Domingas wanted to go. “It’s too hectic, too noisy,” she complained, turning her back on our neighbor. The area surrounding the harbor was quiet. I saw the shop, now closed, and pointed out the storeroom where Halim, leaning against the window, had recounted parts of his life. My mother decided to sit on the low wall over the dark river. She said nothing for a few minutes, until the light had finally gone. “When you were born,” she said, “Halim helped me, didn’t want me thrown out of the house … He promised me you would go to school. You were his grandson; he wasn’t going to throw you into the street. He came to your christening, he was the only one who came with me. He even asked to choose your name. Nael, he said, his father’s name. I thought it was a strange name, but he really wanted it, so I let him … I felt the old man liked you a lot. I think he even liked his sons. But he complained about Omar; he said his son had stifled Zana.” I felt her hands on my arm; they were sweaty and cold. She hugged me, kissed my face, and bowed her head. She murmured that she was so fond of Yaqub … since the time they played together, and went for walks. Omar got jealous when he saw the two of them together, in her room, soon after his brother came back from Lebanon. “With Omar I didn’t want … One night he came into my room, making that racket, drunk, obscene … He forced me, with his man’s strength. He never asked me to forgive him.”

She was sobbing, and couldn’t say any more.

Worried, I began to keep watch on the hammock my mother slept in. She didn’t let herself be affected by Zana’s agitation, as she swung between promises of vengeance and moments of melancholy, trying to reconcile her conflicting feelings. For weeks, Zana mixed up the past and the present, memories of her father and Halim with Omar’s absence. “My father …” she said, putting her hands on Galib’s photograph, her mind on the vast distance between the Amazon and Lebanon. Abbas’s gazals, which she used to read in her room, she now recited out loud, and these words provided a lull in her madness. But the image of the absent Omar wouldn’t leave her. She blamed herself for having written the letter to Yaqub. She called him impossible, and the victim became the aggressor. Rânia said her brothers would never be able to live in the same house, but that time might calm them down; time and distance.

“Nothing in this world can pacify a man betrayed,” said Zana.

“Yaqub might regret what he’s done,” said Rânia. “He’s not going to persecute anyone.”

Her mother looked at her sadly, and said in a voice that was hoarse but unfaltering: