Few are those who give and do not take (1)

She died hungry, so as not to carry on her shoulders a hundred favors, nor to be the creature of anyone's kindness or charity.

She was proud and disdainful, and she was generous and hospitable, even in the hours of her ordeal. She showed tenderness to the wretched, and gave — though the spring of her provisions had run dry — of what kept her last breath in her, and did kindness with what held her to life.

She took charge of a wretched old man in her earlier days, and she died leaving a small orphan, bound to her by no kinship or lineage. She had cared for him and spent on him in her last days.

She was pious, poor of hand, rich of heart, proud within herself, lowly in her station.

I knew her when I was a child, entering certain houses to serve in them and receiving as her wage a few counted dirhams, which she accepted with thanks and blessings. She was then at the height of her strength and her youth.

She refused to share her employers' food, however much they insisted and pressed their insistence. She always found excuses to offer so as to escape their invitations with pride, preferring the hardness of her own living to the delicious food in the hands of those people. They all admired her greatness of soul, revered her, and took care not to wound her.

She always covered her head with a sheer white veil, and wore simple, light clothing even in the coldest, most biting days of winter.

I do not recall ever once seeing her adorn herself as women adorn themselves. It was as though she found in that a pettiness she disdained and scorned. Except when she came back from the pilgrimage, when she would put on the robe of honor that my mother would get for her. She would wear it for a few days, then

go back to her light clothes, as she went back to her work and her perpetual motion.

(1) From her collection of stories, "With Life." See Recently Published Books.

When I first knew her she was married to a peddler who sold safuf or lafitiyya. He carried his sweets on his head on a wide tray of tinned copper, and held in his hand a small, high table on three legs, on which he would set the tray whenever a buyer drew near, or whenever he tired of his rounds and wanted to stop and rest at the bend of an alley or a turning of the road. But she bore him no child, so he divorced her.

The houses she entered were only those of certain families she loved, and perhaps in the end she confined herself to my family, for the love she harbored for my mother and my brothers and sisters.

The sellers of green chickpeas — in their seasons — would send her enormous loads of them. She would put them in a corner of the courtyard of her dwelling, then begin to tie them into small bundles, binding them with special fibers, until these bundles piled up before her; then the sellers would come and carry them off in special sacks to roast them in the ovens and then sell them, borne on their heads, ranged in order on trays of wood or straw. They would go about the streets crying:

— Umm qlaybani khadra!

announcing thereby their delicious wares, which grown-ups love as children love them.

And Hajja Hanifa had other work besides this. Some would send her bales of Aleppo pistachios. She would soak the pistachios in great cauldrons of water, then pound them in the mortar to strip off their dry red skin, then clean them of it and spread them on the roof of our house until they dried. Then she would gather them and split them open, nut by nut, with the pistachio cracker, with a strange deftness. Then she would put them in big sacks for their owners to carry away for salting, roasting, and sale.

And the pistachio sellers would not send this precious nut of theirs except to careful, trustworthy, honorable hands. And God knows that for all the times I stood watching the Hajja at this work of hers — I was a