Just as we leave the office, a powerful feeling develops between us. And then, just as quickly, it disappears. The visit is urged on by ambiguous desire, a misunderstanding or perhaps wondering on his part: What do I want? Why did I call him to go out, why am I here? I let him wonder about my silence that I don’t want to waste. Perhaps my silence encourages him to move his secret contemplation into the realm of questioning. He doesn’t ask and I don’t want to explain. This time, I’ll let my life find its way, I’ll throw my desire to the wind that plays on the surface of the water and transforms it into high waves that crash against the café’s white walls. I observe him while we sit; I chose the seat where I could see the sea. I don’t want to turn my back on it.
A desire more powerful than myself floods me. I give myself to it… it takes me. I no longer see what others see. I let myself give into a desire that I thought I’d lost. How can I know what’s inside him? He begins to speak freely. I listen to him with calm contentment. I listen, thinking about him. Just seeing his fingers holding his cigarette, about to light it, makes me shiver. He pauses, then continues what he had started to say. I watch him look at me this same way and forget that I’m holding a cigarette and an unlit match in my fingers. Then I put this all aside and drink my cold tea. It’s eight o’clock in the evening when we leave Rawda. I go back to his place with him. Outside the door, I want to tell him, let me into your heart as well as your home. Instead I say, I want to see your little garden this time. But I’m thinking, do I really want to be let into his heart? Will I be able to bear the burden of a relationship? Or do I only want to use my head to survey things a little — to see his place and his life, to see them through my own desires, my body and eyes. I look at him for a long time but then feel annoyed and turn my face to feel the wind coming from the blue line of the horizon.
In his little flat, he goes into the kitchen to prepare dinner for us. I stand and watch him. It’s nice, how he busies himself cooking for me. He takes out a bag of frozen seafood and quickly prepares rice and a salad as well. The smells of cooking pervade the kitchen and the whole house. Suddenly I feel hungry. Nour works quickly while my stomach grumbles; I want to eat. I look for a bottle of white wine that he says is at the back of the refrigerator. With the first glass, I feel strongly that I’m living another life. A life that in no way resembles my previous lives in Beirut, Australia or Kenya. My other lives. Lives like my first meeting with Georges, my observations in the notebook that I left on the plane, as if I’d forgotten it on purpose. Lives that begin in two places or more or are from no place. Stories that don’t meet up. Lives whose origins are an abundance of love and an abundance of desire, perhaps more than a man can satisfy. Lives for which I open two permanent parentheses in my heart. I open up for him too and invite him inside.
When we embrace, a little question flashes through my mind: Why does his face grow red when our bodies touch? Why do men fear these moments, inviting the whole world’s worries into the room to come between us? All my questions disappear in a fleeting moment that accounts for an entire lifetime. A complete passion, which I once believed that I’d lost forever, takes its place. In the moment, I tell him “I feel like I’m traveling!” I close my eyes. “What’s happening between us is better than traveling,” he whispers, burying his face in my hair, then kissing my face and neck. Is what is happening to me now like when I first knew Georges? We don’t laugh like Georges and I did. Love then was a frivolous game we enjoyed. It was easy, light and painless. Now love means regaining a desire I believed had died long ago. This act isn’t free of nostalgia. But I don’t know why.
He starts coming to my flat on Makhoul Street every night. The calm apartment transforms into a site of life and celebration. I’ve never known sex in my life like I experience it with Nour. He cooks for me while I sit in the small living room across from the kitchen and watch him search for the ingredients he needs. He’s calm and peaceful standing there. My heart beats with love for him. I love that man when he’s cooking for me. My desire for him is mixed with scent memories of the delicious spices that emanated from Nadia’s kitchen when I was small. Remembering my mother while a man cooks for me is a wonderful, pleasurable thing. This erases the masculine and feminine roles. Nothing remains between us and with us, except love and desire that is reignited every time it starts to wane. A thread suspended between the sighs of separation and sighs of coming together. A separation delineated only by the distance between two bodies and the time between two moments.
I return to search for a place that I thought I’d lost. Is Nour also searching for a place for himself here? He tells me: I don’t belong to any place, not here and not there in that other country where I was raised. I wonder, where we do belong, then? Does belonging have prior conditions? Does moving from place to place, these lives of immigration, diffuse these conditions? Or does immigration not matter? Does belonging to a place give us stability, is instability the reason for our ever-present anxiety? Or is war the reason? Is…? Does…? That anxiety — not just now and not just since I left Beirut, or in Australia, or in Mombasa — follows me like a shadow. Before I left Lebanon I moved from here to there and from there to here. From the mountains to the city I left and then traced my steps back. I found Nahil reading the Hikmeh, or in front of the house throwing food to the birds. I found empty cages whose doors were always wide open. Whenever Abdo, who tended to my grandfather’s fields, found a colorful bird he put it in a cage to give it to Nahil, who would immediately take the bird out of the cage, put it on her open hand, hold it in front of her and let it fly away into the sky.
I light a cigarette while still in bed. Nour tells me that he has allergies and can’t tolerate smoking in the bedroom, but he will just this one time. I don’t answer. I put out the cigarette and ask him if he would drive me the next day to visit Georges’ family. He makes some excuses but I repeat my request insistently. He finally agrees!
Olga accompanies us on the visit to Georges’ mother. The war prevented us from building a life together in Australia, Georges and I. Georges’ mother is there waiting for me, his sister with her. She’s holds a cigarette as if it were the same one she was holding when I bade her farewell fifteen years ago. When she sees me, she cries. She tells me that she’s still waiting for him, that she feels close to death and has bequeathed the task of continuing to search for Georges to her daughter. “After the mother, only the sister can pursue this cause.” She chokes up as she says this. I cry, too. This moment helps me understand why I came to see her. She’s the only person who can allow me, just by seeing her, to finish my ongoing mourning.