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given him a taste of the pleasures of the flesh, unknown to him before their marriage, and so she had
armed him as a man and been disarmed by nature as a woman. But her mother had been hard, and the
maid had not thought the trade a bad one, for her husband had given her a daughter, and this daughter
had given her companionship on her journey through life, and though her daughter too had passed
through the doors, she returned to visit, and each time she returned she told the maid to come with her,
and the maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant
in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by
the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.
The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman
when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after
she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her
figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in
part because she knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and so the end of being
seen was mostly a relief. Mostly, almost entirely, yet not entirely, for life had given the maid no space
for the luxuries of vanity, but even so, she was human.
The maid did not know her age, but she knew she was younger than the mistress of the house
where she worked, whose hair was still jet and whose posture was still erect and whose dresses
were still cut with the intention to arouse. The mistress seemed not to have aged at all in the many
years the maid had worked for her. From a distance she might be mistaken for a very young woman,
while the maid seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her occupation had been to
age, to exchange the magic of months for bank notes and food.
In the summer that Saeed and Nadia were parting into separate lives, the maid’s daughter came to
see the maid in that village where almost everyone had gone and they drank coffee under the evening
sky and looked out at the reddening dust rising in the south and daughter asked mother again to come
with her.
The maid looked at her daughter, who looked to her as though she had captured the best of her, and
of her husband too, for she could see him in her, and of her mother, whose voice came from her
daughter’s mouth, strong and low, but not her words, for her daughter’s words were utterly unlike her
mother’s had been, they were quick and nimble and new. The maid placed her hand on her daughter’s
hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it, the skin of her lips clinging for an instant to the skin of
her child, clinging even as she lowered her daughter’s hand, the shape of lips being mutable in this
way, and the maid smiled and shook her head.
One day she might go, she thought.
But not today.