When Gaby told the story of the navel, and cited the Epistle of Barnabas, her father told her, “Spit on Satan, daughter.” The cohno spat, and his daughter spat, and his grandson spat. But Gaby was convinced that the Epistle of Barnabas might all be false, except for the story of the navel.
Elias al-Shami said that God was the first tailor because when he ordered the angel to remove spittle from Adam’s body of clay, he also ordered him to sew a puncture in the belly of the first man. So the puncture became a navel, and the navel became the mark of man.
“Do you know, Gaby, what the navel is?” Elias said.
She was standing naked the way he liked her to be. He asked her to undress and walk naked around the workshop, then he knelt on the floor and started to kiss her navel before devouring her body with his hands.
“Do you know what navel means?” he asked her.
“Of course I know. It’s the intestine retied to the placenta.”
“No, no, Gaby, listen, my love, I’ll tell you, but this has to remain a secret between us, because the navel is the secret of man.”
Elias al-Shami rose and went into another room and then came back carrying a green book. He sat on the chair, put on his glasses, and began to turn the pages, then when he found the passage he was looking for, he said, “Listen,” and began to read:
“‘Then God said, one day when all the angels were assembled: “Let each one that takes me for his Lord straightaway bow down to this earth.” They that loved God bowed down, but Satan, with those that were of his ilk, said: “O Lord, we are spirit, it is not just that we should bow down to this clay.” Whereupon God said, “Depart from me, O ye accursed ones, for I have no mercy for you.” And Satan spat upon that mass of earth as he departed; the angel Gabriel raised up that spittle with some of the earth. So that therefore now man has a navel in his belly.’”
“Did you understand the story?” asked Elias.
She said that she understood, but he wasn’t convinced. The tailor always treated her as if she didn’t comprehend. He would tell her something, and ask her whether she understood, and when she answered yes, he would begin to repeat it. He would repeat himself several times to the point where the young woman was ready to explode, and she would gaze at him with narrowing eyes. Only then would he realize that he had gone too far, and he’d gather his sentences, shorten them, and drop his commentaries.
In this repetitive manner, Gaby learned the art of tailoring and the art of love, and all the Damascene arts that the master ascribed to his family, who left Damascus for Beirut after the massacres of 1860.
Master Elias always surprised his young love with one question: “What is the most important thing in life?”
When she gave the answer she had learned from the last time he’d asked the same question, she discovered that this time he had another answer in mind. In the beginning the most important thing in life was the art of tailoring, then it became the navel, then dogs, but in the end she wasn’t sure.
Master Elias al-Shami was infatuated with his young lover’s navel. He read to her about the navel of our lord Adam, peace be upon him, from a forged book written by an Italian monk who embraced Islam in the sixteenth century, wanting thereby to solve the complex problem that humankind invented when they had wanted to divide up God among themselves. He’d lean down then to caress and kiss her navel.
“God is indivisible,” said Elias. “That is the most important thing.”
He bent over the young woman’s navel. A small navel resembling a rose tucked into a smooth belly. He knelt and said that the navel was the first icon God made, an icon fashioned from the elimination of the stain of Satan’s spittle.
She said that she understood. She suddenly felt the need to sit down; she had been standing before him naked, listening to him explain that love was the first lesson a man received when suckling at his mother’s breast. He moved closer to her breasts, but, all of a sudden, a glacial fear came over Gaby and she said that what they were doing was a sin, the sin that her father the cohno had repeatedly discussed when talking about women: “God blessed me with only two daughters, one gone off to a faraway country and the other divorced yet not divorced, a widow yet not a widow. May God save us from sin.”
Gaby said that she went back to him after her husband had disappeared and she had given birth to her son, not for the sake of the navel or for sex, but because she felt alone and the night weighed down on her body. She went back and wanted him at night. She told him: Just one night. I want to sleep the whole night beside you in bed so that I won’t feel that the night will swallow me like an abyss.” Gaby was unable to describe to the man the signs of her fear of the night, not because she did not know how to speak, but because speech came only when the other was ready to listen. Speech. Without this readiness, it fell into the gulf that separated one human from another. That is what Yalo learned from Madame Randa. In the beginning, when his magic randified her, she never stopped talking, and he drank in her words and her love. He did not talk much because he didn’t know how to talk as she did, though her speech began to seem as if it were his. When their talking ended, their love ended. Yalo understood that a man spoke only when the other became a part of his speech. That was why Shirin left him sad. He tested her silence with his speech. He told her about his adventures, his wars, stories he had experienced and some he had not, in order to throw her a line to draw her in toward him; she approached the line, grasped the end of it, then let go.
Elias al-Shami was different. When Gaby went back to him, he felt that he was awakening. He said that he didn’t want to lie to her, that he did not want to be like all the other men who lied. He said that when she got married, she fell off the edge of his life. He said that he’d forgotten her and was relieved. “Why are you coming back? I was calm. It was over.”
What could she say? At six o’clock in the evening, she felt a gale stirring inside her, and this gale commanded her to go to the tailor shop. She knew that the master would be by himself now. He opened the door and rubbed his eyes as if he didn’t believe them.
“Come in, come in,” he said hesitantly.
She entered and stood in the portico where she had always stood at six o’clock nude beneath his gaze, and he would take her in his arms. She stood there, hesitant, stammering.
“You’re still beautiful, Gaby,” he said. He lit a cigarette and sat in the rocking chair without inviting her to have a seat. So she remained standing, arms folded. He told her how he’d forgotten her to return to his normal life and reconnect with his clients. He went back to his innocent sexual banter with the women workers in the shop, which never left him troubled, and he never had to undress. He burst out laughing: “Do you know, Gaby, you’re the one who taught me how to strip? Maybe I taught you everything, but you taught me how to take off my clothes. I don’t like taking off my clothes, I feel self-conscious. Even with my wife, I never —”
“I don’t want to hear about your wife,” she said.
Gaby didn’t know where this old talk came from. When they had been in love, she had never allowed him to speak of his wife or his three children. And now, even though she had come here for work, and she didn’t want to rekindle their relationship or be maddened by jealousy again, she reverted involuntarily to her old way of speaking.
When Gaby agreed to marry, it was as if she were throwing herself into an abyss. She saw the man coming to the house and heard her father giving his consent. She closed her eyes, said yes, and fell from a great height. She said yes and went to the shop the next morning. She went to Master Elias’s room, where he was drawing with green chalk on a piece of fabric, and she said, with no preliminaries, that she was engaged and was going to get married. The man raised his head from the piece of fabric and looked at her from beneath his glasses. “Congratulations,” he said. “I can’t say anything but congratulations, my darling. It’s your right, I have no right over you. I pray that you’ll be happy.”