“When did your relationship with him start, Madame. .?”
I left my question hanging in the air, and the shock took the wind out of her sails. Looking at me with startled eyes, she said, “Claire. Claire Midawwar.”
“Have you known him for a long time?”
“A very long time,” she said and got up.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
She picked up her bag and said she was going. “Look after him, and may God make him well.”
Mme. Claire didn’t come that week, and it’s possible that she’ll never come back again. It’s my fault, but I couldn’t help but ask her. I saw her coming once a week and I imagined her with you, eating Roman olives dripping with lemon juice and oil.
Eating Nahilah’s olives with another woman!
I don’t understand anymore.
You’ll ask me about the French actress, I know. But no, I swear there’s nothing between us. I just felt a strange tenderness.
You’ll ask me about my visit to her at the Hotel Napoléon on Hamra Street.
I didn’t mean to visit her. I was feeling stifled here, so I went. I’m not going to tell you any more now. I’ll behave like Claire Midawwar, who went away without telling me a thing.
Tell me, is Claire the woman you sought shelter with during the Israeli invasion of ’82?You claimed that you’d fled to a priest’s house! Was she the priest? Got you! I’ve got you now, and it’s up to me to decipher what you said. Everything needs translating. Everything that’s said is a riddle or a euphemism that needs to be interpreted. Now I must reinterpret you from the beginning. I’ll take apart your disjointed phrases to see what’s inside them and will put you back together again to get at your truth.
Can I get at your truth?
What does your truth mean?
I don’t know, but I’ll discover things that had never crossed my mind.
“And you?” you’ll ask.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. What about you?”
“Nothing.”
“And the French actress?”
“Nothing.”
“And Shams? Where is she?”
Please don’t say anything about Shams. I promise, I’ll forget about Claire and the olives dripping with lemon juice and everything else, but please, not Shams.
So let’s close this chapter and return to the summer moon and Nahilah.
That night, the moon was bright in the skies of Galilee. Yunes tapped on the windowpane and left, but he heard her whisper. He turned and saw her standing at the window, the moonlight pouring down onto her long black hair. He went closer and she said, “The Roman tree. Go on ahead and meet me at the Roman tree.”
He went to the tree, wondering why she didn’t want to go to the cave, guessing that she might be indisposed, because at that time of the month, she’d come to him at Bab al-Shams and ask him to go out with her into the fields, and he’d stubbornly refuse. The game would end with him kissing every crevice of her body while she screamed at him, “Stop it! Stop it! It’s a taboo!” and he’d give way before this taboo and be content with expending himself between her small breasts.
He went to the Roman tree, but instead of waiting for her beneath it, he got inside its huge, hollow trunk, which was wide enough to hold more than three people, and the idea rushed into his head that he could possess her there. He hid in the trunk, held his breath, and heard her circling the tree looking for him. She was like a small child lost in the fields. His love caught fire. He waited until she was close to the opening of the trunk, pulled her to him and brought her inside, while she trembled with fright and called on God for protection. He drew her to him.
“It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”
She yielded to his hands, and kisses, and his hot breath that enveloped her, while saying: “No, no.”
He pulled her closer, his back against the trunk, and tried to lift her dress. She pulled back, and her head struck the trunk. The pain made her groan. He tried to take a look, but she pushed him away with both hands and slipped outside. He followed her, reaching out like a blind man searching for something to grope.
“Listen,” she said and sat down.
“Sit there,” and she pointed.
He asked about her head.
“It’s nothing. Nothing.”
She spread the provisions she’d bought out in front of them. “I brought you some chicory and midardara.”
“No,” she said, escaping his grasp. “Today you have to listen.”
He listened as he ate, the femininity of the moon creeping inside him and chilling his body. She talked and was born through her own words. That day the seventh Nahilah was born.
The first Nahilah was his young wife that he didn’t know, because he was in the mountains with the fighters.
The second Nahilah was the beautiful woman who was born in the cave of Bab al-Shams as she trod the grapes and married her husband.
The third Nahilah was the mother of Ibrahim, the eldest who died.
The fourth Nahilah was the mother of Noor that Yunes clung to in the cave and called Umm Noor, Mother of Light, whenever she came to him with light shining from her eyes.
The fifth Nahilah was the heroine of the funeral who came out of prison to announce the death of her husband and lamented in front of everybody.
The sixth Nahilah was the mother of all those children who filled the square at Deir al-Asad.
And on that night, the seventh Nahilah was born.
Beneath the olive tree whose branches were drenched in the green moon of Galilee, the seventh Nahilah was born. She was approaching forty, wrinkles ran down her long neck, and sorrow extended from her eyes to her cheeks.
The seventh Nahilah had grown exhausted with all there was to exhaust her. A woman alone and poor.
“You know nothing at all,” she said. “Sit down and listen. I’m worn out, Yunes, you have no idea. You know nothing at all. Tell me, who are you?”
Did she ask him “who are you?” or was it enough to recount her torments? Did he see himself mirrored in her words?
Yunes sat down and discovered he knew nothing. He’d been concerned only with his Nahilahs, as though he’d married seven women who were different in every way but united by one thing: waiting.
All of a sudden, Yunes saw his life as scattered fragments — from Palestine to Lebanon, from Lebanon to Syria, from one prison to another.
He had lived for his long journeys to Galilee, when he had to get through the barbed wire, past the dangers and the Border Guard and the machine guns that mowed down border crossers.
He’d built up political and military cells composed of the tattered remnants of men who wanted to get back to their land. He’d joined various organizations. He’d started as an Arab nationalist with the Heroes of the Return and the Youths of Revenge and moved on to Fatah after meeting Abu Ali Iyad, and there, he became an official in the Western Sector.
“I was living in a no man’s land,” he told Nahilah, “as though I weren’t living, and you were here on your own, and I did nothing for you. Come with me to Lebanon.”
She said no. “The children have grown up, and it’s over. What do you want me to do in Lebanon? Live in the camp? Become a refugee? No. You come back here. I know you can’t because they’ll kill you or put you in prison here. You can’t come and I can’t either. You’re my husband, and I’m your wife. What kind of life is this, Abu Salem?”