THE DRY DIRT of the desert covers the open sores on her feet. Huddled in one corner of the abandoned shed, Lucine shuts her eyes and tries to pray, but the words, so carefully etched into her mind by Mairig and their priest, have escaped her. Fragments and short phrases from ancient prayers rise above the fog, empty and impotent: the crazed ramblings of a misguided race. She pushes the words aside and presses Aram’s blue swaddling cloth to her chest instead. The smell of Mairig’s milk is long gone, but inside its soft folds she can still smell the sweetness of him. She burrows her face in the tattered blue wool of his swaddling cloth, sniffing at the lingering scent of his sweat and licking its center where she still tastes the salt of his tears or hers, she isn’t sure. Soon his screams, long melodic wails, followed by a staccato of angry reprieves, fill the empty shed, and she is glad. She will do nothing to stop them this time.
A dusty beam of daylight filters through the small crack in the back wall through which her keeper, the plump woman, regularly wedges small pieces of cured lamb and bread. Lucine tries to relieve herself as far away from this opening as she can, but the chamber pot sits festering in the opposite corner. The excrement, like so much suffering, is ongoing and unpredictable. It leaves her as Mairig and Anush and Bedros left her, permanently and without warning. In her arms, a silent witness to all this exorcism, Aram’s ghost gives up his screaming and sucks impatiently at her breast, the only part of her body incapable of excretion.
At nightfall, the plump one arrives carrying her stale bread. She talks about how the gendarmes liked to lick her back and pull her hair as they thrust themselves in and out of her.
“How are you today?” she asks Lucine, but Lucine does not answer. She hasn’t spoken since the river.
“How is the child?” the woman tries again.
Lucine continues rocking the phantom Aram.
“What does he eat?” the woman asks.
Lucine lays a hand on her concave chest.
The woman sings, “Dandini, dandini danal? bebek. Eller? kollar? kinal? bebek.” It is a lullaby to an infant resting in a secret hiding place. When the infant dies, its mother goes mad and buries it in a golden cradle, then offers herself to the waves. A fitting ditty, only this wasn’t the exact order of things.
Some days later, when the plump one is once again delivering her bread, Aram is gone. His screams recede from her ears to the back of her head, like church bells in a dream. The swaddling cloth lies weightless on her lap. Lucine is searching its folds for any evidence of him: a hair, a stain, but all that remains is the smell of her own vomit and shit. Still, she searches for his spirit in the now-coarse fabric of the swaddling cloth. The plump one finally pries the blue wool out of Lucine’s hands.
“You can come out now,” she says. “You’ll live with me. I’ve arranged it.”
Lucine cries out at the words you’ll live. A hot liquid anger courses through her veins. She strikes the woman over and over again, in the face, shoulders and chest. The woman wraps her plump arms around Lucine’s body and squeezes. She writhes and thrashes until her strength gives out and her limbs go limp with grief. There, with her head pressed into the woman’s ample bosom, and her arms pinned to her sides, Lucine succumbs to life and to living. She slides down to the earth with the woman’s arms wrapped around her.
“We are not what is done to us,” she whispers in Lucine’s ear. She pulls something silver and smooth from the pocket of her dress. Lucine stares at the blade with relief, thinking the woman will now end all her suffering. Lucine tilts her head back, offering her exposed neck to the stranger.
“My name is Fatma and Allah has placed you in my protection,” she says. “Gold doesn’t lose its value by falling into the mud,” she mutters to herself, scraping the flat, cool blade against Lucine’s scalp. Clumps of hair, like small rat’s nests, fall to the ground and soon she can feel the wind prickling the back of her head.
“Now we burn these rags,” Fatma says, peeling the tattered dress off Lucine’s body. She gives her a smock to cover her nakedness and burns the dress right there on the spot. Lucine thinks of the lice in her hair and in her clothing burning to their deaths. Perhaps this was how God sent death to our door, without a single thought.
Dressed in the plain smock, her feet bare, Lucine’s apparel is a far cry from the rustling dresses Mairig forced upon her. Fatma wraps a dark head scarf around her bald scalp and face.