“I can’t believe what I’m hearing... You, Salma, who are so—”
“Sometimes I think about calling the two of you — you and Hyam — asking you to send me flowers or candy or fruit so I can feel some kind of warmth. Lamia, you want the truth? I think your failure means nothing compared to mine. Every day I feel the same way you did that evening when it became clear that everything would end between you and Philippe.”
“You still remember that evening?”
“Now even more than ever. Your only concern was preparing Philippe’s pizza. You didn’t pay much attention when I told you about my kidnapping by the party’s ‘comrades.’ We didn’t know that on that very evening we would do brave and fearless deeds in battle with members of the Other Party! Yes, we swept away passion and weapons in one fell swoop that night, and we were careless.”
Despite her pain, Salma burst out laughing and said, “By day, the machine gun was waiting for me and by evening you were waiting for Philippe while your mad admirer Samir was waiting for him with his gun. A group of armed fighters surrounded Philippe at the entrance to the building. You started pacing around like a madwoman, asking me, Why is he late? I don’t know what inspired me to go out and see what was happening on the street. I found Samir in front of the building in a military uniform. He turned toward me and said, Tell your girlfriend I won’t let him enter this building and he won’t be able to cross this street, no matter how quick he is. I told him that were he to return it would be his last stand. I instructed my guys to follow him home and watch his every move. Then he added, Tell your girlfriend that it is she alone who is able to keep this bad seed away from all of us. Tell her that my situation in life has improved and that I’ve been in love with her since high school. He doesn’t love her. I responded, Why don’t you come yourself, Samir, and let her know all these things? But he didn’t dare climb the stairs to our place, despite all the influence he claimed to have.”
“Yes, calls and threats were enough for Philippe to be humiliated like this in front of my house... and the man with bullets and influence to meddle in my life...”
“I cannot forget your face or how you looked on that night, your back hunched over all of a sudden. We tried to intercede with someone in the party who had more influence than Samir... We went to him in the morning and we felt reassured when we saw him, because he was an older man. But he started to scoff at everything that you were saying. My girl, you are pursuing an already lost cause. He’s not for you. My God, he started admonishing us so we’d understand that we were all under close surveillance. And we went back the way we came, like this, defeated. I knew that the season of your sadness would begin when the ‘joy’ of Philippe’s marriage to someone else became a reality.”
“Come on, let’s stop worrying about this and live our lives.”
“Lamia, I’m living a failure like yours right now, but I’m thinking about getting out of it, whereas you didn’t want to leave it behind. You needed a house, not university, not friends, not family; you found a thousand pretexts to not see anyone. How stupid you were!”
In any case, pretty soon she won’t be stupid anymore. She’ll marry Farid and turn a new page in her life.
She put the pictures back in the drawer and went into the living room. She opened the window and leaned against it. The roar of the powerful electric generators reached her. This feeling of exhaustion returned: an exhaustion of bygone years, a delicious exhaustion which gripped her when Mousa, Philippe’s friend, came for an unexpected visit. She started to feel her sadness passionately because he came to offer her comfort. She sat on the sofa, listening to his pleasant words, stealing looks at his childlike hands and his sturdy neck.
She recalled the day when the three of them — Lamia and Philippe and Mousa — were together and Mousa offered his hand to help her cross over a pool of water, then he turned toward Lamia and said, practically in a whisper, “I can see that the two of you will no longer be together, from now on.”
A painful sweetness emanated from him. He started showering her with calls in the afternoon and their conversations would stretch out long into the evening. She left the cover of the sofa where he’d been sitting crumpled up in the same position for days. It made her happy to think about his presence there in front of her as permanent. She’d sip what remained in his cup, after he left, as though it were a kiss. Once, she was standing in front of the window and he called to her from the stairs, smiling. His smile made her understand that she’d replaced one love with another. If only she were able to delete those evenings from all the memories of her life, when she’d lean out the window and see his broad feet climbing the stairs to visit her without warning. He’d sit on the sofa and start laughing his sweet laugh, continuing his story about Prince Myshkin. His fluttering eyelids melted her. Each flutter was some kind of colorful bird that she’d approach only to have it fly off, away from her, to parts unknown.
What was it in his voice that made her loneliness dissipate, bringing joy to her heart and removing it from its labyrinth? His gentleness entranced her in the beginning. Then ever so slowly he started assailing her with dark thunderbolts. What did he want from her? Nothing, he told her, adding that he didn’t get involved in the lives of women who he has affairs with. Sometimes he’d call her and ask her strange questions, like the number of times her ex-lover had sex with her. Why did he even care about that? His questions perplexed her: What did he want? For her to announce her love for him? Would that be enough? Did he want an intimate friendship? She awoke from her daydreams panicked by the ringing telephone. Farid’s voice surprised her, drowning her thoughts of Mousa, “Darling, I’ll be a little late.”
She opened one of the unsent letters to Mousa she had kept, as though to complement the miserable pleasures that her life kept from her.
You don’t want to influence the lives of the women who you have affairs with? That’s fine. This sentence is enough for me to not want to see your face again. You know something? I turned that sentence over in my head thousands of times and didn’t consider asking you what you really meant by it. You don’t know the dark thoughts that invaded me and made me dead inside. As soon as I would try to get close to you, you’d let me know that there wasn’t any benefit for me in being in your life, freely offering hints, marked by pain, almost as though you were completing the thought to yourself: Or in anyone’s life.
Should I have endured your dark thunderbolts, vagueness, and forgetfulness?
Did I learn anything else from you? Are you truly able to leave me in peace?
I feel like a sad, raging bull, ready to fight, but the stabs it’s receiving on all sides have made it feel hollow.
I feel truly exhausted. Nothingness is the most exhausting thing.
She put the letter in an envelope. She decided to finally send it by post. She passed her tongue over the sticky line. It tasted bitter. No, she won’t send it. If only Salma were here to take care of this. She’d know how to, like she used to do in the past.