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the salt, there is no sauce because she forgot to add a little water . . . that’s reason enough for a beating. It was my mother Noura complained to, because my father is too violent; he would have sent her back without listening to her. Mama listened to her but didn’t console her. She said to her: “He’s your husband. It’s not serious. You’re going to go home.”
    And Noura went back. Beaten as she was. She returned to her husband who had “corrected” her by beating her with a stick.
    There was no choice. Even if he strangled us, there was no choice. Seeing my sister in this condition, I might have felt that marriage was good for nothing more than to be beaten as before. But even at the thought of being beaten, I wanted more than anything in the world to be married. It’s a curious thing the destiny of Arab women, in my village in any case. We accept it as natural. No thought of rebelling ever occurs to us. We don’t even know what it would mean to revolt. We know how to cry, hide, lie if needed to avoid the stick, but to rebel, never. Quite simply because there’s no other place for us to live than in the house of our father or husband. Living alone is inconceivable.
    Hussein didn’t even come looking for his wife. Anyway, she didn’t stay long, my mother was so afraid her daughter wouldn’t want to leave! Later, when Noura became pregnant and they were hoping for a boy, she was the princess of her in-laws, of her husband, and of my family. Sometimes I was jealous. She was more important than me in the family. Before she was married, she spent more time with my mother, and afterward they were closer yet. When they would go to gather the wheat together, they took more time because they talked a lot together. They would close themselves up in a room. It was a room that was also used for storing wheat, flour, and olives, and I remember that the door to the room was green. I would pass by it, feeling alone and abandoned, because behind that door my mother was with my sister. They were in there before the wedding when my mother was removing Noura’s pubic hair.
    I don’t know why this door so brutally came into my memory. I went through it almost every day, carrying sacks. Something disturbing happened behind that door, but what? I think I hid between the sacks out of fear. I see myself like a monkey, crouching on my knees in the dark. This room doesn’t have much light. I am hiding there, my forehead pressed against the floor. The tile is brown, small brown squares. And my father has painted the spaces in between with white paint. I’m afraid of something. I see my mother. She has a sack over her head. It’s my father who has placed this sack on her head. Was it in this room or somewhere else? Is it to punish her? Is it to strangle her? I can’t cry out. My father pulls the sack tight behind Mama’s head. I see her profile, her nose, against the cloth. With one hand he holds her by the hair and with the other he grips the sack.
    He is dressed in black. Something must have happened a few hours earlier? What? My sister came to the house because her husband was beating her. Mama listened to her. Mama should not pity her daughter? She shouldn’t cry, she shouldn’t try to defend her to my father? It seems to me that memories around that green door are intertwined. My sister’s visit and me hiding between the full sacks of wheat, my mother being suffocated by my father with an empty sack. I must have gone in there to hide. It’s a habit of mine to hide. In the stable, in this room, or in the armoire in the hallway where they leave the sheepskins to dry before taking them to be sold. They are hung up in there the way they hang them at the market, and I hide inside, even though it’s stifling, so I won’t be caught. But I don’t often hide between the sacks in the storeroom, I’m too afraid snakes will come out. If I was hiding there it’s because I feared something bad would happen to me, too.
    It is