It was a small memory among countless others that, years later, Amira retrieved with bittersweet nostalgia, turning them over in her mind as another woman might leaf through a photo album. Often, while rain fell on chilly Boston or snow piled in its streets, she would think of her father’s house with its sunlit garden.

Although shielded by high walls on two sides and by the wings of the house on the other two, the garden was far from being the shadowy, secret keep that many Americans seemed to imagine an Arab home enclosed. It was more like a playground, a bright space always alive with children—cousins, of course, almost every day, but also the children of neighbor women and of other visitors, as well as those of the servants; sometimes there were special guests, little royal princes and princesses, not so very different from Malik and herself; less often, the inexpressibly exotic offspring of American oil-company executives or European businessmen.

The garden was a place of play and openness and green growing things—jasmine and oleander and jacaranda, lovingly tended and nurtured with water more precious than oil. It was the garden Amira thought of when she thought of happiness. In memory and fact, it blended with the house itself, a rambling Mediterranean-style stucco villa with tall arched windows that could be shuttered against the midday heat. Women and children alike shifted perpetually between the outdoors and the rooms of the women’s country within.

In the fiercest heat of the day, everyone settled in the shade of the arcade that ran along the ground floor of the main wing and formed a kind of middle ground between outdoors and in. The women worked at small chores and talked, sometimes even sang; both the talk and the singing were done softly, if there were men at home, since women’s voices heard unrequested in the men’s part of the house represented gross misbehavior.

In the direct presence of adults, the children were expected to listen respectfully, speaking only when spoken to. Boys had a bit more latitude than girls in this respect, but even they were never allowed to become loud or unruly. Amira could remember it exactly: the heat made only just bearable by the shade, the kitchen fragrance of cardamom or cloves or rosemary spicing the scent of stewing lamb, the soft voices and laughter of the women. Sitting politely while the grown-ups conversed was never the intolerable burden that it would have seemed to an American or European child. For one thing, that was simply the way things were done; for another, the conversation could be fascinating. Amira’s mother, aunts, and their friends talked of matters that concerned them deeply—money, sickness, marriage, childbirth, the ways of husband and wife— and little or nothing was censored or softened because children were present; after all, they would need to understand these things for themselves before many more years had passed.