“My neighbour Salime helps me out,” said the beggar, as if he had seen Rana and Farid discussing his room in sign language.
“Mahmud, Mahmud!” they heard a woman’s voice suddenly calling from the inner courtyard. The blind beggar went to the window and called back, “Hello.”
“Where have you been all this time?”
“Don’t worry, a couple of friends brought me home. You’re welcome to come up and meet them. Then you can tell me later what they look like.”
He left the window and sat down on the edge of the bed, pushed the toe of his right shoe against his left shoe until it came off, and then reached into it with a mischievous smile. He straightened up with three lira notes clutched in his fist.
“My safe. The fools never thought of that.”
Next moment Salime, the wife of the owner of the building, came in. On hearing that Mahmud had been attacked she embraced him, kissing his forehead, cheeks, and then his lips for a long time. “What trouble you do get yourself into!” she kept saying.
Mahmud’s hands sank into the woman’s soft arms and equally soft buttocks. To Rana, their lack of inhibition seemed odd and embarrassing. She looked at Farid. He pressed her hand.
“Oh, they were just small-time idiots, my little pigeon,” the blind man reassured Salime, burying his head in her ample bosom.” I learned a lesson today — never go with anyone unless someone I know is with me.” He gave Salime a long kiss. She tenderly slapped his hand as it tried slyly to slip between her legs.
“Now that’s enough,” she whispered affectionately. “What will these young people think of us?”
Salime loved Mahmud. He lived in her house for free, and she looked after him as well as her husband and her two boys.
“Has he ever played you his flute?” she asked Rana and Farid. “I’m sure you’d enjoy it.”
“Oh, Salime, it’s not something they’d like …”
But when Rana and Farid asked him, he did play for them, and it was the kind of music that makes you think of the great expanses of the desert and its silence. Mahmud didn’t so much play his flute as caress it, he spoke to it, he put all of himself into it, and the mute wood came alive, unfolding its melodies and giving them back to him.
Salime was greatly moved, and looked ecstatic, but then her husband called and she had to leave them.
“God took my eyes from me, but he gave me better ears and an internal clock instead. He is merciful. He doesn’t let something disappear for no reason. I see with my ears and I can feel the time in my heart,” Mahmud explained to them later as they sat together for a little longer.
At last Rana and Farid left the house hand in hand. Rana was going to walk the last part of the way back to the street on her own, and then take a taxi home. Farid was to go in the opposite direction, and find another street where he could catch his bus.
Outside the building it was pitch dark. Farid drew Rana close once more, and kissed her mouth for a long while. “You are my time to me,” he whispered, and kissed her yet again.
191. Karime
“Karime leaves Gibran sated and lethargic, and she’s eating his brain,” claimed Josef. “Since he fell in love with her he tells such stupid stories.”
Other members of the club spoke ill of Karime too. She had only been satisfying her hunger for love with the old seaman, they said, she had bought him to warm her cold bed. However, Karime’s love wasn’t a single thread of emotion, but an entire skein of very different yearnings.
With her, Gibran led a life free of care. In return, he banished boredom from the widow’s handsome house, opened the mouldering windows in her heart, and blew fresh air in. And she yearned for all the stories he told, she enticed the words out of him, and saw new landscapes rise before her where the two of them went walking. He loved the care with which she went about everything. No one had ever shown such consideration for him before. She, for her part, liked his sometimes painful honesty, which was refreshing after years of lies from her husband. And she liked Gibran’s courage in taking a positive view of young people. He showed her that old age is more easily kept at bay by an ever-inquiring mind than by any creams and lotions.
That first evening with him at the club was something she would never forget. Gibran had insisted on taking her. She felt it was an impossible idea. What would she do in such company, at the age of sixty? “Laugh,” he said. She was sure she would disappoint him, and felt nervous.
Gibran was a huge, gnarled oak tree. He might let her get him into a good suit, a new shirt, and new shoes, he might let her persuade him to shave his stubbly chin, but inside he was still the same wild, undomesticated tree. But now he was asking her to leave the protection of her familiar snail shell. She felt weak at the knees. Suppose the young people laughed at her and cat-called? It wasn’t considered normal for old people to fall in love. Her neighbour Alime, whose venom made a cobra’s appear like mild and milky coffee, had seen Gibran in a pair of silk pyjamas on her balcony, and next thing she was shouting abuse of the enamoured widow to another woman three buildings away. Her voice was loud enough for not only Karime and Gibran to hear her but even the President of the country away on his state visit to Moscow. Gibran took it calmly. “We’ll be famous. The names of Karime and Gibran will go together like Madjnun and Leila or Romeo and Juliet,” he said encouragingly.
In the end she went with him, trembling, and suddenly it had all seemed quite simple. After five minutes she felt the warmth among the young people. And when they were home again she made love with Gibran for many hours, until the dawn of day. At last she fell asleep in his arms, and felt as if she were in a sailing boat.
Karime also loved Gibran because she liked to care for him. She thought it a shame for such a fine man to live in poverty. When she first visited him she had wept. A room, bare apart from a shelf with a few books that were falling apart, an iron bedstead with a stinking mattress and pillows stiff with dirt, a bedside table and two or three raffia stools, and that was all. He didn’t even have a wardrobe; his few worn-out shirts and trousers hung from nails. A man who had seen the world as Gibran had couldn’t possibly stay in this dump.
And in addition she liked him because he wasn’t bitter. He loved humanity. “In spite of everything?” she asked. “Because of everything,” he replied.
Most of all, however, she appreciated Gibran because he knew how to treat women. He could caress Karime with his eyes so that she burned beneath her skin with longing for the touch of his hands. And he could always make her laugh. She loved him because he spoiled her as her husband never had; he had slept with her merely to satisfy himself. Loveplay with Gibran had been a bridge for Karime, a way to forget how much had separated her from her husband. She had been young when they met, and he had lavished gifts on her that made her soft and willing, but he could never work on her senses to make music as Gibran did.
And unlike her late husband, Gibran liked listening to her. She had told him more in a single year than she ever told her husband in twenty. With her husband, she had never been able to speak of her past. Her adventurous youth was interred on the altar of marriage. From then on, she had been obliged to play the part of happy wife to a rich, respected man.
Gibran, on the other hand, always encouraged her to tell him about her experiences as a young singer. At that time she had called herself Bint el Sahra, “daughter of the desert”, not just to arouse the curiosity of the public but also to spare her family shame, for women singers were then regarded as whores. Karime told Gibran how she had sometimes started brawls when she appeared in cafés and nightclubs, when one of the men drank a glass too many and climbed up on stage to kiss her, thus making the others envious or even jealous, and chairs would go flying through the air. Karime and her accompanists joined in with a will until the place was wrecked. Gibran never tired of hearing such stories.