The Orange Grove Read Free Page A

bedroom and she might have existed asa star that shone for worlds unknown. Gazing at the sky, Tamara wondered if the moon had known the desire for death, to disappear from the face of night and leave men orphans of the light. Its weak light borrowed from the sun’s.
    Beneath the starry sky, Tamara didn’t fear talking to God. She felt as if she knew Him better than did her husband. Her words were lost in the sound of water in the stream. Yet she still hoped that they rose up to Him.
    When the men who’d come in the jeep left their house, Zahed had insisted on giving them oranges and asked his wife to help him fill two big baskets. She’d refused. That night Tamara had spent longer than usual on the bench. She’d dared not utter the words that were burning her tongue. This time, too, her prayer remained silent:
    â€œYour name is great, my heart too small to contain it entirely. What would You do with the prayer of a woman like me? My lips scarcely touch the shadow of Your first syllable. But they say that Your heart is greater than Your name. Your heart, no matter its size, is great enough that a woman can hear it in her own. That’swhat they say when talking about You and they speak only the truth. But why must one live in a country where time cannot do its work? The paint hasn’t had time to peel nor the curtains to turn yellow, the plates haven’t had time to chip. Things never serve their time, the living are always slower than the dead. Our men age faster than their wives. They dry like tobacco leaves. It’s hatred that keeps their bones in place. Without hatred they would collapse and never get up again. The wind would make them disappear. All that would remain is the moaning of their wives in the night. Listen to me, I have two sons. One is the hand, the other the fist. One takes, the other gives. One day it’s the one, another day the other. I beg you, don’t take them both from me.”
    That was Tamara’s prayer the night she refused to fill the two baskets with oranges.
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    After the village school was destroyed by bombs, Tamara turned herself into a teacher. Every morning she sat the two boys down in the kitchen next to the fat pots with blackened necks, and took great pleasure in her new role. There was talk of relocating the school, but no one in the village could agree on where. For months, then, families carried on as best they could. Amed and Aziz didn’t complain. They liked being there in the fragrant kitchen, where bouquets of fresh mint hung from the ceiling along with strings of garlic. They even made progress. Amed’s writing improved, and Aziz, despite his hospitalization, took to his multiplication tables with greater confidence.
    As the boys were out of books, one morning Tamara thought to make notebooks out ofleftover wrapping paper, and they, little kitchen scribblers, blackened the creased pages of these odd volumes with their stories. The boys took to the game right away. Amed even invented a character who embarked on impossible adventures. He explored distant planets, dug tunnels in the desert, struck down undersea creatures. Amed called him Dôdi, and endowed him with two mouths, one very little and one very big. Dôdi used his little mouth to communicate with insects and microbes. He used his big mouth to strike fear into the monsters he battled. But Dôdi sometimes spoke with his two mouths at the same time. Then the words he pronounced were comically deformed, creating new words and jumbled sentences that made the little apprentice writers laugh. Tamara took enormous pleasure in this. But after the night of the bombing and the death of their grandparents, those makeshift notebooks told only sad and cruel stories. And Dôdi went silent.
    A week after the visit of the men in the jeep, the distant voice of Zahed came to Amed and Aziz in the kitchen, where they were working, without much enthusiasm, at theirnotebooks. He was