But now she sat, wearing that same red skirt, or one like it, her legs crossed, speaking without any stammer or hesitation, as she had done there.
They were in the car like two shadows. From the top of his lookout hill, Yalo could see only the man’s gray hair. Yalo aimed the beam of his flashlight at the car just as the shots were fired. He felt, as he dodged among the pine trees, carrying the Russian Kalashnikov, and the flashlight, that he was going hunting. The cars were traps for prey like him. He was like a sparrow hunter, he knew the seasons, and enjoyed them. This is what he tried to explain to the interrogator. He said that the point for a hunter like him was not robbery or women, but pleasure. The pleasure of hunting, the love stolen inside the cars with sealed windows, and the pleasure of the first moment, the moment the light fell on the two faces, or on the hand reaching for the thighs, or on the head bent to the breasts free of the folds of clothing.
The beam that Yalo aimed hit its target directly. Yalo was not playing with the light, it immediately hit the right spot. Had the beam not hit its target, he would have considered his adventure a failure; he would have retraced his steps or hid in wait for the car to pass, withdrawing quietly, dragging his failure behind him.
The first shot, or nothing; that was his hunting philosophy. For him the best thing was the gray hair that shone in the light. The best moments were men’s heads covered with white hair as they bent over a forearm or a thigh. The beam penetrated the old gray hair, lit it up, and froze it in place. The light entered the bending white and drew a complete circle around it. The beam lifted up from the gray hair and moved to the other side, drawing eyes, and there were the woman’s eyes, dilated with a mixture of fear and desire.
The light came closer. The phantom emerged after turning on the flashlight and playing it over the car. In the first moments of the hunt, Yalo focused the light, making it sharp and narrow as a ray. After the eyes were frozen, he enlarged the beam and flashed it around as he approached the closed window and rapped it with the muzzle of his rifle. The window opened and revealed terror. The phantom’s head drew close to the man’s window, but he did not allow the woman’s eyes to escape his own alert hawk eyes, wide open in the dark. He penetrated the dark and flashed the beam of light, and the shadows rose. He approached within the shadows, and rapped the window with the muzzle of his rifle, and ordered it open. He looked into the woman’s eyes and contemplated how wide they were, with the pupils shrunk to nothing. Then he withdrew quietly with his booty: a wristwatch, a ring, a gold chain, a necklace, and a few dollars, nothing more. Of course. Once he had asked a man to remove his necktie because he felt that fear was choking the man through the necktie that hung over his opened belt, like a noose. Once he had asked a woman to give him her yellow shawl, for no reason at all. But he wanted nothing more; more came to him with no strain or effort. Yalo was not looking for anything more, but he did take it when it showed up, because he had learned from his torment in the city known as Paris never to refuse grace.
Things were different with Shirin, however.
Why did she say he had raped her in the forest?
“I did not—” Yalo said, but heard the interrogator’s shout:
“You confessed, you dog! And now you say no. You know what happens to liars!”
Yalo was not lying, however. It was true that he had agreed that what he had done could be called rape, but. . it was not a question of that night. Shirin had not leveled any charge against him having to do with that night, only with the days that came after.
Things had been different there with her. Yalo had not known the right words to use to tell her that the smell of incense her arms gave off that night had surrounded him like white clouds and then penetrated his very spinal column.
When he told her that he loved her from his spinal column — this was three months after the forest — she laughed so hard that tears ran down her face, and she kept having to blow her nose. At first he thought she was crying, and he bent over the table loaded with appetizers at the Albert Restaurant in Achrafieh, then he saw that she was laughing.
“I’m laughing at you,” she said. “You’re an idiot, all appearance and nothing more. What is this third-rate crap?”
And she started to speak English, telling him, “Finished, you must understand, everything is finished.”
He said that he did not understand English, so she spoke to him in French.
“C’est fini, Monsieur Yalo.”
“What’s fini?” he asked.
“Us,” she said.
“So you want to finish me?” he asked.
“Please, Monsieur Yalo, I can’t go on like this, please leave me alone and go, let’s understand each other, tell me what you want and it’s yours.”
She opened her bag and brought out a handful of dollars.
Why had she told the interrogator that he had slapped her because she refused to eat?
No, he had not slapped her because she refused to eat sparrows, as she had alleged to the interrogator.
“Who would eat music?” she said when she saw the plate of fried sparrows swimming in a broth of lemon and garlic.
“I don’t eat sparrows — it’s wrong!”
Yalo prepared a morsel of a small sparrow wrapped in bread and dipped in sauce, and brought it near her mouth.
“Non, non, please!”
But the hand that brought the bread-wrapped sparrow stayed there, outstretched, then began to approach her mouth and hover around it, before brushing it against the closed lips. The girl gave in, she opened her mouth, accepted the morsel, and began to chew, yet the muscles of her mouth contracted in repulsion.
She swallowed the sparrow and then stopped eating and talking.
Yalo kept drinking arak and gazing at her face. Her face was as small as a small white moon hung over her long neck. He wanted to tell her all about the moon. He wanted to tell her how he had discovered the moon and the stars and the Milky Way, which looked like a swath of milk in the sky, there in Ballouna, below the villa to which Parisian fate had guided him, but he was afraid she would laugh at him.
“So it seems like you don’t speak Arabic or think much of Abd al-Halim Hafiz.”
He told her that, or something like that, but she said nothing in reply. The little white moon rested still on the long neck, then tears streamed from her eyes. She grasped a paper tissue, wiped her tears, and blew her nose. But the tears did not stop. He started to tell her stories about the “Brown Nightingale,” about Suad Hosny and Shadia, and the song “Jabbar” he loved so much.
He told her that he had come to love the poetry of Nizar Qabbani because of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, and that “A Message from Underwater,” in which a man is sinking in the water of passion, was the most beautiful poem he had ever heard in his life. And that he had not believed that Abd al-Halim did not write the lyrics to his own songs until he read about it in the newspaper.
“It’s impossible, Shirin, the words melt in his mouth like sugar, he spins the lyrics into fine threads, impossible that he didn’t write that poem, but later I believed it, and went and bought a book called Drawing with Words, but I didn’t understand a single word. Poetry doesn’t make sense unless it’s sung by someone like Abd al-Halim. You don’t like Abd al-Halim?”
The moon was silent, flinching with muscle contractions, and he saw the small eyes suspended on its round white surface.