A summer rain, a softening rain, an edge-dissolving rain, it gathers in gutters, accelerates through alleys, surges down into the sea. A coming-going-coming rain, it thunders, murmurs, thunders on the stone and stucco of the big house on the hill. It fills Naeema, in the kitchen of the big house, with a flush of courage as she nibbles on her cookie, crumbs collecting on the surface of her tea, a coming-going-coming courage, which thunders, murmurs, thunders at the back wall of her breastbone.  It fills the emptiness of Hasna, stretched beneath her silken bedclothes in the master bedroom, with a sloshing to-and-fro, her body adrift on the mattress, his face above hers.  It fills Saleem, standing woodenly above her, gazing down at the blankness to which he is married, with a torrentiality of echoes, images, desires, fears: his own voice, repeating the pledge to her—“In sickness and in health”—and hers, repeating it to him above the music and the cheers, and Naeema’s, that still, small sweetness rising from the void, fluttering to him like a bird across the vastness of his study and alighting on his heart that afternoon, and the words of her father, that stiff and stilted Arabic of his, a staccato as rough as the mountains, still echoing even after twenty-four years, explaining that he had no money, that he’d soon have to take his daughter to the souk to find a family who would have her as a maid.  Saleem and Hasna were newlyweds then, he alert with ambition, she swelling with the cells that would become Jamal. They were on holiday. Everything was but a rosy recollection in the making, even the snow that closed the roads and trapped them there, near Timahdite. There were just five houses near the mountain road, mudbrick hovels really, and from one of them a wizened Berber man emerged and hastened toward them, gesturing for them to roll down a window: “So cold out here, you freeze. Come inside. Come! My wife, she makes the food.”  The wife and children spoke no Arabic at all. They sat across from Hasna and Saleem, lined up on the divan like dolls, swaying as if in a summer breeze—or maybe it was the firelight that made them seem to sway. Their faces were carousels of sullenness and smiles, sullenness and smiles.  On the road back to Tangier the following afternoon, Naeema, in the backseat, squirmed and giggled, rocked and wriggled, kicked her feet and hugged herself with skinny arms. She bleated like a sheep. She whined like an insect. She brayed like a donkey. She imitated the sounds of a tractor. She reigned in her own little world: no fear.  Now those memories jostle in Saleem’s mind with more recent ones: Hasna, peering at her laptop, undone by the simplicity of a calendar invitation; Hasna, gazing into a bowl of ceviche as if the chunks of meat are stones; Hasna, standing by the bedside, naked and confused, as he approaches with her dressing gown. She’s forty-five. He’s forty-one. Her mother has disowned her: the dementia is a curse from God. Jamal is in America. Why not? Didn’t they spend two months in San Francisco, twenty-three years earlier, so that he could have an American passport?  It’s just the two of them in the old house on the hill, the last remaining faithful ones: Naeema and Saleem.  There is no cunning in Naeema’s heart, but the fact remains that she is thirty-two, with no husband or fiancé, not even suitors, no skills or degrees, no work experience whatsoever besides what she’s acquired here, and that has not included cooking, for Saleem and Hasna never really saw her as a servant, rather as a daughter, and never assigned her any chores apart from caring for Jamal. She barely remembers anything at all about the mudbrick hut in which she spent her first eight years, but the corridors of this house spread like tree roots through her mind, branching, stretching, doubling back indefinitely, still as endless as they seemed to her when she was first released into them, allowed to hurtle like a wild animal through her new domain. Smells and sounds excited her. Everything she thought she knew about the world was blown open by the sea. As if through a hairline fissure, Arabic leaked into her mind. Saleem and Hasna never punished her for all the nonsense that she babbled, just went on quietly ignoring her until, eventually, the right words came.  Now Hasna’s mind is webbed with fissures, through which all the words she ever knew have leaked away. Into the vacancy left by Jamal, she has flowed. She is the second child that she never had. Saleem still wants her, but he cannot reconcile what he wants with what there is. Naeema’s proposition is suggestive of those soothingly mechanical properties common to things made up of cogs and gears—an intricate system fitted together so that its components may, to preserve its functioning even after damage, spontaneously rearrange themselves; and yet, beneath that quality, there lies another, a vestige of the alchemical capacity for transmutation, from sheep to insect to donkey to tractor, that was Naeema’s bread and butter as a child. Above all, she is anxious to be a solution. To please.  She hears the creak of the bedroom door.  There, at the far end of the hall, she sees him, looking hungry, weary, dazed.  With crumbs still clinging to her lips, she rises. Her djellaba is the color of foam on the sea.  For the duration, tossed and tumbled on the swells, it’s not so much the present that she’s tasting, but the future, with its promise of a familiar life remade anew. The most important difference will be that Jamal is gone.  But when the morning comes, when the watery sun creeps through the rain-streaked glass and finds Naeema in her own bed, not in Hasna’s, she discovers that Jamal is not the only one who’s gone.  Moving numbly, nakedly, through the empty rooms, she discovers that she has no history of employment—for who now will recommend her? She discovers—rediscovers—that she is a spinster, uneducated, unskilled, left alone with the only task of which she is capable: the care of the demented woman in the old house on the hill.  She discovers that she’s nothing but a dirty Berber from the mountains: what she’s been from the beginning, what she will be till the end. That for all her transmutations, she hasn’t managed to make herself into a human being.  And she discovers, finally, seated once more at the table, gazing stupidly down into a cup of day-old tea, a concavity silky with cookie-crumb sediments, that she could’ve been a daughter. That she almost was.

 END