The rays of the afternoon sun angled through the hole in the broken vent. White dust and silence surrounded us, nothing more. Dust and silence that seemed to have been passed down from antiquity. We could hear no wind. On his beam, the horned owl mutely preserved the wisdom of the forest. A wisdom also bequeathed from the distant past. Mariye wept for a long time. She made no sound, but the trembling of her body told me she was still crying. I kept stroking her hair. As if she and I were heading upstream along the river of time.
