In the Time of Love

water. If I record it as it came down to me, recording it in the name of the narrator and in his very words, I am only complying with the commands of loyalty, carrying out the orders of love, while at the same time yielding to a force one cannot risk ignoring.
The narrator says:
In our neighborhood there lived a widow named Sitt Ain. A strong woman, wonderfully eccentric, provocative; a unique individual who could not be replicated, inviting caution in the presence of inscrutable life, which is limitless in its possibilities. Her story usually begins when she was a widow of fifty with an only son named Ezzat, who was six years old. Why doesn’t her story begin before that? Why doesn’t it begin when she was a little girl, or when she was a bride? Why don’t they talk about Amm Abdel Baqi, her husband? Why did she have no child other than Ezzat? And why did she have him at such an advanced age—was the fault hers or her husband’s? But what does all that matter? The narrator is committed to his vision, and if he freed himself from it he would have to give up and investigate until he reached the realm of our father Adam and mother Eve. Therefore let the beginning be when Sitt Ain was fifty and her only son Ezzat was six, when she was a prominent woman, her prestige growing and expanding with time like a rising city. She owned all the large a