Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

The sheikh said he was afraid of the color of water.

“Water doesn’t have a color,” said his wife.

“You don’t know, and nobody knows, but the water has its own color, like gluey blood that slides over the body and sticks to it.”

At the time, Ain al-Zaitoun was preoccupied with the story of its blind sheikh who bathed with dust. It had no idea that after a little while the dust bath would move to the neighboring village, Deir al-Asad, and that the sheikh would die in his new village.

Ain al-Zaitoun was built on the shoulder of a hill. It didn’t look much like a real village. Its rectangular square was long and sloping, and didn’t look much like a real square. Its houses were built of mud and rose up above one another in piles above neighboring terraces. To the left lay the Honey Spring, Nab’ al-Asal, which the village drank from and which the villagers said was sweeter than honey.

Ain al-Zaitoun was suspended between the land and the sky, and Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, had been the imam of its mosque since he was nineteen years old.

Everyone looked like everyone else in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they all belonged to the Asadi clan, the Asadis being poor peasants who had come from the marshes of the Euphrates in southern Iraq during the seventeenth century. No one knows how or why they came. The blind sheikh said they weren’t Asadis and didn’t come from Iraq, but the Asadi name got attached to them because they worked as hired laborers on the lands of a feudal landlord of the Asadi clan who had come from there. It was said that the landlord’s descendants had sold the land to the Lebanese family of Sursuq toward the end of the nineteenth century. The question of land sales in Palestine has “no end and no beginning,” as they say. As to how the Asadi came to possess the lands of Ain al-Zaitoun, no one has any idea. Did he purchase these wide and extensive holdings, or was he a brave fighter in the army of Ahmad al-Jazzar – the governor of Acre who defeated Bonaparte – to whom the governor granted lands in Marj Ibn Amir, along with a group of villages including Ain al-Zaitoun, Deir al-Asad, and Sha’ab? Or did he flee Acre with a band of horsemen following the governor’s death, and were they the ones who occupied the land? The blind sheikh didn’t know, but he preferred the story with the band of horsemen, so he could say that the native inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun were originally cavalrymen with the Asadi sheikh in Acre and had come with him to the village to establish it, and that it came to be known by this name, which had nothing to do with them because they were originally from the districts surrounding Acre – “though we’re all sons of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.”

As for the Sursuq family, it’s even more complicated.

Did the Sursuqs buy the land, or was it given to them as a fiefdom because they were friends of the Turkish governor of Beirut?

The inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun never saw anyone from the Sursuq family. It was Kazem al-Beiruti, a man dressed in Western clothes and wearing a fez, who used to come after each harvest, count the sacks of wheat, and take half. The peasants parted with half their crop of wheat and maize without protest. The olives, however, were a different story; Kazem al-Beiruti didn’t dare demand the owner’s share of olives or oil. “The oil belongs to him who sows it,” the blind sheikh told Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud to his face when he came demanding his share.

When the disturbances in Palestine spread during 1936, the inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun refused to give Kazem al-Beiruti anything. Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud chased him away after humiliating him in public by knocking his fez off his head with his stick, trampling it underfoot and announcing the return of the land to its rightful owners. And Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud al-Asadi declared himself, as head of the clan, sole legal heir of the original al-Asadi, taking the fertile lands belonging to the village and giving the peasants of his family the liberty to cultivate the land without paying the owner’s share. However, he tried to take some of the olives and oil, and this was what caused problems between him and Sheikh Ibrahim.

Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud was one of the local leaders of the Revolution of ’36. It’s said that he met Izz al-Din al-Qassam, ^*and that he was injured in the revolution. He declared that anyone who sold land to the Jews was a traitor who must be killed.

Yunes doesn’t know why Ahmad was killed, because he’s convinced he didn’t sell land to the Jews, and that, in fact, he didn’t have any land to sell since he’d taken the land he controlled by force, and the deeds were in the Sursuq family’s possession.

When Ahmad was killed by the revolutionaries’ bullets, Yunes, who was then seventeen, didn’t understand why. Despite the rumors, he wasn’t the one who’d killed his cousin, and he was sure that Ahmad, who’d become the leader of the village, hadn’t sold land to the Jews. True, he was domineering, arrogant and rude; and true, he hated Yunes and would say that the youth had abandoned his father, mother, and wife to beggary while he worked as a bandit in the name of the revolution; and true, he beat his two wives terribly and treated everyone with contempt, but why had he been killed?

Yunes was convinced that Ahmad hadn’t been a traitor. Everyone hated him, even his children. The strange thing was that at his funeral his wives yelled as though they were being beaten. Surrounded by their children, the two women wept, moaned, pleaded with him to get up, swearing they would never leave the house again. Everyone was dumbfounded. No one mourned the loss of this shit (this is what his relatives called him privately), but everyone was amazed at his wives’ behavior and how unconvinced they seemed that the man had died. They appeared to be afraid he might rise up, see they weren’t weeping enough, and shower them with blows.

Ahmad died without anyone knowing who killed him, but the way he was killed seemed to indicate that he was a collaborator or had sold land. The killer came to his house at night, knocked on the door, shot him, and left. Then, when the killer got to Nab’ al-Asal, he fired two shots into the air. The two shots gave the impression that Ahmad had been executed rather than murdered for some personal or family reason. Suspicion hung over Yunes because of the quarrel between Ahmad and Sheikh Ibrahim, which had ended with the sheikh’s being expelled from his position at the mosque.

It was Ahmad who engineered the replacement for Sheikh Ibrahim, convincing everybody by saying that the sheikh was blind and unable to teach his pupils reading and writing, that he’d begun forgetting the names and verses of the Koran, and could no longer conduct prayers decently. Once shamefully dismissed from his responsibilities, Sheikh Ibrahim became a beggar, at a loss as to how to provide for his family.

Into the house of Sheikh Ibrahim came Nahilah, the twelve-year-old daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah. They had asked for her for Yunes because her family was the poorest in the village. Her father, who had died when she was six, had had only girls, and her mother had inherited nothing from her husband. She took up work in the fields, and Ahmad didn’t let her keep the land her husband had worked because women, in his view, “should never be entrusted with land.” So she ended up working on Ahmad’s land and as a servant in his house and was beaten along with his wives. When Yunes’ mother decided to arrange a marriage for her son, she consulted one of Ahmad’s wives, who advised her to go to Nahilah’s mother: “Go and take your pick – five poor, fatherless girls who need someone to give them a respectable home.” She went to choose, but Nahilah’s mother wouldn’t let her.

“If you want a bride for your son, take this one,” she said, pointing to Nahilah, and there was no further discussion.

“This one” was Nahilah.

Yunes will never forget the wedding, and the wedding night.

How could he forget when he could smell the blood for days and days and would hate himself until the day he died?

How could he forget the girl’s face as she shook with fear?

How could he forget his mother closing the door behind them and waiting?

How could he forget that he fell asleep with the girl next to him in the bed, and didn’t take off his clothes?

How could he forget the high-pitched youyousof joy outside and the mother waving a white handkerchief with a spot of blood on it to announce the girl’s virginity and purity?

How could he forget that room, with its bittersweet smell?

The mother took the girl without argument. She wanted a wife for her son. Marriage would steady the boy and force him to come back home.

The sheikh took the girl without argument, because he’d grieved over his son and wanted a grandson. He had wanted his son to be a sheikh, a scholar and a Sufi, but all the boy could cite from the Koran was the first chapter. He sent him to the elementary school in Sha’ab, but instead of studying he made off with the others into the mountains. He’d picked up a rifle and started moving from village to village, taking part in attacks on British army patrols.

Yunes could see that his father and mother were sunk in poverty, but he had no concept of what that meant. He must have wanted to escape from the company of that old man who cursed fate and sat all day in front of his house, and who’d go every Friday morning to the mosque of Salah al-Din in the village square, where, without fail, an incident would arise that would result in his being thrown out. During that time, Kamel al-Asadi led the worshippers. This Kamel was neither a sheikh nor a scholar. He hadn’t learned the Koran by heart, he hadn’t studied in a religious school, and he didn’t take part in the devotions of the Sufis who’d built themselves a modest mosque in Sha’ab dedicated to the Yashrati master of whom Sheikh Ibrahim was one of the first disciples.

They said, “Let’s get him married,” so they got him married.

And Yunes accepted. He heard the name Nahilah and accepted. He gave his mother ten Palestinian lira – God knows where he got them – for the wedding, the dowry, and the rest.

And the wedding took place.

The boy sat down among the men. The ceremony almost got ugly: Sheikh Ibrahim threw Sheikh Kamel out and performed the rites himself, after which there were youyousof joy. Nahilah entered the house. The youyousmounted, and the young man was receiving congratulations when the door opened and the girl entered, holding her fingers out in front of her with a lit candle on each one. She was covered from head to toe by a robe behind whose colors her face was lost.

Yunes didn’t see her.

He saw a girl on the verge of collapse, swaying as though dancing, approaching the chair on which her husband was seated, and then kneeling. The candles shone in Yunes’ face, the flames dazzled his eyes, and he didn’t see.

Yunes doesn’t remember how long she knelt, for time seemed eternal that day; his eyes burned with something like tears, his shadow swayed on the walls, and the youyouspounded in his ears.

He would never say he was afraid. He would say instead that when his shadow leapt up in front of him that night he didn’t recognize it, as though it were the shadow of some other young man, lengthening and breaking off and barging around against the ceiling and among the guests and against the walls. And he would say too that when he bent over to extinguish the candles, his mother stopped him and made him sit still again and asked him to smile. Then his mother knelt next to the girl, took hold of her right arm and pulled her up, and the two of them walked among the guests as the showers of rice started to fall on them. Sheikh Sa’id Ma’lawi stood up, struck his tambourine and shouted, “God lives!” and the cry was taken up by five bearded men who had come from Sha’ab at the behest of the great Yashrati, sheikh of the Yashrati Shadhili order, to bless Sheikh Ibrahim’s son’s marriage and recite the prayers that would help him follow the path of righteousness like his father before him.

The woman and the girl disappeared into the bedroom. After what seemed like a long while, they returned carrying olives and grapes. The girl tossed the olives one by one to the guests while the woman bent down and laid a large cluster of white grapes before the girl’s feet and asked her to walk on them. The girl took off her slippers, raised her right foot with care and stepped on the grapes; then she raised the other foot and walked on them.

Yunes, telling me of his love for white grapes as we drank a “tear” of arak once at his house, said that the women sitting in the reception room rose from their places and started laying clusters of white grapes before the bride, and that she walked on them, the tears of the grapes soaking the ground.

He said he saw the tears. “Wine is the tears of grapes. That’s why we say ‘a tear of arak’ – not because we want to drink it in small quantities, and not because we put the arak in the small flask we call a batha, which is tear-shaped, but because when the grapes are pressed, the juice oozes out like tears, drop by drop.”

Years later, when Yunes and Nahilah were in the cave at Bab al-Shams and night fell, Nahilah lit a candle she had hidden behind a rock she called the pantry. Yunes leapt up and brought out ten bunches of grapes he’d cut from the vines scattered around Deir al-Asad, and he spread these on the ground and asked her to walk on them.

“Take off your shoes and walk. Today I’ll marry you according to the law of the Prophet.”

She said that that day the man was mad with love. She bent over, removed her head scarf, placed the grapes on it, wrapped them up and pushed the bundle to one side. She told Yunes that at the wedding, she’d only stepped on one bunch, that she hated walking on grapes, that she’d slipped and narrowly escaped death because the grape juice had clung to her heels, and that when it came time to marry her daughters, she’d never ask them to walk on grapes – what a shameful idea!

Nahilah walked on the grapes, which exploded beneath her small, bare feet, then went into the bedroom and did not come out again.

“You know the rest,” Yunes said. “My mother right by the door and me inside. What are these awful customs? You have to fuck for their sake, strip off your clothes and get it over with in a hurry so they don’t get bored waiting outside.”

But I don’t know the rest, Father, and you’re lying when you say the rest was the way it usually is.

You didn’t tell me everything; I know, because Abu Ma’rouf filled me in.

Abu Ma’rouf was a pleasant man I met in 1969 in the Nahr al-Barid camp in northern Lebanon, after the commander of the base at Kafar Shouba had thrown me out for being an atheist. I had gone to Nahr al-Barid as political commissar for the camp militia, when clashes broke out between us and the Lebanese army. The November cold was intense and made our bones ache. They put me and Abu Ma’rouf on the forward road block, which was supposed to be a lookout position. We were opposite a hill occupied by the army, and it was our job to engage the enemy briefly if the camp were attacked before withdrawing, in other words, to delay their advance as much as possible so that the other groups could block the roads leading to the camp.

A naïve plan, you’ll say.

It wasn’t even a plan, I’ll answer, but I’m not interested at the moment in a critique of our military experiences, which I’ve never understood much about. I wanted to inform you that the rest was not “the way it usually is.”

Abu Ma’rouf was a grown man.

In those days, before we reached the age of twenty, we wondered at the way these men would come and fight with us. We thought they must be brave, if only because they were what we imagined men should be like. Abu Ma’rouf was in his forties. A thick black moustache covered his upper lip and curled into his mouth. He would take hold of the Degtyaref machine gun, wrap the ammunition belt around his neck and waist, and sit in silence. I gathered that he was from the village of Saffouri, that his wife and children lived in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, that he had fought in ’48, and that he didn’t believe Palestine would ever exist again.

I never asked him why, in that case, he was fighting. In those days I believed that the “people’s war” (that’s what we called it, inspired by the Chinese model) would liberate Palestine. These days, the issue’s become more complicated, even though I do believe that Palestine will return, in some form.

Abu Ma’rouf, that silent man from whose lips I would have to wrest words almost by force, told me a story similar to yours.

You’ll be surprised, since you never met Abu Ma’rouf al-Abid, and Ain al-Zaitoun isn’t near Saffouri. All the same, this man made me understand your generation’s stories about women, which can be summed up in the one about the cotton swab. Yes, the cotton swab. Don’t tell me I’m making this story up to upset you. I swear I’m not making up a word of it. But I finally understood.

It was four in the morning. We’d gone more than two days without sleep, dumped in the trench under the November drizzle, with the cold stealing into our bones.

He said he was going to warm himself up by talking about women, since nothing warmed a man’s bones like a woman’s body. He told the story of his first night with his wife from Saffouri. At the time, I didn’t ask him any questions, and that may be why he got going. He said that women would warm us up – what was I to say? Then I got scared. I thought maybe he was one of thoseand would eventually make his move. The man wanted me to keep quiet so he could talk, so I listened, but I didn’t believe him. Now I know that I should have believed him, because the story of Abu Ma’rouf and his first wife, who died in Saffouri, could well be your story, too.

Abu Ma’rouf said his first wife died during the Israeli bombing of Saffouri on July 15, 1948, and that it was Abu Mahmoud’s fault, the village’s commander in the sacred jihad: “After the fall of Shafa Amar and the displacement of more than three thousand of its inhabitants to our village, he should have realized that the battle was over, but he insisted on staying put. We gathered in the square in front of the mosque, and he said we could hang on for a week and then the Arab Liberation Army, which was based at Nazareth, would come. But we didn’t hang on. In fact, I can’t remember if we even fought. The planes came. Three of them circled above the village, dropped barrels filled with fire and gunpowder, and the houses started to collapse.”

He said he watched how the houses would blast open, the doors and windows would fly out, and then the flames would rise. He said his wife and three children died in their house: “I was at the roadblock at the entrance to the village, and when I heard the bombing, I ran toward the house. They said I got scared, but no, I wasn’t scared for myself, I was afraid for her and the children. I ran to the village carrying my English rifle, and when I got to the house, the flames were everywhere. I didn’t even have time to bury them. I was driven, with the rest of those who escaped, from Saffouri to al-Ramah, from al-Ramah to al-Bqei’a, from al-Bqei’a to Sahmatah to Deir al-Qasi, and finally, to Bint Jbeil in Lebanon.

“We spent three days in the fields around al-Ramah, where we had nothing and almost died of hunger. My mother asked me to go back to her house in the village to get a little flour and cracked wheat. I found the village empty and didn’t see any Jews. I met three old men and a woman with a crooked back. They said they’d given up, they didn’t know where to go. One of them was a relative of mine, Ahmad al-Abid. I was stunned that his son hadn’t taken him with him and asked if he wanted to come with me. He raised his head to say no, and then I realized he’d stayed behind because he was sick; he was spitting and coughing, and his eyes were running. I went to my mother’s house. The door was open and everything was in its place, untouched. I grabbed a bag of flour and left. On the way back, they fired at me, and I left the bag in the field. Later we found out that the three old men and the woman had been killed. We were in the fields near al-Ramah when we heard the news. It seems Ahmad’s son went back to look for his father and found the four bodies lying in the road.

“We never fought. Now we say we fought and that Palestine was lost because the Arab countries betrayed us. That’s not true. Palestine was lost because we didn’t fight. We were like idiots; we would take our rifles and wait for them in our villages, and when they came with their motorized units and their heavy machine guns and their airplanes, we were beaten without a fight.”

Later, he remarried in Lebanon and had seven children. He’d named the first three after his children who’d died there, but his first wife was still in his bones. “She was like fire,” he said. “She would ignite me whenever she came near me.”

She had been fourteen and he fifteen.

“Impossible! At that age!”

He started laughing, the tears pouring from his eyes from the cold. Then he told me about the cotton swab.

How to tell you the story, Father? Abu Ma’rouf said incredible things, but I believed them – perhaps because we were alone in that trench, perhaps because of the dawn, the changing colors of first light, perhaps because my bones were cold. I don’t know.

He said, “After the wedding party was over – and as you know, a wedding, my friend, is no joke – we went inside. You know, I swear I had no idea. Well, no, of course, I used to practice the secret habit and I’d played around with my buddies and everything, but getting married is different. As soon as I entered the bedroom, I saw her. She was young, seated on the edge of the bed all wrapped up in her clothes, and crying. I sat down beside her, my body feeling icy all over. She told me she liked sewing and embroidery and that she’d made all her wedding clothes. Then she started to yawn. She lay back on the bed, and I stretched out beside her. She didn’t take her clothes off, and I didn’t take mine off either. I went to sleep. Or no, before I dropped off I got on top of her, and as soon as I was on top of her it happened. I came and got it all over my trousers. Then I lay down next to her. I think we must have dropped off quickly because I woke up to a loud knocking on the door. I opened it and found my mother asking for the sheet. Then she rushed into the room, pulled out the sheet from under the girl and ran out. We heard the trills of joy. My mother told me later she’d wiped the sheet with chicken blood and that she’d wished the earth would have opened up and swallowed her.”

Abu Ma’rouf said that two days later he went into his bedroom and found the girl naked, and everything went fine.

“Do you know what my mother did, two days later? She took the poor girl into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and started inspecting her body minutely, touching her everywhere. The girl didn’t know what to do – laugh at the tickling or scream at the pain of my mother’s pinches. Then my mother scrubbed her with scented soap, poured water over her, and dried her off. She brought a cotton swab and asked her to open her thighs; then she placed the swab there and told her, ‘Tonight take off your clothes and wait for him in bed. Take hold of his member and insert it here where the cotton is. Put a pillow under your behind and lift up your legs.’

“When I got into bed and lifted the coverlet so I could lie down, I found her naked. She gestured to me to take off my robe, so I took it off, the sweat dripping off my face and eyes, and I stretched out beside her and did nothing. She stretched out her hand, took hold of my thing and pulled me toward her, and I found myself on top of her, with her holding onto it with both hands and tugging. I was bathed in sweat and fear. She stretched her hand to the place where the swab was and placed it there, and I found myself getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Then I was inside her, and I got bigger inside her and learned the secret of life. She put her hands on my shoulders and screamed. That was the night I really came for the first time. Before that it wasn’t the same. That night my whole being was there, inside her.

“When I rolled off of her, I saw that blood had stained the sheet, and that she was searching for something like a madwoman. She searched the whole bed, afraid the swab was lost. I looked with her for a bit, then dropped off, so exhausted I didn’t hear her questions. The next morning she said she’d found the swab but I don’t think she had. I think my mother had just reassured her it wouldn’t do her any harm.”

Abu Ma’rouf said he’d never forget the taste of her.

“And your second wife?” I asked him.

“At first I didn’t want to get married again; Umm Ma’rouf had been part of my flesh. But my mother, God rest her soul, knew better than I. She knew a man shouldn’t remain alone or he’d mate with the devil, so she convinced me to marry the second Umm Ma’rouf, a refugee girl from Sha’ab, like us. I married her in Ain al-Hilweh, and she bore me seven children.”

“And what happened,” I asked.

“Shame on you – you can’t ask things like that. With the second one, I knew what to do, and everything went fine from the first night.”

“Did you tell her about the piece of cotton?”

“Of course not. You don’t understand women. You must never tell a woman about the others. If a woman doesn’t think she’s the center of your life, she’ll become miserable and make your life miserable, too.”

Abu Ma’rouf’s story amazed me. I thought it wasn’t possible, and then forgot all about it.

But now I see it could be true. I see you before me, and I see Nahilah, I see everything. I can see you, a child, going into the bedroom, playing around with the young girl, then falling asleep beside her. I won’t say you were innocent, but you just didn’t know how. Your mother arrives. She takes the girl to the bathroom. She soaps her and pours water over her, then puts the cotton in her – and you discover the secret of life through a little piece of white cotton.

I know you won’t like this story, you’ll think it’s a slur on your manhood. You prefer to talk about grapes and tears of arak and the dance of a girl adorned in candles before her groom, and you’d rather not admit that you didn’t know what to do.

Would you like to deny the whole thing?

Fine. I’ll agree with you. I won’t say you lay down beside her in your clothes like Abu Ma’rouf did. Maybe you took off your clothes and made the poor girl take hers off, too, and you didn’t know how to do it and your mother had to make do with a little drop of blood from her finger on the sheet. Then she waited seven nights for you two and finally was forced to put the cotton swab inside the girl to guide you to the place.

“It’s not true,” you’ll say.

Okay. So where is the truth? Tell me, since I’m still confused about the dates. Did Ibrahim die in 1951 at three, meaning he was born in 1948? What was going on between 1943, when you got married, and 1948, the year your first child was born?

Didn’t your wife get pregnant?

Would you put up with a wife that couldn’t get pregnant? Why didn’t you divorce her? Your mother used to say she was still a child and would get pregnant when she matured. So Nahilah didn’t mature until 1948?

Did you love her?

No, you didn’t. You yourself said you only learned to love her a long while after you married her, when your visits to her came to be your whole life.

So what was it?

You’ll tell me it was the war, and you paid no attention. You’re confusing me – I don’t understand a thing, I swear to you. Your story seems muddled and mysterious. And my presence in this hospital seems like a dream, but I know I’m not dreaming because I can’t sleep anymore.

Say something, Father – I’ve had enough of all this. Say something, just one word, then die if you want, or do whatever you please, or you could tell me if you need something.

Okay, okay, fine. It wasn’t thanks to a piece of cotton that your marriage was consummated, and it never crossed your mind to divorce your wife for not having children right away, you didn’t experience terror facing the Jewish settlement, you didn’t kill Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud, and you didn’t cry when you had toothaches. .

Happy now?

Satisfied and sound asleep? I swear you’re a lucky man. What have you got to worry about? You sleep like a baby beside death – death doesn’t dare touch you.

Death is afraid of you, you’ll say, or you used to say.

But me, right now I’m not in the mood to listen to heroics. Do as you like – die or don’t die, dream or don’t dream, it’s up to you.

^*Koran, Surah XXIV, 35.

^*Legendary figure of the national Palestinian movement, died in combat in 1935.

HOW DID we get here?

Honestly I don’t understand how things took this course, why they happened – or didn’t happen – like they did. I don’t understand why I stayed here, why I didn’t leave with them. I don’t understand how, you. .

Who says I had to stay?

I’m not talking about the hospital. The hospital, that’s you, and I couldn’t abandon you even if I weren’t a frightened fugitive or hadn’t fallen into Shams’ trap.

I’m talking about Beirut. I didn’t have to stay in Beirut as I claimed to Shams. I told her I felt I had to stay and that it just wasn’t possible for us to leave the people here, to turn our backs on them and go.

But I was lying.

Well no, I wasn’t lying. At that moment, with Shams, I believed what I said. But I don’t know anymore. I was with her in my house here in the camp; I closed the windows tightly so no one would see us. The cold was intense, but I didn’t feel it. My body was shivering with heat. I wanted to prostrate myself in front of her. She was beautiful and naked, wrapped in a white sheet, her long hair beaded with drops of water. I wanted to kneel down and place my head on her belly. Everything inside me was quivering. And there was the thirst that can never be quenched.