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ALAWIYA SOBH “He had an attractive, confident, sonorous voice, and a calm, balanced temperament, despite his wild and wonderful creativity.Then there was his flirtatious grin, and those shoulders that made me want to come at him full speed and leap on top of them.The details of his face, his entire aura – everything about him, actually – was familiar to me somehow. It was as if he wasn’t just close to my heart, my imagination, or my memory, but lived inside them. How had this happened, and why? I didn’t know. In spite of the ease I felt with him, I felt flustered and confused.Yet, it was an ease I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I realized, of course, that it was the spirit of my first love, Ahmad, who had led me to Youssef. But why to Youssef in particular? He said to me once:‘Who can say how spirits connect and why some are attracted to each other?’ Another time he said: ‘Don’t be fooled. The body is a person in its own right. It has a voice. It speaks. It goes silent. It loves. It hates. It cries. It laughs. It longs. It understands and feels confused. It accepts and rejects.’ “I kept thinking about whether Youssef was the man of my dreams, or someone I’d loved in a previous life.Then again, I thought: maybe he’s the headstrong force of love that tries to bind the present and the future to the past, including even the distant past, and, just possibly, to the realm of the unseen? “When I told Anisa later about the questions that had my head spinning, she said: ‘Sudden passion generates all sorts of feelings. And they might all be genuine.’Then she added:‘Listen, girl: forget the questions, and just be happy.You’re lucky.There are people who grow up, marry, and become grandparents without even once knowing what passion feels like.’ “We were sitting by the seaside, and I was wearing a bronze-yellow blouse with a golden sheen to it, its top buttons undone. (I knew he adored this colour. One day when we were in his studio, he’d given it a number of different names, one of which was ‘the colour of ecstasy.’) I was sitting there jabbering away at him excitedly when suddenly I was seized by the gleam of desire in his eyes. They felt like a pair of wings that had swept me into an ardent embrace and taken me soaring. Without thinking, I reached out and took his hands in mine. Ablaze with the heat of passion, they gave me a sting that shook me to the core. So, hands have their own kind of embrace, one that engraves love’s tattoo in the beloved’s for as 84 BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021
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ALAWIYA SOBH long as time shall endure. “What else can I tell you? I don’t know if I mentioned it to you in one of the first chapters, but I always used to feel as though there was a thick layer of frost between my ribs. It would be there even in the height of the summer heat, and no matter how profusely I was sweating. After I came to love Youssef, I felt as though it had melted and been replaced by a tiny sun whose intense warmth seeped into my entire body. “Youssef! How could he have erased himself the way he did? How could he delete the old Youssef and become somebody else? Turn from a spring into a turbid swamp? Commit murder in the first degree against his own soul? What scared me the most was that his eyes took on a lustful gleam that was more absent than present. Had he become like the bloody world outside? It was a question I was afraid to ask myself. I didn’t want to be unfair to him. Lots of other questions crossed my mind too, but I refused to answer them.” *** “I’m going to tell you about something strange that happened to me. And please don’t think it’s some fiction born of my delirium. “It was one in the morning as I recall, and I was thinking about Youssef. I noticed that the television was blasting, but I was so distracted that I couldn’t see or hear a thing. Then my attention was arrested by a fundamentalist preacher on one of the religious channels. He had a long, hennaed beard that came down to his belly. I was afraid of him. He looked like a wolf that had come out of some cave to prey on viewers’ minds, devour their lives and their bodies. All I heard was his last sentence, which was a fatwa allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife. I was so revolted, I sank into a funk. “I felt the need to read some poetry, the way I do sometimes after hearing and seeing reports on the appalling wars that are doing my body in.Turning off the TV, I randomly picked up a poetry collection by Mayakovski that had been lying on my desk. I had the urge to read something that would carry me away to distant orbits, where I could enjoy the fruits of a lovely astonishment, the kind of warmhearted delight that would bring sleep to my eyes. I imagined the lyrical words carrying me to bed and laying my body down to calm BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021 85

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ALAWIYA SOBH

“He had an attractive, confident, sonorous voice, and a calm, balanced temperament, despite his wild and wonderful creativity.Then there was his flirtatious grin, and those shoulders that made me want to come at him full speed and leap on top of them.The details of his face, his entire aura – everything about him, actually – was familiar to me somehow. It was as if he wasn’t just close to my heart, my imagination, or my memory, but lived inside them. How had this happened, and why? I didn’t know. In spite of the ease I felt with him, I felt flustered and confused.Yet, it was an ease I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I realized, of course, that it was the spirit of my first love, Ahmad, who had led me to Youssef. But why to Youssef in particular? He said to me once:‘Who can say how spirits connect and why some are attracted to each other?’ Another time he said: ‘Don’t be fooled. The body is a person in its own right. It has a voice. It speaks. It goes silent. It loves. It hates. It cries. It laughs. It longs. It understands and feels confused. It accepts and rejects.’

“I kept thinking about whether Youssef was the man of my dreams, or someone I’d loved in a previous life.Then again, I thought: maybe he’s the headstrong force of love that tries to bind the present and the future to the past, including even the distant past, and, just possibly, to the realm of the unseen?

“When I told Anisa later about the questions that had my head spinning, she said: ‘Sudden passion generates all sorts of feelings. And they might all be genuine.’Then she added:‘Listen, girl: forget the questions, and just be happy.You’re lucky.There are people who grow up, marry, and become grandparents without even once knowing what passion feels like.’

“We were sitting by the seaside, and I was wearing a bronze-yellow blouse with a golden sheen to it, its top buttons undone. (I knew he adored this colour. One day when we were in his studio, he’d given it a number of different names, one of which was ‘the colour of ecstasy.’) I was sitting there jabbering away at him excitedly when suddenly I was seized by the gleam of desire in his eyes. They felt like a pair of wings that had swept me into an ardent embrace and taken me soaring. Without thinking, I reached out and took his hands in mine. Ablaze with the heat of passion, they gave me a sting that shook me to the core. So, hands have their own kind of embrace, one that engraves love’s tattoo in the beloved’s for as

84 BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021

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