Aisha Ibrahim’s novel Box of Sand is a work of historical fiction set during the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. The plot follows an Italian journalist, freshly graduated, who is conscripted into the army and sent to war in Libya, where he falls in love with a milk seller from Tripoli. But after her mother is killed, she and her brother are arrested and sent to the Italian penal colonies.  In this scene, the milk seller and her younger brother start their usual rounds as the residents of Tripoli flee ahead of the impending invasion.

Day broke unusually early on the first of October. The sun struck the towers of the sultanate castle, so that it woke to witness an enormous Italian battleship settling at the Port of Tripoli. Leading a young black donkey toward the castle from Al Manshiya neighborhood, a slim fifteen-year-old girl pressed through the gathering crowd of Arab and Turkish men, Greek sailors, and Jewish traders, who swarmed along the alleyways, jostling to the port to watch the goings-on. Her five-year-old brother, who was riding the donkey, swinging his bare legs against the sides of a sack holding two jugs of fresh milk, was crying, frightened by the loud screeching sounds coming from the battleship. With time wearing on—or so it seemed to the girl, who had never seen so many people out before milk deliveries—she tugged tightly on the bridle and headed south, turning her back on the castle square. Entering Sidi Hamouda street, she stopped at an elegant whitewashed house, shaded by berry trees, acacias, and a Persian palm. She tied the donkey to the trunk of the palm and knocked on the door. When the African maid opened the door, the girl could see Jeanne-Marie Kieffer, the French wife of the Ottoman garrison’s doctor, Suleiman Bey, overseeing the packing of several large boxes. The maid fetched a pail from the kitchen and the girl lifted the lid from the milk churn and used her measuring cup to pour out a liter of milk.

“We don’t want much milk. Mistress is leaving in the morning,” the maid said, handing her three Ottoman majidi coins. Meanwhile, Jeanne-Marie Kieffer walked up to the shaded porch, where the girl and her brother were standing.

“Oh, Halima, this is no time for milk,” she gently reprimanded, in broken Arabic. “You shouldn’t be leaving the house.”

“Good morning, Lella. We need to sell milk every day.”

“But this is war, Halima. Everyone’s going to leave. Look, we’ve packed our bags,” she said, before stepping back a little. “Come inside. We’ve got some lovely cakes.”

The maid led them to a wooden settee beneath the shade of the pergola. After bringing out a plate of cookies and cakes, she tore off a large cluster of black grapes from the vine and placed it in a bowl filled with cold water. Jeanne-Marie Kieffer picked three grapes, which she chewed on blankly, then lit a thin cigarette. Whenever she inhaled, her thin cheeks hollowed out, her small eyes sank behind her long lashes, and her pale complexion drained of yet more color. The girl watched her anxiously, only nibbling on her cookie. The boy, however—who had given up the settee and sat down on the mats—was devouring with great pleasure a fistful of cake. He’d bunched up his baggy thawb all the way to his chest to create a makeshift dish, revealing, in the meantime, his newly circumcised and swollen private parts that dangled over the mat. Surrounding them were suitcases, boxes, and dozens of books, all tied together with rope. Halima could read the worry in the eyes of Madame Kieffer, who was usually very happy to see her. She would often tease her, regaling her with stories of lovestruck women after Halima confided in her that she secretly hoped to one day marry her childhood friend, Bashir, who collected bunches of halfa grass near Al Manshiya farms and sold them to the English sailors. According to Bashir, the English used them to make paper for books and newspapers. At this point, she would daydream, desperately trying to imagine the magical process that transformed the rough halfa grass into paper, smooth enough for books. This, coming from the girl who knew nothing of the uses of halfa grass, other than how its twisted strands made strong, coarse rope for tying up cattle.

“Have you read all of these?” she asked, pointing at the books.

Jeanne-Marie Kieffer finally opened her eyes, her face softening into something of a smile.

“Not all of them. The bulky books over there are my husband’s medical volumes.”

“I’m going to write a story about you,” she added, suddenly animated. “What do you think?”

Halima’s eyes widened. “A story! What do you mean?”

“I’ve written eight novels so far. Each of them tells the tales of my travels to cities around the world, and the stories of people I met along the way. How wonderful it would be to add a story about a beautiful Tripolitan girl named Halima.”

The woman paused, gazing at the girl’s face, which resembled a flower in full bloom, looking out from the collar of her green kaftan.

“I wish I could describe Halima’s beauty,” she continued. “Her eager eyes, her black braids that bounce around her waist when she runs behind her happy donkey. I’ll write about how you’re clever, and kind, and how you help your mother pay off the bank installments. I’ve written a great deal about the scandals of Di Roma bank. I wish you would read, Halima.”

She pointed at a pile of newspapers. Halima recognized the Arabic letters she had learned at the al-Katatib Quranic school: Al-Mirsad, Tripoli of the West, Abu-Qasha, Tamim-I Hürriyet, and other newspapers that Madame Kieffer told her were French and Italian. She saw a photo of Madame Kieffer on the corner of the last page, looking beautiful and graceful, with her aristocratic nose, delicate chin, and thin lips, her head topped with a hat tilted to one side and decorated with ribbons and flowers. Madame Kieffer read out some of the headlines to Halima and described, as simply as possible, the way families had been exploited by mortgage policies. Halima already knew all about this from personal experience, since the day she first opened her eyes to the world, in the farms of Al Manshiya, an area consumed by sand in the seasons of drought.  She was familiar with having to suffer through long nights without supper, looking upon her elderly father, with his gray hair, wrinkles, and his cracked hands and feet, in which she read a record of misery and years of leanness. Her mother had explained to her that she’d married him when he was already an old man who had lost his first wife and all their children to the plague. She told her of how he had carried them off in a donkey-led wagon to a khan, which the government was using as lodgings for the disease-ridden, and how he watched as paramedics poured kerosene over the corpses and burned them in a large hole. That year the city was overcome by grief, as it lost a third of its inhabitants and another third fled to distant lands. But life had to go on in the ill-fated city, and people opened up their homes to each other, gathering up their misery and sadness. Her mother was not the first orphaned girl to marry an old widower with trachoma, scabies, and other illnesses that caused bouts of coughing, so that his home would once again be filled with poverty-stricken children. The first child he named Khalifa: the “successor” to his departed children. Khalifa joined the Greek sponge-fishing boats—the Raqariq boats, as they called them. He would be gone for long stretches of time out at sea, and the Greek sailors paid him a miserly wage, but all he cared about were the secrets of the sea. “Go to the sea,” his father had said to him. “It won’t betray you like this barren land.” Then one autumn night, the sea did betray him, tossing his bloated corpse onto the sandy shores. As for Halima, who was next in line, she was handed down the name of her dead sister and now had to rove around the homes of the affluent, selling milk. Young Hamad accompanied her in her roaming. He saved her from loneliness and helped protect her from the wagging tongues and suspicious looks. She still remembered the day her father came home, grasping paper notes that she was seeing for the first time—large, red notes with strange pictures and lines. He told them that he had borrowed them from the bank so he could dig a well in Saniya. He would never again need to wait for the rain; he would plant potatoes and onions, and watermelons in summer, he added optimistically. But Halima was drawn to the large blue seal that stained his right thumb. “What is that?” she asked. “It marks the first half of my disgrace,” he snapped. And that was the last he said of the matter. The laborers came; they dug the well, extended the pipes, and pure, fresh water flowed. But when her father tilled the ground with his plow, the Ottoman Ministry of Agriculture didn’t issue him the seeds. He lined up with the farmers at the government gates, and they signed grievances and petitions. The minister assured them that he had spoken to the Supreme Council, but still the seeds did not materialize. And so the season passed in vain, with nothing to show but some invasive weeds that sprouted idly around the well. When the time came to pay off the first loan installment, Halima’s father complained to his cousin, Ismail Effendi, who had been lucky enough to study in Istanbul and now worked at the bank. Ismail Effendi advised her father to invest in a cow that could feed on the grass, so they could sell fresh milk to the foreigners who lived in the city. Some days later, her father returned with another seal on his right thumb. The girl asked again. This time, averting his eyes, he replied: “It marks the other half of my disgrace.” She understood that he had mortgaged the other half of the land. But the disgrace this time must have been harsher than he could withstand. The next morning they found him dead.

Ever since, Halima’s mother had watered the grass to feed the cow. She milked it and readied the donkey and the jugs for the children, who traveled around the city’s neighborhoods, selling milk to well-off families. The milk was plentiful and had enabled them to pay off an installment last spring. Until, that was, the European communities began to depart, one by one, after Italy bared its fangs and news spread of an imminent war. As the Neapolitan, English, Maltese, and Raqariq traders left, their milk clients dwindled. Three months later, Ismail Effendi told them that they had been summoned to court, to give up the land. The mother arranged for her brother, who worked as a porter in the Rushdieh school, to attend the court hearings on her behalf. But after a few deliberations, the bank employees themselves departed, on account of the events taking place in the country, and the case was closed.