The Patience Stone Read Online Free PDF

so she can see his eyes more clearly. They are open, and covered in black dust. She wipes them with the end of her sleeve, takes out the bottle and administers drops to each eye. One, two. One, two.
    She touches the man’s face cautiously, to wipe off the soot, and then sits quite still, as still as him. Hershoulders weighed down with troubles, she breathes, as always, to the same rhythm as the man.
    The neighbor’s rasping cough travels through the silence of the gray dawn, turning the woman’s head toward the yellow and blue sky of the curtains. She stands up and goes to the window, crushing shards of glass beneath her feet. She looks for the neighbor through the holes in the curtains. A shrill cry bursts from her chest. She rushes to the door, and out into the passage. But the deafening sound of a tank freezes her in her tracks. Bewildered, she comes back. “The door … our door onto the street has been destroyed. The neighbor’s walls …” Her horrified voice is muffled by the roar of the tank. Her gaze travels once more around the room, stopping sharply at the window. She walks up to it, parts the curtains and gasps. “Not that! No, not that!”
    The noise of the tank starts to fade; the neighbor’s coughing is heard again.
    The woman collapses on the shards of glass. Eyes closed, voice muffled, she begs, “God … merciful God, I belong to …” A shot rings out. She is silent. A second shot. Then a man’s cry: “
Allah O Akbar!
” The tank fires. The explosion shakes the house and the woman.She hurls herself to the ground, slithers to the door, makes it into the passage, and hurtles down the cellar stairs to her terrified daughters.
    The man remains motionless. Impassive.
    When the shots cease—a lack of ammunition, perhaps—the tank drives away. The thick, smoky silence returns and settles.
    In this dusty stillness, at the foot of the wall between the two windows, a spider is prowling around the carcass of the fly discarded by the ants. Examining it. Then it too abandons the fly, takes a tour of the room, returns to the window, attaches itself to the curtain, climbs it, and crawls over the migrating birds frozen in the yellow and blue sky. It leaves the sky and climbs onto the ceiling, to disappear among the rotting beams, where it will spin its web, no doubt.
    The woman reappears. Once again carrying the plastic basin, a towel, and a sheet. She cleans up. The shardsof glass, the soot that has spread all over the room, every thing. Then she leaves. Comes back. Pours sugar-salt solution into the drip bag, returns to her spot at the man’s side, and administers the bottle’s remaining eyedrops. One. She waits. Two. She stops. The bottle is empty. She leaves.
    On the ceiling, the spider reappears. Hanging from the end of its silken thread, it moves slowly downward. Lands on the man’s chest. After a few moments’ hesitation it follows the sinuous lines of the sheet up toward his beard. Suspicious, it turns away and slips between the folds of fabric.
    The woman returns. “There is going to be more fighting!” she announces, and walks purposefully toward the man. “I’m going to have to take you down into the cellar.” She pulls the tube out of his mouth, and wedges her hands under his armpits. Lifts him. Drags his scrawny body. Pulls him onto the kilim. Then stops. “I’m not strong enough …” She is desperate. “I’ll never manage to get you down the stairs.”
    She drags him back onto the mattress. Reinserts the tube. Stands there for a moment, not moving. Upsetand out of breath, she stares down at him. “It would be better if a stray bullet just finished you off, once and for all!” she says finally. She stands up abruptly to draw the curtains, and storms out of the room.
    The neighbor’s cough can be heard, ripping through the afternoon silence in the same way it racks her chest. She must be walking on the ruins of her home. Her slow, faltering steps wander through the garden, move