Turning and noticing the two visitors, he asked suspiciously, “Who are you? Have you come to beg? Get out of my house, damn it!”
Saddened by her son’s condition, Grandma Hayat replied in a feeble voice, “No, sweetheart, we aren’t here to beg. I’m your mother.”
“Poor thing,” she whispered to Zain. “Fadila’s made him lose his mind all over again.”
After an abbreviated visit, they got up to leave on the pretext that they needed to see Juhaina, and returned to the house with heavy hearts.
* * *
I went to mom’s hometown of Latakia to participate in a literary seminar with a couple of poets and another story writer at a local cultural center. As in Damascus, I’d been scheduled to do my reading last, since I’m just a beginner that nobody’s heard of, and they were afraid that if I read first,
