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her plan so well. The donkey is tied to the trunk of a bare fig tree. He can’t reach anything to eat it, not leaves or fruit. So I don’t need to watch him as I would in the height of the season and I can work alone. I take ten steps in one direction, ten in the other, picking up the figs lying on the ground to put them in the crates. I have a good view of the road looking toward the village; I can see in the distance anyone who’d be approaching and whistle in time. I don’t see Fadel or my mother anymore but I guess they’re about fifty steps away, hidden somewhere in the field. So if someone were to arrive on the scene she could always make them believe that she went off for a moment for urgent personal business. A man, even my father or brother, would never ask an indecent question about such a thing. It would be shameful.
    I’m not alone for very long. The crate doesn’t have much in it when they arrive separately. My mother comes out of the field. I see Fadel get back on his horse; he misses the saddle the first time because the horse is tall. He has a pretty wooden riding whip, very finely made, and he smiles at Mama before riding off. I pretend to have seen nothing. The whole thing happened very quickly. They made love somewhere in the field, sheltered by the grass, or they were simply talking together, I don’t want to know. It’s not my business to ask what they did, or look surprised. My mother will not confide in me. And she knows, too, that I won’t say anything, quite simply because I’m an accomplice, and I’d be beaten to death, too. My father only knows how to beat women and make them work to get money. So if my mother goes to make love with another man on the pretext of gathering figs, I’m not bothered by it. She has good reason.
    Now we have to gather the figs very quickly so the crates will be full enough to justify the time we’ve spent here. Otherwise my father is going to ask: “You bring back empty crates. What were you doing all that time?” And I’ll get the belt. We are rather far from the village. My mother gets on the donkey, her legs straddling the animal’s neck, very close to his head so as not to crush the figs. I walk in front to guide the animal on the road and we set off with a heavy load.
    We soon encounter an elderly woman, all alone with a donkey, who is also gathering figs. Since she is elderly, she can be out alone. As we catch up with her, my mother greets her and we continue on our way together. This road is very narrow and difficult, full of holes, bumps, and stones. In places it rises steeply and the donkey has trouble advancing with his load. At one point he stops dead at the top of a slope before a big snake and refuses to go on. My mother strikes him and encourages him but he wants no part of it. Instead he tries to move back, his nose trembling with fear, like me. I detest snakes. And because the incline is really very steep, the crate starts to dislodge on his back and almost overturns. Fortunately, the woman who is with us seems not at all afraid of the snake, however enormous it is. I don’t know how she does it, but I see it roll up and twist. She must have struck it with her walking stick, and the big snake slithers into the ditch. The donkey is then willing to move on.
    There were a lot of snakes around the village, small ones and big ones. The snakes would even nest in the house, in the storeroom between the sacks of rice, or in the piles of hay in the stable. We would see them every day and we were very afraid of them the way we fear grenades. Ever since the war with the Jews, grenades were all over the place. You didn’t know if you were going to die when you put your foot down. In any case, I heard them talk about it at home, when my father’s father would come for a visit, or my uncle. My mother warned us about these grenades, they were almost invisible in the middle of pebbles and stones, and I watched constantly ahead of me for fear of coming