“‘It’s me, Fawwaz.’
“When he saw me, he jumped like a madman. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m crazy. I should have brought you with me.’
“He took me by the arm and lifted the rifle from my hands as though he wanted to toss it aside.
“‘That’s my rifle. Leave it alone.’
“I snatched the rifle back, and we left. He stopped a car and told the driver, ‘To Hamra.’ There, near the Cinema Sarola stop, we went into a cheap hotel, where he rented a room on the second floor. As soon as we got inside the room, he attacked me and started tearing at my clothes.
“‘Take it easy. I want to wash.’
“He slept with me with Ahmad’s smell still clinging to me. I don’t know if he smelled the other man, but he hit me. Before that, he’d banged his head against the wall and cursed at me. But in the hotel on Hamra Street, he hit me after he’d had sex with me two times in a row. He said he’d fixed up a house in the camp in Burj al-Barajneh.”
Shams lived in Burj al-Barajneh until 1982, in other words, until the fedayeen left Beirut. She led with Fawwaz a wild sort of life that can barely be believed. True, I’m a doctor, or something like it, and true, doctors — through contact with their patients — come to understand the psychologies of their patients, since at least half of all illnesses are psychological in origin. But still I couldn’t understand. I asked Shams about Fawwaz’s childhood, but what she knew of it didn’t provide me with an explanation.
“Did you cheat on him, and he found out?”
She said she never betrayed him except with Ahmad, but Fawwaz made her forget the taste of the love she’d experienced in the Monte Verde.
She said Fawwaz was always afraid of her, always accusing her and repeating that he’d got stuck with a whore, and abusing her because she didn’t get pregnant.
“I don’t know why I didn’t get pregnant in Lebanon and why I did in Jordan, but after the night in the Monte Verde I wanted to get pregnant so I could have a boy like Ahmad. But it didn’t happen, and I forgot Ahmad; the only thing I remember was his lips on my breasts — God, how sweet that was! It was the first time a man had taken my nipple between his lips. Fawwaz would rub my breasts and then bite them. But when Ahmad took my nipple between his lips, the waves rose within me and I felt my depths moving toward him and taking him. Fawwaz was nothing like that. He was a beast. He’d crucify me half-naked and say he could only get aroused when he heard gunfire, and I would lay there beneath him as he would fire his gun, terrorized.
Shams thought that’s what life was like, and then the Israeli invasion had come and saved her. Fawwaz left with the fedayeen, and Shams went to her family’s house in Amman. She found a job in a sewing workshop owned by Mme. Hend Khadir and forgot she was married.
Two weeks later, he came and announced he’d decided to settle in Amman — the revolution was over, he didn’t want to go to the camp in Yemen, and he was going back to his original work.
“Meaning you want to be an engineer again?” said Shams sarcastically.
“Shut your mouth!” her mother shouted. “Women don’t have the right to make fun of their husbands.”
“In al-Wahdat, he no longer needed to fire his gun to become aroused. He stopped beating me and became kind. He’d go to work in his father’s shop and would come back in the evenings to eat and sleep. He’d tell me that he’d dreamt that he’d had a son. The poor man didn’t know I’d had a diaphragm inserted and wouldn’t get pregnant if all the semen in the world were stuffed into my guts. Then I got an infection, so the doctor took out the diaphragm, and Dalal arrived.”
IT’S NIGHT and I want to sleep. My eyelids are weighed down with stories. Now I understand why children fall sleep when we tell them stories: The stories infiltrate their eyes through the lashes and are turned into pictures too numerous for the eyes to process. Stories are for sleep, not for death. Now it’s time for us to stop telling stories for a while, because one story leads to another, and night blankets the words.
But first tell me, what is the story of that spirit woman and that man who drowned in the circles of the red sun?
That happened at the beginning, but even so, it comes just at the end of the story.
Nahilah explained it to you, it was a simple misunderstanding. You thought she was a spirit, and she thought you were a prophet. You ran away, she knelt down, and Nahilah laughed and laughed.
You told me you named the tree Laila. You used to sleep by day inside the trunk of the Roman olive tree, and when you were with Nahilah you’d talk to her about Laila, and see the jealousy in her eyes.
It was the beginning of the fifties, and Yunes was making one of his trips to Bab al-Shams. That day, he hid inside the Roman olive tree on the outskirts of Tarshiha. When the sun began to set, he came out of his tree and saw something he’d never forget.
He said he’d never in his life forget that woman.
“She was wearing a long black dress, and had covered her hair with a black headscarf. She saw me and came toward me. I shrank back against the tree. I was wearing my long, olive-green coat and carrying my rifle like a stick. The woman was approaching me. She was far away, the sun was in my eyes so I couldn’t see her silhouette clearly. I saw a black phantom emerging from among the red rays of the sun and coming toward me. Then, when she was two hundred meters away, she stopped in her tracks as though she were rooted to the ground, knelt down, rubbed her brow with dust, and raised her face toward me. She put her hands together and said something in an Arabic that I wasn’t familiar with. Then she rose, stumbling over her long dress. I took advantage of the moment to hide inside the trunk of the tree, slipping inside it with my heart beating like a drum. I stayed inside the trunk until night had covered everything. There was something strange in her eyes. I thought she was a spirit even though I don’t believe in spirits; but I was afraid, very afraid.”
When Yunes told Nahilah how he’d stood close to his tree, wrapped in the red rays of the sun, and how the spirit woman had appeared to him at a distance and how she was going to carry his mind off like in the stories, Nahilah laughed for a long time.
“A spirit woman! The Yemenis are everywhere. That must have been a Yemeni Jewess.”
Nahilah told Yunes about the sobs they’d heard coming from the moshav the Yemenis had built over al-Birwa and about the mysterious rumors of children dying and disappearing. She said the Yemeni Jewesses would go out into the fields and lament like Arab women and that she’d started to fear for her children. “If the children of the Jews are disappearing, what will happen to ours?”
“That spirit woman was no spirit,” said Nahilah. “She was a poor woman like us who must have lost one of her children. So when she saw you, she probably thought you were a vision of the prophet Elias.”
Nahilah laughed at you and called you Elias, saying that with your beard you’d started to look like a Jewish prophet.
You can’t forget the scene — a black ray emerging from the red rays of the sun, a woman kneeling on the ground and crying out in a voice to rend the heavens. You thought of her as “Rachel the spirit,” and on your way to see Nahilah, you’d enter the Roman tree and invoke the Yemeni woman. You told Nahilah that you were a Yemeni, too. “We come from Yemen. Our tribe migrated from there when the Ma’rib dam collapsed; the dam collapsed and drowned Yemen, and we fled. I’m Yemeni and my sweetheart’s Yemeni, I have to look for her.”
Nahilah would be a little jealous, but then she’d take you into the space at the back of the cave that she christened “the bathroom,” where she’d make you take off you clothes and would bathe you. You’d stand naked and she’d be wearing her long black dress, which would get soaked and cling to her body, kindling your desire, and you’d grab her with the soap still all over you, and she’d slip out of your grasp and say, “Go to your Yemeni woman. I don’t care.”