ARABESQUE Gaza - 1974 I After dinner Im alone with the grandmother, while the men talk business and wives feed the children bumping each other in the hidden kitchen. I am a guest, an English teacher new to the Middle East, without tongue, and I cannot play in pantomime - like my daughter - with the children and the goats. In this bare room the old woman talks as if eventually I must understand her language since she speaks in the feminine. II When I cannot answer, even after her long probing looks, she shrugs, takes her crochet hook from a pocket, and points out the window to a girl dancing solemnly alone. Her gnarled hands, wound with pink wool, move easily, and soon she is making lovely rosettes in the bodice. I take the hook and try to imitate, slip, slip again, finally latch through the last eye to pull the rose together. She smiles, I show her a stitch of my own which she examines, unravels, then duplicates with a flourish.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 08:11:00 +0000
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