Empty girl in silence like a post, guarding what is sacred, what is not known but is known, and spoken of in hushed voices. She still stands there, by her house at the edge of the path leading down to the heart of Nawara, holding a flower, pulling the petals off one by one, waiting to eat the last one, waiting for him to leave.

“Hey, retarded girl,” shouts one little boy.

Eyes vacant like space uninterrupted.

“For shame that such things happen,” my mother says under her breath, as she does every time we see her. “God give the poor girl strength. And even to her mother.”

And still she stands, fixed, listening, hearing, but not understanding, or understanding but not allowing any words to reach her lips, any truth to come to her eyes.

Hers is a story my mother will not discuss. Um Radwan, however, will talk about it all I want and my mother lets her go on—she is probably the only person in the village who does—maybe because she thinks it’s one of those stories that needs telling and needs saving, maybe because she knows Um Radwan needs to talk.

It could have been yesterday, or it could have been forty years ago that Lubna Aziz was born possessed, retarded. Such pity we all had for her mother when one year later her husband, two sons, and parents were killed when their truck exploded after being hit by another truck. We all followed in her grieving, brought her food, sat with her, wailed, and looked after that awful daughter of hers. The elders of Nawara always set money aside for her to make sure that she and Lubna would never go hungry. Her gratitude? To stop speaking to anyone. Dignified mourning in silent black with no interruptions.

I never much cared for her, before or after her disasters. She was poorer than our family and younger than my eldest son, Radwan, and yet she refused him in marriage and made him run to America to find whores to satisfy him. She stole her own happiness as well as mine by refusing my son. Our lives could have been so different if it were not for Safa’s insolence, but no one remembers that; no one thinks of her name, Safa, untroubledness, purity, when they call her Um Khalid for the eldest of the two boys who died. May God have mercy on them. May God give her strength, for that is a heavy burden to bear.