Winter was at its fiercest in Damascus. Its streets were heavy with the smell of grilled meat, the charcoal smoke of its stoves stung the noses of passersby, and a thick layer of mud covered the asphalt and stone paving of its streets in the new quarters and the old. On one of its rainy nights Abu Sayyah came home, his shoulders bowed under cares, contrary to his custom.

Abu Sayyah was nothing more than the driver of a worn-out car, which he stationed in Marjeh Square, at the meeting place of the old quarters and the new, where the modern city rubs against the city of bygone ages. The day before, he had bought from a son of the Syrian desert a pair of tires for his car — the Bedouin had perhaps brought the tires in from Transjordan by smuggling. The price Abu Sayyah paid was very high, but he was compelled to strike the bargain so that he could keep his car running to support his wife and two children. He paid two thousand five hundred Syrian liras for the two tires, and he felt a lump in his throat each time a bundle of banknotes passed from his hand into the Sheikh's. He would swallow hard and bite his lips as though... For who could ever have dreamed that prices would climb to this fantastic figure? Twenty-five hundred liras for a pair of tires! But such is war...

Abu Sayyah shut the door of his tumbledown garage and went into

his humble house on the edge of the Midan quarter, the mud spattering his trousers up to the knee. He was going about under the weight of his cares: how was he to find the price of another pair of tires to replace the two old ones still unchanged, which had been patched locally and were no longer serviceable or safe to use?

Abu Sayyah entered his house dragging his feet and stumbling in his gait, his face grown gloomier, his nose more crooked, his eyes narrower. And his face, whipped by the cold winds, was yellower than usual.

His young wife, with her loose black hair, her white skin, and her drowsy eyes, received him beam-ing and smiling. He answered her smile and hurried inside, throwing his exhausted body onto a sort of couch set up near the wood stove, and began rubbing his hands, trying to warm them.

The room was small and meanly furnished, its floor partly covered by an Oriental carpet full of patches and burns. In the middle squatted the black wood stove like a wounded hyena. Its pipes rose to just below the ceiling, then turned off at a sharp angle, piercing the wall and puffing their smoke into the neighboring garden. Facing the couch were ranged a few chairs made of local willow wood. The walls had once upon a day been painted blue, but smoke and children's fingers had changed their color to a grayish

black. From the ceiling hung a cord ending in a dim electric bulb whose light spread over the room, lending it an air rather like that of a dimly lit cave. On one wall hung a charcoal portrait of Abu Sayyah in the flower of his youth, though the artist who drew it had so exaggerated the length of his mustaches that they looked like two scorpion tails.

The wife sat down on the couch beside her husband and set about knitting a sweater of gray wool for her son, who had gone to bed with his sister. She began: "Perhaps you had a lucky day?" Abu Sayyah answered in a dry voice, trying to smile: "Not bad. I took an officer on a rather long trip, and he gave me fifteen liras for it without my haggling; I also took some boys and girls out to Dummar and got another fifteen liras for that; and I made five liras from a few short fares in the city. That comes to thirty-five liras in all, of which I spent about ten liras on gasoline and oil — and here is the rest." He said this, pointing to his black leather wallet.

His wife murmured: "A gener-ous blessing."

But Abu Sayyah hesitated and stammered, adding: "But—"

"But what?"

His wife answered anxiously, laying her white fingers on his tired shoulders.

"I am forced to buy two more tires, because the front ones are in a wretched state.

"And yet I don't have money enough even to buy two inner tubes."

She glanced at him, giving him a devilish wink, and said: "Why fret over a trifle like money?