Chapter 4: Tel Zahra

"Then he can dig it back up," I said, "and drink it himself."

The salt-mother laughed so hard she had to sit down in the sand.

That was three months ago.

Now I had a stall.

It stood in the oasis market at Tel Zahra, between a man who sold dates and a woman who sharpened knives.

A plank on two salt sacks. An awning of old camel blanket.

Twenty little bottles in a row, all with three petals pressed into the wax.

"You should change the mark," the salt-mother told me the first week.

"I've sold under that mark since I was nineteen."

"You're dead, salt girl. Dead women don't have marks."

"Then I'll be the only one who does."

She shook her head and bought a bottle of the tamarisk oil for her feet.

Tel Zahra had no blue lotus and no cedar.

It had date blossom, tamarisk, wild mint by the spring, and a gray desert sage that smelled like rain on a hot roof.

I learned them the way my father taught me, one at a time, on the back of my wrist.

I made a sleep oil out of them in the second month.

It wasn't the old one.

The resin was the only thing I kept.

The knife woman's husband used it and slept so long she came to complain.

"He missed the whole morning," she said. "I want three more."

I lived in a mud room behind the salt-mother's yard.

She had four grown sons, nine grandchildren and a camel she called the Grand Vizier because it bit.

They fed me at their fire every night whether I wanted it or not.

The youngest grandchildren climbed on me.

The middle one, a girl of eight, wanted to be a perfumer.

I let her smell the bottles with her eyes shut and guess.

"Lemon," she said, about everything.

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