Khaled couldn’t think of a convincing answer. He too yearned to get back but was aware of the difficulties. He knew that to return would be to expose themselves to a confrontation with the vast apparatus of repression that the Syrian regime had come to control in the city. The regime had allied itself with the city’s traditional leaders and built up a large network of agents, most of whom were drawn from the hoodlums of the various quarters, people who had in the past submitted to the greater power of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leftist Lebanese forces.
Despite this he accepted their argument and they returned.
When Khaled entered his house in the Mahalleh area of Qubbeh at six p.m. on Sunday, December 18, 1977, tired from the long journey and from walking through valleys and forests to avoid the checkpoints that were everywhere on the roads, he found her waiting for him. She was standing at the door with her long black hair hanging down onto her neck, from which arose the smell of laurel-scented soap, the light smiling on her eyes. She was wearing the sky-blue nightdress that he knew so well but her legs were, for the first time, free and naked.
“I knew you’d come today. The water’s hot. Go and take a bath. I’ve made the most delicious dinner.”
When he removed his mud-caked clothes and tried to put them in the laundry basket, she took them from him, saying, “Give them to me. They’re all going into the rubbish. Everything — the shoes, the socks, the sweater, the trousers, the underwear — goes in the rubbish.”
She took everything from him from behind the half-closed bathroom door and left him alone and naked before the hot water and the soap. Later Khaled would think of that as the moment of his birth. When he reappeared from the bathroom wearing clean yellow pajamas, he told her that he now understood what baptism meant to their Christian brothers — a feeling of being reborn, of being free and freed.
She smiled and led him to the dining table, which was groaning under delicious appetizers, kibbeh nayyeh, sambousek, vine leaves in oil, wheat kernels seethed in hot milk, cheese pasties, labneh with garlic, aubergine with yogurt, shankaleesh, and, in the middle, local arak mixed with water gleaming in a glass jug set in a container filled to the brim with ice cubes.
“When did you cook all this?” he asked.
She said she’d sensed he would return that day. When she opened her eyes in the morning, she’d been seized by a mysterious feeling that he’d be home that night. “That’s why I came back from the bakery at three and began getting ready, and when I’d finished the cooking I took a bath and waited, and before I heard your footsteps on the stairs I was standing at the door waiting for you. I’ve missed you.”
She poured two glasses of arak, raised her glass, and said, “To you, hero!” Then she drank, sucking at the arak with her eyes closed.
Khaled had never before drunk alcohol in the house and he hadn’t dared to invite her to a drinking party. When he drank of an evening with his comrades he’d return to the house feeling embarrassed, take the cup of aniseed from her hand, swallow it down quickly, feel the burning of the hot water, and go up to bed.
He looked at her. She didn’t look like the wife he’d lived with for two years but like the woman from Shaqif Castle, the woman of fantasies and kisses after whom he thirsted more with every sip he drank. She reached for the kibbeh nayyeh, made a bite-sized morsel dipped in olive oil, placed a sprig of mint and a piece of white onion on top of it, and held it out to him. He held out his hand to take it from her but she refused to give it to him, saying, “Close your eyes and open your mouth.” He closed his eyes and she put the morsel in his mouth and he tasted her fingers.
“I’m drunk,” he said.
“Drunk! You haven’t drunk or eaten anything yet,” she said, taking a bite of the kibbeh nayyeh and saying she hadn’t eaten any in ages.
He drank but ate only a little.
“You don’t seem to like the appetizers,” she said.
“Quite the opposite. They are delicious but I …”
“You’re tired after the long journey, I know, but you have to eat.”
“I’m not tired, I …”
“You’re what?”
“I love you.”
She moved closer to him and placed her hand on his shoulder, and the nakedness of her arm gleamed in his eyes. She moved closer still, and he looked into her eyes, then dropped his and felt he wanted to cry. He took hold of himself, felt as though he was choking, pulled back a little to take a gulp of air into his lungs, and heard her speak a sentence that made him feel that this was the night of his transfiguration. At Shaqif Castle, alone on the night watch, he’d felt he saw God, or made contact with His presence; but when he heard her say, “I am your lawful wedded wife,” the horizon opened and the universe lit up with the light of transfiguration.
“I am your lawful wedded wife,” she said.
That night he drank her lips and sucked on them and became drunk on the sides of her long neck. He kissed her just as he had dreamed of doing — so much so that he would stop in the middle of a kiss, pull back, close his eyes, and then open them to make sure that what he was experiencing wasn’t a fantasy or an illusion.
When his masculinity awoke to the rhythm of her femininity and the scent of desire spread, he felt he was both the woman’s master and her slave. Instead of his tongue being released, love took him back to the language of childhood and he started making noises and grunts and speaking half-formed words.
After two years of waiting he had found her and after two years of sorrow and guilt she had found him, and they were as though they’d discovered a secret they could divulge to no one — the secret people call love but which resists all names.
In their new relationship, which lasted eighteen months, they would only rarely speak. They communicated with one another through a minimum of words and experienced every potential that life has to offer. Even the strange transformation that led Hayat to don the Islamist headscarf passed quietly and without any of the long discussions with which Lebanese and Palestinian leftist circles resounded following the stunning success achieved by the Iranian revolution.
When her belly grew round and butterflies of joy spread their wings around her eyes, they disagreed over the name of the child. They were sure it was going to be a boy, though Khaled secretly wanted a daughter who looked like her mother. He didn’t dare announce his hopes or his expectations in the face of the insistence of his wife and grandmother that the child would be a boy.
She told him her mother-in-law had no doubt that the boy’s name would be Yahya. “She didn’t discuss it with me. She looked at my round belly and called him Yahya. What do you think?” It was the first time since his marriage to Hayat that the martyr’s name had been pronounced in their house. He told her his grandmother’s suggestion made sense and he had to share it.
“But I want to call him Nabil,” she said. “Nabil is the name and the boy has to be noble. What do you think?”
“Whatever you want goes, Imm Nabil.”
She smiled and asked him to tell his grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to break her heart. You tell her please.”
Hayat had no idea what Khaled told his grandmother but she noticed a change in the woman’s behavior: suddenly she aged. Imm Yahya no longer bent over the belly that was rounding out with new life to croon to the baby and call out to it, “Yahya! Yahya, Granny’s darling!” A hidden sorrow possessed her and limned itself in the creases of old age that had formed around her eyes following her son’s death. But she didn’t object, for she was a woman and knew how powerful a woman’s authority can be, and she could see how Khaled had become two mutually contradictory men. At work and with the young men of the quarter he was a leader whose requests could not be refused, while at home he was a lover at the beck and call of the wife who had bewitched his heart.