Chapter One

      ‘It's thanks to the 'adra that you didn't get killed today.’ Teta crossed herself, and her lips moved in a silent prayer as we sat on her bed folding clothes that were stiff and bent in strange shapes from the sun.

      The room seemed darker and heavier than usual, with its old furniture, and the tired curtains that wanted to lie down if only the hooks would let them. Through the window, the tops of the pine trees dropped into the valley, where white stone buildings stuck out tall from between them like giant fingers; and further down still to Beirut, which lay stretched out beside the sea. The hot sky had bleached itself white and cicadas hummed back and forth, back and forth, as if they were sawing the trees. Teta had said once that each time they stopped a person had died, but they didn't stop often: their throbbing started early in the morning when the light came over the mountains and didn't stop till it went away again.

      ‘I fell all the way down from the ledge. The earth crumbled and it was so far, higher than the ceiling.’

      ‘What? Are you a half-wit, Ruba, to be playing in the forest next to a steep fall like that? Are you, girl?’ She touched my cheek. ‘In any case she's the one who saved you.’

      ‘The Virgin?’ I gazed at the little yellow-haired plastic woman in a blue dress standing on the dressing-table. She was really only a bottle filled with holy water that you could see if you unscrewed her crown and I didn't see how she could have saved me that morning.

      Teta nodded. ‘You could have fallen as far as hell itself and you wouldn't have been killed. The Blessed Virgin wouldn't have let you die.’

      ‘Is that her job? Is that what she does?’

      ‘Does?’ Teta gave me a look. ‘She's not a belly-dancer, child, she's the Mother of Christ.’

      I didn't really want to hear about the Virgin Mary unless Teta put her into a story and made her do something exciting like swim out to sea, or play hide-and-seek with God, or dig a tunnel all the way to Beirut and live in it.

      The huge pair of grey-white pants I was trying to fold didn't want to be made small. They were grandmother pants; no one but grandmothers ever wore that sort.

      ‘But she couldn't have saved me because she wasn't even there.’

      Teta smiled. ‘She was there.’

      Maybe Teta was right. Perhaps the Virgin had wanted me to fall; she had made me fall so I could find the glass eye.

      ‘If only she'd help your father as well,’ Teta murmured.

      I looked up from the pants, but she didn't say anything more, just carried on untangling, shaking and folding. A thin green blouse slid out from the pile, was laid flat and smoothed: Teta's hands were slow and heavy, and things obeyed them.

      ‘Does she really look like that?’ I pointed at the plastic bottle full of holy water. ‘Or like Teta Fadia? Teta Fadia looks like an angel.’ A photograph of Teta's mother, wedged into the frame of the dressing-table mirror, showed a woman older than anyone I'd ever seen bent over a walking-stick. Her white hair was parted in the middle and tied back, and she wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses; but behind them was a kind, soft face.

      ‘She was an angel,’ said Teta. ‘Haven't I told you how it's because of her that I can read? “Why should my sons go to the school and not my daughter?” she used to say. “Aren't I a daughter?” And so my brothers and I took turns to tend the goats and go to school.’

      Teta didn't look like her mother. There was still a lot of black in her hair, she was strong with large hips, and her face was neither soft nor beautiful, just round and wrinkled and wonderful.

      As I watched her smiling reflection in the mirror folding and stacking, I fingered the glass eye in my pocket. It was hard and dense, and I hadn't told anybody about it.

      ‘Naji will have come back. I'm going to see.’ When early afternoon had changed into late afternoon and the shops were reopening, Mami had gone with Naji to buy food and house-things. Only Papi was at home.

      Teta's