“This is really the best time for ice cream, you know. You see, it is long enough after breakfast that you are hungry, but too early for lunch. This way, you will eat your lunch later, meaning your belly will be full later in the day, so you will have a light dinner and then sleep with enough food for good dreams and a content stomach that won’t even contemplate indigestion.”

I giggle and get up.

“Ice cream it is.”

And after ice cream it is driving through the new neighborhoods to look at houses that have been built on what were fields when I was last here. And more driving with loud music. And more driving and lunch. By the time we get home, I am full and exhausted. Later, when I am going to sleep, I cannot shake Sharif’s face from my mind.

19 MAWAL Looking

19MAWALLooking

Sometimes stories in our house come from watching, watching just the right way and seeing the underside of things, the thinking things and the forgetting things.

“Watch your grandmother,” my mother has always told me, especially when my grandmother was strong and her eyes were still lively. “She is getting older, may God give her strength. Watch what she can tell you.”

And so I watch my grandmother.

Sun hits aged, fading white walls like stale bread. One old woman, her head wrapped in colors, stands in front of her unshuttered window to look. She surveys the hills and the orange trees under which her six children played before they grew and left, but she does not think about them as she looks out and sees a land as beautiful as it was before.

A shepherd leads his goats to the far corner of her land and she sees this, her wrapped head shaking back and forth as it does every time the gnarled man stops to let his goats graze on the tasty grasses.

There is quiet life in the air: crackles and wind noises and bird songs. She rests her arms on the sill and watches, her eyes scanning the slope to the valley where her husband was killed, and though her son Haydar was a witness to the murder, she does not think about this now.

The woman with creases in her face, deep like the sand beneath the desert, rests here, though laziness is not her nature and the old house is usually filled with the clap clap clap of her slippers against concrete that is so cold in winter it seems like outside.

The joyous scarf suggests that the hair beneath it is lustrous and wild, and while once it was considered to be the most beautiful hair in the village, for some reason it began to fall out on her wedding night, and has left hennaed tufts and gaps in its place.