In the fall of 1998, I was living in Madrid, enrolled in a professional international relations program at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset. I taught English on the side; one of my classes was the Madrid office of the Boston Consulting Group.
One morning, one of my students came rushing through the door several minutes before class began. He sat into his chair with peculiar determination.
“¿Algo pasó?” I said. “Something wrong?”
My student hesitated, a quick glance to confirm there was no one else in class, then lowered his voice and leaned in a little.
“I had to fire my maid,” he said, in Spanish. I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, yes, I had to fire her because she wrote something on my pillow.”
“She wrote on your pillow.”
He nodded vehemently.
“I came back from a business trip and found this strange writing on my pillow. It can only be her, she’s the only one with access to my apartment.”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know, she wrote it in Arabic. I don’t read Arabic and she speaks little Spanish.”
My writer’s soul fired up, conjuring dramatic scenes of clandestine activities, high-level political intrigue, links this “maid” had in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere.
“You should probably find out what the writing says,” I suggested as nonchalantly as I could. “Or if you like, bring it into class and we’ll find a translator.”
My student nodded, still visibly disturbed but nowhere near as interested as I was in the mysterious writing. I spent the entire week unable to stop thinking about it, running scenarios in my mind that would explain the writing on my student’s pillow. Each more fantastic than the previous, none made any plausible sense.
I waited impatiently for the next time I'd see him in class. The day came. He sat down, said good morning, I said good morning; we exchanged the usual pleasantries. Unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I asked him about the writing on the pillow.
“So... that pillow your maid wrote on... did you get the writing translated?”
Find out what happened that sparked a novella readers 14 years later cannot put down. Read the rest of the story seed in Verse in Arabic.
