Empty string

Number of pages: 271 Publisher: Dar Zainab The trust between me and Naima, my cousin's daughter, was mutual, and neither of us feared that the other would reveal secrets no matter the temptations and motives, because our relationship was governed by "the balance of terror" or "we threaten, we threaten back." She was my black box, and she witnessed all my childhood foolishness, and I was also her black box and the only witness to her foolishness. It happened that she betrayed me and I betrayed her, but we were aware, with our naive childish consciousness, that revealing some dangerous secrets would lead to catastrophic results that could not be endured. She witnessed one of my most heinous foolishnesses ever. It was required of me and my cousin Al-Munsif to guard the wheat sacks at night in the field after the harvest machine finished its task. We agreed with a trader to sell him some quantities of wheat in exchange for money that Al-Munsif would spend on his pleasures and whims, and I spent most of it acquiring full Kamel Kani stories and the Green Library. We would loosen the string that tied the sacks and remove some kilograms from them, filling three or four bags that the trader would carry on his donkey-drawn cart and leave with. As soon as Yamma arrived early in the morning, she would express surprise at the way the sacks were tied, and bitterly ask: - I feel the sacks are missing some, and yesterday we didn’t leave them tied like that. We would downplay the matter and laugh at her words, because she was completely confident that "my kind son would never steal," while Naima, my cousin's daughter, knew what we were doing and took her share of the money for her silence. She revealed the dangerous secret to Yamma two months before her departure, in the presence of Naima, and her answer was: - By God, I knew you and Al-Munsif were reducing the sacks, and I thought I didn’t know, because the money was spent on the stories’ thread from the Kaf, ...