“But without an escort,” I added.
She laughed. “I’ll try,” she said. “In any case, today is everyone’s day off.”
I described for her where the house was, and hung up. I lit a cigarette and looked for the bottle of French cognac that Wadia had bought two days previously. I poured a glass of it and sniffed it with pleasure. I took a sip and held it in my mouth for a moment before swallowing.
I went to the bathroom, looked at my face in the mirror, and felt my chin. I shaved, but the reflection that looked back at me hadn’t improved much. After taking a quick shower, I felt invigorated. The sky was thick with clouds and there was a cold bite in the air, so I put on all my clothes and sat down, drinking my glass of cognac in the living room.
My glass was empty so I poured myself another. No sooner had I finished it than the sound of a zumur — as the Lebanese call a car horn — came up to me from the street. I heard it again, so I hurried to the balcony. I saw her head sticking out of the driver’s window in a white two-seater car. I waved down to her and hurried inside, after locking the door to the balcony. I took a swig straight from the cognac bottle, then went down to the street.
She opened the car door for me, and her perfume wafted lightly over me, surrounding me as I settled in beside her. She was wearing white pants and a silk blouse of the same color. Over her shoulders she had a pink wool vest. Her hair was gathered to the side in a single bunch that rested on her chest. Around her neck was a thick pearl necklace.
The car headed toward Raouché. Cold air came at me through the window, so I felt around for the handle to roll it up, but she stopped me, saying: “Don’t trouble yourself with that.”
Putting out a red-nailed finger, she pressed a button in front of her, and the door window began to rise on its own.
She pressed another button, and music from The Godfather poured out of the speakers. I relaxed in my seat, looking at the empty streets and the locked shops plunged in silence.
“If you stay with us until Christmas,” she said, “you’ll enjoy the snow.”
“I don’t like it much,” I replied.
“Me, I love it. I’d love to go to Moscow.”
She turned toward me and looked at me as if to ask what I thought about that.
“Moscow is a city worth seeing,” I said.
“Can you get me an official invitation?”
I stared at her in confusion.
“Who do you think I am? The Comintern’s agent in the Middle East?”
“Don’t you take money from them?”
“Of course.”
We drove through several streets before the sea revealed itself to us, and we stopped under a prominent sign for a restaurant.
I asked her if she had a button to open the door. “Not yet,” she replied, laughing.
We got out of the car, and she walked ahead of me to the restaurant’s entrance, taking elegant, flirtatious steps. I followed her, observing the movement of her behind in her tight pants.
We walked through the entrance to a wide garden that was divided into separate groves, each of which had several comfortable chairs and a wide rattan table.
We were almost the only patrons, and several servers waited graciously on us with impeccable refinement. We ordered arak and grilled meats. Soon the table was filled with plates of tabbouleh, kibbeh, hummus, tahini, red radish, green mint and yogurt.
I tossed down a glass of arak, while she was content with a single sip.
“The problem with your book,” she declared, “is that distributing it is nearly impossible.”
“Why?”
“There isn’t a single Arab regime you haven’t implicated; and then of course, there’s a great deal of sex in it.”
I lit a cigarette. “I mentioned all that to Adnan in my correspondence with him. But he didn’t object to any of it.”
“I don’t think he imagined you would be going as far as you did.”
“So what’s the upshot?”
She put out her hand, replete with silver rings, and placed it over mine, saying: “Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t read it all yet. And Adnan has the final say. I believe he is interested in publishing you.”
“So let’s drop the subject. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
She raised her eyebrows. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Try.”
“I lie a lot.”
“No matter.”
She turned her glass of arak around in her fingers. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she said. “I married for love. Other women were jealous of me over my husband. I have a six-year-old daughter. My work with Adnan is fulfilling: I got the job after a long struggle with his family, who wanted me in the role of a housewife… That’s everything.”
I hadn’t taken my eyes off her rosy skin and her tender lips.
“And you?” she asked me. “Are you married?”
“I was,” I replied.
“And now, of course, you have a girlfriend?”
“My wife was my only girlfriend.”
“Really?”
I lit a cigarette. “I’d like it if you gathered your hair to the back.”
She lifted her hands to her hair and gathered it in the back, then fastened it in a ponytail.
She asked my permission to leave the table, and she was gone for several minutes. As soon as she got back, she said: “What do you think about us getting out of here?”
“But the bottle isn’t empty yet,” I said.
“I have to stop by the house for my daughter.”
We left the restaurant and headed downtown. She turned on the radio and light Western music came out at us, but she fiddled with the dial, switching from classical music to a news report and a program for children, before finally settling on a song by Farid al-Atrash.
Farid al-Atrash’s lament continued to echo in my ears until we arrived at a place near the television building. She stopped the car in front of a luxury building with a wide entrance, made up of several levels of marble stairs.
There were a number of security guards in civilian clothes, one of whom accompanied us to an elevator. Lamia took out a key from her purse and opened the elevator door. I got in behind her and stood watching the panel, in the middle of which was only one button.
When the elevator stopped, I walked behind her, and my feet sank in layers of lush carpet. I found myself in a luxuriously furnished entrance room, and I followed her to a wide room whose walls were covered with ornate wood paneling.
“One moment,” she said.
She left me there.
There was a wide sofa with a plush white exterior that stretched along the length of one wall, with an endless number of small pillows on it, each in varying shades of white and brown. In front of it were chairs of the same design and a low wooden table with a polished surface and a thick edge.
Occupying the second wall were two large sliding glass panels, behind which another large room appeared. Around its walls were high-backed chairs, gilded and decorated with engravings in Arabic, as well as small tables with brass trays on them. Amid them stood a large mirror that almost touched the ceiling.
As for the wall facing the sofa, it was occupied by three oil paintings in a contemporary style, and a wooden bookcase.
I walked up to the bookcase and perused its books. There was a deluxe copy of the Qur’an, and several novels by Ihsan Abd al-Qaddous. Also a mass-market edition of Dr Spock’s book on child-rearing, and an English translation of a French novel called Angelique and the Sultan, in addition to several American magazines, and another French women’s magazine. I noticed what I at first imagined was a row of American mass-market books, but turned out to be videotapes that included the latest Egyptian melodramas. The video-tape player itself was on a separate shelf. A medium-sized photo of Adnan Sabbagh stood by itself in a gold frame on another shelf.