I moved near to her bed. Her words had injured my heart, for they summed up her wretched story. I said, hoping that my emotions would flow with my words, “Don’t be afraid of me, Marta. I have not come to you like a hungry animal, but as a distressed human being. I am a Lebanese, who lived for a while in those valleys and hamlets near the cedar forest. Don’t fear me, Marta!”

She listened to my words and discerned that they had issued from the depths of a soul who shared her pain. She trembled on her bed like a bare twig before a winter tempest, covering her face with her hands as though she wanted to veil her essence from a memory terrifying in its sweetness, acrid in its comeliness. After a period of calm, rent by sighs, her face appeared above her trembling shoulders, and I saw sunken eyes fixed on an invisible object planted in the middle of the room, dry lips trembling with the convulsions of despair, a throat in which a death rattle sounded alongside a deep, intermittent moan.

She said, in a voice suffused with pleading and earnest supplication and reverberating with weakness and pain, “You have come with sympathy and good wishes, and may Heaven reward you—if doing good to sinners is a virtue and showing mercy to the wicked is a good deed. But I beg you, go back where you came from, since being recognized in this place will earn you only shame and criticism, and your kindness to me will get you only contempt and disgrace. Go back, before someone sees you in this grimy room splattered with the filth of pigs. Go, quick, and hide your face with your clothing to keep passersby from seeing who you are. The compassion that fills your soul cannot get back my purity for me, or erase my offenses, or keep the firm hand of death away from my heart. I’ve been exiled because of my sins to these gloomy depths, so don’t let your pity bring you near to vice. I’m like a leper living in a graveyard, and you must not come near because society will consider you unclean and condemn you if you do. Go on back, now, and don’t mention my name in those holy valleys, since the shepherd rejects the mangy ewe out of fear for his flock. When you mention me, say ‘Marta al-Baniyah has died.’ Don’t say anything else.”

She took her son’s two small hands in hers and kissed them with a sigh, then said anxiously, “People will look on my son with ridicule and contempt, saying ‘This is the yield of sin, this son of Marta the adulteress, this son of disgrace, this son of chance.’ They’ll say more than that about him, too, because they’re blind and don’t see, and ignorant and don’t know. His mother has purified his childhood with her agony and her tears, and ransomed his life by her hardships and misery. I will die and leave him an orphan among the boys of the alley, alone in this harsh life. I will leave him nothing but a horrible memory. It will fill him with shame if he grows up weak and cowardly, and it will set his blood on fire if he’s brave and just. If heaven keeps him safe he will grow up to be a strong man, a right hand of heaven against the one who wronged him and his mother. And if he should then die and escape from the web of years, he’ll find me waiting for him where there’s plenty of light and rest.”