That was the first and sweetest kiss of my life. Aliya’s lips were delicate, like the rest of her body, the details of which I began to discover later on. Her body was soft and firm at the same time. Not soft like butter, but rather like fresh cheese. Her lips combined the flavors of date and human. I discovered only then that even humans have a particular taste, just as every fruit or creature does.
After the first kiss, we were silent for a long time, staring at each other, shaken up and afraid. For the rest of the meeting, we communicated with our glances, not uttering a single word. We got up and went to the shore, where we washed our hands and faces. After that, she left and I stayed behind alone, as usual. I didn’t return to the nest but stayed on the shore, throwing stones far out in the middle of the river. Then, just as my father used to do, I sat on a rock and hung my feet into the water until the sun set. With a grave expression, I recalled the taste of the kisses and feared God.
I fell asleep late that night after tossing and turning in bed for a long time. I awoke before sunrise, sweaty and terrified from a dream in which I saw myself in the fires of hell. I also saw the angels of hell, whose gigantic size and cruelty Grandfather had described. They were heating iron with which they seared my lips. There was a fearsome sizzle, and the smoke rose up, together with the smell of grilled flesh. Meanwhile, I sensed the presence of God, who was supervising my punishment as it was meted out, watching from a high place that I couldn’t see. The voice of Grandfather was ringing out angrily, “He deserves it! I warned them all! O God, my God, I told them! O God, my God, bear witness!”
I pushed off the covers and looked around. Smoke was rising along with the smell of my mother’s bread from the oven at the edge of the courtyard. I jumped up and hurried over to sate my thirst from the jar I had left by the door. I drank a lot of water, but it wasn’t enough. I felt the dryness of my lips and a stinging sensation.
During our meeting the next day, I hesitated for a long time before kissing Aliya because hell was on my mind, accompanied by Grandfather’s voice and the gaze of God. But I couldn’t resist the temptation of that pleasure. So I decided to ignore those other things, to put off thinking of them, deciding that this sin of mine wasn’t serious like adultery. I justified it to myself, saying, “The sweetness of kissing Aliya in this world is worth the pain of my lips being seared in the world to come.”
We began to spend less time talking because we spent most of our time kissing. I loved her. It was as though I were “in a lofty (aliya) garden in which no babbling is heard.” Our hands reached out to the other’s back, butt, neck, hair, and the curve of the shoulder. But Aliya pushed my hands away the first time they moved down to her chest toward the alluring bulge of her two nipples, which looked like chickpeas lifting up the thin material of her dress.
“It’s wrong,” she said.
“But we are going to get married,” I said. “Aren’t we going to get married?”
Her face lit up, and she hugged me tight. Then she gave my hand freedom to slip down the front of her dress, and we stretched out on the sand. Later on, she offered herself to me entirely. I loved her completely, as though I were “in a lofty (aliya) garden, where grapes hang low.”
She would reserve the ripest dates to the end of our meal, which grew more elaborate with bread, cucumbers, and figs. She would open the date with her teeth and remove the pit to throw into the thicket. Then she would pass the hollow date around her fingers like a ring before offering me the fingers to suck. I saw her close her small eyes, turning them into two lines with projecting eyelashes, just as they looked whenever she laughed or smiled widely.
Sometimes she would leave the date-ring on her finger for me to eat off before I sucked the finger, and sometimes she would eat it, when the date wouldn’t stay fixed to her finger. After the fingers, she would smear her lips with the next date as though she were putting on lipstick. She would then smear mine and push the date into my mouth, and we would give ourselves over to a long, gentle sucking of each other’s lips.
Aliya had a light fuzz on her top lip, which only two kinds of people saw: those who loved her and those who hated her. The lover, myself, saw in it the consummation of her beauty and, later on, a way to preserve the nectar of dates so that our kissing lasted longer. As for anyone who hated Aliya, he would take the fuzz to be a blemish to be harped upon because there was no other fault to be seen in her body. It was just like the matter of her small eyes. I came to love them precisely for how small they were and the way they disappeared into her face when she laughed or surrendered to the pleasure of our caresses.
After a while, when Istabraq was regaining her strength, she asked me about my letters. I told her about the nest where Aliya and I met, without indicating its location. I said that we left our letters to each other there when it was impossible to meet. We would put them in an agreed-upon cleft at the bottom of a tree trunk rising on the edge of the nest, against which Aliya would sometimes lean, or under white stones we had designated.
“Istabraq,” I said, “please don’t ever tell anyone about this!”
“Don’t worry,” she said, as her mouth gaped open in astonishment. Perhaps she and Sirat also made their own special nest because she began disappearing from the house whenever she found an opportunity.
Later, Aliya began opening the buttons on the top of her dress or taking it off entirely. Then she would smear her breasts with the juice of dates and lie back in the sand, closing her eyes and letting me lick them, suck them, love them as she moaned and trembled. That is what made me always look at a woman’s breasts afterward. Aliya had ideal breasts, neither too big nor too small. Each one was only a little larger than my cupped hand, and its nipple would stand up under my tongue.
Aliya was like Grandfather and me in her passion for dates, but she loved the river more than I did. The intensity of her love for it is what made me first love it too. But I began to feel jealous later on because of how much she would talk about it when it flowed in front of us. She imagined the river more beautiful than I saw it to be. Afterward, my relationship with the river became a mix of enmity and intimacy when Aliya, at the end of that summer of ours, drowned there.
I had once asked her not to go too far out in the water when she was swimming.
“Don’t be afraid,” she replied. “It’s my friend.”
She used to say, “Life is a beautiful gift from God, Saleem. It is not for us to object about how big or long it is. Rather, we receive it with gratitude and enjoyment.”
That’s why I thank God whenever I remember Aliya, and I blame life for taking from me the most beautiful gift it gave, for taking Aliya from me. I blame the river. I hurl rocks, and I cry. Then I throw myself into its embrace, wishing that it would take me to her.
It took her from me on the night of the festival, when we all went down to the riverbank. The families gathered on the shore where the sand and the pebbles came together. They spread out their sheets on the ground, and the mothers arranged dishes of food and sweets made the night before. The children played, running around the groups of adults, with the mountain echoing back their cries. The fathers tended the fires and grilled the meat. Tears caused by the smoke mixed with tears caused by laughter. We all swam in the river in specified areas not far away: the men in one part and the women — without taking off their dresses — in another. Only the children had the freedom to cross between the two areas, pleading with the adults to teach them how to swim. Grandfather kept repeating the Prophet’s traditional command, “Teach your children archery, swimming, and horseback riding.”