“The ring is beside the lamp. Silence reigns and ears are blinded. In the silence the finger slides along and slips on the ring. In silence, too, the lamp is put out. Darkness is all around. In the darkness eyes too are blinded.

The widow and her three daughters. The house is a room. The beginning is silence.”

I wrote in my introduction about silences – this story is consumed with them. Huge gaps for things that can’t be said and can’t be looked at. Female sexuality here is a desperate, muffled thing, which creeps about secret and ravenous, stealing food like a neglected spaniel. Mellifluously told, it’s a dark fairy-tale that makes you feel the void that exists between people, and the ways that sex can close that void in unsettling and sometimes radically impersonal ways – a coming together of flesh which supersedes whatever else it is the body houses.

English translation published in Egyptian Short Stories, Hinemann Educational, 1978)