The Witch of Portobello Page 0,30

later. By then, Athena was already known in Dubai and recommended customers to dine in my tent, and through them I learned that her career was going very well: she was selling pieces of desert! One night, the emir in person arrived, preceded by a great retinue. I was terrified; I wasn't prepared for that, but he reassured me and thanked me for what I was doing for his employee.

'She's an excellent person and attributes her qualities to what she's learning from you. I'm thinking of giving her a share in the company. It might be a good idea to send my other sales staff to learn calligraphy, especially now that Athena is about to take a month's holiday.'

'It wouldn't help,' I replied. 'Calligraphy is just one of the ways which Allah blessed be His Name places before us. It teaches objectivity and patience, respect and elegance, but we can learn all thato'

'othrough dance,' said Athena, who was standing nearby.

'Or through selling land,' I added.

When they had all left, and the little boy had lain down in one corner of the tent, his eyes heavy with sleep, I brought out the calligraphy materials and asked her to write something. In the middle of the word, I took the brush from her hand. It was time to say what had to be said. I suggested that we go for a little walk in the desert.

'You have learned what you needed to learn,' I said. 'Your calligraphy is getting more and more individual and spontaneous. It's no longer a mere repetition of beauty, but a personal, creative gesture. You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.

'You no longer need the tools that helped you learn. You no longer need paper, ink or brush, because the path is more important than whatever made you set off along it. Once, you told me that the person who taught you to dance used to imagine the music playing in his head, and even so, he was able to repeat the necessary rhythms.'

'He was.'

'If all the words were joined together, they wouldn't make sense, or, at the very least, they'd be extremely hard to decipher. The spaces are crucial.'

She nodded.

'And although you have mastered the words, you haven't yet mastered the blank spaces. When you're concentrating, your hand is perfect, but when it jumps from one word to the next, it gets lost.'

'How do you know that?'

'Am I right?'

'Absolutely. Before I focus on the next word, for a fraction of a second I lose myself. Things I don't want to think about take over.'

'And you know exactly what those things are.'

Athena knew, but she said nothing until we went back to the tent and she could cradle her sleeping son in her arms. Her eyes were full of tears, although she was trying hard to control herself.

'The emir said that you were going on holiday.'

She opened the car door, put the key in the ignition and started the engine. For a few moments, only the noise of the engine troubled the silence of the desert.

'I know what you mean,' she said at last. 'When I write, when I dance, I'm guided by the Hand that created everything. When I look at Viorel sleeping, I know that he knows he's the fruit of my love for his father, even though I haven't seen his father for more than a year. But I '

She fell silent again. Her silence was the blank space between the words.

' but I don't know the hand that first rocked me in the cradle. The hand that wrote me in the book of the world.'

I merely nodded.

'Do you think that matters?'

'Not necessarily. But in your case, until you touch that hand, your, shall we say, calligraphy will not improve.'

'I don't see why I should bother to look for someone who never took the trouble to love me.'

She closed the car door, smiled and drove off. Despite her last words, I knew what her next step would be.

Samira R. Khalil, Athena's mother

It was as if all her professional success, her ability to earn money, her joy at having found a new love, her contentment when she played with her son my grandson had all been relegated to second place. I was quite simply terrified when Sherine told me that she'd decided to go in search of her birth mother.

At first, of course, I took consolation in the thought that the adoption