The Old Woman and the River by Ismail Fahad Ismail

Author:Ismail Fahad Ismail
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

- 8 -

She’d never experienced a numbness like the one creeping down her neck now. She found herself wondering, how would she manage to break free from it? At that very moment the sound of snorts penetrated into her hearing. Consciousness swept back over her. Of course, it was Good Omen. She opened her eyes. How did sleep get the better of me like this? She was sitting inside the tomb of Sayyid Rajab as before. She had no clear sense what time it was.

She saw Good Omen standing outside the door. He’d come back to look for her. Perhaps it was the sense of peace she felt here. She’d slumbered in the shrine of Ezz Al-Din in just the same way. She needed a moment to pull her thoughts together. Those dreams that stole over her out of a timeless present left her mind struggling. That strange dream she’d had right before she woke up, she was at a loss to understand its connections.

She’d dreamt she was twelve and she was wishing she could go to sleep and wake up fourteen years old the next morning. She was fascinated by the expression women often used to describe a beautiful girl. “She’s a full moon of fourteen.” She asked her mother what the connection was between the moon and the number. “That’s when the moon becomes full,” her mother answered. The dream went on. She found herself watching her son Saleh as he went about his favorite pastime, fishing. He cast his nets near the entrance of Sayyid Rajab River and bided his time until midnight on the fourteenth day of the Hijri month. “The tide reaches its peak when the moon becomes full,” he explained.

She watched him bide his time until the midnight of the twenty-eighth as well. “The tide reaches its peak when the moon disappears completely,” he explained. She could understand why her son Saleh would appear in her dream given his passion for fishing, but she was mystified to see her husband appear wielding the axe of Deaf Abboud. “Where are you going?” she confronted him disapprovingly. “I have to give your son Saleh a hand,” he replied as he was heading for the door. “He won’t be able to catch a single fish if the mud dams stay put,” he added. She was at a loss how to understand her dream. Had it been like the previous one, she would have dismissed it as one of those silly dreams that meant nothing. But the fact that it had come to her inside the shrine of Sayyid Rajab... She took the pulse of her thoughts. If I were to take this seriously, who could help me interpret it?

She took a slow turn around the shrine and examined all four of its walls carefully. It was a thing to feel proud of: the shells coming from beyond the Shatt had left the walls untouched. There were signs of a shell having landed on an old effaced grave. Another shell had landed a few feet away from the trunk of the Christ’s-thorn tree.

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