From Sleep Unbound. Andrée Chedid

come here. Your father will soon come back home.”

      “Saïd, go and bring me water.”

      “Tahia? Where is Tahia?”

      “Amin, put down those pebbles. You know your father likes to find you here when he returns.”

      “May your soul be damned, Tahia! Next year you’ll see! I’ll send you off to the fields!”

      Rachida would have to go on waiting; soon her voice would be little more than a murmur. Night would fall, and she would still be here, clinging to the balustrade. Alone with Samya, who would stare at Rachida until she reduced her to a shadow.

      On the way home from the cotton fields the men walked after one another in a file. They were tired and walked without talking. Suddenly, one of Rachida’s cries fell among them like a stone, and some of the men heard it. Hussein, who always walked at the head of the line, stopped and said, “Listen, someone’s calling for help.”

      “Nothing but a fight among the women,” remarked Khaled, shrugging. His two wives were always yelling at each other.

      Rachida’s voice rose higher, like the whine of a dog baying at the moon.

      “Something’s going on,” insisted Hussein.

      The others, too, began to listen; they forgot their weariness. One of them suggested: “Let’s go see what’s happened.”

      “Yes, something’s happening,” repeated Hussein.

      He began to run and the others followed him. Now they were all running. And when they saw other men far off in the fields, they called to them either to join them or to alert the people in the village.

      As soon as the women heard cries for help, they too dropped everything. Nefissa, who was too old to go with the others but could read the future in the sand, repeated: “I knew it! I knew that this day had the feel of misfortune!”

      With their children the women abandoned the village to Nefissa and the new-born babies. The men ran along the path; they were coming from every direction: from their small houses, from the river banks, from the rice fields, from the cemetery, from the garden, from the mosque.

      Rachida saw them coming. Still leaning over the railing, she lost awareness that she was screaming.

      Everyone seemed to arrive at the same time, packed into the narrow passage between the two houses. Their robes brushed against the walls. A dull anger that they could not yet explain thudded in their chests. Together, they seemed to form a single body, and one could hear them cry out as if with a single voice.

      The room above seemed to lurch, tossed by this shout as a rowboat is tossed by a wild sea.

      . . .

      The past burst into a foam of images that grew and threatened to swallow up everything.

      The outcry of the crowd reverberated against the walls, sounds sticking as tightly as the knots in a piece of string. Ammal, who had left her flock of sheep, was squeezed in among the others. She was small for her thirteen years. She was wearing the yellow dress that Samya had made for her. What was this uproar all about? Ammal was worried. What had happened to Sit Samya? She battled her way through the crowd; she wanted to be the first one to get to Sit Samya.

      The old woman Om el Kher followed the crowd. Something was going on, something must have happened to Sit Samya. Troubled, she wanted to go to the house to see but not to ask questions of the others.

      Farther off, resting against a tree, the blind man was worried, too. He wondered what had happened to Sit Samya. Why was Sit Rachida shouting? It was impossible to make out what she was yelling over and over again.

      The people were crowding into the house now while Rachida bent even further over the balcony to watch them push inside. She heard them coming up the stairs, shoving against one another as they climbed.

      As soon as they reach the room Rachida will be able to collapse.

      “If I had known! If I had known!” she will repeat over and over again. “I would have given up my walk. I would have given up petting the calf! I wouldn’t have bothered checking the locks!”

      The steps were narrow. The men and women were jostling and pushing one another.

      Her hands pressed against her breast, Ammal came forward, murmuring, I only hope nothing has happened to Sit Samya!:She tried to push through the people. She wanted to get to Sit Samya before the others, to save her. But to save her from what?

      The clamor was becoming louder and more brutal. Maybe they would forget that the bannister was rickety. Maybe the stairs would collapse, and they would all fall. Maybe, too, there would be no stairway any longer. Rachida will stop screaming, and a person will finally be able to get some sleep.

      But if they do reach the room, she will seize the past and hold it up between them and herself, creating of the past a watertight compartment. She will summon up the past and watch it unroll behind her as one follows a vanishing landscape through the window of a moving train. The past, she must recapture it, to hide herself in it!

      But suddenly it seems so far away!

      “Once I was a child, one day. . . . But I do not remember. Where is my childhood? And the face of my mother? Where is it? I can see nothing. I am in a very dark corridor, and I can’t see anything. But much later. Yes, now I remember. I remember certain evenings. . . .”

      . . .

      2

      Those Sunday evenings!

      The car rolled through the city, its hood sleek and shiny, its windows closed. Inside were wood panels and dark leather. The house, the garden, the well-known faces were now far behind us. The car rolled past the shops, the street lamps, the sidewalks. It came to a sudden stop in the square which was dominated by the huge brown railway station; the station clock rang out the hours but they were drowned, lost, in the uproar of the streets.

      Ali said that from this station trains departed for other countries, countries where, perhaps, there were no boarding schools. I had never been on a train; I had never been anywhere. Like so many other things, travel was reserved for grown-ups.

      Tightly buttoned into his suit of shiny marine blue, Ali drove at top speed. I had to turn quickly and peer out of the rear window to catch a glimpse of the station, of the rushing passengers, of the porters, wearing long blue robes and loaded down with baggage. The streets were a confusion of bicycles, cars and donkey carts.

      Ali drove so quickly! I hardly had time to look at the billboards, to try to catch the names of the streets, even to recognize the grain and spice shop in front of which, about a year earlier, we had had an accident. Having hit a bus, Ali had been forced to turn the car onto the sidewalk.

      “Those people should be locked up! Bastards!” he had shouted. The grain and spice merchant had come to the front of his shop, a starched apron tied around his waist. His lips were trembling with emotion, but his plumpness and the lopsided angle of his fez gave him an air of friendliness. He had helped me out of the car.

      “You have escaped! You have had a narrow escape!” he exclaimed, guiding me into the shop by my elbow. He settled me in a corner in a cane chair and brought me a glass of anise and water in a pretty blue glass. I still remember every detail. I managed to drink without making a face as the merchant looked on, almost tenderly.

      Out in the street Ali was examining the tires and the engine. My brother Antoun, who always accompanied me back to school on Sunday evenings, had leaped out of the car. I could hear him discussing the accident with. the gathering crowd, his tone alternately friendly, alternately defensive.

      Standing near me the merchant looked at me for a long time. Perhaps he was imagining what might have happened, for from time to time he clicked his tongue against his teeth, clapped his palms together, and raised his eyes to heaven as if he saw me there. “You have had a narrow escape,” he kept repeating.

      When the car was ready to start again the shopkeeper refused