now. But they will soon be stilled. The beating of his little heart will stop when the heartbeats of his adulterous mother stop. Who is his father? Does it matter to you to know? Would it lighten my sin?
"It is enough for you to know that he is not your son; perhaps it will please you, then, that I die and take him to death with me. But know, Aziz, that the whore is you, not I. And yet I am a criminal in your eyes and the eyes of the world — is my killing of myself a crime as well? Or had I not died before now? Was I not dead all these years in which you left me alone, a stranger, broken in soul and heart? And who is my killer — is it not you? Now there is no calling back what is past. The Aziz whom my soul loved at the first is gone, never to return. What purpose is left me, then, in living?
"Why do I talk of all these things? In a minute this hand will stiffen, these thoughts will melt away, and the beating of this heart will fall silent forever. See — the sun is leaning toward its setting. And I long for life to leave me before the light leaves the branches of the oak. In the oak above my head there is a choir of goldfinches. How sweet their warbling! How pleasant the murmur of the brook and the rustling of the oak leaves!
"Do you remember how we used to come and sit here when first we knew love?
"Ah, if you were beside me now,
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that I might press you to my breast if only once before I take leave of this world! Here our love was born, and here I bury it with me.
"In my hand now is our picture in the wedding clothes. How stately you were, and how gracious, O Aziz, on that day! How handsome your mustache, how deep the magic of your eyes, how sweet the freshness of your face! Ah, if only he might come back — the Aziz of my girlhood, the Aziz of my love, the Aziz of my life and my happiness!..
"How sweet life was with you, O Aziz! I thank you, I thank you, I thank you for every drop of the happiness I sipped from the spring of your love, and I beg your pardon for every wrong that ever came from me toward you, whether in word or in deed or in thought. I die with your name between my lips... Can you bury this picture with me?.. I want to sleep my last sleep with the picture of my beloved Aziz, to whom my soul has been bound since the day I first understood the meaning of love... I have nothing to ask of you but that you pardon my failings... and I have no bequest to leave with you except my mother. My mother. My mother... my darling mother! What will you do, I wonder, when your Jamila is hidden from you forever?..
"If you shed upon my grave one tear only... a single tear... I shall be grateful to you even beyond the resurrection... Farewell, my beloved Qarquri!. Farewell, my Qarquri who is beyond all price.
"Your qarqura: Jamila."
A friend from the village of Aziz al-Kirbaj told me that he had seen him not long ago in New York, and asked him whether he had married again. He answered with a sigh, and a catch in his voice: "There is no Jamila after Jamila!"
hearts the truth of their existence and the functions of their organs — an explanation sufficient for the student to grasp what he wishes to know of secrets, satisfying his hunger, so that he adds to his manifold scientific culture a preventive, social culture of health that spares him woes and calamities.
Therefore the student must — I do not say may — acquire a complete acquaintance with all this, because I believe it is forbidden, utterly forbidden, that those like them, and of their age, should remain bare of information and far from the truth about the diseases of society; for we know that our duty requires us to strengthen the whole through the sound individual, and to protect the whole from the sick individual.
The long-awaited book has appeared
Woman: Body and Soul
By Dr. Georges Hanna
Publishers: Dar al-Ahad — Beirut
To be ordered from the publishers and from the Farajallah Publications Company
The price per copy: 200 piasters, or 230 milliemes, or mils, or fils
174 pages with 9 plates
Size below medium
For subscribers of “The Woman's Voice”: order from the management of Dar al-Kitab — Beirut