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By Root 6282 0

a door, they had bent over and entered a small room. And here he had set the light down on the floor, turned without speaking a word, and gone out again, locking the door behind him. She had heard six retreating footsteps and the striking of a match, and that was all. For a long time she had stood hunched over (for the ceiling was too low for her to stand upright), listening to the silence that swarmed around her, profoundly troubled without knowing why, vaguely terrified, but for no reason she could identify. It was more as though she had been listening to herself, waiting for something to happen in a place she had somehow forgotten, yet dimly felt was still there with her. But nothing happened; she could not even hear her heart beat. There was only the familiar, faint hissing sound in her ears. When her neck grew tired of its uncomfortable position she sat down on the mattress at her feet and pulled small tufts of wool out of the blanket. The mud walls, smoothed by the palm of the mason’s hand, had a softness that attracted her eye. She sat gazing at them until the fire of the lamp weakened, began to flutter. When the little flame had given its final gasp, she pulled up the blanket and lay down, feeling that something was wrong. Soon, in the darkness, far and near, the cocks began to crow, and the sound made her shiver.

Chapter 27

The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she felt, would allow her to catch up with time. But there was always the immaculate, vast clarity out there when she looked, unchanging and pitiless above the city.

By her mattress was a tiny square window with iron grillwork across the opening; a nearby wall of dried brown mud cut off all but a narrow glimpse of a fairly distant section of the city. The chaos of cubical buildings with their flat roofs seemed to go on to infinity, and with the dust and heat-haze it was hard to tell just where the sky began. In spite of the glare the landscape was gray—blinding in its brilliancy, but gray in color. In the early morning for a short while the steel-yellow sun glittered distantly in the sky, fixing her like a serpent’s eye as she sat propped up against the cushions staring out at the rectangle of impossible light. Then when she would look back at her hands, heavy with the massive rings and bracelets Belqassim had given her, she could hardly see them for the dark, and it would take a while for her eyes to grow used to the reduced interior light. Sometimes on a far-off roof she could distinguish minute human figures moving in silhouette against the sky, and she would lose herself in imagining what they saw as they looked out over the endless terraces of the city. Then a sound near at hand would rouse her; quickly she would pull off the silver bracelets and drop them into her valise, waiting for the footsteps to approach up the stairs, and for the key to be turned in the lock. An ancient Negro slave woman with a skin like an elephant’s hide brought her food four times a day. At each meal, before she arrived bearing the huge copper tray, Kit could hear her wide feet slapping the earthen roof and the silver bangles on her ankles jangling. When she came in, she would say solemnly: “Sbalkheir, ” or “Msalkheir, ” close the door, hand Kit the tray, and crouch in the corner staring at the floor while she ate. Kit never spoke to her, for the old woman, along with everyone else in the house with the exception of Belqassim, was under the impression that the guest was a young man; and Belqassim had portrayed for her in vivid pantomime the reactions of the feminine members of the household should they discover otherwise.

She had not yet learned his language; indeed, she did not consider making the effort. But she had grown used to the inflection of his speech and to the sound of certain words, so that with patience he could make her understand any