The Patience Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

when you stood up to go and wash yourself, you noticed blood on your dick. You were furious. You came back and beat me, in the middle of the night, just because I hadn’t warned you that I was bleeding. I had defiled you!” She laughs, scornful. “I had made you unclean.” Her hand snatches memories from the air, closes around them, descends to stroke her belly as it swells and slackens at a pace faster than the man’s breathing.
    Suddenly, she thrusts her hand downward, beneath her dress, between her legs. Closes her eyes. Takes a deep, ragged breath. Rams her fingers into herself, roughly, as if driving in a blade. Holding her breath, she pulls out her hand with a stifled cry. Opens her eyes and looks at the tips of her nails. They are wet. Wet with blood. Red with blood. She puts her hand in front of the man’s vacant eyes. “Look! That’s my blood, too. Clean. What’s the difference between menstrual blood and blood that is clean? What’s so disgusting about this blood?” Her hand moves down to the man’s nostrils. “You were born of this blood! It is cleaner than the blood of your own body!” She pushes her fingersroughly into his beard. As she brushes his lips she feels his breath. A shiver of fear runs across her skin. Her arm shudders. She pulls her hand away, clenches her fist, and, with her mouth against the pillow, cries out again. Just once. The cry is long. Heartrending. She doesn’t move for a long time. A very long time. Until the water bearer knocks on the neighbor’s door, and the old woman’s rasping cough is heard through the walls, and the water bearer empties his skin into the neighbor’s tank, and one of her daughters starts crying in the passage. Then, she stands up and leaves the room without daring to look at her man.
    Later, much later, just as the ants carrying the fly’s body reach the foot of the wall between the two windows, the woman comes back with a clean sheet and the small plastic basin. She pulls off the sheet covering the man’s legs, washes his belly, feet, and penis … and covers him up again. “More repugnant than a corpse! He doesn’t give off any smell at all!” She leaves.
    Night, again.
    The room in absolute darkness.

    Suddenly, the blinding flash of an explosion. A deafening blast makes the earth tremble. Its breath shatters the windows.
    Throats are torn apart by screaming.
    A second explosion. This one closer. Therefore more violent.
    The children are crying.
    The woman is wailing.
    The sound of their terrified footsteps rings out in the passage, and disappears into the cellar.
    Outside, not far away, something catches fire—perhaps the neighbor’s tree. The light rips through the dusk of the courtyard and the room.
    Outside, some are yelling, some crying, and some firing their Kalashnikovs, who knows where from or toward whom … just firing, firing …
    It all stops eventually, in the gray half-light of an undecided dawn.
    Then a thick silence descends on the smoky street, on the courtyard now nothing but a dead garden, on the room where the man, covered in soot, is laid outas always. Motionless. Immune. Just breathing. Slowly breathing.
    The hesitant creaking of an opening door and the sound of cautious footsteps proceeding along the passage do not shatter this deathly silence, but underline it.
    The footsteps stop behind the door. After a long pause—four of the man’s breaths—the door opens. It’s the woman. She enters. Does not look at him straightaway. First, she examines the state of the room, the broken window panes, the soot now settled on the curtains’ migrating birds, on the kilim’s faded stripes, on the open Koran, on the drip bag emptying itself of its last salty-sweet drops … Then her gaze sweeps over the sheet covering the man’s skeletal legs, takes in his beard, and finally reaches his eyes.
    She takes a few fearful steps toward the man. Stops. Observes the movement of his chest. He is breathing. She walks closer, bends down