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