Part 2

The Dust — Part Two

The man dismounted at the edge of the palm grove, let the reins hang loose, and walked on foot. He was tall, broad-shouldered, darkened by a long sun, and on his face was the dust of twenty roads, not the dust of one road, and his abaya was old but neat, and his agal tilted slightly as if he had put it on in haste and then left it unadjusted out of pride. He walked between the people who parted for him as water parts before a boat, and he turned to no one, and greeted no one, and his eyes were on one thing only: the woman standing on the threshold of the mudhif.

Before he raised his head to her, before his face was fully seen, Muzna said in a voice no one had ever heard from her before:

"That is my father's stride."

She did not say it to the people, she said it to herself, but Hammoud heard it as he stood behind her, and he told everyone who asked him afterwards that the Shaykha had uttered the words like one who sees a ghost in broad daylight.

The man reached the threshold and stopped on a step below it, so his head was level with her shoulder, and he raised his eyes, and his eyes were Shallal's eyes... the same blackness, the same heaviness, the same gaze that asks no permission.

"Peace be upon those in this mudhif," the man said, "and a special peace upon its Sadr."

"And upon you be peace, ya walad Shallal," Muzna said.

She did not ask him who he was. And in that moment everyone in the mudhif knew that she had recognized him before he introduced himself, and they knew too, as if the name that had been buried in chests for twenty years had burst at once from every mouth: Dari. Dari ibn Shallal. The Sheikh's son who had left and never returned.

And from the far end of the mudhif the whisper of an old woman was heard: "Woe is me, he has returned."

As for Mutlak, he rose slowly from his place and stood behind his brother's daughter, and his features did not change. His eyebrow did not tremble, his eyes did not widen. He looked at his brother's son as a man looks at a guest whose appointment is a little overdue, and said in a calm tone:

"God give him life... ya walad akhuy Shallal."

And only one person in that place noticed that the uncle had not been surprised. That one was Dari himself.

---

They sat in the mudhif as people sit on a day unlike any other days. The gahwa was poured, but no one drank, and Dari's finjan remained before him growing cold, for a guest does not drink before he has been told "welcome" in full, and the Shaykha had not yet said it.

"Twenty years," Dari said at last, his voice thick and hoarse as if it had not been used for a long time, "and you have not forgotten the name."

"The name is not forgotten," Muzna said. "What is forgotten is the face, and your face is cast upon your father's face, and you are younger than him."

"And you, your age has grown beyond your years."

"Sheikhdom steals from one's life, ya Dari, and never gives it back."

The man fell silent for a moment, then placed his hand on his knee and leaned forward a little:

"I have come to sit in my place."

The mudhif fell into a strange stillness, the stillness of water before the dam breaks.

"Your place?" Muzna replied, and her tone did not rise a single degree. "This Sadr is not a house whose owner returns to it when he has had his fill of estrangement."

"Urf says the man has the greater right, and I am the Sheikh's only son. And you kept the place for a while, and now is the time to return it."

"For a while? Eleven years for a while? In one of those years three men of our tribe died and not a drop of vengeance was spilled for them because I went myself to the houses of the killers and sat on the earth and sought reconciliation. And in another year al-Shatt ran dry and the men took up arms against one another and it was I who stood between them. You who were absent for twenty years, do you know what 'for a while' means?"

"I know the meaning of urf."

"Do you know it? You heard its name from afar, and we lived it in blood."

Dari leaned further, and his voice grew lower and more dangerous:

"I did not come to quarrel, ya Muzna. I came to settle accounts, and to sit, and to claim what is mine."

And then happened what made those present remember that day to the end of their lives.

Dari reached his hand to his chest, beneath the abaya, and took out something small wrapped in a black rag, and opened the rag slowly between his rough fingers, then placed what was inside it on the rug, between him and the Shaykha, before the eyes of all.

It was a seal ring of old silver, with a red agate eye engraved with the seal of the clan.

There was no one in al-Dirah who did not know it. The seal ring of Shallal, the great Sheikh. The seal ring he had never taken from his finger a single day in his life, and with which he had been buried on his hand eleven years before, and Muzna herself had been the one who closed his fingers over it with her own hands before the earth was heaped, and no one had seen it after that.

A finjan fell from Hammoud's hand and shattered on the ground, and no one turned to look at it.

Muzna looked at the seal ring, then at her brother, then at the seal ring again, and did not utter a single letter.

And that was the first time in eleven years that the Shaykha's hand trembled.

---

And the Arabs say of those who return after a long absence:

Shallal was gone and left al-Dirah orphaned, and after him the taste of the dates in the palm grove was no longer sweet, and he left a girl to bear the agal before him, and a son who was gone... and absence is longer than a lifetime.

O listeners of the hchaya... this is the first dust, and what comes after is heavier.

.....................

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