“Oh! Because tomorrow is my birthday!” Rosa sighed deeply, and as she read her smile radiated passionate love and rapture. She didn’t notice the waiter, who put a full glass of beer, very tall in the German style, in front of her and then withdrew in silence.
Meanwhile, I lit another cigarette and sipped my coffee, watching her face intently. I saw tears stream from her eyes. She let them drip onto her lips, which contorted with emotion and radiated joy by turns. At that moment, it would be impossible for anyone looking at her to doubt, even a little, the depths of this woman’s passion for Noah.
She closed the card and pressed it to her breast. Then she kissed it and burst into tears again. I hurried to pass her a Kleenex I had taken from my bag. She wiped her tears and laughed with a mouth tightened by emotion, saying, “Your father is crazy. And I’m just as crazy because I am madly in love with him.”
At that moment, I regretted not having read what he had written to her in the card. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I got up and went around to the other side of the table and hugged her where she sat. She cried on my neck for a while, shaking and a little hysterical. I let her squeeze me to her for a while until she calmed down. Then I kissed her forehead, helped her wipe away the tears, and went back to my place.
“Thank you, Saleem,” she said.
She had calmed down and took a sip from her glass. She smelled the bouquet of jasmine flowers and set it next to her on top of her purse. Then the words burst out: “I’ve never loved a man the way I love your father! When I found him, neither my heart nor my soul erected any barrier to keep him from coming in. I felt that he was the very man I had always been waiting for. Precisely him.
“There were many things we had in common, such as our love for Germans!” (She laughed as she said it.) “Did you know that ever since I was a child, people at home and at school called me ‘the German Girl’? It’s because I look so much like them. This blond hair of mine that you see, this is its true color; it’s not dyed. And my body frame with its wide shoulders …. As far as I was concerned, the whole idea appealed to me from early on. For that reason, I studied German as a second language, something which I continued at the Goethe Institute. Ever since I was young, I’ve traveled nearly every year to Germany.
“My first conversation with your father in his restaurant in Baghdad began with this topic too, and right away I felt …. It was as though we had known each other for a long time, for his first words to me were ‘Are you German?’ I answered him in German, saying, ‘No, I’m actually Spanish, but they say that one of my grandmothers was of German descent.’ He immediately sat down next to me, and we began speaking in German. He kept insisting, half-serious and half-joking, that I was a German hiding in the skin of a Spaniard. We talked about the differences between the two peoples and cultures, then about Goethe, whom we both loved. He astonished me when he began reciting long passages from his poems by memory.
“The difference between German women and me is that I’m a chatterbox. Just the opposite of them, I love to talk a lot.” She laughed and commented, “I’m a perfect Spaniard in this regard, and this is the only thing that your father doesn’t like in me.”
I nodded, remembering my father’s complaints about this very thing when we had lunch the day before. He had said, “The only problem is that she’s a chatterbox. Listen to me, brother! She gives me a headache talking nonsense until very late at night.” He had gone on sardonically, “Sometimes I think that the dictator is kinder to my head than the torture of her chatter. At least the dictator repeats the same pompous, worthless expressions, so your ears can block them out and get some rest. But this woman, in the café and the street, at home and even in bed lying on the same pillow, pours her nonsense directly into my ear canals!” He had smiled and added, “But all the same, she is a good person, she’s honest, and she’s generous.”
Rosa continued to prattle, narrating her life and dwelling on every stage. Her father had been a famous gold merchant in Barcelona. She was her parents’ only child. Her husband, an Argentinian, had also been a gold merchant. She had separated from him without giving birth to any children, and she put the blame for that on him: “I didn’t love him. He was an excellent businessman who was able to continue running the family business after my father died. But he was too practical, and I’m a romantic.”
Rosa pointed through the window at the façade of her building and said, “I own this apartment building as well as a shop in the city center, which I rent out for a good price. Three years ago, I also bought a small, pretty house in the suburbs of Berlin. Whenever I can’t cope here, I flee there for a month or two. If I am German in shape and culture, your father resembles them in his stubbornness!” She laughed. “We say here that the stubborn man has a square head. Just think, he is crazy about Germany like me, but every time I tell him that we should go live there, he refuses, saying, ‘Not now. Later. Later.’”
I listened to her more closely at this point, trying to figure out whether she was aware of his true motive for insisting on staying in Spain, and specifically in Madrid, namely, the secret of the bullet keychain. When I noticed that she was moving on to talk about something else, I asked her, “And you don’t know the reason?”
“No,” she said. “He merely replied, ‘Not now. Later. Later.’ He’s just stubborn. Didn’t I tell you that he has a square head? But look, his heart is round. He hides in that body of his a heart that is enormously good, kind, and sweet.”
“Do I gather from all this that you accept my mediation and will come back to him?”
She laughed. “Of course! Certainly! I’d go crazy or die if we ever parted. I will take the plane this very night. Can I reserve a seat for you to fly with me?”
“No, I’m too tired. I’ll spend the night here and come back tomorrow on the train. I love trains.”
“In that case, I’ll give you the key to my apartment. As for me, I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
She went on talking, and I heard her without really grasping what she said. I was content simply to nod my head while thinking of an appropriate way to ask her about how the two of them made love, given what I knew of my father being ruined during those distant days of electric torture in Tikrit. Finally, I decided to try.
“I have a question that I’m hesitant to ask, but I’m very curious to know the answer.”
“Ask, Saleem, ask! You are dear to my heart, and we’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes, certainly! But it is personal and private. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
She reached out her hand and patted mine. “Saleem, Saleem. There are no barriers between us now. And you ought to have the confidence to trust me with your secrets, if you want to. Didn’t I just tell you all about myself without holding back?”
“Yes … yes. It’s just that I was wondering … I mean … for example … I find it strange that you are as extremely jealous about him as you are, and—”
She interrupted me with a start, “How could I not be jealous of him? He’s my lover. And he, the naughty bastard, knows how to treat women well. In some incomprehensible way, he has the ability to charm most women. I know him well, and I know his tongue. You, no doubt, know him too.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I actually hadn’t known that about him at all and had only noticed it recently, here. When I had discovered it, I was both astonished and perplexed: the images of him collided in my mind. What she said didn’t give me my answer, but the conversation encouraged me to keep trying. So I continued with a certain reluctance that was both real and feigned, “No, I mean …. But promise me that my father won’t find out what I’m asking you about.”