I was passing by Nabila’s place and decided to stop in and see her. She opened the door. I smiled and stood still, without a word, just breathing.
Looking for your friend again? she asked me.
We are all friends here, I replied.
She smiled, laughed, shook her head, and invited me in.
I sat agitated, like a schoolboy who is about to jerk off.
Do you want some coffee?
Yes, I said and looked at her see-through dress. Her thighs were full and round. The lines of her underwear were showing, defining the borders between her majestic ass and the tops of her legs.
She went to the kitchen. I followed her.
I am going to see George, I said.
At work?
Yes.
So why did you come here if you know he is at work?
I thought you might want to send him something, like a sandwich or an apple.
She approached me, pinched my left cheek and said, You are not so innocent, young man, visiting your best friend’s aunt while he is at work.
I held her hand; she tried to pull it away. I hung on to her little finger and pulled her over slowly. She smiled. I kissed her neck. She smelled of beauty cream, milk, and fat bankers’ cigars. She let me wander my lips over her neck, then laid her open palm on my chest and gently pushed me away.
The coffee is foaming on the stove, and you have to go, young man.
GEORGE WAS WAITING for me. I walked toward him and handed him fifty liras. Pretend not to know me, I whispered.
Which machine do you want it in?
What do you mean? I asked.
Which machine? He sounded irritated. I will transfer the amount to that machine.
Oh yes. Number three.
I went to number three and there were fifty liras in credit waiting for me on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
I played for twenty liras and lost. I went back to him and said that I needed the balance back, the thirty that was left.
He gave it to me.
I walked back to my home, thinking that, yes, there had to be a way.
TEN THOUSAND BOMBS had dropped like marbles on the kitchen floor and my mother was still cooking. My father was still buried underground; only Christ had risen from the dead, so they say. I was no longer expecting my father to show up at the door, quietly, calmly walking into the kitchen, sitting at that table, waiting for my mother to serve him salad and thin bread. The dead do not come back.
Ten thousand bombs had made my ears whistle, but I still refused to go down to the shelter.
I have lost too many loved ones, my mother said to me. Come down to the shelter.
I did not go.
TEN THOUSAND CIGARETTES had touched my lips, and a million sips of Turkish coffee had poured down my red throat. I was thinking of Nabila, of poker machines and of Roma. I was thinking of leaving this place. I lit the last candle, drank from the water bucket, opened the fridge, and closed it again. It was empty and melting from the inside. The kitchen was quiet; my mother’s radio was far away, buried down in the shelter, entertaining rats and crowded families. When the bombs fell, the shelter became a house, a candy castle and a camp for children to play in, a shrine, a kitchen and a café, a dark, cozy little place with a stove, foam mattresses, and games. But it was stuffy, and I’d rather die in the open air.
A bomb fell in the next alley. I heard screams; a river of blood must be flowing by now. I waited; the rule was to wait for the second bomb. Bombs landed in twos, like Midwestern American tourists in Paris. The second bomb fell. I walked slowly out of the apartment. I walked down the stairs and through the back alleys, guided by screams and the smell of powder and scattered stones. I found the blood beside a little girl. Tony the gambler was already there, with his car ready to go. He was half-naked and stuttering, M-a-r-y mother of God, Mary m-o-t-h-e-r of God. He kept repeating this with difficulty, breathless and frozen. I carried the little girl. Her wailing mother was hysterical; she followed me to the back seat of the car. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the girl’s bleeding ribs. Tony flew his car toward the hospital. He honked his siren. The streets were empty; the buildings looked hazy and unfamiliar. The girl’s blood dripped on my finger, down my thighs. I was bathing in blood. Blood is darker than red, smoother than silk; on your hand it is warm like warm water and soap. My shirt was turning a royal purple. I shouted and called the little girl by her name, but my shirt was sucking up her blood; I could have squeezed it and filled the Red Sea and plunged my body in it, claimed it, walked its shore and sat in its sun. My hands were pressing on the little girl’s open wound. She faded away; her pupils rolled over and disappeared into a white, soft, dreamy pillow. Her head was leaning toward her mother’s round breast. Her mother picked up Tony’s mantra and they both repeated, Mary mother of God, Mary mother of God. The little girl was leaving to go to Roma, I thought. She is going to Roma, lucky girl. Tony honked a farewell in a sad rhythm to the empty streets.
THE NEXT MORNING I was meeting George down at the corner by Chahine the butcher’s. There was a line of women waiting for the meat. Inside, goats were hung, stripped of their skin. White and red meat fell from above, pieces were cut, crushed, banged, cut again, ground, put in paper bags, and handed to the women in line, women in black, with melodramatic, oil-painted faces, in churchgoer submissive positions, in Halloween horrors, in cannibal hunger for crucifix flesh, in menstrual cramps of virgin saints, in castrated hermetic positions, on their knees and at the mercy of knives and illiterate butchers. Red-headed flies strolled everywhere, there was animal blood on the floor, butchers’ knives paraded on stained yellow walls. The bombing had stopped, and women had come out from their holes to gather tender meat for their unemployed husbands to sink their nicotine-stained teeth into and seal their inflated bellies.
George was walking down the street toward me. When I spotted him, he waved to me. A man in a green militia suit stopped him. They shook hands; George gave him three kisses on the cheek.
As I waited, I watched the flies resting on the mosaic tiles, feasting on perfect round drops of blood.
Who is that? I asked George.
Khalil. He works with Abou-Nahra.
Maybe it is not a good thing that he sees us together, I said, thinking of the poker machines.
He hardly ever comes to the casino. Not to worry.
Maybe there is a way to get a cut of the money, I said. And it might be simple. I come and pay you the money, and you press the credit in the machine while I am playing. Does the machine keep records. . I mean, if you have a straight flush, for instance, would it record the winning strike somewhere?
No. I don’t think so, George said.
We have to be sure. I will pass by on Monday. We can try it. While I am playing, inject some credit in there. A small amount, not much, just to try.
Come by in the morning, early. . usually there is no one there, George said.
And maybe we should stop meeting in the open for now, I said.
I WENT TO THE little girl’s funeral, the little girl who was on her way to Roma. Her mother was wailing. Women with veils over their hair filled the little alley. My mother went to the funeral too. They come to our funerals, we go to theirs, she whispered to me in a moral tone.