By the end of the week Zainab’s patience was spent and after lunch with her mother-in-law and Hassan’s sisters, she left the village without saying where she was going. The fields spread out before her, covered with the green shoots of new crops, their beauty enhanced by the larks and wagtails that hopped among the plants. In this late winter season the great trees looked mournful and the horizons appeared forlorn. Zainab took her customary route to the watering place where she found the bed of the canal dried up, filled with the alluvial mud of the Nile. The tree where she used to sit with Ibrahim stood close by and beneath it three wagtails and a sparrow hopped along the edge of the canal. Near the bank a water wheel had been dismantled and laid down for its winter rest, the hole left be
