She had forgotten how she had told him, in the Albert Restaurant, about Dr. Said and her new old fiancé, Emile. She sat like a stranger, and from her small eyes gleamed something like the savagery of youth on that day that Yalo had decided to forget, and had indeed forgotten. They dragged the three men to the cemetery, and crucified them on the ground under the cypress trees in the cemetery of St. Demetrius. They crucified them before shooting them, then they began to curse them and spit on them. Terror haunted their eyes. That day, Yalo vomited, then started to cry, then went home, then. . No, he did not want to remember now. He closed his eyes.
She said that she had kissed the doctor, she lifted her head a little for her lips to meet his, and she fell in love with him.
“I let him sleep with me but with no desire, but he didn’t. .” she said.
The doctor told her that the complete sexual act was forbidden, for now.
“So he slept with my breasts,” she said, crying and blowing her nose.
“Like how?” quavered Yalo.
“Like this,” she said, tracing with her fingers a line between her breasts.
“And I didn’t feel anything,” she said, “except, of course, I felt hot.”
She said that she started a long-term relationship with the doctor, that he had strange ways, and that he “always slept with her that way.”
“What do you mean ‘that way’?” Yalo asked.
“I mean, here,” she said, and traced an invisible line between her breasts.
“Always like that?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “He said he liked my tits.”
“Don’t say that word,” said Yalo. “It’s not nice for women to use words like that.”
“Fine, so what am I supposed to say? I’m talking facts.”
“Say sahro.”
“What does sahro mean?”
“It means ‘moon.’ You’ve forgotten? I taught you that word when you were at my house, that night.”
“I told you, I don’t remember anything.”
“At the time, you asked me what it meant and I explained it.”
“Fine, explain it to me now.”
“Now, no,” Yalo said. “Just don’t use that word.”
She said that the doctor never slept with her, even once. He was content with just playing around, and with “those.” “He said he was afraid of really sleeping with me because we were in the clinic, and I told him, Fine, let’s go to a hotel. He said everybody knows him, and he’s a married man, so we spent the evening in either the clinic or the car, there in Ballouna, where you raped me.”
“I raped you? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, when you took me to your place and slept with me. We were in the car, and he told me to put my head down.”
“Maybe he saw me.”
“No, he didn’t see you, he wanted me to —”
“He wanted you to what?”
“He wanted me to put my head down, and that’s when your excellency showed up, and we practically died of fright. I don’t know how I held my head up again and how he managed to tidy himself.”
“I’m an idiot!” shouted Yalo. “An idiot! A jackass!”
“Lower your voice,” said Shirin. “Please. The restaurant is full of people. Do me a favor, don’t raise your voice.”
Yalo repeated quietly that he was an idiot and a jackass.
Where was the scent of incense?
Why did Yalo not smell the scent of incense when he saw her sitting in the interrogation room?
At the Albert Restaurant he had smelled that scent. Her incense was stronger than the arak, the fried sparrows, than everything. But here, in the white interrogation room, he could smell nothing. His nose picked up a smell like rubber. When the interrogator forced him to write his life story, he would write about the smell of arrest. He would say that the smell of prison was like the smell of damp rubber. The smoking, burning smell of oil, diesel fuel, and tires.
When he saw her in front of the interrogator, he dropped down onto the chair and closed his eyes, searching for the smell of incense. He saw Emile sitting beside her, and saw her slender, naked thighs and short skirt, and her round breasts, and waited for the incense. But the incense did not emerge, and the other smell grew stronger, like the smell of burned rubber extinguished with water. A sun penetrating everything and making it impossible to see.
Then Shirin spoke.
She spoke and reached out and clasped Yalo’s hand, in the restaurant, before withdrawing it and saying, “Please.”
“Please let me leave. I don’t want anything from you, I’m sorry, forgive me but let me leave.”
“Where are you going to go?” Yalo asked.
“I want to go home and back to my life,” she replied.
“Go. I’m not keeping you.”
“Yes, you are keeping me, let go of me, and let me go. I’m grateful to you for everything, but you have to understand that this is over, it’s all over.”
Yalo wanted to slap her again but didn’t. The slap seemed logical when she opened her purse, pulled out a handful of dollars, and offered them to Yalo, asking him to leave her alone.
“Take everything,” she said. “If you want more, I’m ready to pay, but just stay away from me.”
Yalo stood up and slapped her. He heard the sound of footsteps approaching and guessed it was restaurant staff approaching. He put his hand in his pocket and felt his knife, prepared for a fight. But the footsteps grew fainter and faded away. He sat in his place and drained his glass in one swallow. Silence fell, broken only by Shirin’s coughing and sobbing.
He gave her a tissue and she put the money back in her purse, and then he fed her a bite of kibbeh nayeh. She ate it and they resumed talking.
He described to her the Egyptian movies he loved, because Madame had made him love them. She used to ask him to go down to Beirut once a week so he could bring her Arab movies from the video store in the Sodeco district. She spent her mornings watching the movies, and sometimes asked him to watch them with her. He did not tell Shirin about the other movies, except that he did not know where Madame got them, but she only watched them at night. Daytime was for the Arab movies and night was for those movies that she only watched with a bottle of Black Label scotch. Yalo did not want to talk about those movies now, because ever since Shirin he had begun to see life through new eyes.
Why did Shirin not believe him?
Why did she insist on thinking that he was robbing her and that his love for her and the songs of Abd al-Halim Hafiz were meaningless?
In the restaurant, when she described her relationship with Emile, he felt a need to slap her again. She said that she had started to believe that Dr. Said did not love her.
“I mean, how can I explain it. I don’t know. Only I just felt that he didn’t really love me.”
She said that her relationship with the doctor ended after that hellish night. “It was like all the gates of Hell opened up. I went to see him at the clinic as usual, around six o’clock in the evening, because he would go home in an hour. We sat and talked, and he moved closer to me and reached out to unbutton my blouse, and asked me about Emile. At that time I’d go home and then go out with Emile. I was so fed up with life, living with secrecy and lies and missed appointments, and anyway, the only way he slept with me was the way I told you about. I got back together with Emile. I won’t tell you how it went when we talked. He said that he felt guilty, and so on and so on, and that he was going to bring his mother and we’d get officially engaged. I didn’t tell Dr. Said about Emile, so I don’t know how he knew. I guess I told him Emile called, but I didn’t tell him I went to the movies with him and that we slept together.”
“You slept with him?” asked Yalo.
“What’s wrong with that, when he’s going to be my fiancé?”