She left his room and went back to her sewing machine, immersing herself in her work. That evening, she did not linger, as had been her habit; instead, she was one of the first to leave the shop. When she was at the door, she heard his voice calling to her to stay a little longer because one of the dresses needed altering. She said, “Sorry, but I’m in a hurry. Tomorrow.”
She did not return to work. She told her father that she had lost the desire to work, and the cohno said that it was for the better. It never occurred to him that his daughter, who had closed her eyes as she agreed to marry George Jal’u, was throwing herself into an abyss of despair after having given up on her true love.
She said that she had not come here for the sake of the past; now she was a married woman and had come for work; she asked him whether she might get her old job back.
“Everything will be like before,” he said. “You can start tomorrow morning.” Then he came near her and reached his hand out as he had done before, but she didn’t offer him hers or come near him.
“Thanks, boss,” she said, and left.
But this thanks, boss evaporated quickly, and Gaby slipped back into their old story. And there he was again insisting: “What is the most important thing in life?”
Gaby couldn’t understand how this man never bored himself with his own talk. She was with him now because she needed a job and because she dreaded the heaviness of the night. She wanted him just one night, for which they would go to a hotel or anyplace he wanted. He promised her that they would go to the Grand Hotel in Sofar, and he set a rendezvous with her there, but at the last minute — after she had invented a plausible lie for her father — he said that he couldn’t make it and had to postpone. Whenever she got upset, he would shrink with sorrow and anger, and in the end she would console him, as if she had committed some sin that needed his forgiveness.
“You still haven’t told me what the most important thing in life is.”
She knew that he was waiting for the same answer about the navel and the art of tailoring. But the last time, he surprised her with the dog. He said that dogs were the most important thing. And he went back to the Gospel of Barnabas to recite how God had created the dog.
“Listen,” he said.
She stood half naked, yawning, certain that she would hear the story of Adam, the spittle, and all the rest.
He opened the book and recited:
“‘One day Satan approached the gates of Paradise, and when he saw the horses eating grass, he told them that if this mass of earth received a soul, they would suffer from it; therefore it was in their interest to trample on that mass of earth so that it would be ruined. So the horses, stirred up, violently commenced to assail that bit of earth among the lilies and roses.
“‘And so God thenceforth gave a soul to that unclean part of the earth upon which fell the spittle of Satan, which Gabriel took from the mass. And dogs were created, barking, and the horses were frightened and fled. Then God gave a soul to humankind and all the angels sang: Our Lord, may His holy name be blessed.’
“Did you understand?” he asked.
“God bless you, please, that’s enough. I want to go home, I’m tired.”
“You understood that God created dogs to defend humankind? That is true, but it’s not the most important thing — ask me what the most important thing is.”
“Whatever. What is the most important thing?”
“The most important thing, my love, is that man and dog come from the same clay, and when sin takes hold of man, he becomes a dog.”
“So we’re dogs?” she said.
“Not at all. Love is not a sin,” he said.
When he spoke to her of dogs, she realized that everything had become bland and monotonous, and that she no longer loved him. Gaby told Catherine that she no longer loved him: “But I stayed with him, and that’s the worst thing. When you don’t love someone but you stay with him, even if he’s not your husband. I mean, I understand, a married woman or a married man, she’s the one who’s judged, and the judgments always favor the man. But me, what do I care? I don’t know what came over me.”
“So how did you leave him?” asked Catherine.
“I didn’t leave him. I stayed with him to the end, even after my father went after him. I don’t know, things eventually just died a natural death.”
Gaby told of what happened between her father and Elias al-Shami, and how she felt, as she listened through a partly closed door to the conversation between the two men, that her father had devoured the man.
“Devoured, yes. That was the first time in my life I saw how a human being can become a predator. It was as if my father was chewing him up, and the other shrunk more and more. He devoured him with words. I don’t know how to describe it to you. Finally, it stopped. I was happy. I pretended to be upset, because I should have been upset, but deep down, my anger was sweeter than joy.”
Gaby said that she had been happy to see her father devouring Elias with words. He did it as if he were spreading out a tablecloth before gobbling up a feast. The cohno ground up the words as if he were grinding up the man himself, and the man shrank and nearly disappeared.
He asked her the question but she did not know what to say.
She thought of saying that it was velvet. The tailor used to love velvet so much, he used to ask her to put on blue velvet slacks so that he could unbutton the buttons, and let his hand wander between the velvet of her slacks and the silk of her white breasts.
“Look in the mirror,” he said when they had finished making love. “Look how beautiful you are, look how beautiful love makes you.”
She said he was a dog. “Dogs are the most important thing. It’s dogs who come out of mankind’s navel.”
No, he said, and the little hollow that sliced through his right cheek expanded. Gaby used to love this scar that was the mark of her teacher’s manliness, when he was struck with a razor on his cheek by a swindler playing a shell game in Bourj Square. Elias told his story of the shell-game player many times, and each time the story ended with the blood that streamed down his face, and how he successfully arrested the swindler and drove him to the police station. Then he’d touch his cheek and say, “Ouch.”
But now she no longer responded with “May God be with you,” because she no longer cared. Love was waning and expectations were gone, and all that remained was a deathly feeling of solitude with a man she couldn’t leave because she didn’t know how.
Gaby told no one that she felt an indescribable yearning for the man and that the yearning began in her arms; a shudder would invade her arms, which would become nearly suffocating waves pressing against her rib cage. She didn’t understand this sensation, since she hated him and hated his odor. “At first smelling his odor disgusted me,” Gaby said. She did not realize that through all those years it was her own odor she was smelling. When she was near the man, she gave off a feminine smell that overwhelmed everything else. When Gaby’s desire died, she began to smell his odor, the odor of cracked skin mingled with decay.
Yalo, no.
Yalo smelled his own odor only here, when it mingled with his excrement. Yalo realized suddenly that he might be unable to prove his innocence, and he grew terrified of the words he was writing.
Yalo said that he had to get out of prison in order to accomplish one goal. He would go to Shirin so that he could smell the fragrance of the incense that her arms gave off. That fragrance was love, and Yalo wanted to remember love to restore the scent of life. He tried to write everything, but he wrote only very little. He read the pages and felt the lashes of the whip and the electricity that tore out his fingernails and toenails. The interrogator would grab the pages and throw them in his face because he had not written his whole life story. Yalo did not know how any person could remember his whole life story, and even if one could remember it, the time needed to write it down would be no less than the time it took to live it. Yalo smiled at that thought. He would say “Yes, sir” before explaining his theory about how no one in the world was capable of writing the whole story of his life. Even Jurji Zaidan, whose books Gaby brought home but never read, even Jurji Zaidan, all of whose books about the history of the Arabs Yalo had read, wrote a million pages about others, and then when he wrote his memoirs, he had nothing to say.