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examined her and wrote a prescription for me and I bought it. By the time Ruqayya got well, out of the four liras Ionly had ten piasters left.” My aunt marveled, “Ten piasters? Didn’t you say that you had four liras in gold?” My mother counted the expenditures on her fingers: “Didn’t we cross the Jordan River, and pay for it? Didn’t we take the taxis? And food and drink while we were in the mosque, and the doctor, may God not forgive him. And I bought two wool sweaters, one for me and the other for Ruqayya, when we were in Irbid, because the cold cut to the bone.” She returned to counting on her fingers. “And I bought the medicine. The sheikh of the mosque, God protect him and bless his children, brought me bread and something to eat with it and sage from his house, and a woolen blanket for us to wrap up in.” My aunt returned to the question of the ten piasters: “So how did you get to Sidon?” My mother waved her hand and sighed, saying, “There are many good people.” She did not tell her sister, from whom she hid nothing, that she had stood at the door of the mosque and told her story to anyone she thought might help her, among those who passed.
    We arrived in Sidon at the beginning of February of the following year. When we met my aunt and uncle I was wearing the three dresses, one on top of the other, and on top of them the wool sweater that my mother had bought for me in Irbid. The first words I spoke since we had left home were what I said in a whisper to my uncle: “My father and my two brothers were killed. I saw them with my own eyes on the pile. They were with a hundred or maybe two hundred people who were killed, but they were on the edge of the pile, I saw them. My mother will tell you that Sadiq and Hasan went to Egypt and that my father is a prisoner. I saw them covered with blood, on the pile.”

8
    A Boy and a Girl
    When Ezz said to me, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you,” I thought the way he said it was strange. I nearly made fun of him, I nearly said, “Do you want permission to talk to me, or an appointment?” But I didn’t. I waited for him to speak, and he said, “I’ll take you to the sea.”
    I walked beside him. When he left the village with his father and mother eight months earlier I was taller than he was, but he had become taller than I was. I remarked on it, and he laughed and said, “I have springs in my knees. Every couple of days I hear them creak, and then I find myself a few inches taller.” The smell of the sea was clear in the city. Even though it was mixed with other smells, in the old city it became more dominant as we got closer to the shore, until the only smell was the sea. We took off our sandals and plunged into the sand. Then we sat down next to each other, cross-legged, and Ezz said, “The sea in Sidon is like the sea at home.” I looked up and said, “The sea in the village is better. Here there aren’t any islands or sugar springs or grottoes. The smell there is different, and the sounds too.” He remained silent and I did also, feeling the sea air spread over my hair and face and clothes, staringat the movement of the waves rising and breaking and rising again. I followed the flight of the sea foam. Strange how two images can come together and be superimposed, one over the other! You’re in Sidon, girl, and the other sea is there, bound by the dark, rocky islands, the scent of the lilies and the houses that seem like shells or moss, which sprang from the sea originally and then stayed close to it when the waves washed them ashore. I see them as two seas, as if one eye saw one and the other looked at a different sea.
    Ezz said, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you.”
    “What’s the matter, Ezz? Just say it, what’s holding you back?”
    “I want to ask you … are you sure that you saw my uncle Abu Sadiq and Sadiq and Hasan with the corpses on the pile?”
    “I saw them.”
    “Why does my aunt say … .”
    I interrupted him, “I