* Refers to the theme of a love lyric by Gameel (d. 701), a poet from Medina. Magnun was the self-immolating lover and Layla his ever-inaccessible inamorata.

HALIMA AL-KABSH

From the bowels of prison, born again to the face of the earth! Abbas’s face appears before me, and I take him in my arms. Weighed down by shame and humiliation, I bury my face in his chest. “How badly we’ve treated you,” I whisper. “I wish we’d died. Then you’d be rid of us.”

“It’s only your words that hurt me,” he answers gently. I can’t help weeping. “We should be thankful now,” he says. “Let’s think about the future.”

“You’re all alone, son. God has seen fit to take away your wife and child,” I say, shaking with sobs, “and we weren’t there to comfort you.”

“What’s past is past.”

With his father he scarcely exchanges a word. We are all together in the hall of the old house the way we used to be, sometimes, in the old days.

“I beg you not to bring up the past,” he says. Then, pausing for a moment, he goes on: “I’ve been thinking things over. Does Father want to go back to his old job in the theater?”

“No. Never, damn them!”

“I can turn the reception room into a shop. We’ll sell some of the furniture and set up a snack shop. It’s an easy business and fairly profitable. What do you two think of that?”

“Just as you see it, son,” I say with gratitude. “And I pray God that I may hear good news about you soon.”

“I hope so. I think I’m about to come up with a winner.”

I invoke God’s blessing on him over and over, until he says, looking at us from one to the other, “What matters most is that you cooperate with each other and that I don’t hear things that hurt me.”

“I have often dreamed of living with you,” I say with a sigh.

“If God means me to be successful, everything will change.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and take her with you!” Karam says, growling.

“You must cooperate with each other. I’ll do all I can to give you a decent life, but you must learn to get along together.”