Muna contacted him five days later and asked for an appointment. He suggested the same restaurant and she responded that she wanted to meet for a professional consultation, which would be impossible in a restaurant.
“How about coming to our place? Ahmad would love to see you too.”
“Who’s Ahmad?” he asked her.
She burst out laughing. He then suggested the meeting be at his apartment at twelve thirty on Friday. He suggested Friday because Ghazala didn’t come that day, and before ending the call he asked her to wear a green dress.
On entering she asked him why he liked green.
She was wearing an orange skirt and a thin white blouse. She said her green dress was at the cleaner’s.
He said he’d changed his mind and now he liked orange. He opened the bottle of chilled white wine, poured two glasses, and said green reminded him of the Green Woman he used to see in his dreams when he was small.
When Karim told Muna the story of the Green Woman, he was struck by the unexpectedness of the memory. He said memory was scary: it woke when it pleased, dropped in as if out of nowhere, and had no rules. He told her about the Iraqi poet he used to meet in a bar in Montpellier. “I’d only meet him when we were drunk and all he’d talk to me about was the poems he hadn’t yet written. Once, I asked him to read me something he’d written recently. He responded that he’d given up writing because every time he went near the blank paper he’d be deluged with memories of his childhood in el-Amarah in Iraq, and these hidden memories scared him and were turning him into a poet who lived poetry instead of writing it.”
“Literature’s different. Poets imagine their memories,” she said. She also said she was very fond of poetry and knew all Mahmoud Darwish’s poems about Rita by heart.
He said he used to think the same, “but it seems memory works in mysterious ways and when it gives up its secrets a person becomes a slave to his past, which he hadn’t known was his.”
They drank the bottle of wine and he listened to her as she recited some lines about Rita. He took her in his arms and heard her whisper incomprehensible words. He embraced her and she seemed shy. She got into bed in her clothes. He lay down next to her, naked, lifted the coverlet and saw that she had taken off her clothes. He moved close to her, feeling a blind strangeness: two strange bodies that couldn’t find a rhythm swimming in the darkness of desire, a strangeness that wouldn’t be broken until the last day, when Muna came to him to say goodbye and he took her with water falling from her body and felt sorrow, because he sensed that the end of their relationship had been the moment when it began.
They’d made love as though searching for love. On the last day, he told her that in the beginning they’d been like two blind people and her modesty had been like a veil that prevented him from seeing. When Muna gasped, and he heard a moaning that broke through the barrier of silence, his water burst forth copiously and he took her lips in a long kiss. As he floated above the darkness of his eyes he held tight to her waist to stop himself from drowning.
She pushed him back a little and said she needed air. He retreated, lit a cigarette, and sat facing her on the bed. Muna covered herself with the white sheet, raised her right hand to wave away the smoke of his cigarette, and the sheet slipped off her shoulder and her breast appeared, a hanging white pomegranate. He bent over and took the nipple in his mouth and she covered her chest with the sheet but he didn’t pull back. He pushed his face into the darkness of the white and heard her little gasp before she took his face in her hands and pushed it away.
She said the moment she saw him at his brother’s apartment, she’d decided he was the one. “You know, you and your brother look a lot like each other. Nasim’s been a friend of my husband’s for a long time and your brother’s always been making signs to show that he wants me. I thought he was a drag and would say to myself, ‘What does he think he’s doing? I’m his friend’s wife!’ Then when I saw you, I said it’s you.”
“Meaning you fell in love with me.”
“You’re as much of a drag as your brother. Who said anything about love? Go on, tell me about green.”
“But the green was love.”
“You mean you fell in love with a woman who wears only green?”
“A Green Woman. How can I put it? There was no love, just something strange.”
He told her that the strange thing was how the Green Woman had been sleeping in his memory until she leapt from it.
He lifted the sheet she’d covered herself with and she pulled away as though panic-stricken and pulled the sheet up to her neck.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I want to examine you. Drop the sheet and let me work.”
“Right. I’d forgotten you’re a doctor.”
She closed her eyes and held still. Karim saw a thin white thread bursting out from below the whiteness of her belly, which flowed as though it were a mirror. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t like white skin because it crumbled beneath his eyes and that brown skin, which was like the hues of wheat, resisted being pulled apart because it was thicker. The whiteness of Muna’s skin, however, seemed different from any that he’d seen as a doctor in France. He massaged the thin thread with his finger and told Muna that the stretching wasn’t important because it didn’t affect her beauty, but he could prescribe her an ointment if she wanted.
“Are you speaking as a doctor or as something else?”
“As a doctor, naturally. If I wanted to speak as something else I’d have to become a poet, faced with such beauty,” he said.
“Please, cut that out. So the ointment will get rid of the white line?”
“Not completely. The human body is made to show the marks of time but it will diminish it.”
He told her he’d write down the name of the ointment for her and she would have to apply it once a day, after bathing, for ten days. “Then we’ll see.”
Muna tried to cover herself but the doctor took the sheet in both hands. “Can anyone cover the sea?”
“What a horrible comparison!” Muna said. “If any of my students wrote a simile like that he’d get a zero.”
The doctor laughed and told her that when he saw her body he’d been reminded of the story of the “White Mediterranean Sea” and the Palestinian teacher at AUB who insisted that his students use the right names. “That sea,” the teacher used to say, pointing out the window, “we used to call the White Sea until the westerners imposed the term ‘Mediterranean’ on us. We give our seas the names of colors because our eyes always see them as colored. That’s why we have the White Sea, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea. Only the Dead Sea has no color, because it’s dead.” Karim said they’d laughed at the teacher and he’d only understood what he meant when he saw her body enveloped in its whiteness and beheld nothing before him but the sea.
“A bad metaphor. That’s all,” she said, putting on her glasses and covering herself. At that moment, Karim reignited. He couldn’t work out what had happened to him with this woman because he disliked glasses and he never did like the color white, but in this city he’d found himself set on fire by things he thought he hated. The glasses made him lose control and he found himself holding Muna to him once more.
“No, that’s enough. Once is enough. Tell me the story from the beginning and then we’ll see.”
Karim had discovered that real words, meaning words that fill the mouth and impart the taste of fruit, come only after making love. “That was the secret of the Arabs,” he told Bernadette during the early days of their love. He told her that the secret of One Thousand and One Nights lay in this, that Scheherazade never opened her mouth until they had made love. She filled three years’ worth of nights with words and when the love ended the story ended. She’d told the mad king, “That’s it,” and brought the three sons she’d borne to plead for her, or so she could threaten him with them.