The philosopher was an extreme existentialist. He was not looking for suffering in love or even the torture of impossible love. He considered love, like everything else, nonexistent, simply an unformed, unmaterialized feeling, because love is simply a part of nihilism, and nihilism alone was the essence of everything. To him, Germaine’s presence was delusive, as was her absence. Like everything that surrounded him, she was an illusion. The philosopher made fun of organic fusion in love, metempsychosis, and closeness in love because none of these things existed. For him to philosophize about love he had first to reinvent love, to purify it of the sterility that the idealists had forced onto it. He had to cleanse love of the misunderstandings, the isolation, and the disappointments it faced. According to him every failed love was a sick love — it carried nothing but ugliness. He knew that Germaine was ugly, but her ugliness was a form of beauty particular to her. After having slept with her countless times, he forgot her ugliness and even got used to it. What did belief in love bring him other than regret? Love is a lie, and only the nihilism it provokes can be considered real.
The philosopher did not lack the tactical skills to establish a sharp correlation between truth and deceit. The amazing secret to his behavior was his ability to hide his feelings and to deceive. His primary deceitful attitude was vis-à-vis his wife, whom he did not love and this is where his philosophical game in life begins. Whenever his role as a lover was pure and acceptable, he discarded the minor mistakes he made and the flowery words he uttered. He hid behind and from them, and moved constantly within this closed cycle where he found himself and to which he had become used. Yet he had to find a strategy to deal with Germaine.
He had to adopt a special system with Germaine. He would show eagerness and compliance whenever she rejected him and disregard her whenever she submitted to him; he would erase her from his imagination and fling her far away. He liked this game and spent time thinking and plotting. He took special pleasure in his thoughts as he formulated and refined them. He looked forward to the morning, when he would apply the ideas conceived the night before. The fact of the matter, though, was that it was not he who planned and plotted, but rather that he executed what Germaine had planned for him. She was very smart and made him believe that he was the master of the situation, that it was he who planned and plotted and had the last word. But it was an illusion. He was manipulated; he was an object not a subject. He had no idea that the decisions he executed were hers, not his.
Germaine was a dangerous strategist, capable of devising extraordinary plans of great consequence. She knew what she wanted just as much as the philosopher did not know what he wanted. The road to their aspirations led through opposite gates, one distant, the other difficult, complex, and requiring a great deal of effort to reach. In her genius Germaine was able to bring the two gates close enough to be fused into one. She had no intention of revealing her thinking to him, and she never talked with him about what might be her final goal, or ideal, akin to the philosopher’s idealism that he denied. Germaine was not an idealist like him, and the only abstract terms in her vocabulary pertained to geographical locations, such as the northern hemisphere and the equator. Her drive to reach her goal was not insignificant, nor was she stupid or disinterested. She was well aware that the road led either east or west, with no exit in between. She and her husband were different, with different characters. She was exceptionally self-controlled, and her uniqueness was more clearly defined than his. Although they didn’t admit it to one another, they were both aware of their shared tendency to pretend to possess things they did not have. It was instinctive. Each was aware that the other was not gifted, but Germaine was different from the philosopher because she could distinguish between the logical and the ordinary. This was the so-called experimental French thinking that Germaine understood instinctually. Pretending to ignore the discrepancies would only prolong this situation. Germaine did not confuse matters. She placed everything in its appropriate place. She had weighed matters very carefully and assessed them in a cautious, Cartesian manner. The choice was between, on the one hand, housekeeping in Paris, cleaning the apartments of wage-earners, and submitting to the whims of those whose pockets were bursting with their wealth. The other path led to marriage with the sensitive Middle Eastern fellow enamored of existentialism, an elegant and fashionable man, who belonged to an aristocratic family, and was connected with the Baghdad elite. On top of all that he had a special place in the Eastern City.
This Cartesian Frenchwoman was faced with a choice between two totally different lives but could select only one. The first option was biologicaclass="underline" love or the mere perpetuation of the human race. The second was social and would bring wealth. She chose the latter. She realized the wisdom of her choice when Abd al-Rahman visited her apartment and brought her a huge bouquet. He then asked her timidly, “Do you like escarole?” to which she replied with her head bent in affected embarrassment, “Yes.” At this moment Abd al-Rahman took a bag from the pocket of his black coat, placed it on the table, and poured two glasses of champagne. He adjusted the white rose in his buttonhole, moved to the far end of the room, and took out candles and dishes from the drawer where Germaine kept them neatly wrapped in a piece of cloth. He placed them in front of her and asked, “Germaine, will you marry me?” to which she replied, “I’ll think about it.”
Germaine didn’t have a negative view of Baghdad. She didn’t find it particularly ugly nor did she suffer from its burning heat or its people who were so different from the French. Abd al-Rahman provided her with a large, luxurious house in Mahallet al-Sadriya, surrounded by trees and a brick wall. His father was the first to bless the house where he expected his grandchildren to be born, those who would perpetuate his name and memory. Abd al-Rahman’s father was convinced of his son’s genius and respected him for his mind, but also because he had married a Frenchwoman. He considered his son’s marriage to a Frenchwoman a distinction that could not be matched. For him it signified that fashionable, brilliant Europe appreciated and respected his son by marrying off one of its daughters to him. He saw it as a family alliance between him and de Gaulle, rather than the mere fact that a young man had met a woman in Paris while studying there and brought her home. His father therefore busied himself furnishing the house to suit the tastes of his son’s French wife. He was determined to provide her with everything and did not want to appear stingy. She, on the other hand, was annoyed by his excessive generosity and his continuous intrusions into their lives, yet she accepted his help and showed appreciation and respect for his feelings.
Germaine liked this strange, oriental-looking Mahalleh district with its narrow winding streets. In the souk she felt like a tourist in the city she had read about, the Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights. She imagined herself a Christian prisoner locked in her quarters by an oriental prince. She had to compartmentalize her thinking: one mode of thinking was incredibly sarcastic; the other allowed her to pretend to experience nausea, in order to please her husband. She was able to hide her sarcasm during the first year of their marriage, and so the time passed without major incident. She pleased her husband’s existential tastes in various ways. This lasted until she gave birth in Paris to twins, a girl and a boy. When she called her husband and anxiously asked him what he wanted to call the children, he told her, “call the boy Abath (Absurdity) and the girl Suda (Nothingness).” When he translated the meaning of the names, she slammed the receiver and broke down crying. She felt the loneliness she had known before and realized that the mind she had split in two had rejoined itself.