The Orphan Girl (A Story)

A true story whose letters moan, and whose dense words fall short of expressing its bleeding melody and its great, sorrowful tune...

Little Alya sighed a deep sigh as she sat by the stove, on the floor, tugging with her small, frozen hands at the sleeves of her spring dress... hoping she might force it to cling to her blue-tinged body, the blood frozen in its veins... And she put her swollen hand over her mouth, wishing to smother a dry cough that tore at her small chest with painful tearing...

I was roused from my abstraction — absorbed as I was in reading a book on the life of Byron — by that wounded, strangled voice. And I found myself contemplating this little girl intently, as though I had not seen her pass before me every day, barefoot, her cracked feet afraid to tread the ground lest it hurt them... as though I had never seen her until this moment. She would allow herself to sit only kneeling on her knees, as though it had been decreed that she must kneel forever, begging mercy and tenderness from heaven — for how should the harsh, deaf earth take pity on her wretched childhood?... And how those two wide eyes bewitched me — forever clouded, gazing at things with such depth, as though they longed to solve the riddles of this world muffled before her in a thousand thousand curtains of pitch darkness, where no sooner does one curtain fall than new black veils wrap it round... or as though they dreamed of a new future, an oasis of greening hopes dancing across the desert of her life. That pale face speaks weeping pain in every one of its cells. And that long jet-black hair, drooping over her small face like silent death..., encircling it like a halo — the sight of her stirs whatever affections of latent pity and deep, sorrowful musing lie in the depths... And from time to time the poor little thing looks at her chapped hands, trying to soothe their speaking pain, only to return to staring at the ground like a hoary old woman on whom time has heaped of its calamities and woes as many as her years...

...And I asked her:
Your cough is dry, and your chest drags a rattle, my little one; are you cold?
And I felt as though the word had outrun her, for her small chest — that great chest — had grown too narrow to hold it...
Yes... I sleep with a quilt spread on the chattering-cold floor; it serves me as both mattress and cover. I wrap myself round and round in it all the cold night. No doubt the cold seeps in on me from every side — only I keep guard at the door...

And my mother asked her: What has become of your brother? Have you heard anything new of him?...
The little one started and said: I was told yesterday that he had come out of prison. And in a voice that seemed to rise from the depths she added: But today, they told me he is still there...

The little girl swallowed her dry spittle and shut her mouth upon a lump that strangled the words in it into dumbness... A tear wandered in her dreaming eyes; she let it stream down her cheeks, as though it knew the road well and needed no one to show the way... And it glided over her face as sad music glides through suffering hearts...

It seemed to me she sensed what might await her of scolding and reproach, and perhaps a beating, if she lingered any longer... So she gathered her dress up from the floor and walked an orphan's walk, trailing the skirts of brokenness, her gait bearing all the meanings of her mute, sorrowful orphanhood...

...And the little one sat on the muddy ground, listening in silence to the sounds of lamentation and the wailing of women carried on the air from the neighboring village. And she repeated, with bitterness and grief: My brother will not come back! He will not come back!
I am alone!... Alone in this mad world!... O my God...

*

Her brother was the first and the last of her kin she ever knew... She opened her eyes upon the world and found no one about her to cherish her and be kind to her but him... no one to make her feel the meaning of tenderness and love and affection...

There... in a mean, forlorn hut she grew up with this brother, older than she by some three years. Her father died before she had yet reached her second year; then the mother soon sickened and died... leaving them behind her to drink the cup of misery to the dregs, never sobering from the drunkenness of pain. This brother was father and mother and sister... nay, he was all existence gathered into one brother...

And the little boy, not yet twelve, went off to work, hoping to earn some part of his bread and his sister's. But where was he to leave this little sister? How could she live? Who would care for her? So he sent her to one of the houses of the neighboring village, to stay with its people, to eat and find shelter. And he went off to the city to wrestle with livelihood — and it threw him and outran him... He would eat one day so as to fast for days... folding his belly again and again over hunger... He would sleep an hour under some eaves, and drowsiness would master him for hours in the naked street...

Years passed... and the young lad came back to the village one day. He longed for the sister he had left, of whom he had known nothing since he quit the village. And his heart prompted him to bring his sister to the city; someone would take her into service, and she would at least be near him, so that he might see her whenever the chance allowed. And he would gladden her with an outpouring of the affection of the deprived for the deprived — besides which, the village was cramped, and the scope of living there hard beyond all hardness, above all for one who owned no land to hold and reap its bounty...

And the young lad Fouad went out with one of his friends to the forest, to recall the memory of his homeless childhood in this spot it grieved him to part from. From afar he began to gaze with heartache at the cemetery, feeling some obscure pull drawing him toward it; he reached it and fell to weeping bitterly. Here, some years ago, his father had been laid to rest, and his mother, whom he loved with all his being.

And his companion, who had come after him, raised him from the ground, easing his sorrow with soft, gentle words...

And the two walked among the fields, keeping company with the startled sparrows flitting from tree to tree... listening to the melodies of autumn's nature weeping in silence...

The companion was carrying a rifle; Fouad took the rifle, and he and his friend went on quietly covering the ground...

...And suddenly the valley echoed the report of a gunshot, followed by a cry for help that rattled in the companion's chest and was choked off...

Fouad stood a moment where he was, his feet nailed down, scarcely believing what his eyes beheld. And he let out a mad shriek of terror that set every limb in the valley atremble... Fouad stared at his companion as though, in his sight, existence itself had ceased to move...

But none of that was to be... There was his dear friend and companion falling to the ground, weltering in his blood, moaning a moan that severed the very heartstrings... There was his friend, struck by a bullet that had flown suddenly, and by mischance, from the muzzle of his own rifle as he leapt behind him...

My God!... What have I done?...

Have I gone mad? Or are my eyes deceived?

My God! Have mercy on me... My brother, my companion, my soul — what? What has befallen you??

But his friend opened his eyes, smiled the smile of one taking leave of life, and said to Fouad:

"No bla..... me... my. bro... ther...

And he closed his lids, and his chest went on rising and falling while the crimson blood streamed from a deep, grievous wound in his side...

The peasants hastened from the neighboring fields to see what had happened... They found a young man of twenty lying senseless, death rippling over his face, drowned in a lake of blood... Cries for help rose high, and the wounded man was carried on shoulders from the forest to the village. Then a car bore him to the nearest city hospital, though ninety-nine in a hundred of the links in the chain of his life had already snapped. And Fouad was taken ahead to prison, that the investigation might take its course.

★

...And I found myself vainly wiping away the tears of this little girl, to whom nothing of life had ever been revealed but its dark corner... I took hold of her fevered hand as she fell to raving and screaming at the top of her voice: He is dead... dead... My brother will not come back... he will not come back...

And a tear leapt from my eye as I repeated with the little one:

Yes... her brother will not come back... But the misery written upon so many people comes back and comes back, leaving them no chance to breathe the breezes of happiness and contentment in this life...

I wonder! With what shade of all the shades of consolation and solace could I bring into the heart of this wretched girl one grain of reassurance, one gleam of hope, after despair had sunk into her depths and taken up its abode... after pain had occupied her whole soul, her whole being...

What melody of the music of green life could the lyre of my soul pour out, and pour again, to flood and encompass with it the world of this child, whose whole heart the moans of the sick winter and the strains of black funerals have shattered, snatching every laughing look from the gleam of her two innocent eyes.

This little bud, the spring of whose life the beaten autumn has taken for its own. And so cries of pain went up from the heart of her shattered heart...

And the little one started up out of my hand as she heard her mistress's rising voice wounding her ears:

Come here! Have you not had enough yet of idling and play?

And she raised in her hand a pomegranate rod that itself ached at striking this hapless girl a blind, wailing beating...