Leaving Beirut E-Book

Mai Ghoussoub

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A twelve-year-old girl writes an essay that extols revenge to impress her teacher, and is surprised to receive criticism rather than praise. 'Revenge', Mrs Nomy insists, is 'the most cowardly' human behaviour. Years later, having fled Beirut, she reflects upon the devastating role revenge has played in her country. Might she have found it so easy to forgive if she had stayed? Or might she, too, have contemplated retribution? A compelling and humane book, which abounds in courage and compassion.

Leseprobe

About Mai Ghoussoub and Leaving Beirut

‘Mai lived to fight the Lebanese civil war, and she was living and thinking in the heart of the project that is Lebanon’s only hope of liberation – by establishing a unified civil identity beyond sects; a unified civil culture beyond linguistic and ethnic boundaries, East or West.’

Adonis

‘She was open to the future because she was naturally, independently and continuously creative. Few countries need these qualities as much as Lebanon. I hope a new generation will step forward to try and fill her role with the same intelligence and humanity.’

Anthony Barnett, OpenDemocracy

‘Her life is almost a continuous expression in her sculptures, installations, performances and writings, and her travels and her relationships. Her overwhelming sensitivity and her energy spread without fragmenting. Mai, who was at once very patriotic, was at the same time a woman of the world … she was being herself without any compromise, but she always cared for everyone.’

Abbas Beydoun

‘A message of universal applicability.’

Banipal

‘Ghoussoub’s reconstruction, historical analysis and conscientious examination of the Lebanese civil war gives any individual or student an almost personal account of what happened.’

British Journal for Middle Eastern Studies Newsletter

‘Seeing her around Beirut or London, at exhibitions or performances or festivals, was like catching sight of Debbie Harry in New York. She was an icon, she made things happen, she left a remarkable record of work, and she will be deeply, painfully missed.’

Daily Star

‘One of the most moving chronicles to come out of the Middle East.’

Moris Farhi

‘A gripping and enlightening meditation on how you can live beyond the horrors of the past and find new hope without forcing or falsifying forgiveness.’

Maggie Gee

‘For Mai, all aspects of art – music, sculpture, dance, literature – were elements of a continuum, and she made no intellectual difference between them. She did, however, see sculpture as her work – but writing was a compulsion and an urge, an avocation that often took her unaware and tore into time that was always too little and too full.’

Aamer Hussein

‘One of the most moving and revealing narratives about a conflict that baffles many of us to this day.’

The Jewish Quarterly

‘One woman’s personal and imaginative reflection of war in Beirut.’

Lebanese Gazette

‘An insider-outsider perspective of the postwar situation and the options to move beyond the violence into civility … a thoughtful book.’

MESA Bulletin

‘Examines the propelling forces of war from the distance of exile and reminiscence … and women and their reaction to war … embittering some and empowering others, as they escape or join, forgive or destroy, the social forces that oppress them.’

Middle East Report

‘She was a pioneer in establishing freedom of expression, and being open to all other cultures.’

Rawas

‘Reflecting on the Lebanese civil war, the author wanted to portray the internal wars inside women as a result of the misery, treason, or resentment they have suffered. According to Ghoussoub, resentment is a feeling that every human has, but being civilised will restrict this feeling of resentment, and she doesn’t consider punishment as revenge, because revenge makes punishment barbaric.’

Mikhael al-Khouri, an-Nahar

‘Mai Ghoussoub’s memoirs about Beirut in peace and war are a launching point towards the world. By using the Beirut experience Mai can return to the Nuremberg Trials, and see the Bosnian and African ethnic conflicts. Beirut becomes a mirror for cities throughout the world, and it is not leaving Beirut, as the title suggests, so much as returning to Beirut.’

Iman Younes, as-Safir

Mai Ghoussoub

LEAVING BEIRUT

Foreword by

Maggie Gee

SAQI

Contents

Foreword, by Maggie Gee

A Kind of Madness

Madame Nomy’s Lesson

An Uneasy Peace

Masrah Farouk

Honour and Shame

The Revenge of Leila’s Grandmother

The Heroism of Umm Ali

The Metamorphosis of Said

Kirsten’s Power

On Being Judged

Noha’s Quest and the Passion of Flora

Traitors and Conquerors

Symbols with Shaven Heads

Homelands

Responsibility, Truth and Punishment

Foreword

by

Maggie Gee

In his Independent obituary, Moris Farhi tells the following story about the author of this book, Mai Ghoussoub, who died with tragic unexpectedness on 17 February 2007, at the age of 54, after a very short illness. ‘In the late 1960s a terrible murder shocked Lebanon. A young servant killed her new-born baby by throwing him from the ninth floor of a building. For days, the media pilloried her as a monster. Then, a student, barely 18, discovered that the maid had been raped by her employer and that, unable to endure this ‘shame’, she had chosen to expiate it by killing the evidence of that rape. The student went on to write a searing plea for the maid and offered the article to every newspaper in the land. Not one dared publish it. In patriarchal Lebanon, men could not be guilty of rape; the fault always lay with the woman. So started the extraordinary career of Mai Ghoussoub, sculptor, writer, publisher, human-rights activist and one of the most remarkable women of our times.’

In his article about Mai Ghoussoub for Open Democracy, Neil Belton tells how during the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, when she was still only in her early twenties, Ghoussoub, together with her childhood friend André Gaspard, helped set up a dispensary for poor people in Nabaa, an area of Beirut that was cut off by fighting. One day she was driving a wounded man to a hospital when she crossed an invisible line and the car was shelled. She lost an eye and spent three years recovering from her wounds in Paris and London.

The freedoms of London were deeply attractive to her, but the city lacked a really good Arabic bookshop. So Ghoussoub rang André Gaspard, who was hitchhiking across America, and suggested they set one up together. Though English was their third language, he at once agreed, and before they even had residency permits they had taken out a loan. Al-Saqi Bookshop opened in 1979, and Saqi’s publishing house followed in 1983. Ghoussoub was the source of many of its most daring and creative ideas, and she also took responsibility for the bookshop’s exhaustive stock of Arabic titles and books about the Middle East. Somehow or other, living nine lives in one short one, she also enjoyed a vividly happy marriage to the writer and journalist Hazem Saghie, and found time for her real vocation as an internationally exhibited sculptor, playwright and performance artist. In her full-page obituary in The Guardian, Malu Halasa tells how ‘in 2004, in a duo show with the Israeli artist, Anna Sherbany, [Ghoussoub] became one of the first Arab women artists to explore the veil in a public space by dressing up in an elaborate Islamic get-up and carrying a tennis racket around the art haunts of Shoreditch. To her delight, nobody took any notice, proving a pet theory that Britain is a tolerant country.’

Leaving Beirut is probably the most extended record we have of Mai Ghoussoub’s ideas. It is a subtle and profound book, a fascinating mixture of autobiography, semi-autobiographical fiction and meditations on how human behaviour is distorted by war, cunningly woven together by one central story that seems to come directly from the author’s childhood. (At any event, she makes the reader believe it, and it gives a beautiful, spiral form to the book as we circle it, every time going deeper, rejoining it for the last time at the end.) When Ghoussoub was a twelve-year-old girl at the French Lycée in Beirut, there was a teacher called Madame Nomy, a diminutive dark-eyed ‘maîtresse sévère’, a strict teacher whom she greatly admired. Trying to impress Mme Nomy one day, Ghoussoub wrote, in an hour-long exam, a story about some friends trying to frighten her in a dark wood. She thought about the poem ‘La Conscience’ by Victor Hugo, a writer Mme Nomy had always praised, which ends with a line about the inescapable wrath of God: even after death ‘The eye was in the tomb, staring at Cain’. Accordingly Ghoussoub ended her story by pledging to revenge herself on her friends, staring at them with a look of thunder, a regard foudroyant.

She confidently expected a sixteen or even eighteen out of twenty, but Mme Nomy shocked her by instead awarding her ten out of twenty and pulling her up in front of the class, telling her that revenge was ‘the meanest of human sentiments’, and that she should have been more generous-spirited. This had an enormous impact on Ghoussoub. The rest of the book is a continued questioning of Mme Nomy’s lesson, and the last chapter of the book is called ‘Responsibility, Truth and Punishment: an essay for Mme Nomy.’ These are the grownup’s final conclusions – or should I say final questions, because her restless intelligence never allows her to be dogmatic – about Mme Nomy’s lesson on the futility of revenge. And in the arc of the book that carries us from the adolescent’s story to the mature adult’s essay, we have confronted a number of themes that are crucial to understanding life in the world order that has followed the instigation of the so-called ‘war on terror’ after 11 September 2001.

Though Mai Ghoussoub’s book was written three years before 9/11, it feels very contemporary. She asks what makes a revolutionary fighter, and what makes a torturer and murderer, though she makes careful distinctions between the two. She tells us the story, first, of a girl, Latifa, taken on as a maid at nine-years-old by a bourgeois household and cruelly treated, who during the civil war escapes their stifling flat to become the fearless guerrilla fighter Umm Ali. Secondly, she tells the story of Said: in peacetime the grocer’s son, a perpetually smiling boy whom everyone knew and liked, but who secretly hated to see his father cringing and kow-towing before customers; in wartime a murderous bully and torturer. Ghoussoub explains both transformations by a past of powerlessness and humiliation which left Latifa and Said only able to feel safe in roles of unnatural strength. She is not, quite, ready to forgive the torturer; but nor is she ready to dismiss him or dehumanise him. Said remains terribly human, and so is her honesty about her reaction of horror, which she is not yet able to leave behind. Forgiveness is not easy and cannot be forced. ‘Could we all start again, as if we had had a bad night and were leaving its horrible nightmare behind?’ she asks. She answers that it ‘depends on [our] own inability to face the unacceptable reality that the line that separates the criminal from the next-door neighbour, the helpful lad from the torturer, is not as clear as I had always thought before the civil war.’

We live, even more now than at the time when she was writing, in an age when governments, religious leaders and news journalists like to talk up extremes of human behaviour, archetypes of good and evil, heroes and villains, traitors and martyrs. Mai Ghoussoub’s narratives show how these myths are created, and ask what the more pied and parti-coloured human truth is behind these black and white creations. She writes about how religions breed martyrs. Noha Samman, a Lebanese suicide bomber, a young girl almost sexually in love with death, is compared to a Christian ‘virgin martyr’, Saint Flora of Cordoba. ‘Ten centuries apart, the quests of Flora and Noha had a similar taste of dreadful passion, a taste of eternity and blood.’

In a later chapter, examining the mythologising of heroes in times of war, she looks at how the Christians made a martyr of an eleventh-century mercenary, El Cid. She says ‘[El Cid] lived at a time when the Christian West needed martyrs and the Muslims were relaxed and more inclined to toleration. Today the roles seem to have been reversed … The Christian martyrs are barely remembered … Today it is the unhappy Muslim world which is uneasy with itself … and whose discourse is packed with heroes, supermen and martyrs.’ Of course she was writing before the beginning of the ‘war on terror’, in which unhappy and uneasy Christian fundamentalists have reverted to a Manichean discourse of angels and devils.

Though she had a past of political activism, and consistently asks what I would call political questions – how does today’s world connect up? where does power lie? how might it distort truth to fit its own ends? – Ghoussoub also recounts her own disillusionment with politics after the factional horrors of the Lebanese civil war. She fled, she says, for a while, into ‘fun, kitsch and lightness … my sculptures [would be] colourful, superficial and useless … They were made to enjoy themselves … I painted them in silver and gold, and I painted my own lips with a striking red.’ This was just a phase, but her book still draws in its search for enlightenment far more on art and literature than on political theory. She asks us to think about that great popular film Casablanca, and asks why we don’t hate the corrupt police prefect, played by Claude Rains. ‘Is it because we sense that the corrupt characters are less dangerous than the fanatics?’

Despite the courage that characterised her own behaviour, she refuses to condemn those who, in times of war, are labelled cowards or collaborators. She asks us to consider whether, given a choice between collaborating and risking the lives of those we most love, all of us might not be cowards and collaborators. She is repelled by (even though she writes of it with understanding) the censorious French attitude to women who slept with Germans during the occupation of the Second World War. And yet she honours the impulse towards accountability and justice behind the South African Commission for Truth and Reconciliation: ‘understanding but not vengeance’, ‘reparation but not retaliation’. She is aware that however much we dislike, and have an aesthetic distaste for, the self-righteous, ‘we are human and cannot survive without judgements’.

She becomes afraid, as she goes deeper, that the world is more complicated than the one Mme Nomy saw, but she never speaks of her with anything but love and respect, because of the great gift her teacher gave her: the knowledge that revenge must be avoided at all costs, in the law-courts, in war and in our personal lives.

Yet I should not say ‘must’, because Mai Ghoussoub never does. She does not make statements in this book, she tells stories. And she ends by citing Bertolt Brecht. The best way for the artist to treat people who permit terrible political crimes is through comedy, because comedy, according to Brecht, is more serious than tragedy. This is a wise and complex book that leaves us with the sense that loving people, with all their imperfections, is worth the candle.

25 February 2007

A Kind of Madness

The laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected … In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold.

Stefan Zweig

The phone had only rung twice when she picked up the receiver. She thought she would never get used to the indifference with which the phone was treated in Paris. She herself had often hung up when she had made a call and nobody had answered at the other end by the third or fourth ring. People here didn’t feel the urge to jump to the phone as soon as it started ringing. Maybe it was because their homes were less crowded and less likely to have somebody always sitting next to the handset. As soon as she lifted the receiver she knew, from the slight, familiar disturbance on the line, that the call was from Lebanon.

‘Beirut calling, hold the line.’ The voice of a bored female phone operator in Beirut.

Her heart sank. She could never help feeling nervous when she was connected to Beirut, and she reacted resentfully towards her irrational agitation. Whenever she was drawn back into the country she had left, she was no longer in full control and her pulse would run at a fast pace. Faster than she wished. Impatiently, irritably, she waited to be connected.

‘Go ahead love, you have Paris,’ said the same off-hand voice to whoever was calling from the other end. It was him. It was the same voice that she believed she had silenced forever. This voice did not belong here. It should have stayed where it had been left, muzzled under the rubble of the collapsing buildings of Beirut, safely confined behind the austere scrutiny of the immigration authorities. It had no right intruding into her new universe, her cosy Parisian exile. This voice, his voice, was a transgression, a trespasser into her acquired space. She hung up in the middle of his desperate hellos. ‘Can you hear me …? Hello … Hello …?’ She hung up violently. Angry with him, yes with him, only him. He had no business invading her new serenity. He belonged to a war that she had escaped and that she never wanted to be reminded of again.

The phone rang again. She rushed to unplug it. The sound of silence in the room was deep and devastating. She turned her back on the table where the lifeless telephone stood, and moved towards the window. She tried to immerse herself in the enchanted sight of reclining roofs competing for space on the city’s horizon. She had been lucky to find this flat. Here, on the top floor of this old building, at the end of a winding, narrow street. L’Impasse des Eaux Douces, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. She had spent hours observing the angles created by all these cluttered roofs, imagining the lives that unfolded beneath them. This was her present panorama, one that she had made and designed for herself. A tangible reality, with a starting point that she had drawn as an act of will, reducing her past and taming its recollections. His voice, his existence must not interfere with this landscape … She would not allow it … she could not afford to …

Allen came from behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She jumped.

‘What is it, darling? Sorry, didn’t you hear me coming? Who was that on the phone?’

‘No one. I unplugged the phone. I don’t want to talk about it.’

Allen’s face could not hide emotion. She had been attracted to the serenity of his eyes, to his cool and nonchalant manner. She had met him in the English bookshop one Saturday afternoon a few months previously, and now he stayed with her when he came to Paris. He came regularly, every other weekend and during the academic holidays. She appreciated his discretion and valued his easy-going attitude. She was always grateful to him for not insisting on explanations. Yet somehow at that instant his controlled performance seemed theatrical. It was irritating. It had the smell of inhibition and had lost its charm. She moved away from him abruptly, took her jacket and walked out of the flat. She went swiftly down the steps, avoiding Madame Dufour’s cat and ignoring the scrutiny of its piercing green eyes. She walked firmly out of the building, giving the concierge no chance to step out of her cubbyhole and engage her in one of her tedious conversations.

She walked tensely and hastily. The walk of a harassed woman. A woman distressed by the persistent resurfacing of her past suddenly reaching into the present. She had no space left in her heart for the nagging guilt triggered by Allen’s sad expression. Her blunt rejection of his kindness was the best she could manage. She needed to empty her heart totally in order to be able to survive. She had already once previously gathered all the cruelty she could muster in order to dump the voice that had reappeared in her life today. She had somehow believed that the man whose desperate voice she’d heard on the phone was locked away in the city she had abandoned, relegated to an epoch that was past and gone.

For the first time since moving into her Parisian flat she walked through the familiar streets of her quartier oblivious to the colours and joys of the busy vegetable market, insensitive to the temptations of its shop windows, and unaware of an invigorating breeze announcing an early spring. She did not stop at her café-bistrot for the sweet, lazy ritual of sipping an espresso while watching the passers-by. She could not bear the idea of staying still. She needed to keep on moving. Walking stubbornly ahead. Trying to stop her thoughts from drifting back to the place where his voice had come from, to the amputated memories of a torn city that had once been hers.

Beirut exhaled a fragrance of damp earth. A sweet, teasing scent filled her nostrils. A triumphant sun had cleared the grey thickness from the sky, appeasing its anger with an offering of blue. The fear of death that had emptied the streets and left them grieving seemed to have faded away as if by a miracle. Her body felt powerful and she stepped forward cheerfully. The Palestinian camp of Sabra was waking into life. A smell of dark tea emanated from precarious shacks, seeping through the hesitant openings of their narrow doorways. Children rushed impetuously in the narrow alleys, and their mothers poured water onto concrete floors and then swept it out of their clustering homes with a generous thrust. The camp, usually so noisy and busy, was still testing the vulnerable silence that follows the rage and roar of combat. Inside the medical centre where she was heading, the walls were an immaculate white, and voices were hushed. But the discreet manners of the staff were not sufficient to cushion their patients from the world outside. How could anyone hope to separate the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ in a place where the roof was made of corrugated tin and the front door opened immediately onto the clamour of the alley and the invading dust of its unpaved earth? She wondered this every time she stepped into the ‘hospital’, as the people of the camp liked to call it. She was working here, helping to classify the medicines on the shelves and translating their instructions into Arabic. She had been coming here once a week since the beginning of the war, and it was here for the first time that her involvement with the Leftist movement had felt meaningful and concrete. Here, among the angry complaints and the patient resignation of the wounded, next to a chaotic group of women carrying sick children and attempting to pacify the healthy ones they had brought with them, she realised the extent of her abhorrence of her own class – the middle class – with its paranoid fear of these people and their lack of compassion for the ‘unhygienic camps’ into which none of them had ever set foot.

She looked alien in the camp, and this bothered her. The way she dressed was out of tune with the long, ample skirts worn by the camp’s women, or the headscarves that modestly covered their hair. She could never bring herself to play at looking ‘genuine’, exchanging her jeans for a long dress just before entering the camp to fulfil her militant duties, as some of her female comrades did. She would have thought this theatrical, and she had no time for what she regarded as ‘populist hypocrisy’. She walked through the muddy alleys with the slightly hurried pace of an apparently confident woman.

The air of agitation at the medical centre was explained by the presence of two open-top Jeeps squeezed into the alley next door. She had to advance sideways in order to reach the door and step inside. He stopped speaking and his eyes moved towards the door where she was standing. The two nurses and the doctor were sitting in front of him and she could hardly see them. There was a thicket of armed men standing around in the reception area, drastically reducing its size, and thickening the air with a fug of Marlboro cigarettes. A few awkward seconds passed, heavy with embarrassing silence, before the doctor introduced her and invited her to sit down.

Abu Firas was not as tall as she had imagined. He had been much talked of since the war began. She avoided looking at him, for fear of betraying her inner agitation and her intense curiosity. He had a reputation as a tough leader, a dangerous warrior and a secretive manipulator. She knew he was watching her while he questioned the medical staff about their needs and the problems the clinic was facing in those troubled times. The men went on drawing deeply on their cigarettes, adjusting the Kalashnikovs on their shoulders and listening silently with the deep concentration of chain-smokers. He, for his part, held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger – a nervous, bony hand, from which a deep heat seemed to emanate.

She was incapable of following the conversation, and was powerless to stop herself staring at his hands, with their angular, forceful impact. The haze that enveloped the smoky room had blurred her vision and her sense of reality. She was taken by surprise when she realised that he was already saying goodbye and preparing to leave, followed by his fighters and guards who were now vigorous and alert. When she could no longer hear the squealing tyres of the departing cars, she moved towards the shelves that she had come to organize. Her movements and her thoughts were slower than she intended; the vision of his dark, penetrating eyes and the movement of his warm, agile hands lingered persistently in her mind’s eye. It suddenly occurred to her that, unlike most Arab men, he had no moustache. This fact amused her. She caught herself smiling. An hour or so later, with the medicines on the shelf still far from organized, she heard a vehicle screech to a halt in the alley outside the clinic. One of Abu Firas’s bodyguards stepped abruptly into the room, sucking on his Marlboro and utterly unimpressed by the sign on the door announcing ‘Please knock before entering’.

‘Abu Firas asked me to take you to his office. There’s something urgent that he needs to discuss with you. I will drive you there.’

She knew that she should have shown hesitation, or maybe said something about needing to finish her work, but she was incapable of resisting her desire to follow him. She picked up the navy-blue jacket that she wore while about her militant duties, but as she put it on she wished that she had not tried so hard to look shapeless and unkempt.

She found it hard to recall how she had come into his office or how she had climbed the stairs of the building where the bodyguard had taken her. She wasn’t really listening to Abu Firas’s long and serious-sounding speech about how much the revolution needed people like her. His phrases didn’t seem to be made of words. Their messages were lost in her desire to be closer to his hands, to be warmed by the heat that emanated from their tense movements. She was pleasantly taken aback when he told his bodyguard that he no longer needed him. The voice of the bodyguard saying goodbye sounded curiously incorporeal. She heard the sound of the door closing, and unknowingly she moved towards those hands and towards him.

This was the beginning of a passion that was immersed in war and danger, fired by its secrecy and its proximity to death and destruction. She had plunged into an adventure of perilous abnormality, knowing its dangers but doing nothing to resist them.

She had reached the Place du Châtelet, having walked down Boulevard St Michel, without having realised it. The openness of the pedestrianized square and its lively comings and goings irritated her and drew her back into the present. Why was she walking so fast … behaving like a woman on the run … a fugitive? Beirut was far away. She had choices. She could step inside the Théâtre de la Ville, or walk back towards the bridge. She could abandon herself to the soft flow of the Seine and allow its comforting presence to calm her. She didn’t have to dash about like this. She could push back the memories and assign a more recent starting-point to her personal history, perpetuating what she had achieved before the damned telephone call of that afternoon. What she had done in Beirut, and the way she had behaved there, was none of her responsibility. It had happened in the midst of a generalised dementia. Now she lived here, beside a great, glittering river, in a great and vivacious city, light years away from the morbidity that she had witnessed during that aberrant period of her life.

But those three rings of the phone had been enough to take all the serenity away from her, to bring back strange and unfathomable feelings of guilt, and an uncertainty that was now making her rush about on city pavements, faster than Paris was used to.

‘The responsibility is mine too. I was blinded by passion and lost my lucidity. I fooled myself that I was joining a revolution, one that would stop misery and injustice. But I used him. I used him to belong. To harvest energy from the fear of death that was spreading around. I suppressed the fear in my body beneath the warmth of his embrace. There was the night when I could not let go of his body and kept drawing him back into me with the rhythm of the shelling that was pounding relentlessly, violently shaking the building where we met in secret. I gladly repressed questions about the meaning of what was happening, about its contradiction with the ideals we had all started from. I kept moving and doing things instead of stopping and questioning. I lost any sense of normality and called on his body to take me deeper into the dizziness of the unknown …’

She must have been talking to herself. People were giving her embarrassed looks. She was speaking out loud as if to hear for herself what she had not been willing to tell anyone else. Allen’s discretion had been tactful, but she wished he had been more forceful, less respectful of the years before he met her. Maybe then she wouldn’t have ended up like a crazy woman talking to herself on the pavements of Paris. By now she was on the Rue du Rivoli, approaching the Louvre, and the streets were full of tourists. She felt more sympathetic towards them at that moment, now that she suddenly saw herself as a visitor in Paris rather than a person whose life had begun here, only a few months ago, at the gates of Orly airport.

She turned right at the Palais Royal and looked for a café where she could rest her feet and calm her anguished mind over an espresso. She needed to be in control. She knew that she could no longer escape the intrusion of her own story. She ordered a bottle of mineral water and a coffee, and felt an urge to smoke a cigarette, as if the act of smoking, which she had given up, might seal her decision to take a look backwards. She looked in her pocket and found an old electric bill and a Bic pen that was broken at one end. The waiter was tidying up for the end of his shift, and she settled the bill promptly, eager to be left alone with her thoughts and the blank space on the back of the electric bill.

Dear Abu Firas,

So it was you on the phone today! I apologize for having hung up on you. I could not face hearing your voice. Just as I am not able to face the woman that I was when I was near you. I know you suffered a lot when I disappeared. I can still see the despair in your eyes as you looked into my sudden coldness and my inexplicable metamorphosis during our last meeting. You were speechless. The woman who had longed for your caresses, whose desires seemed never satiated, was turning her back on you, refusing to grant even the hint of an explanation. This woman was at a loss with her own transformation and could not offer a justification that did not exist.