She came the first time on a Tuesday morning and said she would come twice a week, in accordance with the instructions she had received from Khawaja Nasim. She didn’t specify which days, and Karim had to wait since he didn’t dare to ask.
She came on Thursday, but not early, as he’d expected. It was about eleven thirty a.m. and Karim had grown fed up with waiting. He’d agreed to have lunch with Ahmad Dakiz so that they could discuss things to do with the building. She came, resplendent, her dark face shining above her long neck, her black hair tied behind in a ponytail, wearing a dress that reached just below her knees. She rang the bell and waited, and when she saw Karim she smiled and said she’d meant to come early but was late because she’d had to visit a sick friend. She entered and a musky perfume erupted from her rustling dress. She left him holding the door and went into the kitchen.
He didn’t know what to do. Should he go after her or go to the living room, open a book, and pretend to read? He went to the living room and phoned Ahmad Dakiz to apologize for not being able to accept his invitation to lunch, saying he was involved in an emergency. He sensed she was listening to the call but didn’t care. He sat on the couch, opened the first book he found in front of him, and pretended to read.
The smell of coffee wafted in. Ghazala brought the coffee tray and poured two cups. He took his cup with trembling hand, drank a drop, and felt the catch of the bitter coffee as it spread over his tongue and through his mouth. She took her cup and bent forward, as though about to set off for the kitchen.
“Sit down and drink your coffee with me.”
He shifted to make room for her next to him on the couch but she knelt, sat cross-legged on the floor, took a sip from her cup, and made a motion with her fingers, as though she were holding a cigarette.
Karim took a cigarette, placed it between his lips, lit it, and gave it to her. Then he took a second cigarette to light for himself.
“No, you don’t have to light another. I don’t usually smoke but I just happened to think of a cigarette now, I don’t know why.”
They smoked the same cigarette in silence. She put her hand on the couch to get up and he took hold of it. Instead of helping her rise he fell to the floor and found himself rolling over her body. When Karim thought back to how things started he’d tell himself she’d pulled him down and he’d found himself lying on the floor without having decided to before the fact. But the point isn’t who started it: the beginning had been already sketched out to the rhythm of the smell of musk that wafted from the edges of the wine-colored dress that covered her body.
The story began on the living room floor, on the red carpet put there in place of the Persian rug Nasri had so angrily stamped on, swearing the damned thing would outlast him by many years. On that pale red carpet Karim Shammas discovered he was still a novice when it came to the art of love. There he learned to sip the woman drop by drop and melt before her. With his eyes and all his senses he saw how the dew covered Ghazala’s body and how she entered his insides as he entered her and how desire renewed itself at the moment of its quenching.
Ghazala’s nakedness glittered on the floor, and instead of him taking and entering her, she took him. When they took off their clothes, he asked that they move to the bed. She said no with her eyebrows raised and pulled him to herself. He tried to lift her legs so that he could enter and she pushed him away, then with a motion of her finger ordered him to lie on his back and close his eyes. The man closed them in surrender as a sensual thrill spread to every part of his body. She swept his whole body with her long hair, kissed him, kneaded him, panted above him, inundated him with the water that sprang from her, whispered and sang, and, when she let him enter, he was released inside her like a slow musical refrain.
She was hot and tender, aflame and glowing, knowing when and how and what. The smoothness of her skin enveloped him and the strength of her desire melted into a diaphanous film of sorrow that covered her eyes. Her soft moaning entered his pores and her groans of pleasure mingled with the evaporation of his will.
Karim was incapable of describing the feelings that possessed him on the living room floor, or what exactly happened or how. On reaching one peak of pleasure he would find another waiting for him, but he didn’t have to climb the peak in order to arrive, for it spread from the ends of the hair on his head to his fingertips.
Karim found himself in the bathroom. Ghazala filled the tub with hot water, slipped into the water, and held out her hands; he slid toward her and found himself immersed in water and soap. In the bathtub he closed his eyes and began learning to read the woman lying before him with his fingertips. He caressed the smooth skin that made of her chest a mirror covered with the warm exhalation that arose from her pear-shaped breasts, which hung down in a slight curve before being lifted once more by the eruption of pomegranate blossom. He discovered the neck and shoulders, then descended to the buttocks and caressed what lay between her thighs, which gleamed with soap, and when he reached the cracked heels he caught fire again. He tried to slip inside her but Ghazala stood up, turned on the shower, and began roaring with laughter.
Karim, enchanted by what he believed was a rare moment of genuine encounter between two bodies, still had his eyes closed, and Ghazala’s guffaws as she swayed naked beneath the shower took him by surprise. He held out his hand, calling her to him again, and heard her tell him to get out of the tub because she was hungry.
“What do you feel like eating?” she asked.
He told her he wasn’t hungry and wanted to stay where he was. She jumped out of the tub, dried herself, and ran into the living room, where she put on her clothes, and he heard her summon him to the table.
Karim fidgeted in the tepid water and began piecing together the different parts of him that had been dissipated so he could stand. He felt a sting of cold, then leapt out of the tub, dried himself, got dressed in a hurry, lit a cigarette, and sat in the living room waiting for her. He heard the sound of plates being put on the small Formica table in the kitchen and smelled the smell of fried eggs, mixed with garlic and sumac.
“Come and get it, doctor.”
Suddenly he felt hungry. He went into the kitchen and found Ghazala seated in front of the frying pan, and on the table a bowl of tomato salad and a loaf of bread.
“There’s nothing in the house, doctor. It’s good I brought a few eggs and some tomatoes with me.”
She talked about the types of food she made well, laughed as she picked up small mouthfuls of bread which she filled with egg, then dipped in a garlic and sumac broth, and swallowed with gusto. Karim needed silence. He wanted to enjoy the aroma of garlic and sumac, but Ghazala’s inner self seemed to have opened up entirely. She ate and laughed and talked. She told him about her husband, Matrouk, who loved lentil soup after sex, and said she knew that whenever he asked her to make it she had to get ready and wash herself with musk.
She said “musk” and then fell silent, as though she felt she’d made a mistake she couldn’t retract.
“So you’ll be making soup tonight,” he said.
She didn’t answer and ate in silence, then got up, while the doctor looked out the window.
When Karim went into his room and lay on his bed, and the drowsiness began hovering around his eyes, it occurred to him that the siesta was the best thing ever invented. In France, where it didn’t exist and the working day lasted till evening — as though food at lunchtime were not the dividing line between two distinct parts of the day — he despised the siestas of the Lebanese. He thought of them as the product of laziness, remembering how his father would close the shop at noon, eat lunch, and sleep for an hour on the couch in the room at the back so that he could begin life over again. Here though, after two weeks of living in Beirut, he’d realized there was no doing without the siesta. The smell of the city was different after lunch, its sounds died away, and drowsiness spread to all its nooks and crannies.