The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 27





Stitching Sky to Mountain

A few days later he came to the door. Malina called me from my rough table, where I sat arranging the loose pages of The Book of Diseases. I planned to have the sections sewn into signatures for binding. She returned to her room to leave us alone.

He stood like a tree lit by sun in the afternoon doorway.

“Yousef brought me your note, Gabriella.”

“Hamish.” I tasted the sound of his name, sweet and pungent, precious as cinnamon bark. “Come into the courtyard, where it’s cooler.”

We were shy, our unspoken words like water brimming between us.

Then sand on the tongue, insoluble minerals of love.

Sand crunched beneath our leather slippers. We moved to the date palm and sat beneath its long fans on a freshly swept rug where grains sifted back again. Three goats gazed at us solemnly.

Yousef had gone to the vegetable souk to buy onions.

We leaned together in silence for a long while.

At last Hamish said, “I’m sorry about the death of your father.”

“Oh! But you know, he left long ago.”

“Ah.”

I began to cry and he held me. After a while we looked to the swifts high above us as they caught the invisible life of the air in their quick beaks. I took his hand, placed it upon my full belly, and said, “I will bear your child in two months.”

“Oh!” he cried, startled, briefly pulling his hand away. And then he set it back happily. “I’m going to be a father.” And he wept.

The desert day faded. Malina lit a lantern in her room. The moonless blue-black sky hummed with stars that cast their silver through the shadowy palm tree, upon our shoulders, over the courtyard, and across the vast dark earth.