Notes

He must do this because he loves his daughter, and she will never find a good husband if people know her dark secret. It is months before a child with long feet like his father and a curved eyebrow like his mother is taken away in the night

A child who will never see the long feet of his father or the curved eyebrow of his mother. It is morning, on that day months before, and a young woman, hundreds of miles away, wakes up to find a little blood between her legs.

Now her husband's family will decide that she can never have children. And her husband's mother will say, once again, that she is no good.

She will say that a woman who cannot have children is no use to the family. Tears run down the young woman's face and she wants to die, because she does not want to give this news to her husband, who was hoping, hoping, hoping.

What can he do? He has fought with his mother again and again, but now he has to agree at last. He has to say, yes, he will take this barren woman back to her family.

There is no use for her here. He is the only son of the house, and a wife who cannot have children is no use to him and his family. The trouble is that he has learnt to like this woman who is his wife.

Maybe he has even learnt to love her. fe talks to her softly while she cries in his arms. We will do something, he tells her, we will do something. They travel to a country which is at war, where the people live with death every day of their lives.

And for these people, a baby who is taken away from them is a baby who has escaped from the house of death. This İs what the woman tells them - the woman stranger who smells of expensive perfume.