That is what he told the interrogator.
He said it was by pure chance that he met Shirin.
“And the telephone calls every day, you dog?” asked the interrogator.
Why did he ask him about the phone calls as if he didn’t know the answer? People made phone calls because they felt lonely. Yalo wanted to tell the interrogator that he felt lonely because he had no friends. There was no one Yalo could talk to about his love story with Shirin because he lived with no one. From the day Tony abandoned him in Paris, he had lived alone, he and his shadow, he and his rifle, he and himself.
Yalo discovered his loneliness with Shirin when she left him there in the Albert Restaurant after lunch, and after having agreed to pocket the hundred-dollar bill, refusing the larger amount she had offered him. There, he felt lonely, and missed his friend Tony Atiq.
Why had Tony done that?
Why had he left him in an unfamiliar city where he didn’t speak the language, why had he left him alone with no language and no money?
“There, sir, there, if you’d allow me to say so, it was cold. Real cold, sir, that makes everything in you shiver, every muscle in your body, every shudder of your eyes, everything. There, sir, the cold made you blue with fear and loneliness.”
Yalo told Shirin about the cold. He tried to tell her, but she laughed at him: “You’re the world’s greatest liar!” she said, and refused to go up to Ballouna with him.
That was one week after the famous night in Ballouna. He called her house in the morning. Her mother answered the phone sleepy and yawning, and he heard her call to her daughter that someone named Yalo wanted to talk to her. Then came the tone of her delicate voice. Suddenly her delicate voice became broad and deep.
“Hello,” she said in her delicate voice. Then her voice amplified, slowed down, and became scratchy, as if coming from an old recorded tape.
“It’s me,” he said, after hearing her ask, “Who is this?”
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Me, Yalo.”
“Hi. . hi.”
“How are you?”
“I’m. . fine. . thanks.”
“I miss you.”
“. .”
He said that he wanted to see her that day and she replied that she was busy. He said that he would wait for her in front of the Araissi office at nine in the morning and she said no. He said he would be there anyway.
“Fine, fine,” she said.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.
“No, not in front of the office. You’ll find me in the News Café.”
He said he did not know where to find that place and she told him it was near the Clemenceau Cinema.
“Okay, in an hour, so, at nine I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“No, no — I can’t before five in the afternoon.”
“Okay, I’ll be waiting for you at five.”
“Sure, sure,” she said, and hung up.
When he met her at the café and they drank tea, he told her about the cold. She laughed and said, “You’re the world’s greatest liar!”
Yalo went to the café at four o’clock. He sat in a quiet corner, drank a beer, and waited. When the hands of the clock approached five o’clock, he felt nervous and fearful that he would not recognize her. He recalled all her features in his eyes, and waited as he sipped his beer slowly. But as soon as he heard her footsteps on the floor he recognized her, then scented the fragrance of the incense that preceded her. She paused a moment before sitting across from him and did not offer her hand in greeting. She pulled out the chair and sat down in silence. When the waiter appeared she ordered a cup of tea and Yalo also ordered tea.
She drank, and he drank.
She spoke, and he spoke.
Yalo did not remember what he said, or how the time passed in an instant, and then it was six thirty. Shirin looked at her watch and said she had to go.
“Should I give you a ride there?” he asked.
“No thanks, I have my car.”
“Why don’t we go to the mountain?”
“Where?” she asked.
“Ballouna,” he said.
“Please, Monsieur Yalo.”
“You still remember my name?”
“Please, please do me a favor, I’m very grateful to you. You were a gentleman with me. Please keep being a gentleman.”
“Why am I, what did you say?” he said. “I wanted for us to go for a drive and get some fresh air.”
“Please, let’s just forget it,” she said.
Then she asked him how her knew her name and telephone number, and he said he knew everything about her. He knew where she lived, describing for her the tall building in Hazemiya, and he knew where she worked, and he loved her.
Yalo did not remember when he had spoken of love, whether in their first encounter or the second. He remembered that he showed up at their first appointment stammering, and that when he saw her shivering in front of him in the café, he again felt like the hawk he was. He waited for an hour before she arrived, and he felt as if there were water trembling inside the muscles of his chest and inside his arms and legs, making him quiver in his chair. When she came and sat facing him and he saw the trembling of her narrow lower lip, colored red but almost pink, giving off a strong smell of perfume mixed with the scent of incense from her upper arms, his hawk feelings returned, and instead of being gentle, he felt that he had regained the power of words to say whatever he wanted without stuttering.
But he said nothing.
He noticed the trembling of the left corner of her lower lip. He lit a cigarette, sucked in the smoke, and exhaled it in a series of smoke rings. He shaped his lips into a circle and blew rings that landed against Shirin’s eyes and dissolved on her lips.
Did she say then that she was afraid of him, or was that the second time they met?
Yalo did not remember the order of events exactly, but it was probable that she had said that at their second encounter.
She said she had begun to be scared to answer the telephone, or open her bedroom window, or walk home alone, or. . because she saw his specter everywhere, and she was afraid.
He said that he saw her all the time in his imagination, and that her image had never left his eyes since they met in Ballouna, and that he could smell the scent of her body from his own body; that he had been unable to forget her, and that he loved her.
She said she was begging him.
He said he was begging her.
When she showed signs of standing up after paying the check, he caught her by the hand and felt everything inside him tremble. The softness of her hand cheered and intoxicated him. Yalo would write that there in the café he discovered a softness he had never known and would feel regret that he’d not discovered it at his home in Ballouna. There he felt a woman so light that she could have flown to the rhythm of the desire exploding inside him. It had not been sated. He said he had never felt her softness because he had been submerged in the scent of the incense from her forearms. In the café, an unspeakable softness spread through his limbs, as if her cold fingers were made of silk and stitched to her palm.
Why were her fingers always cold?
Once he told her, when he gently took her hand, that her fingers were as cold as ice and that when he took her hand he felt the urge for a glass of whiskey that he would put her icy fingers into and get intoxicated. She laughed; when she laughed at him or with him she was like someone trying not to laugh. The laughter erupted from her lips and fell back to them, then her lips contracted again, and her eyes emitted a ray of sadness.