Do you remember? I asked my sister Ghusun. It had been many years since I’d seen her. She moved away with her husband’s family when she was thirteen, just a year older than I, and when I saw her after so long I thought I would find her stunted, pressed down by the life she led in a crossroads town where the Great Sands begin. She was darker and rounded but not stunted at all. Her five children—four girls and a boy—played in the rooms behind their father’s store while my eldest threw rocks at the animals in the courtyard. Talal was then not yet born. My sister and I hung the wash to dry on the roof and we could see the dunes swelling where the green of the little farms stopped.

Yes yes, she said, of course I remember. Oh, all of them—all of them, our three older sisters, like black lumps in a line! They were so quiet. Dull and obedient; barely speaking, hardly moving. I can see them now, Ghusun said: they must be old, they sit in the tent, sad widows, a life of pounding millet and straining laban. No, not a tent, Ghusun—that’s over, it’s a house now, there are no tents anymore and they are with Omar, because our parents are dead and so he must keep them, our fat hateful brother; they never see anything and they don’t want to know. Remember the farm? It was cool there in autumn; the air smelled of dates and our sheep were the plumpest. Yes, but that is gone too. If only Basim—but we will not speak of that brother, we will not speak any more of the dead, no; but why wouldn’t he marry, where did he go, remember that boy, the American, that year after the war and why did our brother go off with him? What did it mean? It killed them, you know, our parents—but no, we will not talk of this, this we will not remember, and we are here now and we will talk of other things.

Thurayya, she said, it is good here. The sands roll to the farm; it reminds me of home. This house does not leak and my in-laws are docile. You do not know this, in the city, where they say that the Rub al-Khali brings no life—here it does, you can see, not just me and my children but see there, this herd, those camels were born of the ones that came with me. Your dowry! I exclaimed. I remember. Yes. So different for me; I wish you’d have seen it. Only money, I said, only that and no herd. But I loved him. So foolish. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me..