Najwa goes up to the roof terrace at twenty past six on the morning of 19 June, the basket of wet laundry against her left hip as she has done every morning for forty-eight years, since she married Hisham and moved into her mother's house on the upper floor of a limestone building that was new in those days and now has the vertical cracks along the south wall, those cracks she knows by heart, one by one, because there was a time when she counted them in order to fall asleep, when Hisham was still alive and coughed in his sleep and she lay awake, although now she no longer counts them, because when a woman reaches sixty-seven she no longer counts the cracks, she knows them, she carries them on her, she has them in her eyes when she looks at the wall opposite and sees it the way she sees her own hand. She hangs out the first sheet, the one of coarse cotton her sister-in-law from Tyre gave her twenty years ago for the elder daughter's wedding, a sheet with a red selvedge that she recognises by touch even in the dark when she has to change the bed at night. The wooden pegs, the ones she brought down from the wedding chest that had been her mother's, run along the line with that small noise of dry wood against plastic-coated wire which she has been listening to for half a century, a noise that means nothing in any language and yet means the morning, means clean laundry, means that the day has begun and that everything else may as well begin too. Below the terrace the neighbours downstairs are gathering up the glass of the windows shattered during the night; she hears them with that slow and cautious rhythm glass has when it is moved with a dustpan and not with the hand, because whoever gathers it knows that the dustpan does not recognise the small splinters but is less dangerous than the fingers, and Najwa thinks there is a wisdom in this choice, a small wisdom one learns only by doing it too many times, and the wisdom is that broken glass is not touched with the hands, even when one is certain of seeing all of it, because the small pieces are the ones that get in between the skin and the nail and stay there for weeks without letting themselves be taken out.

She hangs out the second sheet, the one that lay under Hisham the night Hisham died in 02019, that sheet she has washed a hundred times and which is still white and which has on it a stain of tea spilled last autumn, a stain she sees as a lesser map of Lebanon, with Beirut up on the right where the stain is darker and Tyre down on the left where it thins away, and while she is hanging it out the drone passes low, an Israeli drone, she recognises it by the sound because the sound of Israeli drones is different from the sound of the cars in the street and from the sound of the UNIFIL helicopters, it is the sound of a distant lawnmower drawing closer, a sound that for six months has entered the register of the domestic sounds of Nabatieh, and while the drone passes she holds the sheet in mid-air and does not let go of it, and between the wooden pegs and her fingers the dishcloth, which was resting on the line beside her, slips, because the dishcloth was damp with too much water and she had not wrung it out well, because this morning she had little water and washed the dishcloth last, because the dishcloth belongs to her granddaughter, who had asked her to wash it at her place given that in Beirut the water has been off every other day since the month of March and given that she had to give it back dry by the evening, and the dishcloth falls into the courtyard below, two floors down, onto the dry grass where the neighbours have laid the pieces of glass on a sheet of newspaper folded in four.

Najwa watches it fall. For a moment she thinks of leaving it there. She thinks that a dishcloth is a dishcloth. She thinks that at sixty-seven going down two flights of stone stairs to fetch a dishcloth is not worth it, above all this morning when the drone has passed and might come back, because the drones in recent weeks have taken up the habit of coming back when they have picked out an active courtyard, and because this morning her daughter who lives in Saida telephoned her at half past five to tell her to stay indoors, not to go up on the terrace, to wait before hanging out the washing. But then she also thinks that the dishcloth belongs to her granddaughter, that she promised to give it back dry by the evening, and that leaving it in the courtyard out of fear of the drone would mean saying to her granddaughter that her grandmother is afraid, and would then mean saying to herself that the courtyard below the house is no longer hers, and would then mean saying to the drone that the drone has won, and Najwa thinks that the drone has not won, not today, not for a dishcloth. So she goes down. She goes down with the slow step of her arthritis, one hand on the iron handrail she knows by heart, the handrail her husband had made in 01988 by a blacksmith from Ghazieh who died two years later in an accident on a moped, and in the courtyard she picks up the wet dishcloth, shakes it out, folds it in two and goes back up.

Up on the terrace she wrings it out slowly above the tiles, and the water comes down into a small pool that the tile drinks in a few seconds, because the June sun here is already fourteen hours long, and then she hangs it on the line with two new pegs in place of the one that had fallen. The drone does not come back. Najwa hangs out the third sheet as well, and then the fourth, and when she finishes the sun has already dried the first. She hears the first siren of the day over towards Marjayoun. She goes on hanging out the washing.