Near the veranda, the odors of the white lilies and her younger son mingled together. Then she would sit on the ground, praying to herself and weeping, longing for Omar to return. Before she abandoned the house, Zana saw the shadows of her father and her husband in the nightmare of her final nights there; she felt both their presences in the room where they had slept. In the daytime I heard her repeating words from the nightmare: “They’re here somewhere, my father and Halim have come to visit me … they’re in this house”; and woe betide anyone who doubted her with a word, a gesture, or a look. She imagined the gray sofa in the room where Halim would put his hookah down to come and give her a hug, and remembered her father’s voice chatting with the boatmen and fishermen in Manaus Harbor. There on the veranda she remembered her younger son’s red hammock, the smell of him, the body she herself would undress in the hammock where he finished up after his nights on the town. “I know he’ll come back one day,” Zana said to me without looking at me, maybe not even aware of my presence; her once beautiful face was now somber and despondent. I heard the same phrase, like a muttered prayer, on the day she disappeared from the deserted house. I looked for her all over the place and only found her at nightfall, stretched out on leaves and dried-up palm fronds; the cast on her arm was dirty and splashed with bird droppings, her face puffy, her skirt and petticoats wet with urine.

I didn’t see her die; I didn’t want to see her die. But I heard that some days before her death, laid out on the hospital bed, she lifted her head up and asked in Arabic, so that only her daughter and her friend, herself nearly a hundred, could understand—and so that she wouldn’t give herself away: “Have my sons made their peace with each other yet?” She repeated the question with all the strength left in her, the courage an anguished mother finds when death is near.

No one answered. Then Zana’s smooth, almost unfurrowed face vanished; she merely turned her face to one side, searching for the only tiny window in the gray wall, where a patch of evening sky was gradually going dark.

ALSO BY MILTON HATOUM

ALSO BY MILTON HATOUM

The Tree of the Seventh Heaven

GLOSSARY

GLOSSARY

ANI (Portuguese ANUM): a bird of the cuckoo family (Crotophaga ani), and of similar shape to a cuckoo, with uniformly black plumage. In many parts of Brazil it is thought to be a friend and intimate of death, and thus a bad omen.

ARRACK: distilled liquor, from the Eastern Mediterranean.

ASSAI PALM: a palm tree (Euterpe oleracea) that grows on riverbanks, whose fruits are used to make a soft drink.