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ALAWIYA SOBH dress for fifty years! What’s wrong with your dress? It’s pretty enough. It’ll do just fine!”’ “Shaking her head with a sigh, she said: ‘No miser will ever know what love is, Basma.’ “When I told her about the love and affection Youssef showered on me, she looked away dejectedly and said: ‘Imagine. I take a bath and spray myself with perfume before getting in bed with my husband, but he couldn’t care less. Believe it or not, I often catch him sniffing dollar bills, especially new ones. He’ll take a big whiff and say: “The scent of a freshly minted dollar is sweeter than all the women and flowers in the world! After all, what good can they do me?”’ He would say things like: ‘If you got used to sniffing money, you’d fall in love with it too. Isn’t there a perfume made from dollar bills? If you put some of that on, I’d love the way you smell! I swear to God, if there were a cologne out of greenbacks, it would take over all the markets. People would kill to get their hands on the stuff. They might end up having to close down all the perfume factories. After all, the perfumes they make now are just a waste of time.’ “Riyadh’s emotional and physical stinginess tormented Anisa, turning her body cold and callous. His hands never caressed her. She never knew the feel of a loving kiss. His lips never once approached hers, or if it happened once by chance, they barely grazed them.Then in a flash, he’d take her from below. Never once had she felt herself transported by his glances the way a woman is by the gaze of her beloved. Never once had he kissed any part of her body. Instead, he would bite her all over with the appetite of a ravenous man, as if her body were some meaty delicacy. When she chided him once for his emotional and physical coldness, he cried: ‘Aren’t my sperm enough for you!? They’d fetch quite a price on the market these days!’ Little did he know that as far as she was concerned, his precious sperm were little more than filth with which he polluted her on a regular basis. “Before she fell in love with Musa, a well-known film critic, the light had gone out of Anisa’s eyes. Even their whites looked jaundiced. But then she started to come back to life. Love awakened laughter she’d forgotten she was capable of. Musa was her window onto life, especially after the loss of her eldest son due to a medical error at the hospital. The pain of the shock had shaken her to the 96 BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021
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ALAWIYA SOBH core, casting her into a state of paralysis. But by the power of her will she managed to heal, and she learned to love her body again after having developed an aversion to it with her husband. She was so in love, I started calling her ‘Musa’s mad woman.’ She would have given that man her very soul, yet she refrained from giving him her body: throughout the years of their love affair, Anisa refused to sleep with Musa. Even so, she went on loving him despite her realization that the sensual prolongs love’s lifespan. She told me she trembled at the thought that if she broke God’s command by committing adultery, she might pay a price for her sin by one of her children falling ill, for example, or even dying. At the same time, she refused to call her feelings for Musa platonic. On the contrary, it was a love so passionate that it was neither dulled nor diminished by their abstention from physical pleasure. In fact, Musa grew more attached to her with every passing day.And for her part, their love was an earthquake that had turned her life upside down. Her ardour for him gave her the sense of being riddled with beautiful wounds of body and soul alike, wounds she referred to in her novel as ‘love pangs.’ “Once, I asked her how all this love had gone on living in her heart for so many years without a physical relationship. And her reply was:‘Love is one thing, and sex is another. Love is there all the time, whereas physical intimacy takes up only moments of that time. I don’t deny, of course, that those few moments are when love is ignited and intensified. But believe me, my relationship with Musa fills my heart with love’s intensity. Love is the pulse of life. It’s expansive enough to accommodate sex and lots of other wonderful things along with it. But for lots of people, sex may not be expansive enough to accommodate anything but itself. It’s quite narrow, actually, and only appears otherwise to people who are obsessed with it alone to the exclusion of love.’ “Shooting me a reproachful smile, Anisa raised her finger in my face and added: ‘Besides, its real name isn’t sex, but lovemaking!’ “‘In that case,’ I objected, ‘why won’t you do it with Musa?’ “Her face tightened and she looked away before replying:‘Adultery is sinful, Basma. But you can train your body to obey you. My body has absorbed my fear of harm coming to my children were I to give in to its desires. In this sense, the body can be tamed and domesticated. But at the same time, it’s transcendent and beautiful. So, in spite of my physical urges toward Musa and my desire to complete BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021 97

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ALAWIYA SOBH

core, casting her into a state of paralysis. But by the power of her will she managed to heal, and she learned to love her body again after having developed an aversion to it with her husband. She was so in love, I started calling her ‘Musa’s mad woman.’ She would have given that man her very soul, yet she refrained from giving him her body: throughout the years of their love affair, Anisa refused to sleep with Musa. Even so, she went on loving him despite her realization that the sensual prolongs love’s lifespan. She told me she trembled at the thought that if she broke God’s command by committing adultery, she might pay a price for her sin by one of her children falling ill, for example, or even dying. At the same time, she refused to call her feelings for Musa platonic. On the contrary, it was a love so passionate that it was neither dulled nor diminished by their abstention from physical pleasure. In fact, Musa grew more attached to her with every passing day.And for her part, their love was an earthquake that had turned her life upside down. Her ardour for him gave her the sense of being riddled with beautiful wounds of body and soul alike, wounds she referred to in her novel as ‘love pangs.’

“Once, I asked her how all this love had gone on living in her heart for so many years without a physical relationship. And her reply was:‘Love is one thing, and sex is another. Love is there all the time, whereas physical intimacy takes up only moments of that time. I don’t deny, of course, that those few moments are when love is ignited and intensified. But believe me, my relationship with Musa fills my heart with love’s intensity. Love is the pulse of life. It’s expansive enough to accommodate sex and lots of other wonderful things along with it. But for lots of people, sex may not be expansive enough to accommodate anything but itself. It’s quite narrow, actually, and only appears otherwise to people who are obsessed with it alone to the exclusion of love.’

“Shooting me a reproachful smile, Anisa raised her finger in my face and added: ‘Besides, its real name isn’t sex, but lovemaking!’

“‘In that case,’ I objected, ‘why won’t you do it with Musa?’ “Her face tightened and she looked away before replying:‘Adultery is sinful, Basma. But you can train your body to obey you. My body has absorbed my fear of harm coming to my children were I to give in to its desires. In this sense, the body can be tamed and domesticated. But at the same time, it’s transcendent and beautiful. So, in spite of my physical urges toward Musa and my desire to complete

BANIPAL 70 – SPRING 2021 97

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