I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops by Hanan al-Shaykh

it. Then I gave it to him and he took hold of it hesitantly. Bus came up, peeling a potato, and asked him for a thank-you kiss, but my brother ran over to me and we rushed out of the kitchen together.

Like a thirsty horse
I made for the water. But I wasn’t thirsty. I was on fire. I threw the water over the English boy and his friend, and fire blazed in my head and heart and between my legs.
    Images kept, on coming at me that, like an enraged horse, I tried to resist, defiantly tossing my head high, but each new picture flashing into my mind provoked me more and I shook my head frantically from side to side.
    Seeing Saad laid out on the floor, dumb and silent;Saad, whose mighty voice had welled up from his entrails. Now his wife seemed to have snatched his voice to lament for him, joined by her daughters, by his aunts and sisters, all beating their faces and rubbing ash and black soot onto their cheeks.
    The English pigeon devouring the remains of the couscous without a pause, immersing its whole beak and head in the grains while I smiled at it, saying, “You seem to like couscous from a packet. I suppose it’s because you’re an English pigeon. You’re used to things out of packets.”
    Aisha’s insistent words in the grain store, as she shook her gold earrings and the bangles on her wrist, urging me to stay at home, but I could only gaze at her shoes and marvel at how exactly they matched her handbag.
    Then I am standing in Aisha’s house with its Moroccan furniture and Moroccan smell, hardly able to believe that I’m in London.
    The letter with my name in English on the envelope, a Moroccan stamp, and a list of requests from my family for a white bridal veil for my sister, surgical stockings for my brother and a china dish for my mother.
    Offering the blond English boy—the one I was throwing water at now—half my lunch, and sitting there full of gratitude because he smiled, because he liked the taste of the piece of chicken dipped in cumin and saffron and he was smiling at me for the first time. I wanted his approvalbecause he was English. I wanted the approval of everyone from the bus conductor to the Pakistani shopkeeper, because he owned a shop and spoke English. Being lost in the Underground, tears running down my cheeks. Learning to decipher the names of the stations. Learning the letters by heart as if they were magic signs.
    I was throwing water at the English boy and his friend and they were yelling, “She’s crazy. Jesus Christ, she’s completely crazy.”
    He started up at my scream and I saw the purple blood on him and on me. Then he jumped to his feet as if he’d been bitten by a snake, shouting, “You’re a virgin! You’re still a virgin! I don’t understand you.”
    I didn’t chew my fingers with regret at giving him my virginity, furious at my weakness in lying down for him, and taking this boy in my arms just because he was English, a citizen of that great nation which had once ruled half the globe; nor did I blame myself for having clung to the notion that I had severed all links with my country just because I had traveled to London alone without any member of my family. Instead of striking my face and grieving aloud because my hymen was no longer intact, I wondered, Is it because he’s an Englishman that he doesn’t feel proud he’s taken my virginity, or is he frightened that now I’ll try to force him to marry me?
    I tried to tell him that I didn’t blame him for defloweringme but he wasn’t listening. He just went on saying in a shocked way, as if he had lost his mind, “You’re twenty-five, thirty years old? And you’re still a virgin? Jesus Christ, I don’t understand you. I just don’t understand at all.”
    He didn’t go to the bathroom to wash, he stayed in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him wipe himself with Kleenex tissues and drop them on the floor, indifferent to the smears of blood on them. He pulled on his trousers and went quickly over to