a Moroccan visiting the town but she invited him to her house and laid before him the story of her daughter-in-law, until the Kirbaj house turned into an inn frequented by everyone who lifted up his voice in that town crying: "A healer, a good one! Medicine for love, medicine for the eye!" And it was not long before Umm Aziz made certain that the skill of the Moroccans likewise availed her nothing. What, then, was to be done?

There remained one door Umm Aziz had not knocked at, which she had kept as a last resort should every other means fail her: visiting the monasteries — "peace be upon them!" So she began moving with her daughter-in-law from monastery to monastery... Jamila in her hand like a dumb machine to be turned whichever way she pleased.

At first Jamila resisted these visits, but she learned by trial that her resistance was of no use. So she surrendered to her mother-in-law's will, having lost her own will entirely with the loss of her husband's love. Life had become a heavy futility to her, and she could find no way to be rid of it.

Some ten years had passed since her marriage, and she understood that the happiness which had intoxicated her in the first months was gone, with no hope of its return. Aziz hardly spoke to her at all — hardly even looked at her. He spent most of his nights in the marketplace, coming back now and again with reddened eyes ringed with blue beneath. From his mouth rose the smells of arak and wine and beer. His teeth were coated with a thick yellow crust. The color of his face had turned from rosy to ashen. The ends of his mustache drooped downward. His beard sometimes went a week without seeing the razor.

When he came home, the house turned into a graveyard without motion or life. No one dared breathe a word. And if it happened that someone said or did something not to his liking — were it his father or his mother — he would break out into blasphemies and smash whatever bedding and vessels his hand could reach. Once he beat his

wife because she refused to go to church wearing all her jewels.

Jamila watched all this with a breaking heart. And Abu Aziz and Umm Aziz looked at her as though she were the cause of their only son's misery. So they came to loathe her. How often she overheard them talking thus:

"My boy," Umm Aziz would say, "has wasted away with grieving. God will not grant her a child, and Azrael will not carry her off from him. If she died, he could marry some decent man's daughter in her stead, who would bring him a boy to comfort our last days and his!"

Of the tenderness Jamila had once met with from her mother-in-law, no trace remained. Seeing her now sweep and wash and cook, she no longer cried out as before: "Wa balli, wa balli! May you live to bury your father-in-law, God willing!"

The maid who had been hired to wait on Jamila had long since gone back to her own house. Jamila now worked like an ox, in the house and out of it. And if she sat down to rest she would instantly hear her mother-in-law's voice: "Sitting

Guipure — The Richelieu Shop

GUIPURE

By airplane... they have arrived —

all varieties of

guipure: at the Richelieu shop — Emile Halabi & Co.

The New Bazerkan Market — opposite the Rafidain Bank