The three times in total that Musa saw his strange beloved on her own were very alike, and so he did not find much to say about them to his sister. Each time, he followed her, then quickened his pace and walked beside her, speaking but hearing no response before she vanished into the passage leading to the hammam.
And then Suzanne disappeared completely.
Pastor Yaqub began coming alone to the restaurant. Instead of white wine he took to drinking arak. His resonant laugh disappeared and his face was lined with grief and worry. Musa would get up from his own table and go over to greet him but the clergyman would not lift his eyes from the fried fish on his plate. He chewed and swallowed the fish and drank his arak and wrinkled up his eyes as if he were about to cry.
Musa did not dare ask the pastor about his beloved. The girl was gone and standing patiently in front of the house no longer yielded any results. Instead of looking forward to Sunday as a joyous day of reunion, the sight of fried fish began to stir up emotions of distress and aversion in Musa. He stopped eating the Messiah’s fish and now he would spend his time sitting in the café at the Seaside Inn staring out at the still waters of Lake Tiberias and feeling lonely.
The pastor told him everything, though. One day he came over to Musa’s table and asked if he could sit down. He began to talk. He asked Musa why the young man had not asked about Suzanne, since after all, he loved her. Musa stuttered and did not know what to say. The girl had returned to America, Yaqub Jamous told him, because she could not make herself feel comfortable living in the Holy Land. She refused to learn Arabic, and the Hebrew words she had learned in America were now forgotten. She told her father that when she first set foot in this land she was afraid and that had never changed. All she saw in her dreams, she told him, were nightmarish scenes of death. She hated it here, and she wanted to escape to Portland. The clergyman said he tried every possible argument to convince her to stay on. He had even talked to her about Musa. I told her that you love her and that love is the doorway to life, he said. But the girl was determined to leave, and now I don’t know what I will do with my own life here. The Arabs look on me as a Jew and the Jews say I have betrayed the faith of my forefathers. I will follow my daughter; I’ll go back.
Musa told his sister that he had been struck dumb, so astonished was he to hear the man asking him to accompany him to Portland. There’s plenty of work in America, he had said. You will join our church and our brotherhood, and I will see to it that you marry Suzanne. What do you say?
Musa did not know what to say. He was totally at a loss, hearing this unexpected question. Should he say that he realized now that the girl had not understood a single word he had said to her? And he knew that she had departed without even an inkling of how much he loved her? Or, should he tell the elderly clergyman that he did not like these new religions and that he had had enough religion in the form of the cotton balls soaked in oil that his mother had forced him to swallow when he was little? Or should he admit to the pastor that he did not even like the fish of Lake Tiberias and never had, from the very first bite? He had eaten it entirely for the sake of the pastor and his daughter. For real fish, he thought, you had to try Sultan-Ibrahim, a fish whose hues came from coral, sun, and salt. Nothing could be as good as the catch of saltwater fishermen. This lake which had witnessed the Messiah’s story had become a tedious place to be. Should he tell the man now that he intended to return to Beirut, where he could sleep his fill because the fresh moisture of the sea and the salt smells sent him sailing into a true and sound sleep?
Musa said he felt a serious trick had been played on him. He saw himself now as a gullible simpleton whom an American girl had bewitched merely with the fragrance of white skin that shimmered on her arms. He said he tried to look into the clergyman’s eyes — closed, as usual, for the man would drop his eyelids when speaking, as if listening to the demons he had summoned and who whispered into his ears. Musa felt betrayed. The pretty girl who had enticed him with the hammam’s fresh aroma had been nothing but a figment of his imagination.
Then the priest asked him why he had tried to deflower his daughter.
He said the girl had been in a state of shock after encountering Musa, and that she loved him. She told her father that she had fallen for the young Lebanese man who stood all day long at the bend waiting for her but never talked to her. It’s like he raped me, the girl said to her father. He came to the house. I invited him here. I met him three times. He walked with me to the hammam and sat on the sidewalk waiting for me. When I came out he would bring his face near my hair and sniff the smell as if he were inhaling me. Then he’d go away. The third time, after he sniffed my hair and turned away to go back to the hotel where he works, I took him by the hand and dragged him with me to the house. He seemed afraid. He almost fell down, more than once. But as soon as he came inside and saw that you were not here he fell on me and tried to rip my clothes off. I wanted him anyway so why did he have to do it like this? I felt like he was hurting me and I wanted to cry. He hugged me and then ran out of the house and I didn’t understand anything. Then I hated him, and I do not want to stay here for another minute.
Me, no! said Musa. No! She made up this story. The pastor began to fuss at the top of his voice, right in the hotel restaurant, and he caused a scandal for me, Musa told Milia.
Musa told only wisps of his story to his sister. It was as though he had lost his memory and the only incident that stood out for him, and that he could talk about, was the fact that he did not know the girl did not speak Arabic. It’s her father’s fault, he said to Milia. He was sitting with me at the table — he and his daughter — and we were always speaking Arabic. True, she never said anything but she acted as though she understood what we were saying. She would nod her head and laugh whenever her father laughed, as if everything were normal. And when I was walking around with her, she nodded as if she understood what I was saying, even though she never said anything. I just told myself, maybe this is the way she is. These new religious types, these Seventh-day people and all of these religious groups coming to us here from America, maybe in these groups women don’t talk to men until they’re married. God knows — but I think he was mad. I think the girl needed to escape from him, not flee from me.