Burned alive Read Free Page A

was the law of men. The girls and the women were certainly beaten every day in the other houses, too. You could hear the crying. It was not unusual to be beaten, to have your hair shaved off and be tied to a stable gate. There was no other way of living.
    My father, the all-powerful man, the king of the household, who owns, who decides, who strikes and tortures us! And he sits there calmly smoking his pipe in front of his house with his women, whom he treats worse than his livestock, locked up. A man takes a woman in order to have sons, to have her serve him as a slave like the daughters who will come, if she has the misfortune to produce any.
    I often thought when I looked at my brother, who was adored by the whole family including me: What more does he have? What makes him so special? He came out of the same belly as I did. And I had no answer. That was just the way it was. We girls had to serve him as we did my father, groveling and with head lowered. I can also picture the tea tray. You had to bring even this tea tray to the men of the family with your head down, looking only at your feet, with back bent, and in silence. You don’t speak. You only speak in answer to a question.

    At noon, it’s sugared rice, vegetables with chicken or mutton, and always bread. In my father’s house, the garden gives us almost everything we need for food. And we do everything ourselves. My father buys only sugar, salt, and tea. There is always food to eat; the family lacks nothing for meals. In the morning I make tea for the girls, I pour a little olive oil onto a plate, with olives on the side, and I heat the water in a basin on the coals of the bread oven. The dried green tea is in a sack of tan cloth on the floor in a corner of the kitchen. I plunge my hand into the sack, I take a handful and put it into the teapot, I add sugar, and I return to the garden for the hot basin. It’s heavy and I have trouble carrying it by its two handles, my back arched, so as not to burn myself. I come back into the kitchen and I pour the water into the teapot, slowly, over the tea and the sugar. I know that if I drop any on the floor, I’ll be beaten. So I pay attention. If I’m clumsy, I shouldn’t sweep it up, but rather collect it and put it back in the teapot. Then my sisters come to eat, but my father, mother, and brother are never with us. In this picture of tea drunk in the morning, sitting on the floor in the kitchen, I always see only sisters. I try to situate my age but it’s difficult. I do know that the eldest, Noura, isn’t married yet.
    As for outside work, there is a lot of fruit. Grapes grow along the terrace, where I pick them. There are oranges, bananas, and mainly the black and green figs. And a memory that I’ll never lose is of going out early in the mornings to pick the figs. They have opened a little with the evening coolness and they run like honey, the purest of sweets.
    The sheep are the really heavy work. Take them out, lead them to the fields, watch over them, bring them back, cut the wool that my father is going to take to the market to sell. I take a sheep by its hooves and get it to lie down on the ground so I can tie it up and I clip the wool with the big shears. They are so big for my small hands that I have trouble using my hands after only a few minutes. And I milk the ewes while sitting on the ground. I squeeze their hooves between my legs and I pull the milk, which is used to make cheese. When the milk cools off you drink it just like that, fat and nourishing.
    In general, I am incapable of organizing my memories by my age at the time, but I think my memory is about right, give or take one or two years. I am more certain of events around the time of Noura’s marriage when I was about fifteen.
    My sister Kainat is still at home, older by a year and not married. And then there is another sister after me whose name escapes me. I try to remember her name, but it doesn’t come to me. I have to call her something