It happened during that last summer that I rose early one day to accompany "the girl" to the market. My father called me, gave me an Ottoman dinar, and charged me to hand it to the butcher.
The sight of the square was a delight: the village women in their bright dresses sitting beside the trays; the smells of mint and apples and yellow melons and peaches with their soft rosy down; and the cucumbers people crunched so that their scent carried far and wide.
Near the square there was a house one went down to by several steps; before its entrance was a great platform paved with clean tiles, and on that platform I always saw a lady of great splendor, dressed in loose morning gowns of silk or costly velvet, sitting smoking the narghile with a number of ladies around her.
We reached the square and made straight for the butcher. He had hung the sheep from the roof of a
tent made of tree trunks covered with vine leaves, and stood cutting the meat beside a table, before a large number of customers.
I drew near him... Did I hand him the dinar? Did I lay it on the table before him? I do not know.
I remember that people turned to gaze at that enchanting lady "of the narghile," who had come to the square swaying in her velvet gown, its train lifted off the ground by a soft white hand, while behind her walked a number of her companions, who seemed to me her ladies-in-waiting.
And naturally... I stood feasting my eyes, from close by, on that sight which "glorifies the Creator," as my father used to say when he described a beautiful face. "The girl" disappeared, so I went to find out what had become of her, and when I found her she said:
Where is the dinar? I left you handing it to the butcher. I said: I gave it to him.
We went to him; he demanded his money and denied that he had taken any dinar from me.
— Where is the
dinar? How did it go? Who snatched it from your hand?
She went at once to the watchman of the square and told him what had happened, and I returned home weeping.
And my sisters fell upon me, scolding: You lose an "'usayliyya" just like that, like the feeble-minded! People lose a beshlik, or a zahrawi, or a Mejidi riyal — and you lose five Mejidis and three beshliks at one stroke?
I nearly died of grief and mortification. My father was watching and listening; he rebuked my sisters and said:
— Enough! Leave the little one be. Come, ya baba.
Then he took me into the sitting room and shut the door. My tears were streaming like brooks. He said, deliberately:
— Wipe your tears, and listen: do you remember
exactly that you handed the dinar to the butcher, hand to hand? If, ya baba, you do not remember exactly, then do not swerve from the truth — and he used the word "swerve" — the watchman has learned of it, and he accuses the butcher, and the man may go to prison, and he may be innocent. Speak, ya baba.
And he looked into the depths of my eyes with two pitying, honest eyes, and I said, the tears choking me:
— I cannot say whether I gave it to him hand to hand, or laid it on the table, or whether it fell from my hand to the ground.
And he drew me to him, and I hid in his breast, and I felt, as he kissed me, that he was breathing in the scent of my hair and my neck, deeply. At last he said:
— Ya baba! Remember always what I am going to tell you. Never say anything but what you are certain is truth and right.
Then he opened the door and called my sisters and said to them:
— Enough. We are done now with the story of the 'usayliyya.
In this parliamentary session in which the rights of woman are being debated:
WANTED
A dozen or more free men
to stand beside the woman who aspires to nothing but the service of Lebanon, and to resolve:
That they will be the first to apply the principle of equality and the charter of human rights in the Arab East — that charter in whose drafting Charles Malik the Lebanese took part.
And that they will restore to their wives, their sisters, and their daughters the sacred trust enjoyed by the motorcar driver, the shoeshine boy, the carrier of suitcases, and the porter of vegetables.
And that they will no longer permit this sacred and virtuous mother to be deprived of a right that has been exercised, once or twice, by criminals, thieves, pickpockets, forgers, and smugglers — before the prisons of mountain and city choked with them!
WANTED
A dozen or more free deputies!! Who will stand up for her, O men of free Lebanon!!