Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

I’m only teasing my son.

Come now and sleep.

Tomorrow I’ll go to Hamra Street and buy you Fairouz, and that’ll be your sixth birthday present. Now I have to go and make you lunch, and I’ll put some orange-blossom water in it. There’s nothing like orange-blossom water. It has the most delicious flavor and the loveliest scent. I’ll put some orange-blossom water in your lunch, and your birthday meal will be delicious.

^*Ritual invoking the Presence. The da’ira al-hadrarepresents the circle of saints reunited in the Presence, in ecstasy.

^*Christian city in the south of Lebanon attacked in ’ 76 by the Saika, a pro-Syrian Palestinian militia, leaving approximately 400 civilians dead.

THE EXPERIMENT worked. Didn’t I tell you?

After I’d bathed you, daubed you with cologne, rubbed you with ointment and dressed you in your sky-blue pajamas, I sat you up at the table and let go of you, and you didn’t fall or slump over. You’ve regained your balance – and it’s impossible to balance if your brain is damaged. I left you alone, standing behind you without touching you. Then an idea came to me.

I stood in front of you, took hold of you just below the armpits, and the miracle occurred. It’s the first time I’ve dared to try such an experiment. There are three involuntary reflexes that newborn babies have.

The first is the gripping of the finger. We open the baby’s hand and put our finger on it, and the baby closes its palm. I’ve tried that, and it works.

The second is when we put our finger on the baby’s cheek close to its mouth, the baby will start to move its mouth toward the finger, grasp it with its lips and suck on it. I’ve tried that, and it works, too.

The third, I haven’t dared to try. I was afraid you’d fall, and your bones, which have become fragile and soft, might break.

I told Zainab about the two experiments, and she gave me a blank look and didn’t say a word. As for Dr. Amjad, you know better than I that he doesn’t give a damn. It’s a waste of time – medicine’s the least of his concerns now. The only thing that interests him about the hospital is how to steal the medicine we get as donations and sell them.

We all know he steals, but what can we do? He’s the director, so who can we complain to? Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, as they say. I’m not going to start bellyaching, this is the situation we’re in, and we have to accept it.

I can’t remember if I told Dr. Amjad about those two experiments, but I’m certain his reaction would only be scornful.

The important thing is that I’m happy, and I’m not going to allow anyone to spoil my good mood.

Today I decided to carry out the third experiment, and it was conclusive. I stood in front of you and placed my hands under your armpits and I watched you. Before I began, I raised you up a little, the way you do with babies, then I put you back in the chair and placed my right index finger under your left armpit and my left index finger under your right, and I watched you. I swear, you got up and your feet moved as though they were walking. I saw you walking with my own two eyes. Then I got scared. I grabbed you and put you back in the chair, and I saw pain invade your closed eyes. I picked you up as a mother would her baby – God, how light you’ve become – I picked you up and put you back on your bed and was overwhelmed with joy.

The third reflex occurred, which means that, from a medical standpoint, you’re a child again. You won’t progress from sickness to death, as they’d hoped; instead you’ve become a baby and are starting your life over again.

And that means everything can change.

I have to calculate how old you are now, in your new life. I’ve decided to calculate from the moment you fell into your coma, which means that as of four days ago, you entered your seventh month.

You’ve been in the womb of death for seven months, and I have to wait for your birth, which will be in two months.

So here we are at the beginning, like you wanted, and all the torments of childhood await you.

Let’s get started.

I spend my time with you, I bathe you, I feed you, and I see you changing before my eyes and feel at peace. I feel my body relaxing, and I sense that I can talk to you about what I feel and be free. You’re my son, and fathers don’t show fear in front of their sons.

Why, come to think of it, was I ever afraid?

How did fear come to possess me and make me its prisoner? I was afraid of everything, always looking over my shoulder, although no one was behind me. I’ve lived these long months in nothingness. For six months I’ve been with you, paralyzed by fear. Your new infancy has just liberated me from it. Fathers aren’t allowed to show fear in front of their sons.

My fear is gone.

Do you think I could get you out of here? Why don’t we go back to the house? No, we won’t go back now; we’ll be patient. We’ll be patient for two more months, until the birth.

I’m talking to you and I don’t believe my eyes.

I was leaning over you when, out of nowhere, Abu Kamal appeared at my side. How did he get in?

“What are you doing here, Abu Kamal? What brought you here?” I asked him to sit down, but he remained standing next to you as though he couldn’t hear me.

“What were you saying?” he asked me.

I told him I was treating you.

“Treating him with words?”

“I’m treating him. What business is it of yours? Please, sit down.”

But Samir Rashid Sinounou, Abu Kamal, wouldn’t oblige. He went over to you, bent over the bed and then drew back. I heard what sounded like a sob and I thought he was weeping, so I put my hand on his shoulder, but then I saw that he was laughing.

“What’s this? Incredible! This is Yunes Abu Salem? How the mighty have fallen!”

And he went on laughing.

I tried to grab him by the shoulders and push him out of the room, and I saw his tears. He was laughing and weeping. His tears were streaming around his gaping lips, and his choppy laugh was a sort of cough.

The bald man of about sixty, known in the camp as Eggplant because of his black skin and oblong face, seemed to have lost his balance and dropped his head as though he were about to fall to the ground. I calmed him and made him drink some water.

“How the mighty have fallen,” he said. “Is this how a man ends up? This is Abu Salem – God, he’s become younger than a suckling child. What kind of illness turns men into babies?”

I took his hand and led him out into the corridor.

“What has brought you here, Abu Kamal?”

Eggplant hasn’t visited you before, and I don’t believe you were friends; he inhabits a different world and cares only about marriage. He married three times and had ten children, and now he’s alone since his third wife died and his two divorced wives refused to come back to him. His children have all emigrated and his life’s over, as Umm Hassan said. Umm Hassan felt sorry for him and would visit him and send him food; he was from her village. Abu Kamal is from the Sinounou family, which left al-Kweikat when its people were expelled in ’48.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

“Poverty,” he said.

When I took him out of your room into the corridor, he stood leaning against the wall, but when he uttered the word poverty, he collapsed onto the floor and started his complaint. He asked me to find him a job in the hospital. He said Umm Hassan was a relative of his, he knew the esteem in which I’d held her, and he’d come to ask for work.

“I can do any kind of work. Things are unbearable.”

“But Abu Kamal, you know the situation better than I do. Things aren’t too good here.”

“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I don’t want to die of hunger.”

“And your job? Why don’t you go back to your old job?”

“What job, Cousin? Is there anyone left in the camp who reads newspapers?”

“Go to Beirut and get a job.”

He said he couldn’t work in Beirut any longer. The week before, a policeman had stopped him when he was selling papers on the Mazra’a Corniche and asked for his papers. When he saw he was Palestinian, he threatened him and said it was forbidden for Palestinians to work in Lebanon without a permit.

“Now you need a work permit to sell papers, Cousin! So he confiscated the papers and chased me away. He said if I hadn’t been an old man he’d have thrown me in jail.”

“What about the camp? Work in the camp,” I told him.

“You know that nobody here reads newspapers any longer. Anyway, no one has the money to buy them, and people have their television and video now. What am I to do?”

He started talking about his problem with videos, and about how he couldn’t see: Everyone else could see, but he couldn’t. “They sit around their televisions and run the tape, and they see things I don’t. That isn’t Palestine, Cousin. Those pictures don’t look like our villages, but I don’t know what’s got into everyone, they’re glued to their television sets. There’s no electricity, and they still play them, signing up for Hajj Ismail’s generator just for the video. They pay twenty dollars a month and go hungry so they can watch the tapes; they sit in their houses and stare at those films they say are Palestine. We’re a video nation and our country’s become a video country.”

Abu Kamal said that after the incident with the policeman he tried to work in the camp. “I opened a news stand, and my only customer was Dr. Amjad, but he didn’t pay. He’d take the papers, read them, and return them, while I sat all day long with nothing to do. Can’t you find me a job here?”

“Impossible, Abu Kamal. What could you do here?”

“My brother, my friend, I want to eat. I can’t go on like this. Are you willing to see your Uncle Eggplant become a beggar? We’ll have seen it all! To hell with this miserable life!”

I tried to help him up but he refused.

“Get up, Uncle. Come on, let’s sit in the room.”

But he wouldn’t get up.

“Get up. You can’t stay here like this.”

He said he didn’t want to go into your room because he was afraid.

I told him there was no money and things were tough.

He asked for a cigarette and smoked it greedily, as though he hadn’t had one for a long time. I offered him the pack, but he refused it. He accepted one more, smoked it, and went off.

No, before he left, he went into your room to say farewell, and I saw a kind of jealousy in his eyes, as though he envied your long sleep. Then he gave me a few words of support and left the hospital.

I felt so bad for Abu Kamal Sinounou, but what could I do for him? You don’t know him so you won’t understand why my heart is so heavy. He’d transformed himself from a newspaper seller in Acre into the owner of the largest shop in the camp. Then his shop was destroyed and his life with it; his third wife died, and he ended up alone and poor.

Why are all your stories like that?

How could you stand this life?

These days we can stand it because of video; Abu Kamal was right – we’ve become a video nation. Umm Hassan brought me a tape of al-Ghabsiyyeh, and some other woman brought a tape of another village – all people do is swap videotapes, and in these images we find the strength to continue. We sit in front of the small screen and see small spots, distorted pictures and close-ups, and from these we invent the country we desire. We invent our life through pictures.

But how did your generation bear what happened to you? How did you manage to block up the holes in your lives?

I know what your response will be; you’ll say it was temporary. You lived in the temporary; the temporary was your way of coming to an understanding with time.

You’re temporary, and we’re video. What do you think?

ABU KAMAL used to sell newspapers in Acre and made his life up as he went along. He was about fourteen when he started. He’d leave al-Kweikat on his bicycle each day and reach Acre some forty-five minutes later, pick up his bundle of al-Sha’b, ^*and sell them. In the afternoons, he carried a big sign around the streets shouting, “Make it an evening at Cinema al-Burj!” inviting people to buy tickets for The Thief of Baghdad, and receiving half a lira for his efforts. Adding this to the lira he’d earned from selling papers, he’d return to his village.

Abu Kamal was known as Eggplant in his own village, too. It must be said, my son, that we brought with us both our nicknames and our real names. Eggplant proved he was wilier than all the rest of Kamal Sinounou’s children, however. His three brothers worked with their father growing watermelons, but he found himself a job on his own. He went to Acre, saw a paper seller, and asked if he could work with him. The vendor took him to the Communist Party’s Acre office, where he met a short man with whom he came to an agreement to sell the paper.

Abu Kamal wasn’t a communist; he wanted to leave the village because he didn’t like working in the fields. But it seems that his job selling al-Sha’bhad its influence on how he spoke, since for the rest of his life he’d mumble certain phrases he’d picked up from the paper’s headlines about workers’ rights, Arab-Jewish brotherhood, and so on.

When things started to get complicated, he stopped going to Acre and joined the al-Kweikat militia as a bodyguard for Mohammed al-Nabulsi, the only man in the militia who owned a Bren gun. When the village fell and Mohammed al-Nabulsi died, Eggplant found himself part of the wave of people who moved out. They didn’t go to Amqa because of the famous dispute between the two villages that followed the rape of a girl from the Ghadban family by an Amqa boy.

All the people of al-Kweikat went to Abu Sinan, and they all took up residence under the olive trees, where they set up their tents of blanket and canvas. They stayed in the fields of Abu Sinan for about a month. I won’t go into what we know now about how people went back to their villages by night to steal provisions from their houses whose doors hung askew, and about how Qataf, an eighteen-year-old girl, died from an Israeli soldier’s bullet as she was leaving her house carrying the demijohn of oil, her blood mixing with the oil, and about how, and how. .

“There was nothing left for us to do but pillage our own houses,” said Umm Hassan. “Is it possible to steal from yourself? But what else could we do, my son?”

I didn’t ask Umm Hassan why they didn’t try to take their villages back the way you did in Sha’ab instead of creeping into their houses and stealing from themselves, because I knew her answer would be, “Go on! All that about Sha’ab, and it still fell. Enough nonsense!”

Anyway, Yunes, where were we?

Things have gotten strangely mixed up in my head. Even the names are mixed up. A name will fly away from its owner and settle on someone else. Even names have lost their meaning.

I wanted to say that Abu Kamal tried not to live in the temporary. After Qataf’s death and the madness that seized the people of al-Kweikat, everyone left Abu Sinan for Jath, and from Jath in Palestine they went to Rimeish in Lebanon, and from Rimeish to Rashaf, and from Rashaf to Haddatha.

Abu Kamal lived in Haddatha for about two years, working on the construction of the Haddatha-Tibnin road, but he left after a quarrel with his sister-in-law. He then traveled to Beirut, where he worked in construction. He stayed in Beirut for about a month and then went back to Haddatha because of exhaustion and the swelling that had developed in his hip from carrying containers of concrete behind the master plasterer. He returned to discover that the Palestinians had been rounded up and put in the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut. He went to Burj al-Barajneh, but he couldn’t find a camp; all he found was a bit of empty land and people sleeping out in the open. A foreign official came, with a Lebanese at his side, and they started distributing tents. They distributed two or three and then stopped for one reason or another.

Those were the days of waiting.

Abu Kamal went back to Haddatha because working with concrete had tired him out, and he found that the Palestinians had been deported to the suburbs of Beirut. The trucks came, they ordered the Palestinians living in Lebanese villages to gather in their squares, and they were transported to Beirut and the north.

That was how they left Lebanese Galilee after their expulsion from Palestinian Galilee.

Abu Kamal didn’t grasp the reality of what had happened. Like all of you, like my father, he was led by the feeling that everything was temporary. The temporary led him to work for the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, and then toward death.

You lived in the temporary and died in the temporary. You endured unbearable lives and hid yourselves in that never-to-be-forgotten oblivion.

What should I have asked Abu Kamal as he sat there, collapsed, his back against the wall?

Should I have asked him why he’d married three women? Or how his fortune turned after the death of his last wife, Intisar?

Would I have been able to explain to him why his first wife, Fathiyyeh, and his second, Ikram, refused to go back to him?

And how will Abu Kamal live now?

The children have emigrated. They send a little money to the two women, but he’s alone, and no one sends him anything. Should I have told him he was paying the price for his behavior? Why should he have to pay? Was the camp destroyed just because he married a third time? His third wife, Intisar, died during the long siege that destroyed our world: Our world wasn’t destroyed during the great massacre, when we were buried under corpses; our world was destroyed by what they call the War of the Camps, between 1985 and 1988, when we were besieged from every side. That was when everything was wrecked.

Later we read all that stuff they threw together in a hurry about how the intifadain Gaza and the West Bank was born to the beat of the War of the Camps. It may be true – I don’t mean to judge history – but tell me, why does history only ever come in the shape of a ravening beast? Why do we only ever see it reflected in mirrors of blood?

Don’t talk to me now about the mirrors of Jebel al-Sheikh. Wait a little, listen a little.

In front of me sits Abu Kamal, who I wish would die.

A man who has tried his hand at virtually everything, forging his path through life. He worked in concrete – he left concrete with a hip problem, then at the Jaber Biscuit Factory, before deciding to sell ice cream. Then he opened a café, then a shop, which he named the Abu Kamal Minimarket and where he sold smuggled tobacco and a bit of everything. This man who tried to master life by every means possible, now, however, only inspires pity in me. I’m incapable of imagining a solution for his predicament. How could I possibly find work for him when I am myself, as you know, virtually unemployed? And then this man comes and tells me his two wives have shunned him and are keeping the money his children send from him?

“If I could just get in touch with Subhi,” said Abu Kamal. “Subhi’s always been kind to his father, but I don’t know his address. I went to Fathiyyeh and told her. . I told her I didn’t want anything. You don’t know, Son, what it is to be treated like shit by a woman, a woman who was once. .”

“Shame on you, Abu Kamal. Don’t talk that way about the mother of your children.”

“But you don’t know anything.”

He said that Fathiyyeh was humiliated twice. The first time was when he married Ikram, and the second, when Intisar forced him to repudiate his two other wives as a condition of marrying him.

“It was my fault, Son – it was my fault, but I just couldn’t resist the Devil. He seduced me and made me accept the woman’s conditions, but she died and took everything with her. Now I have nothing. The shop was burnt down, the house is half-destroyed. Can an old man like me live alone? I said I’d go back, I’d go back to my life the way it was before and to the two women who couldn’t do enough to serve me. Do you know what Fathiyyeh did when I went to visit her? She stood at her door and began yelling and rousing the neighbors. As though I were a beggar. I didn’t go to ask for anything, I went because God had opened my eyes. I said, ‘I’ll get my wife back, and I’ll be decently taken care of. I’ll get my children back. God took Intisar and the shop to punish me.’ I went to make amends, and all I got was humiliation and abuse. Now I don’t have the price of a loaf of bread.”

I put my hand in my pocket, but all I found was ten thousand lira. I gave them to him saying it was all I had.

“No, Son, no. I don’t beg.”

He put out his second cigarette, stood up, and left.

I know Fathiyyeh. That woman – I swear every time I think of Nahilah I see Fathiyyeh’s image. A tall, dark woman who covers her head with a white scarf and stands as straight as the letter alif– no bending, no shaking, and no stumbling, as though life had passed beside her, not through her.

I don’t understand how Fathiyyeh accepted his second marriage. At first, he hid it from her. He bought a house in Burj al-Barajneh, where Ikram lived, and divided his time. He’d spend the night in his first wife’s house in the Shatila camp, and he’d spend a portion of the day with his second wife in Burj al-Barajneh. Word got out and Fathiyyeh discovered what was going on. When Abu Kamal returned to the house one day exhausted from work – as he claimed – she raised the subject. A look of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, and he thought of denying everything because he was afraid of how she’d react, but instead he found himself telling the truth.

“Yes, I got married,” he said. “And that’s my legal right.”

He waited for the storm.

But instead of getting angry and breaking dishes, as she usually did whenever she had a disagreement with her husband over the smallest of things, and instead of killing him, as he believed she might do, this woman, straight as an alif, collapsed and broke in two. She bent over, letting her face fall between her hands, and started shuddering with tears. Fathiyyeh broke apart all at once and never stood upright again until he divorced her.

That same day she made peace with Ikram, and the two women lived in one house with their ten children. As the family hemorrhaged children through the deaths of several boys and the emigration of others, and the marriage of their girls, the women found themselves alone, breathing in the scents of letters sent from far away and chewing over their memories together.

After her divorce, Fathiyyeh came back to life. The slump of her shoulders was erased and they became straight again; the long neck bore its white scarf, and the woman walked the roads of the destroyed camp as though she were flying over the rubble, as though the destruction were a sideshow whose sole purpose was to focus the viewer on the beauty of her commanding height and the splendor of her huge eyes.

Fathiyyeh neither yelled nor roused the neighbors, as Abu Kamal claimed.

She stood at the door, blocking it with her broad shoulders, so Ikram couldn’t interfere. She knew Ikram’s heart would crumble for the man who’d made her believe that his every footstep shook the earth. She kept Ikram behind her and raised her right hand, straightening her scarf with her left one.

“Out!” she said. “Out!”

He tried to speak, but she put her hand over her mouth to keep her hatred and her shouts in, saying only those two words – “Out! Out!” The man left without daring to speak. He didn’t even ask for the address of his son, Subhi, who worked in Denmark. He saw the barrier rise in front of him, and he leaned forward, before turning his back on the door Fathiyyeh had blocked with her body.

And now he comes up with the story that she yelled and humiliated him in front of the camp.

Why do people lie like that?

I’m convinced he believed it himself. I’m convinced that when he told me the story of how he tried to get his divorced wives back, he heard the yells that never emerged from Fathiyyeh’s mouth.

Tell me – you know better than I do – do we all lie like that? Did you lie to me, too?

I told you your story with Nahilah as a beautiful story, and I didn’t question your version of that last meeting beneath the Roman olive tree. You’ll say it wasn’t the last and will tell stories of your visits that continued up until 1974, but that meeting was the last as far as I’m concerned and as far as the story’s concerned. For after Nahilah had said what she said, there was no more talk, and when there’s no more talk, there’s nothing.

When there’s nothing new and fresh to say, when the words go rotten in your mouth and come out lifeless, old, and dead, everything dies.

Isn’t that what you told me after the fall of Beirut in 1982? You said the old talk had died, and now we needed a new revolution. The old language was dead, and we were in danger of dying with it. If we weren’t fighting, it wasn’t because we didn’t have weapons but because we didn’t have words.

On that day the words died, Yunes, and we entered a deep sleep from which we didn’t awaken until the intifadaof the people at the interior of the country. Then the papers published the photo of the child with his slingshot and you said to me, “It seems it’s begun again.” It did indeed begin, but where was it going?

You’ve never liked this kind of question, even when the self-rule agreement was signed at the White House and we saw Rabin shaking hands with Arafat and we thought everything was over.

You were sad, but not me. I was like someone watching someone else die. And now I can tell you that deep inside I was happy. Death isn’t just a mercy, it’s happiness, too. This language has to die, and the world manufactured from dead words has to become extinct. I was happy as I watched the end, all while wearing a false expression of sorrow on my face.

Do you remember?

I was at home, we were sitting in front of the television, and you were pulling every last bit of smoke from your cigarette down into your lungs and listening to the American talk. Then you turned to me and said, “No. This isn’t the end. There was one end and we got past it. After what happened in ’48, there won’t be an end.

“During that time, it was the end, my son, but we survived. What’s happening now is just a step, anything can change and be turned around.”

Your words broke up in front of me and scattered in all directions. Then you went out. You left me alone in front of the television tuned to the American talk. I waited for you until the program came to an end, then I turned it off and went to sleep, feeling that psychic confusion that compelled me to mask my joy with a simulated sorrow.

And now, tell me: How long are we supposed to wait?

Here am I, waiting for your end – forgive me, your beginning – in spite of everything, in spite of the smell of powder that emanates from your room, and in spite of your face, which flows over the pillow like the face of a baby still unformed. I’m here, waiting for the end. No, I’m not in a hurry, and I don’t have the slightest idea what I’ll do after they close the hospital.

They say they’re going to demolish the camp anyway, because the camp isn’t the camp any longer – its borders have shrunk, and its inside space, at this point, is up for grabs. I don’t know who lives here now – Syrians, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Indians. . I don’t know how they get here or where they find houses. Soon the bulldozers will come. They say the plan is to demolish the camp and turn the land into part of the expressway linking the airport to central Beirut.

Anything’s possible here. Maybe we should start our exile over from scratch. I don’t know.

I told you I’m waiting for nothing except the end, and then I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not important. I asked you about speaking the truth so I could understand why Mr. Sinounou lied about things that didn’t happen and then believed his own lies.

NO. NOT SHAMS.

I haven’t told you anything about her, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know anything. A man only knows the woman he’s loved when the talking ends; then he discovers her all over again and rearranges her in his memory. If she dies before that happens, she remains suspended in the fog of memory.

Shams remained suspended because she disappeared in the middle of the talking and left me on my own to discover the infinite senses of things. Shams disappeared into the jungle of her words and left me alone. I don’t think all that was an illusion, that I was just a parenthesis in her life, but I don’t understand how anyone could be such a chameleon.

My problem with that woman was that I never knew. After having made love, she’d turn into another woman, and it was always up to me to search for the woman who’d been in my bed.

Patience. I’ll explain everything. Shams would disappear. She’d be with me, her love too, and then she’d disappear, would take off I don’t know where. I’d wait for her and she wouldn’t come. Then, when I’d just about given up hope since I had no way of contacting her, I’d find her in my house, a different woman, and I’d have to start all over again.

I’d get lost searching for her. I’d walk the roads, my heart thudding whenever I saw a woman who looked like her. And suddenly she’d knock on my door and come in, her long hair cut short like a boy’s, her eyes full of wonder as though she were discovering a place she’d never been in before, reserved, wrapped in modesty as if I were a stranger. She’d start talking about politics, saying that she this and she that. . I’ll spare you her lectures on the necessity of reorganizing ourselves in Lebanon, etc.

When I approached her she’d pull back, shy again. I’d try to take her hand and she’d draw back as though she weren’t the same Shams who only a few days earlier had been whinnying in my bed. I’d take her slowly and watch her approaching slowly; then, when I had her in my arms, I’d feel the need to be sure she’d truly returned to me, so I’d whisper in her ear and ask her to say her aythat would sharpen my desire, and she’d draw back again.

“I don’t want to say it. .”

She’d move away, sit on the sofa and light a cigarette. I’d wait a little before I’d go back to her. I’d take her hand and start the journey once again, and then I’d hear that ayseeping from her lips and eyes. When I took her in my arms, as a man does a woman, she’d twist a bit to one side, hide her face in my neck, let out an ayand pull me toward her.