Burned alive Read Free

sheepskin. When it was very hot we slept on the terraces, lined up under the moon. We girls were next to each other in a corner. My parents and my brother slept in another part.
    The workday began early. At sunrise if not earlier, my father and mother would get up. When it was the time for harvesting the wheat, we would bring something to eat with us and everybody worked, my father, my mother, my sisters, and me, but not my brother. When it was time to gather the figs, we would also set out very early because they had to be picked one by one, without missing a single one. We put them into crates and my father would take them to market. It was a good half hour’s walk with the donkey to a small town, really very small, and whose name I’ve forgotten, if I ever knew it. Half of the market at the town’s entrance was reserved for produce and the merchants who were there to sell it. To shop for clothes, you had to take the bus to a larger town. But we girls never went there. My mother would go with my father. It was like this: She’d buy a dress with my father and then she’d give it to one of us. Whether you like it or not, you have to wear it. Neither my sisters nor I, nor even my mother, had anything to say about it. It was that dress or nothing.
    Girls wore long dresses with short sleeves made of a type of cotton, a very warm material that pricked your skin. They were gray or sometimes white, or very rarely black. The collar was high and tightly fastened. Over this we had to put a long-sleeved shirt or a vest, according to the season. It was sometimes so hot that it was stifling, but long sleeves were required. To show a bit of arm or leg—or worse, any skin below the neck—brought shame. Under the long dress we wore the saroual, which are long baggy pants that are gray or white. Worn beneath these was a pair of underpants that were cut big like shorts and that reached above the stomach. All my sisters dressed like this, too. Women usually did not wear shoes, except sometimes married women, so we were barefoot all the time.
    My mother was often dressed in black. My father wore a white saroual, plus a long shirt and the traditional red-and-white head scarf. My father! I can see him sitting under a tree on the ground in front of our house, his cane nearby. He is small and has a pale complexion with red splotches, a round head, and very mean blue eyes. One day he broke his leg in a fall from a horse and we girls were so pleased because it meant that he couldn’t run after us as fast as before to beat us with his belt.
    I see him very clearly, our father. I can never forget him. It is as if I carry a photograph of him in my head. He is sitting in front of his house like a king before his palace, with his red-and-white scarf that covers his bald red skull, he’s wearing his belt and his cane rests on the leg folded under him. He is small and mean. He takes off his belt and he shouts: “Why have the sheep come back by themselves?”
    He pulls me by the hair and he drags me on the ground into the kitchen. He strikes me while I kneel, he pulls on my braid as if he wants to pull it out, and he cuts it off with the big scissors used for shearing wool. I have hardly any hair left. I can cry, yell, or plead but I’ll get only more kicks.
    It really is my fault about the sheep. I had fallen asleep with my sister because it was so hot, and I let the sheep go off on their own. He hits so hard with his cane that sometimes I can’t lie down on either my left or my right side because I am in so much pain. With the belt or the cane, I think we were beaten every day. A day without a beating was unusual.
    I think maybe it was this time that he tied us up, Kainat and me, our hands behind our backs, our legs bound, and a scarf over our mouths to keep us from screaming. We stayed like that all night, tied to a gate in the big stable. We were with the animals, but were worse off than they were.
    This is what it was like in our village. It