the night with me; so Sister Susanna brought me a young Japanese woman who had taken her nursing diploma and entered the school of midwifery. I agreed with her that she would pass the night in my room, and might sleep — since no vigil was needed — for 1,500 piasters a night.

At the pension where I had been staying before my illness there was a black woman called Alta — that is, "Aliyeh" — who did the washing and ironing of clothes. She lived with her old mother and her daughter in a wooden hut built in the pension's garden. After I entered the hospital she went on looking after my clothes, and visited me at night when her work was done.

She visited me one evening — before Easter week — and saw the Japanese nurse in a second bed; she was asleep, snoring an unpleasant snore, like a laborer who has spent his whole day carrying loads. She asked me who the girl was, and when she learned that she slept in my room and charged me 1,500 piasters a night, she knitted her brows and turned down her lips.

She came back to me the next morning, when the Japanese girl had gone off to her lessons, and burst out the moment she entered:

"I did not sleep all night. I could not bear to see you 'exploited' like this. I have just spoken with Sister Susanna, and she said you only need a companion to pass the night in your room and call the nun for you if your condition should require prompt treatment. I will take this girl's place. Pay me what you will, or pay nothing; I and my mother and my daughter do not forget you. Send the Japanese girl away from tonight."

*

I return to the eve of Holy Saturday, the hour when the rains

were pouring down like the brooks and the streams. I began repeating that verse of that French poet:

It rains in my heart as it rains on the plain.

And the tragedy of my life came rolling back, followed by the tragedy of an emigration that was to have been a short journey of four months — then war was declared, and here I am in the fifth year.

And the tragedy of my brother's murder came rolling back — that poor man who was called "father of the poor," who for forty years

had done good to the wretched classes, laborers and black slaves,

and whom three black men repaid by slaughtering him as one slaughters a hen. And I began cursing that ungrateful black hand which had robbed me of the one man who was to have sheltered my days.

And suddenly the door opened.

Before the door stood a paravent — a draft screen — that protected me from the currents of air when the door was opened. Aliyeh's head appeared, the water streaming from her dress. She went into the bathroom adjoining