Seven Veils of Seth by Ibrahim Al-Koni Page B

is brooding about something. When a woman’s eye shines with hatred, she is certainly hatching a plot to divest herself of that feeling. Man is different, because he can feel hatred without humoring it or finding relief through some plot.
    He carried her across the southern deserts on the back of a camel while she clasped in her arms the infant she had hoped would be a peg to tie him to the soil. Instead that child became a goad for the father and a red-hot poker. Each time the horizons begat new horizons and the desert extended into the distance to engender another desert, her despondency, misery, and depression increased. Yes, indeed, her cheeks flushed in an alarming way and the features of her face darkened more from despair than from any tanning by the southern, Qibli winds. She remained closeted in her despondency even during the evenings when – to prepare for departure during the following days – they halted their nomadic travels. She once asked him a question, the thrust of which he did not grasp until she had performed her heinous act: “I wonder whether children can find a place in the heart of a nomad?”
    He remembers telling her then: “No one loves his children as much as a nomad. A wanderer admittedly does not really choose to bring children into his world, but he loves his children when they arrive in this world much more than those idiots who pride themselves on their love of the earth.”
    She smiled slyly that night, but he paid no attention to her crafty look, because he roamed around in the obscurity of the night’s desert, which was bathed in moonlight. He trailed after the stillness far away to borrow prophetic maxims from unexplored regions of the spirit world. He did not realize that when hatred gains the upper hand, it inevitably seeks a victim, sooner rather than later.
    The next morning she placed before him their son, wrapped in swaddling clothes, eyes protruding, blue-cheeked, his delicate neck still showing the imprint of her fingers. In an unfamiliar voice, she said, “I guessed that the nomad who did not choose to beget a child would never think of burying it in the ground.”

3 The Goddess
    He deserted her.
    He left her in the wilderness and bolted, roaming through the wastelands. Whenever he remembered what she had done, he collapsed and vomited till he almost threw up his guts, which had gone without food for days. His need for food led him to consume grass and drink from mud puddles. Although he had resolved he would never return to her, a disruptive whispering crept into his breast, urging him to go back. It was an odd kind of whisper; not one he could label. Only after he had groveled in his desert for several more days was he able to assign to it that strangest of all titles: compassion, alias mercy or the duty that binds the heart of anyone who has one. So he went back.
    He returned to find her kneeling like some evil spirit at the tent’s entrance. She stared at him with the antipathy of a sorceress and the eye of a she-owl but said nothing. He sensed that it had been a mistake to return but realized as well that duty’s call inevitably leads to pain, even though it relieves the heart. Since her presence near him felt like a life-threatening lasso around his neck, he decided to liberate himself.
    One day he approached her and began: “Do you remember any family member to whom I can take you?”
    She replied gruffly, “I have no family. You know that.”
    â€œThere’s not some distant relation somewhere?”
    When she shook her head no, he felt the lasso tightening but did not despair. “Tell me what I should do with you.”
    â€œJust do what any man who takes responsibility for a woman does: he settles down with her on the land.”
    â€œA nomad has no fixed abode . . . as you know.”
    â€œBut I’m not a nomad. I’m a woman. I’m a female. I’m a mother. I can’t live if I