“Give that thing to me,” I said. With my left hand, I took the candelabrum by its bulbous sterling-silver stem, and then I held my right hand, palm down, above the three quivering flames. It took a few seconds before the pain became unbearable and still I held it, gritting my teeth and letting it burn me, holding steady, not moving.

“Silence,” said a voice.

I held firm. The pain was so acute I had to look away, look up at the painted ceiling, look up into the light of the chandelier. This is beyond bearing, and it’s such a simple thing, just candles, just little flames. Steady little flame. A flame is a flame is a flame. I heard the sound of my flesh cracking.

My mother cried out, “That’s enough!”

She pulled my hand away from the flames. She held my wrist with all her strength, her eyes flashing with protective rage. The candelabrum was taken away. Scent of smoking wicks.

Even in the midst of the pain, I saw she had let her hair down, all her glorious fair hair, and just for an instant she was my mother, the mother I knew, staring at my hand and then at me with her quick anxious gray eyes. I heard her whisper my name.

The palm of my hand was black, covered with big yellow blisters. It was a mass of agonizing throbbing pain. The black skin was cracked and bleeding, and then as I watched, it faded to red, bloody red, and the blisters shrank. The fissures closed. And the raw red flesh turned to dark blue. The pain was slowly fading. The hand was healing itself. The hand was turning a pale pink color and slowly it became purely white. Just my hand. The pain was gone.

And they didn’t have to tell me:

No one else, no one else in the ballroom, no one else in the Château—no one else throughout the whole world—had died and no one had felt this pain.

The orchestra gathered. Everyone was talking. The music began and I went to the nearest chair and sat down. I looked out at the night sky beyond the terrace and I kept seeing the bright blue sky over Atalantaya, and feeling that soft tropical air.

29

Fareed