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anything you like,” she said. “Riding, bathing, anything. Can you get up?”
    When I told her I could not, she put her hand over my eyes.
    “What am I seeing?” I asked her, smiling. An old game. Her voice came clearly and with a fierce undertone: “It’s our rowboat on the Oun.”
    “We couldn’t row on the Oun right now,” I said. “It’ll be dry.”
    “You’re not playing right. You’re supposed to see it.”
    “All right,” I said. “I see it.”
    And I did. Sun on the chipped white paint, sunlight on the water under leaves.

    The next morning I realized Kethina had come as well. As soon as I saw her, I knew what had made the difference in Siski’s face. The two of them came in together, Siski in yellow, Kethina in rose. They had washed their hair and tied up the long damp plaits. “For the heat,” Kethina explained. “It’s not hot now but later we’ll be so glad we put our hair up early, believe me.” She bent and pricked my cheek with her arrow-shaped mouth. Her fingers strayed in my hair. “So pretty! Siski, you never told me about her hair. Almost blue— a real mulberry black. ”
    She turned, sighing, swinging her arms. “So what are we going to do?”
    “What about breakfast?” Siski said.
    “Splendid!” Kethina cried, snatching Siski’s shoulders. She pressed her brow to Siski’s, her eyes laughing. For a moment they whirled with their foreheads together, giggling, their fresh gowns lifting and swaying around them. “What would I do without you? I’d never eat!” Kethina cried. “But now I’m terribly hungry. What shall we have? Please not fish or cucumbers.”
    “Let’s go down to the amadesh and see,” said Siski.
    “We’ll be back to report,” Kethina cried out over her shoulder. And they were gone in a patter of pale house slippers and bubbling laughter and floating gowns and scent, and that was the way they were all summer. Laughing in corners, embracing one another and making journeys which, from what they said, were always perfection itself. On the journeys they wore wide hats and carried baskets. They would come home dusted with chalk from the hills and burned by the sun on their slim arms, Siski’s hair grown wiry and Kethina’s lank with the heat and their dresses creased from sitting on banks or old stone fences. And always they would explain about the wonderful day they had had, and indeed the excitement on their faces suggested extraordinary delights, as did their dusty boots and drooping ribbons and the odor of sweat, like that of pea flowers, which rose from their damp clothes. Siski had moved the two red chairs from Malino’s old study into my room and she and Kethina would collapse on these, their legs stretched out, the toes of their boots turned up, fanning themselves with their bleached silk hats while the scent of burnt grass drifted in at the window. Then they would tell me what had happened. Sometimes they had been charged by bulls, sometimes received from a peasant a gift of butter tied up in a cloth. Later still I would smell their tobacco and hear them whispering out on Siski’s balcony as the moon rose over the orchard. And while I could hear their sudden giggling and even the jingle of Kethina’s charm bracelets and sometimes, I thought, a bare toe rubbing the iron grating, I never heard what they talked about. And the sound of their chatter exhausted me, they talked without ceasing all through the day and night.
    My sister despised silence. She had a willful and hectic happiness with which she was determined to conquer the world. Sometimes I would hear them screeching, her and Kethina, swinging on the boughs of the Lathni chestnut tree by the well. The house grew quiet only when my father shouted for peace and then I would hear again how it was when we were absent, the growing hush of solitude in the halls where no one walked and the lifeless parlors and the rows of abandoned bedrooms. Then it seemed like our house again with the alien