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300 pages
First published January 1, 1980
"I would like everything about me to grind to a halt and for me to become like a window through which one looks and through which things are seen to move, while the window itself remains silent and still, observing people come and go.鈥�
"How can people forget the nightmare overnight? How can they run smiling out of their homes, as though the deaths that happened only the day before occured in some other country? Suddenly I shudder as it seems clear to me that everything in our lives is on the verge of the disintegration. I ought to refuse to scrub the floor or prepare the food, make the bed or water the plant pots. I should let everything in the place die a slow death, and my father and mother would also do better if they stopped eating and living, for why should life continue inside the home when everything outside is collapsing? The apartment itself should fall down, too. Then it could be seen how war pervades the whole of Lebanon.鈥�
"When I heard that the battles raged fiercely and every front was an inferno, I felt calm. It meant that my perimeters were fixed by these walls, that nothing which my mother hoped for me could find a place inside them. The idea of my marrying again was buried deep by the thunder and lightning of the rockets. But it was all sick thinking, I would tell myself. My deep sleeping was a sickness, my devouring huge quantities of food was a sickness, my increasing weight, my wearing only my housecoat for two months on end were sicknesses. The scabs on my face that spread to my neck, to my shoulders, and my not caring about them, were a sickness. My silence was a sickness. My mother would launch into a tirade whenever she saw me in my housecoat during those two months, but I stayed completely silent. My indifference to her anxieties, especially when she tried to get out of me my real reason for divorcing Majed, was also a sickness.鈥�