“Why didn’t your fiancé report this incident immediately?” he would have said.
“How was he a man of fifty, who became a young man today?” he would have asked.
“Why did you run away and escape?” he would have asked.
But he said nothing, and the interrogator did not press him for a response. He considered his silence to be a response, and a confession.
“Is this the man who raped you, robbed you, and continues to stalk you?” asked the interrogator.
Shirin nodded in reply.
Emile looked at his watch and asked the interrogator if they might leave now.
“Of course, of course,” said the interrogator, and escorted them to the door of the guard desk.
But at the Albert Restaurant, no.
He slapped her and she shut up. Then when he ordered rice pudding she smiled, and he told her that he loved her.
“I’m engaged, Yalo,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
“Please,” she said.
The waiter appeared with the bill, but Yalo asked him for another glass of arak. He took a sip and looked into the girl’s eyes before closing his eyes for a long time.
“Please don’t fall asleep,” she said.
“Shut up,” he said. “Leave me alone. I’m talking to God.”
The girl began to talk, and Yalo listened to her with his eyes closed.
“I respect your feelings, but as you can see, I’m engaged, so I can’t,” she said.
“That’s the shit who abandoned you in the forest and ran away?” he asked.
“No, no, I left him, my fiancé is someone else.”
The girl talked, and Yalo listened.
“It’s like an Egyptian movie,” he said. “It’s like I’m sitting in a Ustaz Wahid movie.”
She said that she would listen to Arab songs only to please him, and that she respected him. She said that she cherished him, and apologized and said that he was free to slap her because she had hurt his feelings when she had offered him money.
“Stop it!” shouted Yalo.
He got up and mimed the scene in “Daughter of the Nile” where Farid Shawqi slaps Hind Rostom and how the actress falls to her knees and says, “I love you — you beast!” “That’s how you should be,” he said. “You have to love a real man, not these shits, one geezer your father’s age, the other one afraid of his mother.”
“You’re right,” Shirin said, “but what can I do? I love him. He was my classmate at the American University, and we slept together. I took birth control pills, but one day I forgot, I don’t know why, and when I told him I was pregnant and we had to get married, he ran away and said he was afraid of his mother. So I took care of myself. I had such a dépression and one of my girlfriends took me to Dr. Said, who made me a courtage, and who loved me. He told me he loved me because I’d cried so much. I got to his place, to the clinic, and I started crying. I couldn’t speak. I sat on the chair and placed my head between my hands, and I started gasping, and the tears just ran from my eyes, and the doctor didn’t say anything. He let me cry and sat there watching me. He told me later that he sat and watched, and that he became infatuated with me ‘for my tears’ — that is exactly what he said, in Classical Arabic, ‘for your tears,’ then he took me in his arms. I don’t know how long I stood there crying before he said, ‘Come on, let’s go to the room next door.’ Then he said, ‘Get undressed.’ I took off my skirt and stood there. But he said no, and motioned with his hands that he meant everything. So I took everything off, and he stared at my breasts, and I felt, I don’t know why, his gaze penetrating my breasts like pins, and I heard him say: ‘Very nice.’ But I didn’t respond. I was shaking with fear, and I told him, ‘Doctor, I’m cold,’ and he said, ‘Stretch out there,’ and I stretched out on that strange bed, sort of a half-bed. I was on my back, with my legs dangling, and the nurse approached me with a needle, while he looked down below, and he had a strange look on his face, I don’t know, I was afraid I was in trouble and I tried to speak, but my tongue was heavy in my mouth, like rubber, and after that I don’t remember anything. No, before I passed out, I told him, ‘I’m cold, please give me a cover,’ I was so cold and ashamed, and his eyes were like, they could see everything, and then when I opened my eyes, it was all over. I heard the nurse saying, ‘Thank God, get dressed and go see the doctor.’”
As Shirin told her story, her tongue had a life of its own as she talked, cried, and blew her nose, as Yalo gave her tissues and burned, everything within him was inflamed. The half-bed inflamed him, and the doctor’s motion for her to take off her clothes inflamed him, and the sight of the nurse as she gave her the shot of anesthesia inflamed him.
She said she had taken off all her clothes, and drew what seemed to be circles around her small breasts. He smelled the fragrance, the fragrance of nakedness, but he was like a paralyzed man. She talked and he listened, and his eyes felt as heavy as if he were on the verge of sleep. She spoke of the bleeding she suffered two days after her abortion, and how Dr. Said al-Halabi took her to his private clinic, where she spent three days until she was better, and how she had fallen in love with him by the third day.
“I let him sleep with me without feeling any real desire. No, he didn’t really sleep with me.” She said that on the third day, at about six o’clock in the evening, when she was alone in the room, overcome with sleepiness and craving a cigarette, she saw him coming in the twilight that obscured the room with gray, making everything uniform. He sat by her on the bed, and said, “It’s done. Thank God you made it through. Now you’re able to go home.” He pulled the blanket off her so she could get up, and took her hand.
“When he held my hand, I felt that I loved him.”
She said that she loved him for his hands. His long fingers, like those of a piano player, were interlaced with hers, when she fell in love with him.
“He put his right hand on mine and ran the other through his white hair, and I fell in love.” She said that she loved him, and was hoping he would pull her against his chest.
“I told him, ‘I don’t want to go — I’m so comfortable with you, Doctor.’”
Describing that evening, Shirin said that night crept up on them and she had no idea what happened after that.
“I don’t know what happened, I don’t remember. You know, I never remember these kinds of things, not just with Dr. Said, but, like, with anyone, with you I don’t remember either, and I don’t remember with Emile. Of course, I remember the room and the doctor beside me, and I did sleep with him, but I don’t remember the details. Why does this happen? Do you know?”
“How do I know?” said Yalo.
“That’s strange. I don’t remember a thing,” she said.
“You mean now you don’t remember how you slept with me?” asked Yalo.
“. .”
“You don’t remember the second time, when you said that you could smell pine, as if there were pine trees in the room?”
“I said that?”
“Of course!”
“No way.”
“You were talking about the pine smell, and I felt as if my spinal column were coming apart.”
“I never said a thing,” said Shirin. “It is just not possible. When I was with you I was dying of fright, anyway, please God, let us forget.”
Why did she forget everything?