I put Olga’s latest test results on the bottom of the suitcase. I put all the doctor’s papers at the bottom of the suitcase and zip it closed as though I don’t want to remember and don’t see any other solution. Olga sleeps on the way to Dhour al-Choueir. Her body seems small, like the body of a teenage girl. Her hair has thinned. She’s weak and debilitated.
In the hotel room, she takes off her clothes, one article at a time, and appears to be shaking. I go to her to help her get in bed. The air is warm and the windows are all the way open. There’s absolutely no air circulation; the curtains are motionless. I draw back the bedcovers and clear a place for her to sleep. She keeps holding my hand for a few moments and pulls me gently toward her. With a kindly gesture, she motions to me to sit with her in bed. She closes her eyes. I take off some of my clothes and throw them on my bed by the window. I stand for a moment, then turn and see Olga looking at me. I take off my remaining clothes and walk naked toward her bed. I lift the covers on the other side and slip in beside her, with the intimacy of two people whose relationship has not dissipated because of distance.
She turns to me, I notice a weak half-smile on her face, and I encircle her with my arms. Her naked body is very cold, despite the hot weather. Her skin is smooth but dry. As I draw nearer to her I feel heat creeping through her body. She buries her delicate face in my naked breasts. Time passes like this before our breathing together takes on an even, harmonious rhythm. I pass my hand over her back as though I’m getting to know her all over again. At that moment, I can’t recall the smoothness of her body or the moments of warmth that have never left my mind during my time away from her, those moments I’d make use of whenever Chris approached me in bed. I hold her in my arms once more and feel at that moment as if I’ve forgotten every memory that linked the two of us.
I listen to the rhythm of her calm, regular breathing and I know that she’s surrendered to a short sleep, but before long it will be interrupted by nighttime pain. When we awake in the morning, I’m still embracing her, her body like an unborn child’s.
Tomorrow we start chemotherapy, I tell her, and kiss her a morning kiss.
I wait for Nour but he doesn’t come. I know that he’s not in his office; I know that he’s out somewhere. I’ve been waiting here for hours and his bedroom, which I’ve never liked, is lonely and cold. But I’ll wait and I’ll wait even longer because I know that if I walk out this door before seeing him I won’t be able to return.
So I’ll wait and this is how I’ll pay back the debt of waiting that I owe him, because he waited for me so many times. It’s as if the air in the room has decreased. Perhaps this explains my feeling of suffocation: if waiting for him in his flat where we first came together causes such feelings of suffocation, then love is useless. Should I just leave? Go back to Mombasa to see the man I don’t want? Or wait for this other man who doesn’t come? I postpone the moment of leaving. And so I delay every decision and every movement. I delay my whole life. In this way, I extend the period of my waiting ever more. I write and dilute my desire for him through writing. I make it dissipate and I forget. I look at the clock on my phone, which is lying next to me on the bed. It would have been better if I hadn’t taken off my clothes. My nakedness is lonely; I can’t bear it. Naked in a room that seems naked, with the whole world outside. I’m alone, waiting for him. I don’t know why just then I remember what Georges said to me in his warm, seemingly hopeless voice when we spoke on the phone the night I left for Australia: “The most beautiful thing about you is that you have a strong presence, you’re not controlled and you’re soft, you’re present and tender, very present and very gentle, you’re strong and resilient. You give without weakness. This is what’s unique to you: you don’t allow a man to decode you too easily.” Did he say everything that he thought about me all at once because he sensed that we’d never see each other again? Only now do I write down what Georges said. But I’m thinking only of Nour, who seems more and more mysterious as I grow closer to him. Every time I know his body more profoundly, I grow lonelier. I miss the smell of his skin…
Nour can’t bear to stay in one place for long. Maybe the idea of searching for his roots was born out of this constant movement, so that he could travel. But his continual searching worries me, as does his being away. He’s searching for his roots and believes that he’s holding onto something, but in reality he’s only holding onto shadows of the past, his illusions. “I don’t belong here,” he tells me, “I want to go back to my country.” But does anyone have a “home” country? Don’t we invent our own homelands? Perhaps Chris is right when he says that we don’t need that many reasons to love a place and call it our homeland.
Nour returns to search for his roots. When he doesn’t find them, he decides to leave. As for me, I see myself lost deeper and deeper in a spiral of waiting. It’s OK, I tell myself. I’ll learn how to leave once again, how to depart peacefully. Peacefully? This is the right word now. Peace inside me, in the walls of my womb, which trembles like a leaf whenever I think of him. There’s an entire life that I have almost no power over and that’s nourished by love.
The last time we met, I went into his apartment. I didn’t see him and I didn’t see his suitcase but I felt it. I knew that he must be in the bedroom. I pulled back the curtain and through the window I saw him sitting on the balcony, which isn’t even wide enough for two people. He put on his sunglasses and tried over and over again to light his pipe. He looked at me from behind his sunglasses. I smiled at his repeated, failed attempts to light his pipe. He wanted to read on my face the impact he makes on me. He wanted to read the impact his coldness and appearance have on my eyes and body. He walked toward me and lifted his glasses from his eyes. I have missed his eyes. I miss the worry with which they sear me whenever I look into them. I know that I still need him more than he needs me. I know he has built a relationship with me within certain boundaries around his life, his work, his relationship to this place, women, his return to his homeland, and his search for his roots. He has chosen a place for me and kept me in this limited, narrow space.
Here I am, waiting once again. Another wait and another. The end of my last wait is still in my mind. For two weeks I wait for him in the café. I wait for some correspondence from him telling me that he’s returned to Beirut, that the room is waiting for me and that he too waits for me. He says that he’ll come back after two days and he doesn’t come back. I wait an hour for him in the café, two hours, three. I wait for him even longer than this.
Wimpy fills up, Wimpy empties. Alone on my chair near the cold pane of glass, I look like a mannequin forgotten in a shop window. Our date was set for eight-thirty, time passes, it’s ten o’clock and he still hasn’t called. The waiter hovers around me. At ten o’clock I’m the last customer. The cafés and restaurants in Solidère are just getting started at ten, but here on this street, Hamra Street, it’s closing time.
Across from me, Modca has transformed into Veromoda, with a big sign for Jack & Jones. I think, what if I pick up the orange and white chair I’m sitting on in Wimpy’s sidewalk section, bring it over to the closed Veromoda, and sit there right in front of its door? It would seem unnatural to anyone who saw me there. People used to sit there but now people only walk in or look at the displays in the windows as they pass. Now it would be strange to put a chair on the sidewalk in front of it. No one sits in front of fancy boutiques except the man who takes bags from people as they enter, bags they’ve brought from other shops. He takes them to be sure no one puts anything from this shop in their bag when the owner’s not looking.