And you said nothing... for your wounded motherhood was too weak to rise up... And when I dried your tears with my lips, I heard you speaking of life and death in the voice of the philosophers...

And we lived, Salwa, distracting ourselves with ourselves, with our food and our drink... with our daily needs; and I drowned you in clothes and jewels... and we fre-quented the places of amusement, that I might fill your empty world so you would not say: I want a child...

But you did want... your moth-erhood wanted, and your nature wanted — that nature I defied and treated harshly with my insistence... Yet — to speak the truth — you were generous in your silence... and I was grateful to you for understanding and forbearing... even though every glance of yours toward a child told the measure of my cruelty... the measure of my tyranny over you...

I would see you playing with your brothers' children and never having your fill... stroking the sweet, innocent faces with yearn-ing fingers, then taking the little girls aside and tying their blond locks with colored ribbons...

And I would notice you passing the shops and staring long at the toys and dolls, then sighing like one who says: If only!!

How many and many a time I came upon you before a heap of our dead child's clothes, breathing in their scent and wiping your tears with them; and I would go out, finding my presence beside you hideous, and despising in myself this selfishness...

Yes — you yourself, without being able to help it, gave me no help... My keen sensitivity was wounded time after time, and my bitterness grew against myself... against my father, who forced me to be afflicted through no offense of my own...

And what fault was it of yours, that you should endure, and live with your pride stabbed as a woman and your mission cut short as a mother, because when I ventured to marry you I did not take the long view of the matter...

Indeed, it never crossed my mind

that the curse living in my blood would work its work in my children...

And how cruel you were, Salwa, when you came to me on a day whose daylight you had spent with your sisters at the house of one of them, returning in the evening to say... Salem! Why do you not adopt a child, to be a help to us in

life... And I answered you dryly... but then I came back to myself and excused you. Emptiness was killing you, and nothing availed to silence your longing to hear a lilting word called out to you by a little one clinging to your skirts...

It was a fresh stab, and that night my eyes knew no sleep... In the morning I rose with an idea... an