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of the minaret:
    The bed, stripped of its sheets, exposed the dusty cloth mattress, with its long faded stains that looked like sweat or watery blood, old and pale stains. The odd fibrous horsehair pierced the cloth of the mattress that was so dry it was rotten, and stuck out erect in the air.
    Along one of the walls, three old suitcases were stacked with such perfect symmetry that I hadn’t noticed them, since they did nothing to alter the emptiness of the room. Upon them, and upon the nearly dead sign of a “G. H.”, an already calm and sedimented accumulation of dust.
    And there was also the narrow wardrobe: it had a single door, and was the height of a person, my height. The wood continuously dried by the sun opened in fissures and barbs. So that Janair had never closed the window? She’d taken more advantage than I had of the view from the “penthouse.”
    The room was so different from the rest of the apartment that going in there was as if I had first left my house and slammed the door. The room was the opposite of what I’d created in my home, the opposite of the soft beauty I’d made from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and absentminded irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.
    And nothing there was made by me. In the rest of the house the sun filtered from the outside in, ray upon gentle ray, the result of my employment of both heavy and light curtains. But here the sun didn’t seem to come from outside: it was the sun’s own place, fixed and unmoving, in a harsh light as if it never shut its eyes even at night. Everything there was sliced-up nerves that had been hung up and dried on a clothesline. I was prepared to clean dirty things but dealing with that absence disoriented me.
    I realized then that I was irritated. The room was making me physically uncomfortable as if the air still contained the sound of dry charcoal scratching the dry lime. The room’s inaudible sound was like a needle sweeping across a record after the music has stopped. A neutral hissing of thing was what made up the substance of its silence. Charcoal and fingernail coming together, charcoal and fingernail, calm and compact rage of that woman who represented a silence as though representing a foreign country, the African queen. And she’d been lodging there inside my house, the foreigner, the indifferent enemy.
    I wondered if Janair had really despised me — or if I, who hadn’t even looked at her, had been the one who despised her. Just as I was discovering now with irritation that the room didn’t just irritate me, I detested it, that cubicle with nothing but surfaces: its entrails had been parched. I looked at it with disgust and disappointment.
    Until I forced myself to summon some courage and a violence: on this very day everything there would have to be altered.
    First I’d drag the few things inside the room into the hallway. And then I’d throw into the empty room bucket upon bucket of water that the hard air would swallow, and then I’d swamp the dust until a moistness was finally born in that desert, destroying the minaret that haughtily overlooked a horizon of rooftops. I’d throw water into the wardrobe to flood it up to its mouth — and then at last, at last I’d see the wood start to rot. An inexplicable rage, but which came naturally, overwhelmed me: I wanted to kill something there.
    And then, then I’d cover that dried-out straw mattress with a soft, clean, cold sheet, one of my own sheets with my embroidered initials, replacing the one Janair must have thrown in the wash.
    But first I’d scrape the gritty dryness of the charcoal off the wall, I’d carve off the dog with a knife, erasing the exposed palms of the man, destroying the too-small head of that large naked woman. And I’d throw water and water that would run in rivers down