I asked him, then, “What’s your name?”

He answered, his eyes lowered toward the ground, “My name is Fuad.”

“Whose son are you, and where is your family?”

“I am the son of Marta al-Baniyah,” he said.

“Where is your father?”

He shook his little head, as though ignorant of the meaning of the word “father.”

I said, “Where is your mother, Fuad?”

“Sick at home.”

My ears drank in these few words from the boy’s mouth and my emotions lapped them up, creating uncanny, melancholic images and phantoms, since I knew in a second that Marta the pauper, whose story I had heard from the villager, at that moment lay ill in Beirut. The girl who had only yesterday enjoyed safety among the trees of the valleys today suffered the torments of poverty and heartache in the city. The orphan who had passed her youth in the palm of nature, herding cattle in lovely fields, had descended along the bank of the river to the corrupt city and become prey to the claws of misery and distress.

While I was thinking and imagining these things, the boy was looking at me as though he saw by the eye of his pure soul how my heart was crushed.

When he started to depart, I grabbed his hand and said, “Take me to your mother. I want to see her.”

He went before me, silent and perplexed. From time to time he glanced back to see if I was really following in his footsteps.

In those grubby alleys where the air ferments with the gasps of death, among those decrepit buildings where felons commit their crimes, hiding behind curtains of gloom, and in those winding back alleys that bend first to the right and then to the left like black vipers, I made my way in fear and dread. The boy before me possessed, by virtue of his youth and purity of heart, a rare courage. But no one would share it who knew the cunning ruses that the toughs practice in this city, a city that Easterners call the Bride of Syria and the jewel in the diadem of emperors. When we arrived in the worst neighborhood, the boy entered a shoddy dwelling, of which the years had left only one rickety wall intact. I entered, following behind him, my pulse accelerating as I drew near. I stood in the middle of a humid room bare of furniture except for a dim lamp that battled total blackness by the spears of its yellow rays and a dilapidated bed that bespoke agonizing penury and abject privation. Prostrate upon it lay a woman sleeping. She had turned her face to the wall, as though seeking protection thereby from the injustices of this world, or as though she found in it a heart more tender and empathetic than the hearts of human beings.

The boy approached her, calling, “Mama!”

She turned toward him and he pointed in my direction. She moved under the shabby blanket, and in a pained voice accompanied by soulful anguish and bitter sighs, she said, “What do you want, man? Are you here to buy my last days of life, to defile them with your cravings? Leave me! The alleyways are crowded with women who will peddle to you their bodies and souls for a trifle. As for me, I have nothing left to sell, except a few remaining uneven breaths. Soon, death will obtain them for the price of a quiet grave!”