Khaled was tired. True, he missed his city, but in establishing a base at Shaqif he’d found a way to escape from the house. His heart had been broken every night as he watched Hayat cover herself in pajamas and flee into her body — two years lived in thirst and in the pain of love. Khaled didn’t think he could love like the Udhris and be content with the simultaneous presence and absence of the beloved and her never-fulfilled promises. Many times, when he leapt from the bed moist with the dream that had spread itself beneath his eyelids, he would decide to take a second wife; he’d tell Hayat he couldn’t go on any longer and was prepared to continue supporting her if she preferred that to facing her family, but that he had to get another wife. When he got back in the evenings, though, exhausted from working at the bakery, even the glimmer of a smile of tenderness from her, bearing what seemed an obscure promise, would suffice to make him forget his decision and feel that even just to sit at the dinner table with her was to own the world.
When he told her he was going with the boys to the south because political conditions so demanded, she lowered her eyes with obvious sadness and said, “As you wish, but please take care of yourself and don’t die, for my sake don’t die.” She smiled and said she’d miss him, “but don’t you worry, I’ll go to the bakery and help out Imm Yahya.”
He said he preferred to close the bakery while he was away.
“And how will we live?” she asked.
“I’ll send you money from the south.”
“No, Nabil. We don’t get paid by the revolution. We give to the revolution.”
She bit her lower lip and said she was sorry she’d said his name wrong.
He said she was right and the bakery must keep on working and he’d never take a penny from anyone.
“I depend on you,” he said.
On his journey to the south Khaled took with him Hayat’s smile, the tremor in her voice as she used the name she’d given his uncle, and her decision to keep an eye on the bakery while he was away.
At Shaqif Castle, before the rocky, plunging canyon, where the wind buffeted the bodies of men scattered through its stone-hewn passageways and vestibules — there, where one felt oneself alone before the gods of war and death and as though one were just one more block of stone left behind by the succession of wars that the castle had witnessed since it was first built, Khaled felt a mysterious freedom, mixed with an ache in his heart. He felt he had been liberated from Hayat, her blue nights filled with the sleeplessness of longing and the strain of a desire buried deep in the soul.
His restless dreams, with Hayat at their center, came to an end. Khaled had never dreamed of his wife naked, even though her upward thrusting breasts gleamed under her nightdress, spreading the colors of distant clouds through his eyes. His sleep was blue and his sleeplessness was blue and all he ever dreamed was that he had moved closer to her and looked into her face, which he would see either as covered by her hair, which spread over the pillow, or in profile, her lips touching the edges of the coverlet. He’d move closer to her, but the moment he felt her breath lightly fan his face he’d find himself jerking about on the far side of the bed, rise like one stung by the lust spurting from him and leap out. He never got close to her in his dreams. He never touched her body with its armor of pajama bottoms and socks which covered her lower legs, and which she always wore, winter or summer.
There, before the wind that ululated through the valleys and battered the walls of a castle resembling the vault of heaven, Hayat disappeared from his sleeping dreams to reappear in his waking dreams. He would sit behind the barricade, guard the stars, and see her. He’d cup her face in his hands and kiss her. Khaled had never kissed Hayat in the past, or at least he’d hugged her and kissed her on each cheek when his uncle had died, but then she hadn’t been his Hayat; she’d been, rather, the widow of the martyr. He didn’t recall the feel of her cheeks on his lips but did remember the wetness of her tears. He told himself he’d kissed not her but her tears. Then, when it was time to say goodbye, when she’d smiled as she wiped away a tear suspended in the corner of her eyelid, she’d moved closer to him and kissed him on the cheek, but the surprise had so overwhelmed him that he’d felt the kiss only after he left the house.
Here, though, on his own, before the gods of night that spread their shadows over Mount Amel, Golan, and the Sea of Tiberias, he discovered the kiss, and the nuances of its diverse flavors. Hayat would take possession of him with her lips that opened to reveal white teeth, saliva, and the sweet taste of her tongue. He would kiss her on her closed lips, on her upper lip, her lower lip. He would kiss her quickly, or with tender slowness, or with a lust that made him reach for all the flavors of her tongue. He would kiss her on her eyes and on her smile. He kissed her neck and moved down to her shoulders with quick little kisses and deep lingering kisses. He bit her lips and felt her teeth biting into his lower lip, heard the moan of the kiss and became drunk on her lips. He was alone with the blue of the night, a mouth that held the secrets of the world, and lips burning with talk of love that evolved into a sensation fashioned by the miniatures of the night.
There Khaled felt the pleasure of love, mixed with a pain in his heart. It was there that he came to understand that longing is another name for the pain that dwells in the soul. His pain was great but it was mute. To whom should he complain and what might he say? Even Radwan, who clung to him like his shadow, never learned the story. How should he justify to him the fact that he’d never touched the woman who was ever present in his heart, his house, and his bed? And who would believe him? Even she, even Hayat, didn’t believe the story of his love for her, and how it had taken the form of a pain which was a synonym for waiting.
The stay in Shaqif Castle, known to the Franks as Belfort or Beaufort, was a moment of contemplation and an exercise in the recovery of love. The castle stored away in its stony walls the secret meaning of the absurdity of the present. For when the present bears witness in such a miraculous way to the layers and legends of the past, it too is in danger of being transformed into a part of the story of the place. Shaqif is a Syriac word meaning “towering rock.” The castle is located at a distance of five kilometers from the city of Nabatiyeh and overlooks the fortresses of Hounein, Tebnine, and Baniyas, as well as the heights of Lebanon, Mount Amel, Mount Harmoun, the Golan Heights, the hills of Safad, the Jordan Valley, and the Syrian coast all the way to Beirut in the north and Acre in the south. It is also known as Arnoun Castle with reference to the Lebanese village at its foot. The castle’s foundations are entirely carved out of the rock and no one knows the date of its construction. Some historians believe that Arnoun is a distortion of Renaud, the name of the Crusader Lord of Sidon within whose domain it fell; to Arab historians it is known as Irnat.
Their residence in the castle was, however, merely for purposes of guard duty, for after the Israeli incursion into the south and the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces, the Palestinian leadership had decided to observe the ceasefire.
At the organization’s general assembly Radwan said he could see no reason to stay there. “We’re outsiders and we don’t fight. We guard empty space and have to deal with an unfamiliar environment. We’d do better to go back to Qubbeh and resume our struggle there.”