Hammam Al-Dar - Saud Al-Sanousi

Everyone who lives in the house becomes one of its residents. The pigeon of the house does not miss and the snake of the house does not betray. This is what Basera told me two years before that day, my father’s grandmother, or perhaps his great-grandmother’s grandmother, I don’t know, because she is very old, eternal, living in the corner of the lobby of the old Arab house, shrouded in her blackness at the bottom of the stairs. Why down the stairs? I have never asked myself about the location of things I used to have since my birth, in an Arab house whose narrow rooms overlook an open inner hall, the hall of Basira, whom I have never seen open her eyes, as if her eyelids were threaded by her eyelashes from time immemorial.

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