I looked at his smiling face, then I headed for a chair with armrests beside the sofa, and sank into it. I started looking at one of the oil paintings made up of long parallel rows of small white squares surrounded by larger red squares. At a point in the middle of the painting, which wasn’t clear at first glance, the situation was reversed: the red squares were smaller and inside the white squares.
A girl with plain features, wearing clean clothes and shoes, brought in a tea tray. The porcelain teapot was in a contemporary style with flowing lines and a wide handle coated in gold leaf. The sugar bowl consisted of a single piece of porcelain with a thin, barely visible line running across it, separating the bowl and its gilded cover.
I poured a cup of tea for myself, and stirred it with a gold spoon. I was about to light a cigarette when Lamia came back, and sat on the sofa. She asked me to give her one.
“Do you like my house?” she asked.
“Very much,” I replied. “Even though I’ve only seen one small part of it.”
“You’ll see the rest later,” she replied with a laugh.
I poured her some tea and asked her about her daughter.
“She went to her aunt’s house,” she said.
She took a sip from her cup, then put it on the table and stood up, saying: “Come with me.”
I followed her to the elevator.
“Would you like to go for a swim?” she asked, as we went down to the ground floor.
“In this cold weather?”
She didn’t say anything. We got into the car. With a serious look on her face, she started driving.
“Where to?” I asked her, after a little while.
“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”
“Nowhere in particular.”
We passed a billboard with an ad for a film by Roger Vadim, starring Sylvia Kristel. I had seen her in the film Emmanuelle, in which she played the role of a woman who enjoyed all kinds of sex.
“I’ve seen her in person,” Lamia said.
“I like her face a lot. Come on, we’ll go see her in it.”
“If someone saw me in the movie theater with you, it would be a scandal. I’ll take you to your apartment.”
I stayed silent until we reached the house, and then I asked her, “What do you think about a cup of coffee at my place?”
“You mean at Wadia’s place?” she asked.
“Wadia is in the mountains and won’t come back before this evening.”
“Okay, bey,” she said, talking the way they do in Egyptian films.
There was a free parking space directly in front of the building, wide enough for the car. But she maneuvered the vehicle several times to park it in a side alley some distance from the main street.
I noticed the filthiness of the apartment and the mess that was spread everywhere as soon as we entered. I sat her down in the living room, then opened the balcony door. I began gathering up books, magazines and clothes scattered on chairs. Then I brought a bottle of cognac and two glasses. I set a glass in front of her, but she put her hand over it. She leaned over to me and said, “Coffee.”
I poured myself a glass that I downed in one go, and went to the kitchen to make the coffee. I let it boil for some time, so it could acquire the bitterness that Syrians and Lebanese love. Then I carried it out with two cups on a round tray of colored plastic.
As I was pouring her cup, she asked me, “How is the film coming along?”
“How did you know?”
“Beirut is a small city; there are no secrets here,” she explained.
“We’ll be done in almost a week.”
She smiled wickedly. “Antoinette is a good director,” she said.
“She really is,” I said, sitting down opposite her.
“I hope the film isn’t all about the heroic acts and sacrifices of the Palestinians.”
“And what if it is?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve gotten tired of that kind of film. And they’re the reason for the ordeal we’re living through.”
I bit my tongue. A moment later, I asked her: “Were you in Beirut during the heavy fighting at the start of the civil war?”
“No,” she replied. “I was in London the whole time.”
I began to feel a headache coming on, so I got up to look for an aspirin. I found one in my shoulder bag and swallowed it with a swig of cognac, then returned to my seat.
I looked closely at her lips, and then suddenly told her, “I want to kiss you.”
The words came out of my mouth thick with liquor. She fidgeted in her seat with a feigned display of embarrassment. So I moved over next to her on the couch, and took her in my arms.
“The balcony,” she said.
I got up and went to the balcony and closed the curtains over the balcony door. I went back to where I was sitting beside her, then turned my entire body toward her.
She lifted her mouth to me, and I savored the touch of her soft lips. She moved her thigh and pressed it against me. Then she brushed against me gently with her knees between my legs. That made it possible for her to notice that I wasn’t hard.
She gently extricated herself from me without drawing her knee away. I wanted to say something, so I opened my mouth. My tongue seemed to be moving with considerable difficulty.
The day had been full of mistakes. I had started drinking early. Then I switched between different kinds of alcohol. And now I wanted to tell her something, but I called her by my ex-wife’s name.
She drew back from me, her eyes widening and her face going pale. I tried to explain to her how the first letter of her name was the same as my wife’s, and that the alcohol had made my tongue heavy. But the attempt wore me out, so I remained silent.
After a moment, she said, “It’s getting late. I have to leave.”
“Stay for a little longer,” I pleaded.
“I can’t. Wadia might come. I have to go.”
Inside, I was glad she was going, so I stood up. She picked up her purse and asked me where the bathroom was. I pointed her toward it.
I stood waiting for her in the living room until she returned, having straightened her hair and clothes. I started walking her to the door. “You don’t have to do that,” she told me.
I put my hand on her arm, and she came close to me. I kissed her on the lips, and in a voice that I tried to give the ring of truth to, I told her, “I don’t want you to go.”
She pressed herself against me, and angled her thighs in such a way that she could touch me. But there was something there that hadn’t changed, so she drew back, saying: “I have to go.”
She raised her hand to my face and touched my cheek with her fingers, then added, “You had a lot to drink today. Talk to me tomorrow.”
“I will.”
I opened the door and was about to press for the elevator, but she stopped me, saying that she preferred to take the stairs. She waved goodbye, whispering in English, “Bye-bye.”
I waited until she disappeared, then I went inside and locked the door behind me.
Chapter 14
Antoinette returned my “Good morning” without taking her eyes off the scattered papers on her desk. When I sat down in front of her, I discovered that her eyelids were swollen, and that she had put on a good deal of eyeliner to conceal that fact. I sensed that she was extremely nervous.
She headed toward the small kitchen next door, saying: “We’ll have some coffee, and then we’ll begin.”
I picked up the newspapers off her desk, and cast a quick glance at their headlines. Attempts were still ongoing to rescue the Arab summit conference slated to be held next week in Amman. In Muscat, Sultan Qaboos had declared that the Soviet Union was responsible for the instability in the Gulf region, and he demanded that the nations of the West counteract the Soviets’ expansionist policy. In Khartoum, a US official was looking into Sudanese defense requirements. And in Washington Menachem Begin declared that his government would not relinquish Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. In Paris, Le Figaro said that Syria had become another Ethiopia in the heart of the Middle East, after ratifying a treaty of peace and cooperation with the Soviet Union.