Water ran down the diagonal channel in the concrete, gray with oatmeal, flecks of wasted food in the bottom, while the yellow soles of her housegirl's feet flexed very slightly as she stood on the concrete riser, leaning against the long communal basin like a man standing at a bar, scrubbing pots slowly, expressionlessly and thoroughly, while his love, her skirt tucked above her knees, worked ten feet down the same channel, her bracelet shining, her wrists white with suds, her ankles flecked as if the baby had spat on them again, and she scrubbed the clothes one by one in the soaping basin and then scrubbed them again in the rinsing basin there in that courtyard with the bathroom smell; and then she wrung them out and pinned them on the wire. (The sister was asleep. Every day she slept until almost sundown. Then she put her earrings on and went out to chew khat and get drunk. She never paid rent. She was much happier than his love, whom he rarely heard laughing outside her home; he could remember only one time when the baby was on her lap and she was throwing litter out the window of a taxi.) The baby took the pushbroom and played with the water in the channel while inside one of the still-shut blue doors someone else's baby cried determinedly, and the lady beside his love bent over a plastic basin, twisting and scrubbing, and she and his love laughed gently together. The baby stood and peed into the gutter again, picking fretfully at his sneakers. Then he threw a passionfruit rind in and stepped on it. By now it was nine-o'-clock and she had been at it for two hours. She darkened the courtyard with her cool dripping clothes hanging from the wire, baffling the unpleasant sun. She cleaned out the gutter and scrubbed the floor with a brush. None of the other ladies ever did that; she'd taken it upon herself.
In the third hour she did the jeans and jackets, scrubbing them with a hard brush on the concrete floor she'd washed; she rubbed in soap powder with her hands; then she went about her folding and straining and rinsing; while in the darkened room the housegirl peeled garlic, considering deeply over each clove, making each as perfect as a white tooth.
In the smoldering forenoon the pot, bubbled continually, the women smoking cigarettes and gossipping with the bird-nodding of gazelles' heads. Whenever the baby was bad they grabbed him and made to cut his penis off with a big knife or burn it off with a lighted match, and when he screamed they laughed.
Now at last it was safely late, the house not too hot anymore but cool and blue inside; and after dinner the baby sat on the floor eating rice with a spoon. The soles of his feet were already thickly callused. He'd grow up to be what he had to be, just like her first husband, who'd beaten her. (She said: Every time a woman gives birth, the pain is so great that she wants to punch her husband!) She bathed the baby in the plastic washtub and let him splash and play. Then she rubbed his body with Vaseline. When he became fretful and bad, she gave him a capful of cough medicine and he fell asleep on the bed. Then she went out to do more washing, while the girl with the furrow-woven hair sat hunched over the pot, slowly chopping chard. Later, happily lying beside her white lover in the cubicle of the rich couple, who even had hot chocolate powder, she listened to her little radio. She said: If I get rich, I'll buy a nice house, buy my mother a car, buy my children everything. — Her hands and buttocks were more lovely than the dapplings on a giraffe leaning down to browse on a bush, the giraffe's flesh brownish-yellow with dark brown spots like a fresh buttermilk pancake. Her soft brown thigh was delicious with sweat.
