“I’m not a baby!” I cried. “I know heaps and heaps of things, and if you don’t tell me, I shall not go to sleep—and what is more I shall uncover myself and catch my death of cold. So please tell me why you don’t marry.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because he whose children I should have been happy to bear is for ever buried, beyond that hill, in the forest of Belgrade.”
“That cannot be,” I said sceptically, “there is no cemetery there.”
“No, yavroum,” she said softly, “but he lies there; for I buried him.”
Through the curtainless windows the stars were lending us light. The face of the halaïc shone sweet and tender, full of womanly charm and loveliness. My little hand slipped into hers. Who shall deny that we have lived before, that each little girl has been a woman before? Else why should I, a mere child, have understood this grown-up woman; and why should she, a woman, have thus spoken to me?
There we sat, our mattresses on the floor, as near to each other as possible, holding each other’s hands while the stars were helping us to see—and perhaps to understand.
“Like you, he was a Greek, and like you he said things about nymphs and goddesses. He said that I was one of them, and he loved me. Some day soon I was to be his. But in our household then there was another man who vowed that no infidel should possess me. We were living at the time over the hill, in the outskirts of the forest of Belgrade. One night when the moon was at its waning, like the night you saw me in the garden, that man killed my lover. I buried him myself—in the forest of Belgrade—and, have tended his grave for these seven years. I do everything to please Allah, and I never complain. To avert the punishment which is allotted in the other world to the women who have not done his will, I exhort him, according to the prescribed magics. It is said that if during these rites, some time, a child should come, it is Allah himself who sends it, to show that he understands and forgives—and you came, yavroum, the other night.”
She bent over and kissed me gratefully.