dress with little or no embroidery—a sign of their poverty. Her hair was covered with a rust-colored scarf, and her face had a hundred wrinkles. Yousif could sense and understand her great anxiety. Some of the children must have run and told her about Amin. From the look on her face, Yousif knew she had not believed it was only a broken arm and had come out to see for herself.
“Habibi, Amin,” she said, wringing her hands. “How did it happen?”
Amin, still mounted on the horse, reached out with his good hand and took hers. “I fell off a stone wall.”
“Where were you?”
Amin glanced at his two friends and then at his mother. “I’ll be all right,” he told her. “Don’t worry.”
The horse entered the narrowest path leading to the house, followed by a group of curious children.
“Does it hurt a lot?” his mother wanted to know. “I wish it were my arm instead of yours.”
The rider held the reins and stopped the horse in front of Amin’s house. Yousif and Isaac helped Amin dismount. The sight of blood made Aunt Tamam purse her lips and beat on her chest. Then she bent down, touched the ground, and kissed her fingertips, an expression of humility and gratitude Yousif had seen his mother make many a time.
“Allah be praised,” she said, “it wasn’t more serious. Here we are worried sick about your Uncle Hassan—”
“What about Uncle Hassan?”
“It looks like he had another heart attack.”
“Did father go to Gaza? Is that why he isn’t here?”
“No, not yet. But I know he’s checking to see if he he should leave now or wait.”
A wall of silence descended among them.
“That’s the way it is,” Fayez Hamdan said, turning his horse around. “Trouble comes in groups.” The horseman left them standing in front of the house, taking with him all the blessings of a grateful mother.
“I sent one of the children after Abu Khalil,” Aunt Tamam said as they entered the house.
“Who?” Yousif asked.
“The one who mends bones,” she told him.
“But why?” Yousif asked, surprised. “Why not my father? You know he’s a doctor. Why didn’t you send after him?”
For the first time the old woman’s face wrinkled with a genuine smile. “You don’t have to tell me who your father is. Dr. Jamil Safi is the best doctor there is, but this is too small a job for him. Abu Khalil has been mending bones all his adult life—and he’s nearly seventy.”
Yousif shook his head. “My father will be disappointed. He loves Amin like a son.”
“Believe me there’s no need to trouble the doctor with something as simple as a broken arm,” she assured him. “He’s too busy for this sort of thing.”
Yousif was not convinced; he suspected she did it to save money. The poor, he knew, carried their pride like open wounds. But the old woman disappeared inside the dark cave of a house, and he could not talk to her.
“I’m going to get my father,” Yousif insisted, walking away.
“Please don’t,” Amin entreated, clutching his arm.
Yousif couldn’t understand. “He would want to look after you.”
“No doubt,” Amin said, biting his lip. “But like mother said, mending bones is not a big deal.”
Pride. Yousif knew it in the silence that lingered.
Aunt Tamam held a kerosene lamp atop the stairs they were about to climb. Although he had been to Amin’s house several times, Yousif still marveled at its simplicity. It was basically a spacious room that served as a bedroom, living room, and kitchen, plus a low-ceilinged basement used to raise chickens. Amin’s father, Abu Amin, was not only the town’s best stonecutter, but was also in charge of several men working on the villa Yousif’s parents were building. Why couldn’t such a man afford a better dwelling, Yousif wondered? Then he remembered that Abu Amin, a Muslim, at one time had two wives and two sets of nine children. He was lucky he could feed them, much less build them a house.
As they ascended to the main floor, Yousif was struck by the darkness. Even in daytime three oil lamps were lit, since light from the one curved window that ran to the floor and from the two holes high in the opposite wall was hardly sufficient. Shadows hovered in every corner. A large mirror was hung at an angle facing the front door. It magnified the size of the room and made the shadows twice as ominous.
Amin’s mother brought a mattress and laid it on the floor next to the window. There he sat, propped by a couple of pillows, apologizing all the time for the trouble he had caused his friends.
Within minutes, Abu Khalil was at the door. Yousif glimpsed him in the mirror and watched him walk up the six or seven steps. Yousif and Isaac rose and made room for the sprightly old man who was dressed in plain, ankle-length, black dimaya. What impressed Yousif most was the matching rust color of the turban, the sash, and the ankle-length ‘aba. It contrasted well with black. For a few seconds, the tidiness of the diminutive old man seemed promising.
Having removed his outer garment, Abu Khalil was even smaller than he looked. He knelt by Amin’s side and began inspecting the injured arm. It was broken in three places, he grimly announced: once above the elbow and twice below. Amin groaned.
“It’s a bad accident,” Abu Khalil muttered, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette down to a butt he could hardly hold, “but I’ve seen a lot worse.”
There was no ashtray around, so Abu Khalil ended up giving the butt to Yousif, who passed it on in turn to one of Amin’s little brothers. Yousif laughed as the little boy took a drag on the cigarette before pitching it outside through the open window.
“Where’s that old mother of yours,” Abu Khalil complained, scratching his white beard.
“Don’t you call me an old woman, you old goat,” Amin’s mother rebutted from one of the shadowy corners.
“Hurry up and bring me what I need then,” he told her, blowing his nose boisterously, wiping his whiskers with a flourish, and then unwrapping Amin’s arm. The unsanitary way Abu Khalil went about doing things belied his tidiness and disturbed Yousif.
“Aren’t you going to wash your hands?” Yousif asked.
The old man glared at him, his small blue eyes clear as crystal. “Young man, I was mending bones long before you were born. You dare tell me what to do?”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Aren’t you Dr. Safi’s son?”
“Well, yes.”
“I even mended his bones when he was knee-high.”
“Medicine has changed.”
The old man shook his head and, under his breath,
