Fatima Meskina — Part 1

* 1*

She lives by herself in rue Zerqtouni. The rue is a packed mud trail lined with shops, winding through the oldest part of the mountain village of Azrou. It isn’t quite wide enough for a car to pass, but it accommodates most other forms of local transport several abreast, including pushcarts, donkeys, and mopeds. From dawn to dark the street is a parade of everyday Moroccan life, offering along its quarter-mile length every product and service that can be found in the town.

Up a little higher, at the second-story level, windows appear intermittently in the uneven but unbroken façade of shop buildings. Here the noise and dust of the street rise up and homogenize, becoming one with the air that filters into the cheaply-let upper rooms and apartments on either side of the street. Fatima’s house is in one of these places, over a cobbler’s shop, next to a barber. Her green, munchkin-sized street door opens inward onto a narrow mud stairway, eroding behind the wooden treads from years of service. At the bottom of the stairs, just inside the door, is a mud plug with a handle in it, wrapped around with cellophane and fitted into the hole of the open sewer that serves as a toilet. The top of the stairs, without a landing, lets onto two rooms: ahead, the storeroom, a holding place for things she may have to sell in a cash crisis; and on the left, the living room of four square meters, at the center of which is a wooden pole holding up the roof. The floor and walls are of mud. A window faces onto the street, “my television” she calls it, because of the ever-changing flow of life outside.

I think of Fatima in her house as I have seen her there on many mornings, perhaps as she is there even this morning, for nothing much happens to upset the rhythm of her life. She squats on a folded blanket in the corner by the window, tending the knee-high woodstove just in front of her. It’s quiet in the house and a little dim, but outside it’s bright and sunny, which is typical of Azrou, and noisy with the clatter of morning. Fatima hasn’t dressed yet but her teeth are in and she has wrapped a scarf around her long black braids, so that none of her hair shows except for little black wisps at the temples; they’re streaked with white or flaming orange, depending on how recently she has applied henna. Her face is still soft-looking from sleep. Its grayish-olive color is merely background for her prominent tattoo: a dark blue infusion of symmetrical cross-hatchings, starting at her chin and going up over her nose, culminating in a windmill-like emblem between her brows. It makes you think of Don Quixote, and appropriately so, since she is as willing as he to put all stock into the romance of the moment. She got the tattoo as a girl so that when she married and left home, her tribal origins would still be evident. The marriage plans went awry, but the tattoo remains.

Boiled coffee simmers quietly on top of the woodstove. On the burner of a portable gas bottle she heats a small saucepan of milk, and as it starts to boil she lifts it off the flame and pours it into her glass. “Bismillah,” she says, in God’s name, quickly, before the milk hits the glass, to ward off the apparitional djinns who lurk everywhere, and particularly where liquids move: drains, pots, taps, baths.

The coffee, heavily milked and sugared, is one item in her three-part breakfast. The other two are bread, sometimes buttered and smeared with apricot preserves, and her pipe. She is a kif smoker. Although her language doesn’t have the word, we would call her an addict, a pothead. She doesn’t go more than a waking hour or two without smoking, and often she has one pipeful after another. She has a special pocket sown onto her floral print bloomers to hold her pipe and her kif pouch; they go wherever she goes. “Where is my wife?” she’s likely to say irritably, whenever she’s lost track of her smoking kit.

I picture her sitting alone, but she isn’t often that way at breakfast. What she has to eat is freely shared among her friends, and among them, she usually has more to share than they have. As often as not in the morning her front door is open, as wide as it will go before it bumps into the bottom step, and someone or two will stop by and shout up: “Fatima!”

“Who is it?” she says, with impatience and scorn, for one of her favorite conceits is to seem put upon by too many visitors. But whoever answers in a familiar voice — one of her widow friends, the children of the cobbler downstairs, the bath guardian’s wife — she tells them to climb up. There is no room for chairs, so each newcomer, at the most, gets a little stool to sit on, or a wooden block to support her behind while squatting. Fatima is a squatter herself, it’s by far the preferred posture for socializing in her small, busy house.

Her guests, unless they are Americans, are often treated indifferently, but they don’t seem to mind; they know it’s only a game, and I suspect one that’s played only when Americans are present. She wants to assure us Americans that we are her real friends, compared with which her Moroccan connections are merely hangers-on. She knows and they know that if it weren’t for the Americans, she would be depending on these hangers-on. But for now there are Americans and this makes her house a fairly happy combination of social center and distribution point for charity.

She hasn’t lived in the house for many of her 60 years and she only rents it, but modest as it is, it represents a kind of stability and independence for her: though not the only woman in her neighborhood who lives alone, she’s probably the only one of them who doesn’t have to support herself by telling fortunes or selling sex. There was a time when she worked as a prostitute, and other times when she was a housewife, a field worker, and a cook. Now she’s at comparative leisure as she should be for her age, working only two or three days a week for the Americans.

She’s one of a select and peculiar group of professional third world women, the Peace Corps maids, and it is in this connection that I came to know her. If our paths had crossed in some other way she would have struck me as she strikes many visitors to Morocco, a strange and slightly unnerving bit of local color, someone you probably would cross the street in order to avoid meeting, and later report on as an old woman who didn’t cover up and looked you straight in the eye. Instead of that, she became my friend, teacher and guide for the three years that I saw her regularly, and today she is never long in drifting quietly into my mind whenever someone says “Morocco.”

I am only one of many who could tell her story. She started working for her first Peace Corps volunteer eight years ago, and like houses, furniture, advice or anything else serviceable enough to pass on to the next volunteer, she has been handed down from one to another. It has now been 14 years by her reckoning, because some years there have been more than one volunteer in town and she counts each year for each volunteer separately. The whole group of us form a kind of scattered family now. She corresponds with us. She’s never written a letter herself because she doesn’t know how to write, and though she speaks three languages — Berber, Arabic and French — her correspondence is carried on in a fourth, English, through her American translator-scribes. We have all translated letters to her and written them for her, and from this we have come to know about each another. Though some of us have never met, we’re all united through the resident of rue Zerqtouni.

I first met Fatima in the fifth year of her service — it was the ninth year by her reckoning. She didn’t work for me, but for my friend and fellow volunteer Mary. I had only just met Mary, and as is often the case in the Peace Corps, the initial basis of our friendship was geography. I was posted to El Hajeb, at the northernmost rise of the Middle-Atlas mountains, just where they decline to the Saïs Plain. Mary was my closest neighbor, half an hour south in the middle of the mountains in Azrou. Fatima was already a legend by this time, and so I had heard of her before we actually met: she was variously called Mary’s new maid, the maid in Azrou, Azrou Fatima. Everyone described her as a real character, meaning it in the usual American sense of someone generally worthy of the attention they call to themselves. Thus, on my first visit to Azrou, I was expecting to be impressed. I was presented to her in the dazzlingly clean front room of Mary’s villa, which Fatima herself was just then mopping up, scooting around the floor on her hands and knees with the agility of a young girl.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Buzz.”

“Baz? Baz! el-Baz! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

At this, my introduction, Fatima began to laugh hysterically, flashing her gold dentures, pointing at me, and dancing around like a pixie. It seemed my name, or her pronunciation of it, had some meaning in Arabic or Berber that she found irresistibly funny. Mary was smiling politely. I was not.

“Tell him,” she said to Mary, when she was calm enough to speak again, “that his name is the name of a bird. It’s a great name. I never met a person with that name.”

This was a tarnishment to my shiny new-volunteer patina, that she would address a remark to someone else for translating that I could understand perfectly well myself. At that moment I thought myself fortunate that she wasn’t my maid. She seemed impertinent.

When Mary left us alone for a minute the idea was confirmed. She began firing off questions at me, speaking with exaggerated simplicity when she could see my comprehension was failing, correcting my pronunciation of the gutturals with equal exaggeration in prolonged croaking and rasping sounds. I thought her vulgar and crude. I marked her immediately as something closer to the Moroccan experience than I was interested in at the moment, and I was sure I couldn’t have stood being around her much.

“You, Hajbi,” she would call out to me, using this irritating epithet that I didn’t understand (it only meant from El Hajeb, but it sounded derisive when she said it). “Say something. You haven’t said anything.”

Nearly everything she did, according to my perspective at the time, bothered me. She demanded participation in her conversations, and she would find out what you thought, felt, or preferred, by whatever means were necessary. This usually took the form of relentless questioning or good-natured aping of your reticence. I loathed it, because it completely undermined my purpose in going to Azrou in those early days: to escape the Peace Corps Experience that I had allegedly come to Morocco to enjoy, to avoid speaking Arabic, to flop out of the fishbowl of El Hajeb, where I was the only resident foreigner. Azrou offered all this inside the walls of the crumbling villa that Mary rented. The house was a barrier between me and the Morocco I saw quite enough of in my own town, but when Fatima was in the house it was as if I’d forgotten to shut the door and something sticky and alien had followed me in. I dreaded being left alone with her, knowing that as soon as I was, the questioning would begin.

“Tell me something about El Hajeb,” she would demand.

“It’s nice, I like it.”

“What do you like about it?”

“The people are nice.”

“How nice? People are nice everywhere. What are they like?”

And so on, until I managed to toss out some bait that she could sink her teeth into, for she was only fishing really, for a story. Her life, the lives of everyone she knows, the whole of life is for her anecdotal. If she can’t make you tell her a story, she’ll tell one herself, only she’ll probably do it a lot better. She’s a performer, a rhapsodist in a tradition that was around long before stories were written down. She has a different voice and a different face for every character in her stories. No emotion is more than a split second away from perfect expression through a look, gesture or sound, and without using lights, special effects or props, she can keep an audience hanging on every word for hours. Much later I came to appreciate her for the accomplished artist she is. In the beginning, however, being her audience was torture, because indifference or incomprehension was not permitted.

Typically, she would tell a story of which I could understand at best the general subject. She would stop periodically to demand my concurrence or opinion on a particular point, the nature of which would always escape me, so I would offer some weak formula like “of course” or “you’re perfectly right” to appease her. Or so I thought.

“No, no, no, you haven’t understood what I told you. You haven’t understood anything. Don’t sit there nodding your head when you don’t understand. Now tell me what parts you really heard.”

Then she would extract a painful, halting narrative from me, correcting every misunderstanding with an impromptu vocabulary lesson and drill.

“Kaif waloo,” she called my Arabic, Like nothing, as she popped the ash from her pipe into her hand and tossed it onto the floor, in a sort of tangible metaphor of my uselessness. “Now tell me the new words you learned, so you’ll remember them.”

I grudgingly repeated the new words she had showed me, but I did learn them. And I had to admit to myself that she was an inspired teacher. She had the agility of a stick figure and could become the meaning of any word, using props at hand, or if there were none, pull them convincingly out of the air. I don’t think I ever forgot a word she taught me because the lessons always returned so vividly to mind.

I got used to her, the way you get used to a noisy neighbor, or a nosy coworker. Slowly I came to see her as a feature of the crumbling villa, rather than an invader of it. This was the sensible course, and the only one: she was always at Mary’s at some point during my visits, always busy: taking the ashes out of the woodstoves, mopping, hanging out the wash, splitting kindling. She chattered incessantly while she worked and she expected response from whoever was in earshot. If it wasn’t Mary, it was me, and before too long, talking to her became easier than trying to ignore her.

I was visiting once early on, in November perhaps, just as the weather was turning cold. I had had a trying day, and normally I wouldn’t have travelled all the way to Azrou, just for an afternoon, except that I wanted only to commiserate, in my own language, as only ex-patriates can do, about the frustrations of living where we found ourselves. Mary was still at school when I arrived at the house but Fatima was in, in the midst of cleaning. I reclined on a banquette in the cold front room and opened a book, with every intention of ignoring her. She kept up her work, which took her to all parts of the house, and talked to me the whole time, shouting when necessary to be heard, expecting me to shout answers back. It was such a strain to understand what she was saying. I answered in colorless monosyllables that I hoped would discourage her and tried to focus on my reading.

After several minutes at these cross purposes, she came into the front room and began to build a fire in the woodstove. At this close range it was harder to ignore her, but I tried keeping my nose in my book. After a minute of lively talk that I wasn’t following, she changed her tone and said abruptly: “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Look. I’ll tell you what you’re problem is. You don’t know why you came here.”

“What?”

“Look! Stand up!” she demanded, taking my arm and directing me to a map of the world that hung on the wall above the banquette.

“You know what this is? The world.” She made a gesture of its enormousness.

Feeling highly put upon, I nevertheless tried to look expressionless.

“And where are we? We are in Morocco. Here we are, in the middle.” She fingered Morocco on the map, a Mercator projection that indeed put Morocco in about the middle of things. It occurred to me that she really believed this, she probably had no notion of the earth’s being spherical, and didn’t need one.

“And you,” she barked. “Where are you from?”

I felt horribly patronized. Here she was using almost the very first sentence I had ever learned in Arabic, as if this were as much as I could understand. But the look on her face said I couldn’t evade the question.

“From America.”

“Where’s America? Show me.”

I showed her.

“O.K., look. You came from far away. Really far, all the way across this big water here,” she said, tracing her brown, wrinkled finger slowly across the Atlantic, “and now, what? Where are you now? Did you come here to read books in English? To visit American girls? What about us? Moroccans. I am Moroccan. We say to you, welcome. Welcome to our country. You come a long way to help people in our country, to teach our children at the school. What are we going to say to you, get lost? Go home? God prevent it! I say to you welcome. And you, if you’re going to live here, you have to see what we’re like, how Moroccans are. How do we think? What’s in our heads? If you don’t want to know, why come all this way? Try to talk to people. So what if the language is hard, you have to try. Ten years I work for the Americans, and my English is nothing — excuse me, donkey, ohmygod, thankyou — you are here six months and you know lots of Arabic. You’re smart. Work at it. Try.”

I took her advice, and from this point we began to warm up to each other. She moderated her attacks on my Arabic, which had only been intended to get a rise out of me, anyway. I began to listen to her with more attention to what she was saying than to how much it was annoying me, and this made all the difference in our communication: she became someone I wanted to understand. I began to listen for meanings beyond just what was in her words, to figure out what her meanings were, who she was, how she got to be that.

She struck me as being unhappy. It became apparent once I started paying attention to her that she groused all the time and zeroed in on the downsides of every situation that came her way. There was a streak of meanness in her that came out, in her worst moods, as slanderous putdowns of whoever had most recently crossed her, and if she had anything good to say, it was about someone who had gone, someone she had lost.

She seemed to see herself at the end of a Golden Age. She talked constantly of the volunteers of the past, “my little girls,” she called them, and she told how well they spoke Arabic, how much the Moroccans loved them, and about their many parties, adventures, expeditions. There were four or five former volunteers by this time, all coincidentally girls, and most of them part of a two- or three-girl “team” that had worked in Azrou at the same time.

I heard some tales about these other girls from Fatima herself, but also many of them from Mary. Fatima was a burden to her, hanging around the house too much and plaguing her with her shortcomings by constant reference to these paragons of the past.

Mary repeated the stories that Fatima had told her, but between us their meanings were different, for we had the dubious tool of popular psychological analysis with which to examine Fatima’s stories, and try to understand what made her tick. It wasn’t the accomplishments of the earlier girls that we found interesting, but rather, why Fatima touted them so much in front of us and compared Mary so unfavorably to them.

We speculated that the real reason for her discontent was nothing about Mary, but the fact that there was only Mary. For the first time in several years — really since the first American Fatima had worked for — Mary was the only volunteer in Azrou. Fatima’s income was reduced, and along with it, the income of her circle; it included at various times two old widows, a divorcée, a prostitute, some other kif addicts like herself, and a family, the head of which tended a public oven. If her stories could be believed, Fatima helped them all out financially and exercised tremendous influence over them. So our theory was that she was suffering a kind of deflation, partly in her income, but mostly in her importance. She derived a lot of prestige from working for the Americans, and she seemed to thrive on the independence and deference from others that her relative wealth created. Now with less money to spread around, and less visibility with the Americans, she had come down a notch and wasn’t as sought after.

If her influence in her circle was diminished at all, however, it wasn’t apparent to me, since I hadn’t seen her in action before Mary’s time. I was struck by her ability to command just about any sort of behavior she wanted from anyone she knew. All her friends deferred to her: whatever she suggested or told them to do, they did. She had a bit more patience with Mary and me, but if either of us was going about something in the wrong way, she stepped in and set us straight. We didn’t think of challenging her. She simply had the kind of voice that had to be obeyed.

“What are you up to?” she said to us once on finding us in the kitchen, obviously in the midst of making a meal.

“Cooking.”

“We’re invited to an-nhar lli ma-andu khu, they’ve already cooked a big meal. Leave this till later. Come on.”

And off we went, knowing resistance would fail. An-nhar lli ma-andu khu was the mul-furan, the public oven tender. He was better known as Sidi Hamid, or Figuigi, as he was from Figuig. His other name, “an-nhar lli ma-andu khu,” the day that has no brother, came from one of the earlier Americans. He sat repeatedly and politely through Fatima’s long, meandering anecdote, complete with impersonations, that explained how he had got this ridiculous nickname.

Sidi Hamid and his family lived two blocks off rue Zerqtouni in a simple upstairs apartment, three rooms bigger than Fatima’s but as simply furnished, not particularly clean, and without running water. The floors were tiled but pockmarked and broken up. The walls were white stucco, cracked, chipped and grime coated. There were many children — they never all seemed to be present at one time, but at different times there seemed to be six or seven distinct shapes and faces.

At one point our hosts had left Fatima, Mary and I alone in their parlor while most of them shrieked at each other in another room not far off.

“Fatima,” I said, “maybe we shouldn’t come over here to eat with them, they are so many and it must be hard for them to feed extra people.”

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to you,” she told us, “you’re always welcome at their house, they insisted that you come.” We learned later that Fatima bought a lot of their food, and that they were indeed happy to have us there, for our company as well as for the fact that Fatima bought them meat when we were to have meals with them.

Sidi Hamid was a kif addict like Fatima. He rarely stirred from a low banquette against the front room wall, smoking, talking with Fatima, never removing his stocking cap that probably covered a bald head. He didn’t seem to take much notice of his children, unless they were misbehaving severely or he was in a foul mood; then he beat them. The house was bedlam, with several voices always competing at once and a big, dimly functional TV set supplying decibels at rare moments when the voices stopped.

Being poor, Berber, and friends of Fatima’s, the family was much more relaxed than many. Thus, the mother, Rabha, a big black Saharan woman, conducted domestic operations not from some remote room of the house but from a cushion on the floor of the parlor where everyone else sat. She effected the serving of meals and tea adequately with gestures and looks to her eldest daughters, but otherwise her voice was usually just one in the clamor, lost despite its tone of authority.

Only Fatima brought any order to the house. She immediately commanded the attention of anyone she spoke to. She knew all their names, and also nicknames that could endear or embarrass them; merely being addressed by her made the children straighten up and sit still. They always did her bidding, sometimes with an air of bewilderment, as if they were performing some action utterly foreign to them. Fatima never failed to bless them for the obedience she received, and upbraid their parents for not being better disciplinarians. When we walked home with her after visiting them, she would explain things she had said and done there, and how they fit into her plan to raise the family up to what she thought was a respectable standard.

“I am their parents,” she said. “I know about growing up without parents because I did, and it’s not good. Sidi Hamid and Rabha are too soft. I have to be strict with them.”

* 2 *

Over the course of that first year I saw Fatima nine or ten times. As my Arabic improved so did our relations. I still couldn’t carry on a normal conversation with her, and when I pretended to be doing so she always caught me. But she saw that I was trying. More importantly, perhaps, she saw that I was trying to please her, and she liked me for that.

As she and Mary got more used to each other, both their spirits improved, and increasingly neither of them needed so much to borrow my ear to talk about the other. As Mary became less of a preoccupation with Fatima she was freed up to discuss the one subject that was even more of an obsession with her: herself. She never tired of telling stories in which she was herself the central figure, and no one who could understand her could tire of hearing them, she performed them so well. In this way, through the year, I picked up bits and pieces of her past.

She would tell of her childhood in the Middle Atlas mountains, of learning Arabic in the town of Midelt (for her native tongue is Tamazight, the Berber dialect of the Middle Atlas). She talked about the deaths of her parents when she was a child and her long history of labor. She has never been to school. She has worked since she was eight years old, supporting her brothers and sisters till they were grown, or dead, and supporting herself, except during brief excursions into matrimony.

Most of these were rather like explosions; quickly over, but leaving destruction in their wake. She’s had five husbands, who lasted from a few days to a couple of years. They all divorced or abandoned her, and she relates hilarious tales that make it plain why they left. She is indomitable, and no self-respecting Moroccan man would keep her for a wife. Her interpretation of why the marriages didn’t work is a little different from the one I assumed, however. I asked her once why she never stayed with any of them, or why they always left her.

“Do you know why?”she said. “Ana hua ar-rajl.”I am a man. The sentence doesn’t translate well, perhaps it’s closer to I am what a man is. I don’t know what it meant to her, but she said it with dead seriousness.

“In a marriage there can be only one man, and none of the ones that married me was a real man. I was better than them, and they couldn’t stand it. I grew up like a boy, working to help my family. I learned how to take care of myself. What do I get for that, a chance to be under some man’s foot?” Here she went through a few frightened housewife gestures: “‘Yessir!’ ‘Whatever you want, sir!’ ‘Of course, sir!’ Impossible. For me, I could never do that, but that’s what they wanted.”

Though many years have passed since the last husband said good-bye, she hasn’t changed her stance, and that was clear to us whenever we were with her.

Once in that year the three of us went on a trip together — to Midelt, at Aid El Kbir, the major Islamic feast. It was a three-day school holiday with a weekend added and the whole country was in motion, for at no other time of year is it more important for everyone to be with family. I wanted to visit some other volunteers who lived in Midelt and Fatima was going to visit her only blood relatives — some uncles, cousins and nieces — with Mary a bit reluctantly in tow. We boarded an overbooked bus in Azrou for the three-hour ride through the mountains, having got tickets only because Fatima knew the agent. We found seats only after she badgered soldiers on the bus to stand so we could sit.

When we arrived in Midelt she asked if I would spend one evening of the three-day feast with her family. Though I would have preferred to spend the holiday all-American, suffering then, as I often was in my first year, from Moroccanitis, I accepted, knowing there could be no refusal, but also wanting to show my gratitude for her help in getting us there.

The affair at her uncle’s was monotonous as only affairs in the most conservative Moroccan tradition can be for Westerners. Men and women, about ten of each, sat in separate rooms on low banquettes that lined the walls. The men, of course, were in the larger, more amply furnished of the two rooms, and the women were all packed together in a small narrow room on mattresses that sat on the floor. There was no moving about, as this would have implied that you found something lacking about the place you had originally been seated. In the old-fashioned, humble quarter of society that Fatima’s uncle inhabited, the pinnacle of holiday hospitality was to see that no one went for a moment without some consumable, whatever was then being passed around.

For the first three hours, it was only tea and cookies. Yet these were something of a relief, for the tedium of sitting was softened a bit when sad-faced serving girls whisked in, bearing more trays of starchy cookies, or fresh bundles of mint for the one occupied person in the room, the aged, white-turbanned man making tea. I enjoyed the mixed blessing of being left completely alone. None of the men took much interest in me once they saw how badly I spoke Arabic; and anyway most of them were Berbers and preferred speaking their own tongue among themselves. I could see Mary occasionally through the archway into the other room and she was faring worse. The women, wrapped up in their holiday finery, could not leave her alone, and pelted her with questions about her personal life, constantly tittering and feeling her hair and limbs.

Some millennia later the main event began, with the presentation of a steaming platter of unadorned mutton: one purpose of Aid El Kbir, for many, seems to be making up for the missed consumption of meat, forgone throughout the rest of the year for lack of money. The traditional ram had been slaughtered the morning before for the occasion. Eating of it usually began from the inside out and so by now the parts that we normally think of as meat were appearing: ribs, loins, legs. The serving girls, one on each side, placed the huge platter of flesh gently on the table in the men’s room: the women would get it after we had picked it over.

All of us in the room gathered around the low table in one corner. Bread was broken and somberly passed around, and God’s name was invoked. Then the serious eating began, with right hands diving into the platter to rip off pieces of flesh. Fatima rescued Mary and the two of them came in to eat with us, forcing two more places around the table, to the opprobrium of the elders.

“We’re not going to wait until you’re through,” Fatima said to a few enquiring or abashed faces, “it will be cold by then. You can treat your wives like that, but is it any way to treat guests?”

This was typical of her flouting of etiquette. She made such scenes fairly often, especially when Americans were present, because she knew it amused us, and that it would redound to her reputation among us. The Moroccans were never indifferent to her performances; the women were often secretly admiring, the men openly contemptful of her brashness. She enjoyed both forms of notice, but beyond the theatrical aspects of her behavior there was a seriousness and honesty that came from Fatima’s heart, and that was the thing that made us love and respect her; it was also the source of most of the happiness, and most of the pain in her life. In a society whose every heartbeat is ruled by tradition and precedent, she very consistently does what she wants, rather than what’s expected of her, whatever the cost. It’s not a trait that has won her many fans in the Moroccan mainstream, but it’s her calling card with Americans.

To judge by her reports, she got off the track of female passivity early on. Most women her age were married by arrangement of their parents when they were teenagers. But her parents were dead, and her labor was more useful to the family economy than a not very profitable marriage would have been. So she became the sort of girl no one wanted to marry. Having children by one of the men who did eventually marry her might also have given her a ticket into a more conventional role, but she never had any. Whether because of her working, or for some other reason, I never asked her. Someone said once that she’d had a hysterectomy, or had “faulty plumbing.” Whatever her situation, she never made it to the one respectable place that Moroccan culture reserves for a woman: the docile wife of a good provider and the mother of his children.

Failure to maintain a stable marriage is the fatal undoing of many Moroccan women. Fatima’s inability — or refusal — to function as a homemaker has also been the shaping force in her life. She has tried out, at different times, the various ready-made roles available to an unmarried woman — servant, beggar, whore — but none of them fit her. So she got into the habit of refusing; refusing to behave as she was expected to, but also refusing to be classified with the stigma of an unmarried woman. By the time I met her, defiance was a way of life with her. She would never let anyone get away with pigeonholing her where she appeared to belong: in the tattered fringe of old, beaten-down, mildly deranged women.

We were walking back from the souq in Azrou one very hot, windless, cloudless day, a two-handled basket full of vegetables swinging between us. It was in the late spring, near the end of the school year, and my students having stopped coming to class, I was spending a few days with Fatima and Mary. Fatima had a jellaba — the national unisex, coverall garment — but unlike any respectable woman, she wasn’t wearing it, she’d folded it up and put it on top of her head to provide a little shade from the sun. I knew that if I weren’t with her she would be going about just the same way, but my presence bolstered her a bit and she held her head high, staring back at anyone who stared at her as she swaggered along. With her usual costume of American hand-me-downs — a wrap-around skirt, a teeshirt, and running shoes with knee socks — she was the most peculiar-looking of women on the street that day, and but for her tattoo she might have been a creature from a distant land, she looked so unlike her counterparts.

I’d made an informal survey in the souq that morning of women’s tattoos, or of half their tattoos — some were partly covered by veils — looking for one like Fatima’s, as I thought there must be other women of her tribe settled around Azrou: her homeland, or blad, was not far away. But there were no tattoos of the same type, and I hadn’t seen one anywhere else; the bold windmill design seemed to be unique to her.

“What tribe do you come from?”I asked her as we walked along.

“Me?”she asked, and a mischievous grin took over her face, telling me I would never get the straight line on this matter from her. “I don’t come from a tribe,”she said, “I come from the forest and the mountains, the place of the birds and the trees.”

“Well, is ‘Meskina’ really your name?”

It was a reasonable question; though conceivable as a family name, it’s also a common noun, about the equivalent of our “poor thing,”and owing to the cultural habit of spouting sympathy on any possible occasion, it’s one of the commonest words in Moroccan language.

I knew I’d never know the truth about this from Fatima. She broke into gales of laughter and pointed at me as if I were being put on the spot.

“You little devil,”she said, “you won’t catch me that way. My father and mother are dead, and my brothers and sisters too. I have no husband. I have no children. I’m alone in the world. There is only me, meskina. I am really meskina,”and she laughed until she almost dropped the vegetable basket.

* 3*

Mary’s year came to an end. She had served one year in a different town and after her year in Azrou her tour was over. Up until the end she had considered extending her time, staying another year in Azrou, but finally she decided to go. Fatima started to droop. It was time for her to say good-bye again. I remembered her crankiness from when we’d first met and I saw it an a different light now. How wearying this must be for her! To work for someone a year, bring them up, get used to them, and then watch them walk away, over and over again.

There was some consolation in the fact that Mary would definitely be replaced. Another volunteer, Bob, had arranged to transfer to Azrou, and he took over most of Mary’s props: house, job, furniture, maid, and a cat, Latif, that Mary had adopted during the year. Bob and I had trained together and were friends, so I expected to be seeing a lot of him, along with Fatima, in this second year. Bob and Fatima had met before as well during Mary’s year, but there was a bond between them that made me think their paths had crossed long before that — in another time, another place. Bob was fascinated by Fatima from his first meeting with her, and he went to live in Azrou as a man to his destiny.

Whatever form his destiny was to take wasn’t clear from the outset. My first visits to Azrou in that second year reminded me of early visits from the year before. Mary, having left, very quickly entered the Golden Age and became one of Fatima’s “little girls.” Fatima entered another cranky phase, the period of her adjustment to Bob, and she now characterized the Golden Age by its feminine aspect: the girls spoke Arabic better, were easier to work for, did not “zigzag,” a character trait which Fatima found inherent in all men. Bob was the first American man Fatima had ever worked for, and she did find him difficult; she had probably not had to contend at close range with a male ego since her long-ago marriages, and she found herself competing with, rather than dominating her employer.

The girls, whatever initial tack they had taken, eventually fell, or perhaps were forced into a kind a daughter role with Fatima. Bob didn’t fit into a son slot. He was a foot taller than Fatima. His Arabic was already pretty good when he came to Azrou, so she couldn’t intimidate him honestly on that ground. He seemed to awaken some dormant spouse-badgering instincts in her.

“You try to explain to him,” she said to me once, “I don’t think he understands. Just like a man. You know how when Mary was here I always built the fires in the stoves and all she had to do was light them. I know how to make fires in these stoves!” she said with grand gestures, “I’ve been working with these stoves for years, I’m an expert. He tries to do it himself and wastes all kinds of wood, and still doesn’t get the house warm. I came over the other night and here he was wrapped up in a blanket freezing” — she became for a moment a teeth-chattering skeleton — “with the room full of smoke. I asked him ‘why?’ I told him I’d build the fires, he says, ‘OK!’ and look! He’s done it again. He zigzags. Talk to him please, God bless your parents.”

From what I observed, “zigzag” simply meant deviation from her view of what was right and what should be done. If there was any real zigzag in Bob, it was only in his agreeing with Fatima about whatever it was she would have him do, merely to silence her, and then doing whatever he wished. This was easier for him to get away with than it had been for Mary, and I suspect for the other girls, too. He didn’t need Fatima’s cooperation for a lot of the things that the girls couldn’t have done without her. Being a man, Bob could go about alone without being harassed and didn’t require Fatima’s escort into Moroccan society, or help in procuring various services — woodsellers, plumbers — that the girls might have been hassled about, simply because of their sex. This deprived her of one of her most prestigious functions: being the local American consul.

When I had visited Mary nearly everything we did, except speaking English, included Fatima. Bob and I, however, had known each other before either of us knew Fatima, and immediately our relationship excluded her a bit. We had a lot in common; to the people of Azrou we were interchangeable, sharing certain features not found much elsewhere in the population: considerable height, red beards, blue eyes. But beyond a physical resemblance, there was between Bob and me shared a kind of understanding that hadn’t existed with Mary. Fatima sensed this, and for a time I think she became a bit jealous of me for appropriating Bob on my visits, of being able to share more with him than she could. He and I went hiking and climbing, to the public bath, to cafés, occasionally to a bar, all without Fatima.

But though she wasn’t with us, there was little that we did without her. We talked of her constantly. Part of our talk was just for Bob to dump his frustrations with her, as Mary had done. Part of it was psychologizing, and part of it was hero-worship. Bob saw her as almost saintly, despite her many obvious foibles, and he never tired of telling me new stories from her past, new blessings and curses she had taught him, or amusing things she had done since we last visited.

We returned home one day from some outing and found Fatima at the villa. There were two walnut trees out in front and she was high up in one of these, barefoot, where she’d climbed up to shake down the nuts that were just then coming ripe. We shouted up greetings and teased her. She merely shook the tree in response, sending down a few nuts on our heads.

We suspected that she was in a snit because we didn’t get even the bare minimum response to our greetings that civility required, and later when she came into the house she sulked past us and went into another room. There she muttered Berber curses at Latif, who cowered from her, raised the hair on his shoulders, and took a flying leap out the window. I asked Bob what was troubling her and he shrugged in a way that seemed to say it could be any number of trivial matters.

Bob made a pot of tea. He asked Fatima if she would join us for a cup, but she said no. She did, however, come into the front room and start to serve us, mumbling about how awful this “atai negro” (black tea) was, and wondering why we couldn’t drink mint tea like everyone else. We knew she was upset then, for she never acted servile except when she was either performing, or genuinely angry: it was her way of indicating that she wasn’t getting enough attention.

“You needn’t do that,” Bob said, “if you’re not going to drink any with us we can pour for ourselves.”

“Let me do it, this is women’s work, you’ll get soft if you do housework.”

Now she was provoking us: she had enough experience of Americans to know that we wouldn’t go along with her professing any kind of inequality of the sexes, even if we could live comfortably in a culture that was based on it. Bob and I were too white and liberal to let an aged third-world woman stoop so loudly before us and she knew it. We immediately protested, Bob took the teapot away from her and poured our tea. Then he poured a cup for her, adding the nearly lethal dose of sugar that would make it sweet enough for her. She looked on quietly, as indifferent as a Persian cat.

“Is that enough sugar, or do you want more?” he asked her.

“Just a little more, thank you,” she said, with the air of a restaurant patron. Then she began to laugh mischievously — her way of saying that she’d won — and her face lit up. She was old, entertaining Fatima again. We all sat and talked, which was all that she really wanted from us in the first place: not to be left out. Though never again as severe as this, she fell into occasional moods when I was visiting, and Bob and I found it easiest to placate her with attention. She always responded immediately. We took her with us where we could, to cafés or on short walks, and she usually came with Bob when he visited me in nearby El Hajeb.

We noted one day that the film at the Azrou cinema was a French-dubbed version of “Superman.” Bob and I were nostalgic for a bit of Americana and Fatima, on consultation, was sure she would enjoy watching it, so we set off for the cinema together that evening.

The place has the charm and atmosphere of the intercity buses in Morocco, and indeed it seems to be designed to provide the same experience: there are closely packed, hard seats with no leg room, air opaque with tobacco smoke, a requirement to be seated a long time before anything happens, and a tendency to be always breaking down at critical moments. Fatima was the only woman in the theater and we the only foreigners, so together we were nearly as great an attraction as the film, even after it started: a tattooed old lady between blond giants.

Withstanding stares, cramps and smoke, we sat through the whole show. When we came out, Fatima ducked into a little recess between buildings to fill her pipe and restore herself. She took in a few long drags, during which she said not a word. Then she released a flood of minute observations on the film. She was transported by it and questioned us closely on the meaning of various parts of it. Although she understood French better than either of us, everything else about the film was completely foreign to her and she was trying hard to press it into an anecdotal form that would make it comprehensible, portable enough that she could tell others about it. She seemed to have no idea of intentional fiction or fantasy; with no notion of literature, other than her oral knowledge of the Koran, she considered any representation of experience as being a possible version of reality, whether in film, song, myth or hearsay. Now her object seemed to be to reconcile what she saw in the film with what she believed, rather than to question the premises of the film.

“That time when he was underground in the fire, was that hell?” she asked, in complete seriousness. She wanted to know about the reverse action sequences, how they were possible, and why the baby superman had been so cruelly abandoned as a child. We explained as well as we could about the fate of the moribund planet Krypton and she thought it must have been one of the seven worlds that constituted her Berber-Islamic cosmology. She chattered on about her ideas from the film until we reached her door.

“Come up and drink some coffee,” she asked, still obviously wired and wanting to talk out all of her observations and questions. We were tired and begged off. She told us the next day that she had gone and wakened her little prostitute friend Fatuma to tell her about the movie.

We met a new friend of Fatima’s one day; she called him Sidi Omar. He was new only to us, for she had known him for years, and told us about him before, always ending her reports with “He’s not in Azrou now.” He spent part of the year elsewhere and had only recently returned to Azrou when we met him.

He is a familiar figure in Azrou when he is there; he sells cooked sheep heads in the central square, and can be seen there every day, standing behind his makeshift steam-table under a white plastic awning. He’s a little wiry man with watery eyes that always smile. Like Fatima he is a kif addict and visits her often, as many others do, particularly when he’s out of kif or money. On one of his visits to Fatima’s house when Bob and I were there he invited us all to eat with him the next evening.

We met Fatima at her place from where she would walk us to Omar’s house, just around the corner and up the street from hers, by her report.

“I never took the girls there,” she told us, “because it would be hshuma (shameful); Sidi Omar lives alone and anyway, they wouldn’t like it.”

It was dusk when we set out. The way to his house seemed to trespass on several others: we walked through courtyards, and down corridors open to the sky that seemed suddenly hushed, as if others lurked in the shadows, watching us pass. At one place we saw a straggly cat lying on its back in death throes, feet heavenward, twitching uncontrollably.

“Meskina,” Fatima said in passing with a pontifical gesture, “it must have eaten something bad. Lord have mercy.”After the third or fourth unlocked door between courtyards and passageways we came to Omar’s cave-like dwelling: a little hovel with an earthen floor two steps below ground level, spotted with several wooden poles that supported the floor of someone else’s house above. The walls were blackened from the fireplace in the corner where he roasted the heads that he sold in the square. Fatima assured us that the real reason the walls were black was that two prostitutes had burned to death in the house many years before. “He bought it really cheap,” she said, “because no one else will live here.”

The place had no windows and was lit with only a small electric bulb, suspended from overhead in what was probably the center of the room, though its exact boundaries were lost in darkness. The “living area,” immediately under the lightbulb, included a few blankets and pillows, a bamboo cabinet of the kind made locally, neatly folded clothes, cooking utensils, and a cassette player.

Omar sat cross-legged among these props and sprang up to greet us in the hearty local fashion, no different than if he were welcoming us into a palace. In the shadow of his doorway he was a frightening vision, visible mainly by his white skullcap and the whites of his eyes. He was missing a few teeth. The ones present were just a shade lighter than his brown skin and they all showed when he smiled. He had the same gaunt, skull-like countenance as Fatima and moved about with the same feline agility which is rare in people half their age. While befuddling their brains, the kif seems to keep their muscles taught and young.

We sat in a loose circle on the blankets and cushions. There was socializing first, with inevitable rounds of sweet mint tea. Fatima and Omar swapped stories and pipefuls of kif; Bob and I sat quietly and absorbed atmosphere. This was the oddest inner sanctum we had ever seen, and we weren’t much use in the conversation: Omar’s thick Saharan accent distributed Ns in place of Ls in a random way, and we couldn’t understand much of what he said.

After a time Omar began to prepare dinner, but he kept up his end of the conversation with Fatima. Here there was no wife, no stable of women to do the knavery quietly in another room. Omar did it all before us, without self-consciousness, letting Fatima provide only token assistance. This was a pleasant contrast to the normal domestic situation which would dictate that any woman present, whether relative or not, must perform all the culinary work.

I watched the two of them, in the way that you watch a foreign film without subtitles, attending to manner, gesture and tone, since the sounds don’t provide much meaning. There was something unusual about Omar and Fatima’s interaction: they were friends, in a way that I had never seen a man and a woman as friends here. They didn’t use, or even take up any of the considerable ammunition of the separate gender roles that their culture offered them; they were equals. Their manners were the manners of two men speaking, with no visible distinctions between them.

The meal was sumptuous. A first course of kefta, or spiced ground beef, followed by one of Omar’s special head-and-organ stews. In addition to roasting heads he also jerked meat. This was cured on a rooftop somewhere high above us, then brought to life again by the addition of boiling water and some red-colored flavoring. The four of us sat around the platter of brine, in which bobbed various morsels of sheep. Fatima and Omar attacked the dish with gusto, fishing out the meat with brackish chunks of bread and popping them into their mouths. Omar would occasionally light on a tempting nugget, an eye or brain fragment, and place it in front of Bob or me with the pride of the homemaker: “Eat! Eat the meat!”

Sidi Omar grew up in the Sahara and it was from there that he had just returned. He had brought back a cassette that had become the talk of Fatima’s little circle. That night he was to play it for us. It was recorded on both sides with a long, mythical ballad by a religious folksinger, accompanied by the four-stringed aoud and a bandira, or tambourine. The plot of the ballad was this: a malevolent fisherman amputated his wife’s legs in order to keep her at home, and then abandoned her because of her uselessness. The woman bore a child which she had set to sea in a hamper, being unable to care for it herself. Many years later the fisherman caught the hamper and the child, now grown, stepped out of the hamper and slew the father.

I relate here in a couple of sentences what took Bob and I the whole evening to catch onto; the story was not revealed directly, but with many interruptions and meanderings, and regular choruses that reprised the moral lessons in the story but told nothing new. The cassette was also recorded quite poorly so that Fatima couldn’t always understand it. Omar, who had heard the performance, paraphrased for her but we couldn’t understand him any better than the tape. Fatima provided a pared down Arabic version for us when we could tear her ear away from the cassette: she was completely enthralled by the story and hypnotic rhythm of the music. She allowed the story the same possibility of truth she had given Superman and reacted strongly to each turn of events, lashing out at the evil fisherman, weeping for the maimed wife, vindictively cheering the son’s revenge.

The four of us sat late into the night and talked after the song was over, with Fatima serving as moderator and interpreter. She saw the song as an exemplary illustration of the power and justice of God and didn’t miss the opportunity to drive this point home to Bob and me. Unlike many others we met — in fact, unlike the majority of Moroccans we knew — she was never anxious to convert us to Islam; she has accepted with the same tolerance she shows for other foreign eccentricities that some people have other religions. But she insists on the supremacy of one God, whatever name he may go by, and sees his hand as the undeniable agent in every human fortune and mishap. The song provided her yet another case in point that there really was no getting around the will of Allah, and she explained this to us in several different ways, then questioned us and made us repeat the main points back to her to make sure that we understood.

* 4 *

Most of our time with Fatima was more ordinary than these episodes I’ve described. Visits to her peculiar circle of friends and our other excursions are the things that we remember first and talk about. The foundation that made those occasions so memorable grew from the times we spent together in between, and these times were as enjoyable as anything else that the three of us ever did together. We often just sat at her house or at Bob’s, over a meal or tea, or without any props except Fatima herself. With only her pipe to stoke her imagination, she was happy to be the source of entertainment for hours.

It was in these ordinary times that Bob and I — and then Fatima, too — first started to notice a matter that was coming up on us, something we would have to face up to before much longer. The year was slipping away. The first year, it seemed, had been all hard work, and interminable; getting fluent in the language and the culture, coming to terms with the job, and, perhaps hardest of all for ordinary Americans, learning to live happily in an atmosphere of limited choices. In the second year all the effort suddenly began to pay off and we found ourselves at home, acclimated. The time sped by unaccountably. Soon the end of our service was on the horizon and little by little the idea that we would be separating began to intrude on our time together.

We all began to acknowledge that the year was running out and we talked of it, but only in passing, making vague references to what we would all be doing when we went our separate ways. There were a few more silences when we were all together, but I think that we felt the real sadness of it only when we were alone, apart form each other. Bob and I saw that our own golden age was about to end: a time of leisure, simplicity and companionship that we would probably never know again. Fatima’s sadness at losing us was compounded by anxiety for she was losing not only her friends, but also her livelihood. As of that time, in the late spring, no new volunteer had been assigned to Azrou and none would be until late summer, if at all. She began to droop a little as the implications of this weighed down, but she didn’t complain.

One day she was carrying on a long conversation with Latif in Berber — I guess it was Berber, though at times I thought she must have known a special cat language, for she could command his attention as effectively as she did that of any human. Latif walked in a kind of figure eight at her feet, as if wanting to escape but unable to.

“What are you saying to him?” I asked.

“That’s our business,” she said. “We have to think about what we’ll do when you two leave.”

She became morbid with worry as Bob’s departure neared and she talked of being ready to die soon, yet she began to hoard whatever she could as if expecting to withstand the siege of life for a good time to come. There was a grasping side of her nature that surfaced whenever her income was threatened and we saw it now in full force. It was a damper on all our spirits, like an intrusion on us, because it was the same grasping that we saw everywhere in Morocco, and that probably exists everywhere else in the world where poverty and riches are found side by side. But we had been able to maintain the illusion throughout the year that Fatima wasn’t part of that grasping, so it was distressing to see it in her now, to see her laid bare.

The idea of losing her independence, and the money that bought the kif, was impossible for her to take in stride. She collected every possible thing that might be saleable, postponing the day that she would be desperate for income. Bob told her that he would leave her all the furniture in the house but even with this assurance she seemed nervous about missing out on something of value, and she reclaimed several trinkets and pieces of clothing that Bob had thrown away.

In these circumstances something happened that soured Bob’s final days in Azrou. He had run out of firewood just as the cold weather was ending, and he decided to go without, rather than buy more, in the little time that remained. Fatima had always taken her supply of firewood from whomever she worked for and she didn’t like the idea of there being no wood in the house. Her woodstove not only heated her apartment, she used it for cooking as well since a one-burner gas bottle was her only other cooking appliance. And her house, with mud walls, cracked windows, and sod roof, was much colder than Bob’s villa.

Unbeknownst to Bob, she ordered what we called a “donkey,” which was in fact a donkey laden nearly to the breaking point with wood collected from the nearby forests. The wood was delivered to Bob’s house. Fatima must have let the pitiable old woodman into the garage to deliver the load but she was nowhere to be seen when Bob came home from school. He learned from the woodman that Fatima had ordered the wood and that he was to pay for it. He did. It was only the equivalent of $5, but he felt manipulated, and scolded Fatima when he saw her next. He was angry that she had undertaken the whole operation without asking him, and I think a little hurt that after their year together she wouldn’t come to him and simply ask him to buy her a donkey of wood.

Fatima, I suspect, was too proud to ask him to buy the wood for her, and perhaps she was expressing a bit of childish anger at Bob’s leaving. I guessed that she didn’t simply ask for the money because she didn’t trust herself to stock up on wood rather than kif.

Bob said that after he spoke to her about the matter she was deferential and apologetic to a degree he had never seen before, even in her best performances. She said she had ordered the wood only because she thought he needed it, and promised she would have the wood returned even though the woodman, meskin that he was, would probably never return the money as he had surely already spent it. The wood was gone the next day — undoubtedly it went to her house — and the issue was never raised between them again, though I was regaled with the two versions of the story numerous times afterward. What I’ve recorded here is Bob’s perspective, but I should also record that Fatima insisted it was all due to a misunderstanding: she had been sure that Bob wanted more wood, that he had mentioned it to her, and she was both incensed and mortified that he’d treated her like she was a thief. The upshot was that Bob and Fatima spent their last month together walking around each other on pins and needles. Bob felt badly about it in every way, but mostly, I think, because he was disillusioned with Fatima. For a moment the veil of unlimited hospitality and friendliness was pulled aside, and he saw in her the thing he thought she was above; that opportunistic maneuvering for gain that always worms its way into relations between the haves and the have nots.

About a month before our close-of-service date, I had an offer to stay and work in Morocco for another six months. I immediately took it up. It meant leaving El Hajeb earlier than I wanted to, and being inconveniently far from both it and Azrou, which was my second home now, but at the time it was a more attractive option than leaving the country. When I had packed up my house and shipped all my things for keeping to Rabat I took a bus to Azrou — the other way from where my work lay — to say good-bye to Bob and Fatima. I found them both at Bob’s house. They were quiet and a little uneasy with each other, the wood incident still hanging thickly in the air. I wasn’t expected but they knew why I had come, and it struck us all at once that this was probably the last time the three of us would be together in Azrou — or anywhere.

I didn’t want to stay, so I got on with the farewells. Bob and I handled it pretty badly, in typical manly fashion, successfully suppressing any show of feeling, and assuring each other how likely it was that we would meet again. I left his house feeling appropriately strained for having kept everything inside.

Fatima walked out with me. I would see her again too, I was sure, but it was the first time I had left Azrou without knowing when I would see her, and I worried about leaving her alone: Bob was due to leave in two more weeks.

We began walking, silently, down the road toward the village center where I would catch a bus back to El Hajeb and then on to the coast where my work was. The sun was setting in front of us, casting long, long shadows behind. I’m sure she would have accompanied me all the way to the bus but at the fork in the road where she could turn off to her house I stopped, not wanting to put off any longer the thousand blessings I was about to receive, the admonitions to write, the tears, the last minute concerns.

“Well, Fatima,” I said, in as off-the-cuff a way as I could muster.

“My little boy,” she said, very low and solemnly as she touched my arm, “May God open a good road for you and bring you only good things. May he preserve you in all your pursuits. May he help you in your job. May he . . . ‘‘ and she talked on, and I realized that but for her I wouldn’t understand even half the words she was now using, and our two years together were suddenly a very long time. She had never looked so old and weary as she did then. As she droned on I noticed that cataracts were beginning to cloud her eyes, but she held them intently on me and held her head and frame erect as she always had done. She didn’t say anything for herself but continued the catalogue of blessings until, at a brief pause, she seemed to wait for me to speak. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t release a quart of tears that I was more comfortable and accustomed to suppressing. I merely looked at her, sadly. Then she said in her old, familiar tone, “Hurry now, you’ll miss your bus,” and turned away.

On to Part 2

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