Before going to bed he found himself phoning his wife. He didn’t know what impelled him. Was it loneliness or was he looking for a refuge now that he felt everything was closing in on him, as though he were in a darkened cell? He asked about the girls and said he missed them and heard Bernadette’s voice asking him tenderly to “come back to Montpellier because we’ve missed you and Nadine and Lara ask about you every day.” Why didn’t he come back, she asked, and what had he been thinking of to endanger his job and his position at the hospital in Montpellier? He said he’d be back soon but couldn’t abandon the project just then. He heard her kiss on the phone as she told him, before hanging up, that they’d be waiting for him.
He slept intermittently. In fact he didn’t sleep properly until dawn, so didn’t open his eyes until ten thirty in the morning. He phoned the architect to reassure himself that the work was progressing but couldn’t get hold of him. He dressed and walked the streets aimlessly. He walked to kill time. He didn’t like just waiting about.
He reached Sassine Square, took a seat at the sidewalk café, ordered a cup of coffee without sugar, swallowed down the bitter catch in the throat à la Ghazala, and contemplated the memorial to Bashir Gemayel and his comrades killed in Ashrafieh on the Feast of the Cross in 1982. The Phalangist militia leader was portrayed as a young man bursting with vitality, which was etched on his face in lines of shadow. He thought about the absurdity of the moment that had brought him — a former fighter in the leftist Palestinian Joint Forces — to sit opposite the image of the man who had once been the embodiment of the merciless enemy. He smiled when it occurred to him that only the dead can embody the vitality of life, for had Bashir lived to be sixty and died of an illness he would probably have committed additional horrors that no intercession could have erased.
He smoked three cigarettes, then began to feel hungry. His watch showed twelve thirty. He thought he’d better go home because the hour of his appointment with Matrouk was near. He decided to buy a grilled chicken sandwich from Abu Esam’s, next to his building. He walked in the direction of Sofiel, reached the Tabaris roundabout, turned right, entered Haramiyyeh Lane, and started the descent toward Gemmeizeh.
Thick dust in the air? Where had it come from? Borne on hot winds the dust formed a cover over the city, but Karim felt a shiver of cold. Since receiving that phone call from Matrouk he hadn’t known whether he was cold or hot. Everything had got mixed up with everything else. He felt he was about to faint; he leaned against the wall, rubbed his eyes, and continued on his way like a blind man. He reached Abu Esam’s place, saw grilled chickens turning on spits in front of the shop, fire surrounding them on all sides, and, instead of asking for a sandwich, as he’d decided to do at the café, he ordered a whole chicken. He could smell the arak Abu Esam was drinking to go with his salted chickpeas and decided he’d drink a glass of arak with the chicken. He took the grilled chicken, which Abu Esam had wrapped in a flat loaf of white bread before putting the whole in a plastic bag alongside two small tubs of finely mashed garlic in olive oil. The smell of the garlic wafted everywhere and the man began salivating as he took the bag in his hand and set off for the apartment.
He reached the entrance to the building, remembered his refrigerator was empty, and instead of climbing the stairs to the second floor, where he lived, walked about fifty meters to Emile the greengrocer’s. He bought a kilo of large mountain-grown tomatoes and a kilo of cucumbers. He looked at his watch. It was one. He hurried back to the building, took the stairs at a run, and on reaching his door gave a start, as though he’d received an electric shock. A man was standing there, waiting for him. He retreated a little, apologizing for being late; this tall brown-skinned man had to be her husband. He opened the door to the apartment and asked him to go ahead, but the man hesitated and said, “That won’t do — after you, doctor.” They entered more or less abreast, their shoulders bumping as they entered. The man pulled back and Karim turned slightly. “Sorry, sorry,” the man said, smiling. His white teeth showed. Karim patted him on the shoulder and asked how he was, and how Ghazala was.
The man went into the living room while Karim went to the kitchen, washed the tomatoes and cucumbers, prepared two glasses of arak, took the chicken out of the bag, and put two plates, two knives, and two forks on the Formica table. Then he invited the visitor to join him for lunch.
“You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, doctor. There’s no need for lunch. I just need a couple of words with you.”
“It’s no trouble, you’re most welcome,” said Karim. “I was passing Abu Esam’s, fancied a chicken, and thought we could have lunch and drink a glass of arak together.”
The man thanked him, then breathed the smell in deeply, relaxing his thick lower lip and closing his small eyes, which looked as though they’d been gouged into his face. He said garlic called for arak: “I only have to smell garlic to think of arak.” He said he’d learned a lot about garlic from Madam Salma, Khawaja Nasim’s mother-in-law, and was always seeing her sitting in her daughter’s apartment peeling garlic and eating the cloves because garlic was good for blood pressure. “She eats raw garlic, with nothing else, and she told me about its health benefits. Madam Salma says that a clove of garlic in the morning opens the heart just like the sun opens the day, even with fried eggs. There’s nothing better than fried eggs with garlic. That’s how we eat eggs in the Jabal. We fry them with garlic and that’s it. I don’t know where Ghazala learned to do them with sumac, I like just garlic. It reminds me of the way my mother used to smell.”
When Matrouk started talking about eggs and sumac, Karim felt the fellow had come to the point and put him in the dock from the outset. Matrouk drank a little from the glass of arak in front of him. He picked up the grilled chicken and started breaking it apart with his hands. He looked at the doctor and said he was sorry but he could only eat using his hands. “Ghazala always laughs at me. She says I was born a peasant and I’ll die a peasant, but I can’t taste the food properly unless I eat with my hands.” He took a chicken thigh and put it on the doctor’s plate.
“I prefer the breast,” said Karim.
“ ‘Breast for the bereft,’ as they say,” answered Matrouk.
“The breast’s healthier because it doesn’t have fat.”
“Whatever you say, doctor,” said Matrouk. He took away the thigh and put a piece of breast in its place, saying food without fat had no taste.
They drank and ate in silence. Suddenly, Matrouk stood up, tugged at something at his waist with an irritated expression, pulled out a revolver, laid it on the table, and went on eating.
The doctor choked and found himself unable to swallow a morsel of food that had lodged in his throat. He picked up his glass of arak with a trembling hand and took a large gulp, feeling the blood drain from his face. Matrouk’s expression changed when he placed the revolver on the table next to the chicken breast, which the doctor hadn’t yet eaten. The anger that had creased his brow dissolved; it sagged down into his facial features, which lengthened with sadness. He stopped eating and looked at the doctor with eyes so dimmed with grief that he failed to notice the panic that had transformed his host into a wet rag. There was silence, through which they could hear each other breathing, and then Matrouk suddenly broke the silence, cleared his throat, drank a sip of water, and told the doctor that he’d come to consult him about Ghazala. And he started to talk.
He said that at first he’d decided to kill her. “I found out she was being unfaithful to me with another man and when a woman’s unfaithful to her husband, only blood will wash out the stain.” Matrouk lit a cigarette and said later he’d changed his mind. “How can I kill her? She’s the mother of my children and I love her.” He said he’d changed his mind, picked up the revolver and started fiddling with it, turning it over in his hands. He looked at the doctor and saw the terror that had seized him. “It looks like you’re afraid of guns.”