I followed my mother to the other side of the courtyard where she said she had furnished a room for me. There was a bed, a cane chair in the corner of the room, and several earthen vases full of flowers. A bluish rug and bluish curtains gave the room the aura of a tile bath.

“You went through all this trouble for me. I don’t even know how much longer I’ll be here,” I said. “I want to buy a house for you, something more comfortable than this.”

She looked surprised. “At my age moving is no good. Besides I’m used to this house—I’ve lived in it for so long. I know all the neighbors around me.”

“Fine, if that’s how you really feel.”

“I want you to be as comfortable as possible here. You must relax—what you’ve got shows you’ve suffered.” She looked at the sky as if pleading with God. “What I did to you couldn’t be easily undone.”

“You mustn’t feel that way,” I said.

Her face trembled a little as if in a spasm and then she merely sighed and left the room.

I spent the rest of the day reading, listening to a radio my uncle brought over, or looking out of the window at the dark, bent heads of children playing. Moths floated into the room like bits of paper.

My uncle sat for long hours in a shady corner in the courtyard smoking his water pipe, smiling, dozing off, dreaming. My mother worked slowly, shopping, cooking, watering the plants. She did not let me help, saying, “You must rest for a while now.”

Neighbors came in—a very thin tall woman, a young girl with fat red cheeks who laughed a lot, an older woman leaning on a cane. (Of the thin woman, my uncle said later, that her husband’s first wife had put a spell on her; of the young girl, I don’t understand how she can smile like that, her husband beats her every night; of the old woman—that she was a hundred and one years old.)

They talked, mostly about a funeral, a wedding, how the water had run dry in some gutters, premonition of someone’s death, dreams about the possibility of an earthquake. They sighed loudly from time to time and said they would have to wait for God’s will and there was no point in trying to change things. They always spoke in low melancholy tones which seemed to be more from habit than anything else.

Then night fell with its usual suddenness. Again, the voice of the muezzin, other sounds mixing to make a muffled but incessant moan, and a little later, the incredible display of the stars.

My mother took me to a room in the adjacent courtyard. She carried a naphtha lamp with her and set it down on a mantel in the room. Except for a battered trunk covered with velveteen, and a few other items—oversized pots, pans, and trays—the room was empty. She opened the trunk and took out different items.