He wrote to her, saying:

Salwa, it is from me — so do not stare long at the signature, and do not tire your eyes traveling up and down between the lines.

It is from me, after a proud silence that lasted long and that I did not wish to break until someone came to me saying: "Salwa has become a mother."

Then the impulses to write grew strong in me, that some of what I have felt, and feel still, might be lifted from me... But why do I begin at the end??

Let me draw myself out of what I am in, and close my eyes to a world I disown — and behold, I am Salem, that Salem of old... walking proudly with the arm of a beautiful bride, who was you, tucked in his, so carried away with joy that his feet scarcely touched the ground.

How near that picture lies to my mind; it comes to me whenever I summon it, that I may live on the memories of its sweetness and linger over it for hours; and my mind rebels against me if I summon any other, as though my life had ended there.

And we walk together to that house of ours... and existence ends. Do I stir in you the memories of our house? Do I waken them, when you have crowded them into a corner of yourself and wrapped them in a thousand veils... just as oysters secrete a pearly substance to coat every strange intruding body and ward off its sting?

I will not stand long before a single picture, for there are dozens... all of them sweet... all of them happy... all of them

brimming with color... And these come to an end... our store of them runs out, and we come upon other, gloomy pictures... This one reminds me of the day I carried you to the maternity hospital... and left you to the hands of the delivering doctor... to return an hour later and kiss your marble brow and scald your cheeks with the tears of my feeling, while you gently moved me away, saying: Won't you look at the little one?

And I looked... a bundle of flesh wrapped in swaddling clothes; and when I held it and pressed on my little one's head my first kiss, the muscles of his face did not quiver in that way the faces of newborn babies do.

And I remember I said: What a dull little fellow...

And days later I came home with him... and this little one had become for us something tremen-dous, giving wings to our hopes and teaching them to stray to far horizons... Now we pictured him a boisterous boy, now a nimble lad... now a young man cutting his way through life and shouldering the passersby aside.

But that quietness in the child, that dullness, gave no assurance that our little one would have any of that... And what astonished us most was how little he cried...

And I remember the hour when I came home from my work one day at noon and you met me on the stairs, agitated and trembling, to say: Salem! I have noticed something about our child... He does not see... His eyes do not respond to the light even when it pours into them, and never once does an eyelid flicker...

Come...

And you took me to him, and I picked him up — he was forty days old — and stared into his eyes and read in them no meaning of life... I brought him near the window, and the glare pouring in with the rays of the noonday sun did not dazzle him...

Dread wrapped me too, and I summoned the nearest doctor; he examined the child and turned to face us with the cruelest truth two parents can hear... The child is blind — or so the outward signs declare... And there was more than one sign that troubled the doctor: the little one's limbs did not move with suppleness...

As for you... a stupor seized you that made me fear for you... As for me, the thing was a thunderbolt... I fancied it ringing in my ears with the old parable: The fathers eat sour grapes...

And you know, Salwa, that I was never one of the eaters of sour grapes... You know what a clean life I lived... But the disease ran in my arteries with my blood... For I am the son of a man who fathered, besides me, a brother born dead... and a sister who carried in her body what my child carries; then Death saw no place for her among the children of life, and gave her rest.

And here I am, seized for another's offense... casting out into the world one of those misfits for whom the world of the strong has no room...

And this was the truth that admitted no second face...

Scarcely a month had passed before the natural fate that awaited my son overtook him, and he died after a brief illness...

And my teeth were set on edge by the sour grapes my father had eaten...

And you remember, Salwa — you remember how I tore from your tender embrace a lifeless piece of us... and carried it to the cemetery... and laid it to rest in a wide pit in which I buried our dreams as well; then I came back with anguished eyes and parched lips, saying: Salwa... we want no more children...