No, he hadn’t put it like that. In fact, at the time he’d said the opposite of what he thought now. He’d said then that love made the story endless because “one thousand and one nights” doesn’t imply a set number of nights: the number opens infinite doors. The stories might go on forever, and the love too.
Karim lit a cigarette and began to cough. He ran to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of ice-cold water.
“Eduardo was like that,” said Muna.
“Who’s Eduardo?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let me go and make tea.”
She wrapped herself in the white sheet and went to the kitchen, so he followed her.
“Please, I don’t like men who come into the kitchen. Wait for me in the bedroom.”
She returned with two glasses of tea and lay down on the bed. Karim sat next to her and started to narrate.
“Once upon a time, there was a woman …”
“Not like that. I don’t want a story from One Thousand and One Nights. I want your story with the Green Woman.”
Karim said that stories had to begin somewhere, which is why our ancestors had used the past imperfect tense, because everything was born imperfect and would die imperfect, but he didn’t want to tell that story now because the color green no longer mattered, so he was going to tell her another story. As the story seeped from Karim’s memory, the scene struck him as ridiculous. A woman lying on the bed, her eyes shining behind her spectacles, and a naked forty-year-old man, his white skin shining with sweat that added color to the hair on his chest, sitting at the end of a bed holding a glass of tea in his left hand and a filterless Gauloise in his right, puffing cigarette smoke into the air, and telling the story of a green woman.
He said the woman was called Majda and she used to come to their apartment once a week to clean. But she wasn’t a maid, or didn’t behave like one. She would arrive in a hurry and leave in a hurry. She was said to have had three children but they’d all died at birth, “and I don’t know … We knew she was married to a man called Abu Sultan and that this Abu Sultan didn’t work. Then, when Majda disappeared, we discovered the truth.
“She was the only woman Father didn’t view as a sex object. He was a strange man. A pharmacist, and cultured, and he read a lot. He’d made a special niche for himself in his little community, which was limited to his friends at the Gemmeizeh Café, where he went every day to play backgammon. All the same he became — how can I put it? — he became another person when he laid eyes on a woman of any kind whatsoever. He used to say each age possesses its own special magic. But he talked of Majda with respect, didn’t lounge about in front of her, and watched his language. She was pretty. A strange woman. She didn’t speak a word. She’d come in the morning, do the laundry and the cleaning as if there were no one else there, then gather up her stuff and go home.
Majda disappeared twice over. The first time was when she got pregnant, the second when she gave birth to her baby in a welter of hemorrhaging and blood.
The story goes that Majda suffered a great deal at her husband’s hands and that he didn’t work. He’d beat her to pocket the money she brought back from working as a maid in people’s houses. Then he discovered his path in life: he manufactured a sort of hump for himself and became a beggar. He’d go off every day to the area of Ras Beirut, where no one knew him, and work all day. Back home he would shrug off his hump, snatch his wife’s money, and set off to get drunk and consort with prostitutes.
“Am I boring you?” asked Karim.
“Not at all,” said Muna, yawning. “But where’s the story? I mean what’s the topic and what happened to make you fall in love with the maid?”
“That’s not what the story’s about. It has nothing to do with that. I mean, I didn’t fall in love with her. I got scared.
“Majda lived with her husband in a shack located at the entrance of the Zaroub el-Haramiyeh settlement, an area considered in those days to lie outside the confines of the city even though it was close to el-Burj Square. The inhabitants were the unemployed and every kind of vagabond, thief, and beggar. The wooden shacks were roofed with corrugated iron sheets that gave no protection from the cold in winter or the heat in summer. Still, the inhabitants found in it a refuge from homelessness. You only had to pay three lira a month to Wajih, one of the men working for Hajj Murad, a Beirut gang leader, for him to allow you to build yourself a wooden shack. Wajih, who was in his early thirties, wore a red tarbush like his boss Hajj Murad, and imposed charges on the inhabitants of the shacks. These he called rents, the individual amounts being determined by his mood and his estimate of how much you could pay.
“The issue was that Wajih could never see eye to eye with Abu Sultan, who refused to pay the charges on the grounds that he was too poor and who would make a scene, weeping and wailing, on the street. Even when he found himself a steady job as a beggar it changed nothing, till it reached the point at which the shack was to be demolished.
“Wajih told Majda that were it not for his belief that she was a holy woman and his being a God-fearing man, he would have burned the shack with man and wife inside. ‘As you know, we fear only the Good Lord in His Heaven but what can I say? You made me feel as though my hand was paralyzed.’
“Was Majda a saint? Wajih and many others were convinced of it after seeing her green apparition appear next to the ruins of the shack.
“I honestly don’t know. What everyone does know is that Majda almost died. She went into labor at four in the afternoon. It was winter, she couldn’t move, she saw the blood and started screaming. The people of the neighborhood came running and didn’t know what to do. After a short while someone called the midwife — her name was Imm Saad — who immediately began tearing sheets into strips and placing them on Majda’s belly to soak up the blood. The shack filled with the smell of blood — the bedding, the pillows, their belongings. The midwife yelled that she could do nothing to stop the hemorrhaging — ‘Call the Red Cross, the woman’s going to die before our eyes!’ — and the blood never stopped. Majda was at death’s door. The ambulance arrived and took her to the hospital and she gave birth to a boy after a difficult operation.
“Once the woman had been taken to the hospital, the neighborhood women volunteered to clean the shack. They took out the furniture and scrubbed the floor. The furniture that was unsalvagable got thrown onto the rubbish tip at the end of the lane.
“When Abu Sultan reached his house at nine p.m., drunk as usual, he was stunned by what he saw; and when people told him what had happened to his wife and how they had cleaned out the house and that the woman was now in the Hôtel Dieu hospital, all he asked was about the contents of the house.
“ ‘Where’s the stuff?’ he screamed.
“ ‘God will replace it for you, neighbor,’ said one of the aged women who had hurried to the shack on hearing the man’s screams, thinking something bad must have happened to Majda. ‘There was nothing worth keeping — bedding and rugs. It’s not a problem, we’ll get you more. Go to the hospital now and check on your wife.’
“ ‘Where’s the stuff?’ Abu Sultan asked again, moaning like a wounded animal.
“ ‘I think they threw everything onto the dump at the end of the street,’ said the woman.
“Abu Sultan ran and the men and women of the area ran after him, everyone fearing the man had lost his wits because his wife had died. They ran till they found themselves at the garbage dump, where the man waded into the blood-soaked things and a cloying stench filled the air.