Dear Odd Bull,
It is extremely unfair and no one here will help me so I am complaining to you. After all you are the Chief of the United Nations here and it is your job to look after oppressed minorities of which I am one and so is Maman although she won’t admit this to anyone this side of Beirut. I am being persecuted by everybody but especially by Mr. Bibas of the accounts department at the radio who will not pay me my wages on time but makes me grovel to him in his office and laughs at me while I try to explain my case. I know he is looking at my breasts under my too tight blouse but I have no money for new clothes and Maman is tired of altering garments for me. She says she grew up in a household with three sewing girls working for them in the old days and a Greek gardener who kept the hushchash orange and the lemon trees in perfect order. So she refuses to turn into a servant of her own daughter even though she makes fancy dresses for the rich ladies who shop at Fashion Vienna in Zion Square.
Dear Sir Odd Bull or Colonel or General Odd Bull, you see we need help for many reasons but especially because we go to sing hymns at the Still Small Voice in the Desert Chapel and our neighbours suspect us for this and think we are spies for Jesus and King Hussein. How could we be spies if we go so openly and mostly for the singing? Believe me, we get no money from Mr. Wells, just Scottish oatcakes and packages of English breakfast tea and sometimes booklets from the Bible Society in Stirling, Scotland. The hymns are sweet too and make me think of green fields by streams bubbling over smooth grey pebbles to the sound of trumpets like they have in England from pictures of when I was young and we lived there. When I sing
Blow ye the trumpet blow
The gladly solemn sound
in the little room overlooking the deep valley I raise my voice without fear. There are...
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