Sublime

A week before Arshad was to return, welcoming relatives started arriving and soon the house was full. There were beds down the length of the thatched verandahs and in the rooms, and on them the women sat by day and slept at night.

Three extra women came as usual from the barber's family to help with the cooking; and the village songstresses, who

Somewhere in Shobrakheit, my mother is dividing all the dinner fruits in half.

She joined him in making butterfly nets and ran behind them like a small child, indifferent to the bombs and missiles exploding incessantly nearby. She was convinced that the best way of beating the war was to stop talking about it. She had stopped being afraid of dying a long time before and was even more reckless than Abdel Latif, who would rush