Free In the Country by Mia Alvar

his plate with a splash. All the while I tried not to consider what it would mean if I did want a child, but not with him. And all the while I longed for Saturday, the start of the workweek, when he would be back at the pipeline and I would be alone with Aroush.
    “I could have watched her for you,” I said to Mrs. Mansour. “I would have taken Aroush off your hands this weekend.”
    “Oh, Teacher, I did not think of it.” Mrs. Mansour looked genuinely surprised at the idea. “You are Teacher, not baby nurse.” Was I flattered by this distinction, between my work and a servant’s?
    From her cot Aroush snored once. We both looked over. She stirred but did not open her eyes.
    “Teacher, do you believe in tests?”
    “Tests?” Again I panicked, thinking of standardized tests, the kind that would evaluate Aroush’s progress under my teaching. She’d found me out. And now Mrs. Mansour wanted to measure how much improvement fifty dinars an hour bought. “Of course tests will be important,” I said, “to gauge her development in the future. But we don’t want to place too much emphasis, too early, on—”
    Mrs. Mansour shook her head. “For example, God, He takes away everything that you have. Or oppositely, he give you riches and gold. Tests.”
    “Oh,” I said, “tests from God.” I took a sip of coffee. “You think the workers’ strike is a test?”
    “Not the strike. Aroush,” she said. “My husband, he says she is a test. A trial from God, which one day He will reward us for this difficulty. My parents, they think she is
adhab.
A punishment. Pentance, Teacher, in your Book.”
    Whether she meant
penance,
or
penitence,
or
repentance,
I understood.
    Mrs. Mansour said she no longer spoke to her parents. Having a child like Aroush served her right, her father had said, for marrying into the wrong sect, for following her nose to the vulgar smell of oil money, for abandoning her war-torn country to live an easy life of leather floors and marble ceilings in a mansion on the Persian Gulf. “I am happy most days,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Most days Aroush, she is my little miracle. But sometimes…this weekend, she cried and cried. She would not stop. And I…” She paused, then whispered, “I wanted to be in London. In the shops. Away from her.” I could hear a hot tremble in her voice. “So maybe it is true. Maybe I am being punished.”
    “No.” I meant this, though my voice rang false. Lately I’d been dreading when Mrs. Mansour might catch me in my lies and scold me, as any boss would a dishonest worker. But she treated me like a god. As a teacher in the Philippines I’d often felt myself at the mercy of mothers; Mrs. Mansour was the first mother I had known to put herself at my mercy. I saw more clearly how much power she had given me, the damage I could do, her dependence on what I chose to say.
    “Tell me, Teacher, what kind of mother thinks her daughter is punishment?” Mrs. Mansour turned up her hands. The henna had faded to the slightest of traces. She seemed to be exposing to me some raw layer underneath the jewelry, designer clothes, and potions: her flesh, not an idea. Deceiving Mrs. Mansour had revealed to me a Mrs. Mansour who was not so easy to deceive. And loving her child made it harder still. No better moment to come clean with her than now.
    But “you can be forgiven for thinking that” was all I offered. Then I added, softly, “No one ever sat with a howling child and didn’t think for a moment she might be in hell.”
    Mrs. Mansour set her half-finished coffee cup on the tray. “Thank you, Teacher.” Her voice had cooled. “You say the perfect words to give me hope always.” She stood and bid Aroush and me a good day. By the time she returned for her daughter in the afternoon, she had put on her sunglasses and her veil. Her lipstick and henna had been freshened. Hard to imagine, then, the wan, depleted woman who’d accepted coffee in my living room that