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traditions that forbade the education of girls or, when they allowed it, required that the girl not advance beyond the school under the village oak.
    Salim Mokhtar put all these social usages behind him with a single leap and took to walking five kilometers every morning to take his daughter to school, then doing the same in the afternoon to bring her back home.
    People said the man was in love with his daughter and had fallen victimto her gray eyes, the purity of her white skin, and the magic of her smile. His wife said it was madness: the girl ought to stay at home, help her mother, and wait for a groom. “You’re crazy, Abu Salah. Who lets his daughter go to school like a boy? What are people going to say about you and me?”
    But the man paid no attention and told everyone who asked that the world had changed and women weren’t part of the furniture, that he’d made up his mind and no one had the right to object.
    Salma went to school for two years. Then along came the groom and the groom was the son of the owner of the land on which all the inhabitants of the village worked as laborers, so her father couldn’t refuse. When he told her, she wept and he wept at her weeping and said to her, “As you wish, my daughter. I am prepared to leave the village and go and work as a porter in the port of Tripoli for your sake, but please don’t cry.” But Salma wouldn’t stop weeping. Her father said he’d go to Sheikh Deyab and make his excuses but she shouted at him, “No!” and said she consented to the marriage.
    Hend had never seen her mother’s village, which lay far away in the middle of a valley next to the Great Southern River, which ran, exhaling its perfume, along the edge of Kherbet el-Raheb, so she couldn’t situate her story. She told Karim she’d forgotten the details because memory needs a place, time erases memories, and people only stumble over their memories in the crevices of places.
    The story, however, took an unexpected turn and ended in a series of tragedies that engraved themselves deeply in the memory of the people of the village.
    Salma had suddenly choked back her tears, told her father she would marry the man, and gone to her wedding as if to a funeral. Her mother couldn’t understand Salma’s hesitation over an offer of marriage that had fallen upon her from the sky. The groom was a young man of twenty-fiveand she was fifteen. He was the only son of a man who owned the lands of seven villages. The daughter of a poor laborer, she would be transformed into a lady whom all the women in the village would fall over one another to serve. She would live in a big stone house and leave their house of mud.
    The story goes that the man was patient with Salma till patience itself could be patient no more. The first night he cut his hand to allow those waiting to cheer at the sight of a sheet spotted with virgin blood. On the second he approached her and she covered her face with her hands so that her tears wouldn’t fall on the ground, and he slept next to her and didn’t touch her. The third he took her hand and felt such a killing coldness that he pulled back. The fourth he said it wouldn’t do and she said, “Leave it till tomorrow.” The fifth she said she was sick and the sixth he asked her what she wanted and she said she wanted to go to school. He said she was asking the impossible and promised to bring Shaykh Hafez to teach her at home, but she said she wanted to study mathematics and science, so he laughed and said, “We’ll see.” The seventh night he took her by force. She wept and pleaded with him but he ripped off her clothes and flung her to the ground and opened her. That night a lot of blood flowed because Qasem Abd el-Karim couldn’t stop. Two days later, sitting next to her on the bed, he told her he’d tasted the sweetest honey in the world and that though a man didn’t usually apologize to a wife, he was going to. He said this and more and she bowed her head and covered