Now the sun's rays are all but flooding the whole terrace facing the sea at the house of Saada, Umm Jamil al-Haddad. And there stands the mistress of the house beside the window, waiting for the mail carrier to pass, hoping he may bring her a letter from her son, who has been abroad in Brazil these six years. Though the son writes only two or three times a year, she has grown used to standing there every day, a little before noon, at the hour when the carrier passes. “He is brisk and good-hearted, this carrier,” Umm Jamil thinks as she listens to his heavy steps on the asphalt road. “Every day he passes by here on time, without delay, and if he brings me no letter, the fault is not his.”

Then she closes the window and hurries to the kitchen to busy herself preparing her simple lunch — a piece of meat with a few of the vegetables produced by her one garden, which stands beside the house. When she has finished her work in the kitchen and eaten her meal, nothing remains for her but to sit in her room and rest, for her supper amounts to a little cheese, bread, and olives and needs no preparing. As for the garden, she has finished weeding and watering it, and tomorrow the shopkeepers will come with their baskets, and she will pick for them what oranges and sour lemons remain there.

It is springtime, and she finished hoeing the garden last week, but she does not begrudge it a visit every day, to cut a dry branch here and there a weed sprouting in the walls or in the trees' watering channels. For this garden is the source of her livelihood: in it she plants all the greens and herbs she needs, and

she sells the fruit it yields and buys what provisions she lacks, and stores away the money that is over and above her need.

Umm Jamil sits beside the window and watches the lemon buds, which have lately begun to open, their refreshing scent spreading abroad. The Great Feast is at the door, and before long she must set about what she calls “the feast clean-out,” the great cleaning she gives her house every year. She begins by cleaning the cupboards and chests, taking out of them the colored bundles and parcels and the piles of sheets, covers, and blankets, wiping away the dust inside the furniture, and then returning the bundles, the parcels, and the piles to their places. But her hardest labor comes with cleaning the “buffet,” or china cabinet. For this cabinet is very tall, almost reaching the ceiling, and she must climb on a chair to bring down from its shelves the colored glasses, the engraved flasks, the pitchers and basins and silver candlesticks, the narghiles with copper hearts, and the other precious things she inherited from many people who died before her. And despite the fatigue it costs her, she feels an exceeding pleasure when she washes the glassware with water and soap and scours the copper pieces with sand and lemon and sets them out, row upon row, on the terrace to dry in the sun and grow bright as gold. She rejoices in the sight of these things, though she never once uses them in her life. She drinks from an earthenware pitcher and leaves the colored glass tumblers where they are. She sleeps on an old patched sheet and keeps the new sheets clean and folded. She takes her food in morsels with

her fingers and leaves the silver spoons and forks wrapped in paper in the drawers. For Umm Jamil has her own philosophy in the matter: that belongings and pieces of furniture are things a person acquires and heaps up in his house to enjoy the sight of them, not to use them for his needs.

“Everything is better off than the son of Adam,” Umm Jamil repeats, remembering the owners of these vessels who have died. “Everything is better off than the son of Adam.” No doubt she loves these vessels because they are more enduring than human beings and longer-lived. This chest full of bundles she inherited from her mother, dead these many years. As for the big “buffet,” her late husband inherited it from his aged mother, and at that time it held only half of what is in it now; the rest she bought piece by piece with her toil and her thrift. She would gladly have bought other things and realized those wide hopes that had kept her company since her girlhood, but luck betrayed her and fate turned against her. For who would have thought that her husband, the blacksmith of the huge frame, whose arm was harder than the iron he worked — who would have thought that death would snatch him away between one night and the next morning and leave her alone and broken in spirit, when she had always believed that she would die before him and that after her he would marry a woman who would bear him many children, for by her he had been granted only a daughter and two boys. The younger of the boys died in childhood, the girl married at an early age, and her other son, Jamil, remained alone, working at the smith's trade with his father. And when he saw that work had slackened, it came into his head to travel to America like his young companions; and his father implored him

to give up the journey, and the two of them tried to persuade him, now with tears, now with shouting and reproach, but he was not persuaded; rather he