisture on her forehead and above her lip as she worked at the stove. Finally he slept.
‘What is happening with the maid?’ his wife demanded petulantly. ‘Your eyes are on her all the time. You linger in the kitchen. You visit her shed. You drink too much Pepsi every day, and I think it is just so she can bring you another.’
‘You’re foolish,’ he said, more irritated than ever by the accusations that had been raining on him for days. His wife would never grasp the treasure of his self-restraint. It had become his greatest joy to keep his hand only on the girl’s knee and nowhere else, to prove to her that he could be trusted. One day she would speak to him. ‘She is a helpless child. If you had had your way, she could be dead now, wasted.’
‘And what a waste!’ the wife snapped.
The man threw his hands up in despair. ‘Haven’t you finished?’
‘Oh, you would like that!’
‘Fire her if you wish,’ he said impatiently. Perhaps the girl was not worth this daily sniping.
The wife was taken aback. She thought of the girl wandering off through the village and then onto the mountain roads. Soldiers lurked there. She could be shot, or worse.
‘Go on, fire her,’ he said. ‘I want peace in my house.’
The wife snorted. ‘You think I’m so callous?’
She returned to the kitchen and found the girl sitting on the stool in the corner, gazing out the window at the low, brown hills. Goat bells clanked dully from somewhere, and the air was dry and hot.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, though she knew it was futile.
The girl jumped off the stool, startled. She went to the stove and resumed stirring the beans.
The man placed his hand on her knee as had become customary. The girl no longer flinched, but kept a wary eye on him. He lit her cigarette and spoke.
‘My boys are still causing trouble and the headmaster was insulted when I offered him more money to keep them. It seems at least one of them will have to return. I have arranged to have him picked up from the port since the airport is closed. Imagine, the headmaster sending a boy back to a country where even the airport doesn’t function.’
He sighed. ‘My wife thinks I’m interested in you,’ he commented. ‘She’s frightened because you’re so beautiful and silent, and she’s aging and jabbers on against her will.’
The girl chewed the inside of her cheek, smoking.
‘Is she kind to you?’ he asked suddenly.
The girl nodded, and he was surprised.
‘Truly?’
The girl nodded again.
‘Please speak to me,’ he said. ‘I would like to know what happened to you, why you are here.’
She shifted her knee out from under his palm and drew her legs closer to her body so that her knees were beneath her chin. The material of her trousers tightened across her behind, which looked like the two rounds of a peach. After a moment, she lowered her legs and obliterated this vision.
‘I care for you,’ he said without thinking.
He was so upset by these words that he left abruptly, and the girl stared at the shed door swing until it stopped at half-open, leaving only a portion of the vine-covered fence visible.
The boy had grown taller and wore torn jeans and an untucked T-shirt. His hair was too long and his ear had a small, almost invisible hole in it.
‘How could you do this?’ the wife screamed, tugging at his ear. ‘What are you? You know what people will think?’
The boy shrugged. His face was pale and sour.
The man commanded: ‘Answer your mother.’
‘Are you a homosexual?’ the wife said shrilly. ‘Is this why?’
The boy glowered at her and tried to leave the room.
‘Stay!’ the man barked, but the boy writhed out of his grip and stormed away.
‘You see what Paris does!’ the wife turned on her husband. ‘He should have stayed here! Now he’s become homosexual!’
‘He’s not!’ the man thundered.
‘He might be,’ she hissed. ‘How do you know?’
‘If he’d stayed, he would’ve joined a militia and been killed. Is that what you want? You want your son to die rather than wear earrings?’
The wife sneered at him but did not answer.
‘Leave him alone. He’s a boy,’ the man said, as if this explained everything.
The boy stayed in his room playing loud American music and smoking cigarettes. He sat hunched on the floor and scowled when his parents tried to come in. He did not go outside, nor did he eat with them. He made tapes from records and wrote in the names of songs in tidy, minuscule block letters. He lined up the tapes on his shelf and played them one by one. Sometimes he used headphones, and the house fell silent. The girl brought him Pepsi unbidden, and he drank it.
At dusk the man’s hand settled on the girl’s knee.
‘You see how difficult my life is,’ he complained. ‘My son is a mutant and my wife despises me. Only my business is going well. And I thank God for these brief times with you, when I can unburden myself in your tender presence.’
The girl was eating a sandwich of honey wrapped in bread. Her sticky lips shone. She pushed her hair behind her ear and took another bite, then licked a finger.
‘You like it?’ he said, smiling.
She did not answer.
‘What do you think about? Your family? Your village? You must be a village girl. Perhaps you were displaced in the war?’
The girl paused in her eating. Her large green eyes shone moistly.
‘Tell me?’ His hand tightened on her knee.
She did not.
He sighed, wondering at her resilience. ‘I don’t know why I ask, when I am fond of this silence,’ he mused.
Dusk gave way to night and the cicadas began buzzing. The man sat with the back of his head leaning against the wall, eyes closed, her knee warm and moist beneath his palm. His fingers slid slowly a few inches up the soft fuzz of her thigh and stopped there. His stomach hurt with the strain of this delicate control. Her breaths became shorter, but when he opened his eyes he found her face taut with fear.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said brusquely. He got up to leave. ‘I’m not perfect, you know.’
She did not move. Her teeth bit at her thumb.
‘Don’t do that,’ he chastised, and left.
‘Now we have two children who refuse to speak,’ the wife muttered. She slammed pots and pans into the cupboard beneath the counter. The girl hovered about, unused to the wife’s activity in the kitchen. ‘Now I go from here to escape you, and I find him instead with his homosexual ear and torn clothes. I leave the house for a cocktail, thank God, and all I think about is him in his room, or you in your shed, and I don’t know what you want or think or feel and it makes me so angry!’ she shrieked, dashing a whiskey glass onto the floor.
Quiet fell. Rays of shards surrounded the opaque chunk that had formed the base of the glass.
‘Sweep this!’ the wife commanded.
The girl retrieved the soft, short-handled broom from the narrow cupboard and began sweeping, her bent form following the movement of her arm back and forth in waves. Her short, curly hair was pinned tightly back from her forehead. She had found a child’s plastic pink barrette in the shape of a flower for this purpose.
‘I’m sorry,’ the wife said. ‘I’m so tense, that’s all. My husband is behaving strangely and my son is a monster. I hardly ever get to the city anymore because of the blocked roads and I miss my social times.’
The girl swept the glass into the metal dustpan.
‘Uf, what a noise,’ the wife commented, smiling, and the girl nodded in agreement, then went outside to empty the dustpan into the garbage.
The man found the boy on the patio with his Walkman, the tinny sound of music like a nail screeching on metal.
‘Take that off,’ he shouted.
The boy complied with a swift, irritated movement.
‘What are you going to do with yourself now? You can’t enter a school here. The closest one does not teach in French and you barely know Arabic anymore. I won’t have you going into the city every day with all the danger.’
The boy shrugged and smiled with one corner of his mouth.
‘You think this is funny?’
The shed door creaked open and the girl emerged. She walked past them with hurried bare feet, not looking at them. The man saw his son’s eyes travel over her.
‘But the danger is not so bad that we should not try. I will call tomorrow.’ The man sat back, satisfied by his son’s disappointment.
At night the man went to the shed to speak with the girl but he heard a noise that gave him pause. He crept closer and pushed open the door to see his son moving on top of the girl, and then he heard her giggling softly. It shocked him to hear sound coming from her. Her slender arms were wrapped about the boy’s shoulders and her curly hair was dark on the pillow. The boy grunted and the man stepped back, his body trembling with shame.
He stood in the darkness of the patio, listening. Time passed. Then the door opened and his son emerged into the moonlight, tiptoed past the vines and crossed the patio. The man remained in the shadows until the boy had gone inside.
He opened the door to the shed. The girl was already asleep, her naked body sprawled on top of the sheets. He saw the sheen of sweat on her skin. Her hipbones jutted above the dark spread between her legs. One arm was bent behind her head, the other hung off the edge of the pallet, fingers pointed to the floor.
He sat down and she woke. Her four limbs scrambled to cover herself, but his weight pinned the sheet and what was left of it reached only her belly. Her breasts were small but full, with dark, wide nipples.
He touched one and she made a whimper.
‘You have disappointed me,’ he said. His restrained, poignant adoration voided itself of meaning with the force of grain suddenly breaking through a flimsy sack and pouring out in a heap. The notion that she might have spoken to his son upset him further.
‘Did you tell him?’ he asked, his hand still on her breast, which shrank beneath his hand as she hollowed her chest, trying to ease away.
She shook her head.
He was bitterly pleased with her anguish.
‘Tell me, now.’
She stared at him, uncertainty flitting across her features.
‘Tell me or I will do what he was doing,’ he said awkwardly, as if she would not know the name for it.
She lowered her head, obscuring her face.
He gripped her breast harder. ‘Speak.’
A shuddering went through her body and then, to his amazement, she spoke. ‘I was taken from my village when they attacked,’ she said.
Her voice, so small and weak, shocked him. It did not approach any of the voices he had imagined for her. She had a faint lisp.
‘Who attacked?’
She squirmed under his hand and he released her, for that had been his bargain. But his hand felt bare and cold now. She tugged uselessly at the sheet, which was still pinned beneath him.
‘Go on.’
‘The soldiers,’ she said in her little voice. ‘That’s all I remember. Then I was here. I think a lot of time went by before I was here,’ she added.
‘Did they do to you what my son did?’ he asked, for now this was the thing he wanted to know.
She did not answer. He heard her breathing, in and out.
‘You can’t remember?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked. The question gnashed about inside his stomach. The wraith of his past obsession with her story flitted away.
She tried again to pull the sheet but he weighted himself down on it stubbornly. Her arms crossed her chest and she started to pull up her knees, but the sheet threatened to slide off completely and she lowered them again.
‘I think you spoke to my son,’ he said.
The girl shook her head.
‘I took care of you,’ he said. ‘I was kind to you and told you my feelings and thoughts. I was patient with your silence, understanding. You repay me like this?’ he tugged at the sheet but she gripped it against her belly with her elbows. ‘You think you can play this game and get away with it?’
She shook her head fiercely.
‘And then you finally tell me your story and it’s so bare you might not have spoken at all,’ he said. ‘You were there, now you are here. What kind of thing is this to wait for as I did?’
The girl’s lips shivered. She bit them. Moonlight filled the shed as the door creaked wider in the breeze.
‘You will leave tomorrow,’ he decided, and the pronouncement restored him. Sometimes kindness was ignored: this was the way of things, and he had to accept it as he did other facets of existence. He could not understand how for so many weeks he had endowed this creature with almost mystical properties, only to see her engaged in the most basic of acts, and to hear this bland little tale.
He wanted to stay. He wanted to remove the sheet from her trembling body and insert himself into her, biting her cheeks and nose and lips. He breathed deeply and rose. He patted her leg.
‘You see how you were mistaken?’ he said. ‘You could have had a good life here.’
‘How can you drive her off like this?’ his wife shouted. ‘She has nowhere to go and doesn’t even know where she comes from. She’s our responsibility!’
The man was astounded by her defence of the girl. ‘I thought you despised her,’ he spluttered.
‘Perhaps, but I am not evil! She can’t even recall her own name. She does good work here, and I’m used to her. And she talks now.’
‘She has to go,’ the man said, feeling the order of his house crumble about him. ‘She is a whore.’
‘No thanks to you,’ his wife retorted.
‘I never touched her!’ he said at once, for this was paramount in his thoughts and he had been seeking the opportunity to admit it.
‘You think I care?’
She was adjusting her gold earrings before the mirror. He noticed that her hair had been done at a salon and her nails were manicured. She wore a tight skirt and silk blouse, and her calf muscles were taut as she stood on her high heels. Suspicion touched him with its fiery little fingers.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘To the city. I’m going to a party,’ she said bluntly, and left the room.
Evenings, the man sat alone on the patio and smoked a waterpipe, listening to the distant rat-tat of gunfire, although sometimes the war paused and he heard only the cicadas in the trees. The girl’s irritating laughter would float from the kitchen as she clattered dishes in the sink and regaled his wife with some village gossip. His son had left again, for America this time, a boarding school that accepted problem boys. The man’s business was doing well despite the political situation, his wife had stopped the brief affair he knew she had had but which remained unmentioned between them, and his satellite turned this way and that, picking up the rest of the world. Occasionally, he invited some men from the village to sit in his television room, for he enjoyed their rapture at the large screen and at the array of broadcasts in foreign languages. At these times, they drank arak, served by the girl on a wide silver tray, the jug’s mouth covered with an upside down glass and the rest of them in a circle around it. He still called her No-name, out of habit, though others had invented a name for her.
Her merry little voice in the kitchen irked him, so he was relieved when one day she married a boy from another village and disappeared from their lives. But he would go to her shed sometimes and lie on the pallet, remembering the story he had waited for and which had been so bland, and he wondered also how she must have felt beneath his son’s gangly, teenage body. He was glad, however, that he had held his desire in check, for it proved that he was fundamentally a good man, and that it was not his fault that his kindness had been so disregarded.