People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in elation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son.
