But the peasant girl from the Coptic Estate-she was the only one who bore him children. Says her mother: “Your grandfather Muqaawi was big and strong and bedded both slave and freewoman, Arab and non-Arab.

May God have mercy on her,” and they would add, “if she bore witness to the One God before the Angel came to take her away.” When the Guest died, they prayed for her soul: “Her hand was blessed. Or she would teach her how to stretch out her hand and feed the chicks and the baby ducklings. She would take the squirming Hend into her lap and stroke her back until she fell asleep. And because her mother was constantly running around taking care of the housework, she would always send her to the Guest’s room. Mama dees.” (Mama sit down so I can nurse). Little Hend would crawl after her mother for half the day, crying and trying to catch hold of the hem of her long robe: “Mama sit.

Her dresses too were embroidered with tiny lions and fishes and dolls. She wove rope out of long strands of fiber and mended the holes in old clothes. Her room always smelled of perfumed candles. The back of her hand was also covered with tattoos-a bride, a fish, and a lion. The Guest was a tiny, timid peasant woman with a green tattoo on her chin. ”The Guest is sleeping,” they would say, or “The Guest wants such and such” or “Go bring the buttermilk pan from the Guest’s room.”

They called it “the high place.” A woman sat at its door, a woman that they did not call “Grandmother” but rather “the Guest,” though she never once stepped out of the confines of the family home. She would crawl up the hill behind the western balcony right up to the solitary room roofed in wood and clay that looked, for all the world, like a heavenly dome. Her mother often left her to her own devices.

She proved that she was a creature capable of surviving and flourishing on the barest necessities of life. She was hard to keep up with as a child, light and thin, teething and crawling and speaking well before any of her brothers did. She remembered how she used to squirm in her grandmother’s lap, an angry child with a bare bottom. She has become more like her grandmother than her mother, Hend thinks to herself.

الخباء by Miral al-Tahawy