Authors: Elias Khoury
He said he preferred to close the bakery while he was away.
“And how will we live?” she asked.
“I’ll send you money from the south.”
“No, Nabil. We don’t get paid by the revolution. We give to the revolution.”
She bit her lower lip and said she was sorry she’d said his name wrong.
He said she was right and the bakery must keep on working and he’d never take a penny from anyone.
“I depend on you,” he said.
On his journey to the south Khaled took with him Hayat’s smile, the tremor in her voice as she used the name she’d given his uncle, and her decision to keep an eye on the bakery while he was away.
At Shaqif Castle, before the rocky, plunging canyon, where the wind buffeted the bodies of men scattered through its stone-hewn passageways and vestibules – there, where one felt oneself alone before the gods of war and death and as though one were just one more block of stone left behind by the succession of wars that the castle had witnessed since it was first built, Khaled felt a mysterious freedom, mixed with an ache in his heart. He felt he had been liberated from Hayat, her blue nights filled with the sleeplessness of longing and the strain of a desire buried deep in the soul.
His restless dreams, with Hayat at their center, came to an end. Khaled had never dreamed of his wife naked, even though her upward thrusting breasts gleamed under her nightdress, spreading the colors of distant clouds through his eyes. His sleep was blue and his sleeplessness was blue and all he ever dreamed was that he had moved closer to her and looked into her face, which he would see either as covered by her hair, which spread over the pillow, or in profile, her lips touching the edges of the coverlet. He’d move closer to her, but the moment he felt her breath lightly fan his face he’d find himself jerking about on the far side of the bed, rise like one stung by the lust spurting from him and leap out. He never got close to her in his dreams. He never touched her body with its armor of pajama bottoms and socks which covered her lower legs, and which she always wore, winter or summer.
There, before the wind that ululated through the valleys and battered the walls of a castle resembling the vault of heaven, Hayat disappeared from his sleeping dreams to reappear in his waking dreams. He would sit behind
the barricade, guard the stars, and see her. He’d cup her face in his hands and kiss her. Khaled had never kissed Hayat in the past, or at least he’d hugged her and kissed her on each cheek when his uncle had died, but then she hadn’t been his Hayat; she’d been, rather, the widow of the martyr. He didn’t recall the feel of her cheeks on his lips but did remember the wetness of her tears. He told himself he’d kissed not her but her tears. Then, when it was time to say goodbye, when she’d smiled as she wiped away a tear suspended in the corner of her eyelid, she’d moved closer to him and kissed him on the cheek, but the surprise had so overwhelmed him that he’d felt the kiss only after he left the house.
Here, though, on his own, before the gods of night that spread their shadows over Mount Amel, Golan, and the Sea of Tiberias, he discovered the kiss, and the nuances of its diverse flavors. Hayat would take possession of him with her lips that opened to reveal white teeth, saliva, and the sweet taste of her tongue. He would kiss her on her closed lips, on her upper lip, her lower lip. He would kiss her quickly, or with tender slowness, or with a lust that made him reach for all the flavors of her tongue. He would kiss her on her eyes and on her smile. He kissed her neck and moved down to her shoulders with quick little kisses and deep lingering kisses. He bit her lips and felt her teeth biting into his lower lip, heard the moan of the kiss and became drunk on her lips. He was alone with the blue of the night, a mouth that held the secrets of the world, and lips burning with talk of love that evolved into a sensation fashioned by the miniatures of the night.
There Khaled felt the pleasure of love, mixed with a pain in his heart. It was there that he came to understand that longing is another name for the pain that dwells in the soul. His pain was great but it was mute. To whom should he complain and what might he say? Even Radwan, who clung to him like his shadow, never learned the story. How should he justify to him the fact that he’d never touched the woman who was ever present in his
heart, his house, and his bed? And who would believe him? Even she, even Hayat, didn’t believe the story of his love for her, and how it had taken the form of a pain which was a synonym for waiting.
The stay in Shaqif Castle, known to the Franks as Belfort or Beaufort, was a moment of contemplation and an exercise in the recovery of love. The castle stored away in its stony walls the secret meaning of the absurdity of the present. For when the present bears witness in such a miraculous way to the layers and legends of the past, it too is in danger of being transformed into a part of the story of the place.
Shaqif
is a Syriac word meaning “towering rock.” The castle is located at a distance of five kilometers from the city of Nabatiyeh and overlooks the fortresses of Hounein, Tebnine, and Baniyas, as well as the heights of Lebanon, Mount Amel, Mount Harmoun, the Golan Heights, the hills of Safad, the Jordan Valley, and the Syrian coast all the way to Beirut in the north and Acre in the south. It is also known as Arnoun Castle with reference to the Lebanese village at its foot. The castle’s foundations are entirely carved out of the rock and no one knows the date of its construction. Some historians believe that Arnoun is a distortion of Renaud, the name of the Crusader Lord of Sidon within whose domain it fell; to Arab historians it is known as Irnat.
Their residence in the castle was, however, merely for purposes of guard duty, for after the Israeli incursion into the south and the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces, the Palestinian leadership had decided to observe the ceasefire.
At the organization’s general assembly Radwan said he could see no reason to stay there. “We’re outsiders and we don’t fight. We guard empty space and have to deal with an unfamiliar environment. We’d do better to go back to Qubbeh and resume our struggle there.”
Khaled couldn’t think of a convincing answer. He too yearned to get back but was aware of the difficulties. He knew that to return would be to
expose themselves to a confrontation with the vast apparatus of repression that the Syrian regime had come to control in the city. The regime had allied itself with the city’s traditional leaders and built up a large network of agents, most of whom were drawn from the hoodlums of the various quarters, people who had in the past submitted to the greater power of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leftist Lebanese forces.
Despite this he accepted their argument and they returned.
When Khaled entered his house in the Mahalleh area of Qubbeh at six p.m. on Sunday, December 18, 1977, tired from the long journey and from walking through valleys and forests to avoid the checkpoints that were everywhere on the roads, he found her waiting for him. She was standing at the door with her long black hair hanging down onto her neck, from which arose the smell of laurel-scented soap, the light smiling on her eyes. She was wearing the sky-blue nightdress that he knew so well but her legs were, for the first time, free and naked.
“I knew you’d come today. The water’s hot. Go and take a bath. I’ve made the most delicious dinner.”
When he removed his mud-caked clothes and tried to put them in the laundry basket, she took them from him, saying, “Give them to me. They’re all going into the rubbish. Everything – the shoes, the socks, the sweater, the trousers, the underwear – goes in the rubbish.”
She took everything from him from behind the half-closed bathroom door and left him alone and naked before the hot water and the soap. Later Khaled would think of that as the moment of his birth. When he reappeared from the bathroom wearing clean yellow pajamas, he told her that he now understood what baptism meant to their Christian brothers – a feeling of being reborn, of being free and freed.
She smiled and led him to the dining table, which was groaning under delicious appetizers, kibbeh nayyeh, sambousek, vine leaves in oil, wheat
kernels seethed in hot milk, cheese pasties, labneh with garlic, aubergine with yogurt, shankaleesh, and, in the middle, local arak mixed with water gleaming in a glass jug set in a container filled to the brim with ice cubes.
“When did you cook all this?” he asked.
She said she’d sensed he would return that day. When she opened her eyes in the morning, she’d been seized by a mysterious feeling that he’d be home that night. “That’s why I came back from the bakery at three and began getting ready, and when I’d finished the cooking I took a bath and waited, and before I heard your footsteps on the stairs I was standing at the door waiting for you. I’ve missed you.”
She poured two glasses of arak, raised her glass, and said, “To you, hero!” Then she drank, sucking at the arak with her eyes closed.
Khaled had never before drunk alcohol in the house and he hadn’t dared to invite her to a drinking party. When he drank of an evening with his comrades he’d return to the house feeling embarrassed, take the cup of aniseed from her hand, swallow it down quickly, feel the burning of the hot water, and go up to bed.
He looked at her. She didn’t look like the wife he’d lived with for two years but like the woman from Shaqif Castle, the woman of fantasies and kisses after whom he thirsted more with every sip he drank. She reached for the kibbeh nayyeh, made a bite-sized morsel dipped in olive oil, placed a sprig of mint and a piece of white onion on top of it, and held it out to him. He held out his hand to take it from her but she refused to give it to him, saying, “Close your eyes and open your mouth.” He closed his eyes and she put the morsel in his mouth and he tasted her fingers.
“I’m drunk,” he said.
“Drunk! You haven’t drunk or eaten anything yet,” she said, taking a bite of the kibbeh nayyeh and saying she hadn’t eaten any in ages.
He drank but ate only a little.
“You don’t seem to like the appetizers,” she said.
“Quite the opposite. They are delicious but I …”
“You’re tired after the long journey, I know, but you have to eat.”
“I’m not tired, I …”
“You’re what?”
“I love you.”
She moved closer to him and placed her hand on his shoulder, and the nakedness of her arm gleamed in his eyes. She moved closer still, and he looked into her eyes, then dropped his and felt he wanted to cry. He took hold of himself, felt as though he was choking, pulled back a little to take a gulp of air into his lungs, and heard her speak a sentence that made him feel that this was the night of his transfiguration. At Shaqif Castle, alone on the night watch, he’d felt he saw God, or made contact with His presence; but when he heard her say, “I am your lawful wedded wife,” the horizon opened and the universe lit up with the light of transfiguration.
“I am your lawful wedded wife,” she said.
That night he drank her lips and sucked on them and became drunk on the sides of her long neck. He kissed her just as he had dreamed of doing – so much so that he would stop in the middle of a kiss, pull back, close his eyes, and then open them to make sure that what he was experiencing wasn’t a fantasy or an illusion.
When his masculinity awoke to the rhythm of her femininity and the scent of desire spread, he felt he was both the woman’s master and her slave. Instead of his tongue being released, love took him back to the language of childhood and he started making noises and grunts and speaking half-formed words.
After two years of waiting he had found her and after two years of sorrow and guilt she had found him, and they were as though they’d discovered a
secret they could divulge to no one – the secret people call love but which resists all names.
In their new relationship, which lasted eighteen months, they would only rarely speak. They communicated with one another through a minimum of words and experienced every potential that life has to offer. Even the strange transformation that led Hayat to don the Islamist headscarf passed quietly and without any of the long discussions with which Lebanese and Palestinian leftist circles resounded following the stunning success achieved by the Iranian revolution.
When her belly grew round and butterflies of joy spread their wings around her eyes, they disagreed over the name of the child. They were sure it was going to be a boy, though Khaled secretly wanted a daughter who looked like her mother. He didn’t dare announce his hopes or his expectations in the face of the insistence of his wife and grandmother that the child would be a boy.
She told him her mother-in-law had no doubt that the boy’s name would be Yahya. “She didn’t discuss it with me. She looked at my round belly and called him Yahya. What do you think?” It was the first time since his marriage to Hayat that the martyr’s name had been pronounced in their house. He told her his grandmother’s suggestion made sense and he had to share it.
“But I want to call him Nabil,” she said. “Nabil is the name and the boy has to be noble. What do you think?”
“Whatever you want goes, Imm Nabil.”
She smiled and asked him to tell his grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to break her heart. You tell her please.”
Hayat had no idea what Khaled told his grandmother but she noticed a change in the woman’s behavior: suddenly she aged. Imm Yahya no longer bent over the belly that was rounding out with new life to croon to the
baby and call out to it, “Yahya! Yahya, Granny’s darling!” A hidden sorrow possessed her and limned itself in the creases of old age that had formed around her eyes following her son’s death. But she didn’t object, for she was a woman and knew how powerful a woman’s authority can be, and she could see how Khaled had become two mutually contradictory men. At work and with the young men of the quarter he was a leader whose requests could not be refused, while at home he was a lover at the beck and call of the wife who had bewitched his heart.
Imm Yahya didn’t ask what had happened. In the past, when she’d asked Khaled about his wife or hinted she was tired of waiting for the child that didn’t come, she’d see Khaled’s thick eyebrows knit and his face darken, and understand that he would never answer her questions. After he came back from the crusader castle in south Lebanon, though, Hayat’s name was forever on his lips and it was he who had given her the good news that his wife was pregnant. She noticed though that the name Abu Rabia no longer crossed his lips or those of his comrades: they would come to the bakery to confer and meet while all the burden of work fell on his wife’s shoulders.