***

There was a moment when she thought she loved. But doubt made her forget. 

Thus it was inscribed on the walls of an ancient tomb erected underneath an abandoned telephone booth. 

Tourists would pose there for photos. But never, for one moment, did they dream of the hidden world that lay concealed beneath the ground. Even as they stepped on it a million times, they were and always will be oblivious to the unseen which screams at them from the cryptic graffiti on the walls of apocryphal tombs. 

She was a girl who had once lived and was now dead. Her name cannot be ascertained. But she was lovingly buried, which indicates her having been a person of a certain standing with whoever it was that saw to her burial. It is known though beyond doubt that she was not a princess of the Heian period, nor an ice-cream vendor from Shiraz. Anything else one might say of her (but is, of course, unable to) is probably of little importance. 

Since we know so little of her, and since her tomb is marked by the above-mentioned intriguing inscription, which corresponds to the wide-spread notion that girls are usually perceived in connection with love, periods and pregnancy (the tomb giving no indication of the latter), let the respected reader allow us to propose that we imagine her story like this:

One late afternoon, at the hour which used to be known as Solomon's hour in the times of poetry, she went to a phone booth in order to make a foreign call.

For the sake of convenience, let us agree to call her Alia. 

Inside the telephone booth she saw a man whose hair reminded her of that of another man, whose hair, in turn, had reminded her of someone else's. 

Though he was holding the receiver in his right hand, he was apparently asleep. Now and then, he stirred, like one absorbed in a heavy dream. There were moments when he seemed at the brink of waking but eventually he conquered the impulse and continued his nightmare-ridden sleep. 

Without wanting to, she watched his clouded face, his furrowed brows and troubled lips, listening to his irregular breathing, punctured by suppressed sighs.

Resisting the impulse to comfort him, she tightened her veil. She stood like that for a period of time which defies definition, until her eyes released a tear and were filled by it. The tear burnt her veil and it dissolved in the flames. 'My poor, tormented stranger', she whispered as her lips touched his mouth. There, they turned into scarlet roses and drowned her heart with their fragrance. Her heart, drowning, became the wing of a butterfly, and it descended on a field of poppies. There, it expired and the stranger awoke with a start.

Prompted by an internalised reflex, he dropped the receiver and drew his knife. She stepped back in fright, and looking up at her, he cut his finger and dropped the weapon. Blood sprang from his naked hand like the nectar of a passion fruit, and she held it to her lips. 

"To drink from this cup", he said, cupping his hand, "is to become a gazelle who pledges her life to the hunter."

"My life is not mine to pledge but yours to claim", she replied. 

"Who are you?", he asked. 

"Who are my eyes? Who is my hair? Whence have these lips come which I have learnt to call my own?", she asked in return. Touched by her reply, he smiled the smile of a mountain spring and her being took in the reticent warmth of his smile. 

Seeking form and solidity in the lines of an old poem, she quoted: "My father was a Turk, my uncle Habashi; not Turkish is my tongue, nor Arabic, said she."

"Then let me have your kiss", he quoted in response, "here, where where the willows bloom."

"By God, Arabs and Turks bring mercy not but doom", she laughed, completing the verse.

"Doom sounds graceful on your lips", he smiled.

"Doom is mine", she sighed, "for I am now a woman lost. All I could hope to rely on has been destroyed in your embrace."

"That is true ", he agreed, "We can therefore abandon all pretexts."

"What were you doing here, or rather what were you hoping to do when you came here?"

"Nothing", he replied.

"And you couldn't have done that anywhere else?"

"I have no other place", he explained, "This telephone booth is all there is left of my life. Come, make yourself at home! Let us have some tea."

She lowered her eyes in thought.

"I will not presume to ask you what is your story, for no one can ever hope to grasp another's story. But I will be glad to have tea with you."

"Ah", he said, "mine is a short and sad tale. But life will be easier for you if you allow yourself to be spared the details."

"I tend to forget details anyway", she stated frankly, "but I always remember kisses, textures of hair, feel of skin, secrets written in glances and sighs, and roses plucked from valleys, nectar, dew and rapture to be paid for with losses more dear than any woman's most precious possessions."

"Always?"

"Always is now. Ever is this occasion. Forever is this moment. Do not think I shall miss my life when it is taken. Do not think I shall lament my freedom when it is lost, for all I can ever possess, all I can ever truly call my own is this moment of perdition with you."

"Whether it is right or wrong to take of you what is offered", he mused, "there is no choice now. Neither for myself nor for you."

"Yes", she confirmed in a firm voice, "for the veil is burnt and so is the heart. My lips have surrendered without your asking. Alea iakta est."

"What?"

"Alia has fallen."

"We live, perhaps, to fall?", he mused.

"What use is it to know whether this is what we live for or if it's perhaps something else once the damage is done."

"The damage?", he demanded, "Damage hinges on regret. But how can you surrender in one moment and regret it in the next?"

"Who said I surrendered?"

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I was only saying the damage is done."

"May I remind you", he said sharply, "that I was asleep."

"Oh you brute!", she cried out, covering her face with her hands. "Murderer! Defiler of innocence! It is a monstrous thing you are saying. It is a monstrous thing you have done! Nothing can bring back the veil that has gone to the fire, and I stand naked before you in my shame."

"God knows that I cannot be condemned for something I haven't done."

"It has been done!"

"Not by me."

"But not without you!"

"Alia, habibti, why don't we have tea?"

She shook her head. 

He shrugged.

After a while she said quietly: "He who hides his sister's transgression, his transgressions will be hidden, and he who reveals his sister's transgressions, his transgressions will be revealed."

"Must I...comfort you?"

"Don't bother. You whose lips are to blame, you whose furrowed brows and clouded eyes softened my heart, even though I can no longer say with any certainty what attracted me to them and whether they could attract me again, you who were here at the wrong moment and claimed me, knowingly or unknowingly. Who can tell? You're my undoing. And you say you were sleeping!"

"I w a s sleeping. And on waking up, I warned you. But you wouldn't heed my warning."

"How could I?"

"What would you have me do?"

"Do you expect m e to tell you?"

"Let us have tea, please, my gazelle. Let the beauty of what has passed between us not be clouded by blame. I do not care whose fault it is."

"You make it sound", she exclaimed, "as if the blame were ultimately mine! You seek to appease me with a flirtatious word at the right moment, and how manipulative you are in this, how carefully controlled! On the Day of Judgement you are going to stand before God and say: She seduced me. But I humoured her. I pretended not to mind."

"Alia", he said, "what has come into the world, one has to live with. Let us have tea and think of our common future."

"In this telephone booth?"

"What's wrong with this telephone booth?", he demanded, "It housed me and sheltered me and gave me a shell in which to live. When there was nothing, there was this telephone booth. I was here, in it, when you came. It was here that you found me. It is here that I found you. Why else should it have fallen to my lot, anyway? But let us go and look for a place to stay. Let us be patient and allow life to fall back into place, and we will find just the right place, insha'Allah."

"A girl who has allowed her veil to burn, what could she care about 'insha'Allah'? You act as if you were ignorant of my condition. Find a place to live? With you? How can I trust you?! After all this..."

He sighed.

"Maybe I lack the courage to spend my life in a telephone booth, and I lack the courage to spend life outside of it. Perhaps that is who I am. Perhaps being true to myself means being true to my fears."

"This", he pleaded, "is a stage within the progression of stages. Courage - yes, it takes courage to breathe in the air, it takes courage to navigate the seas upon whose waters our ship has been cast, if courage is what we call it."

Her clenched fists became rigid and her eyes closed in a final gesture of dismissal. The dice had been cast and bounced back. It was a struggle that was lost before it began. 

"Do you mean you are going to walk away after all that happened? As if it had no bearing, as if it had no consequences?!"

She waved it aside. "Don't kill me with your consequences, with your bearings. I don't care. Not any more. Not ever again."

"Perhaps what you seek in me is the very thing you are trying to run away from."

Angrily, she turned away.

"Alia, must I tell you that once you have entered into my life, there is a place for you in it? A place which no one else could fill. Alia...the world before you and me and the world after you and me are not the same world and can't ever be the same world again. La ya sitt al ghazala. Abadan. 'Omri dunya. There is now a point in my mind which is called by your name, and it watches me in everything I do."

She averted her eyes. 

He heaved a heavy sigh.

"You make me give myself away", he said accusingly, "It is not for a man to do that. Revealing one's vulnerabilities is a woman's privilege."

"So they do, and are made to suffer for it", she replied.

"Perhaps", he said.

"Not perhaps."

"You know", he began, "I remember when I was about 9 years old, I saw a man lean against a woman's shoulder in a gesture of tenderness. I remember despising him for that. In fact, it is an impression I remember vividly. I thought it ought to be her leaning against him, not the other way around. It is not for a man to lean against anyone's shoulder..."

She nodded in appreciation of his words.

"Though I envy women the privilege of doing such things, I am myself incapable of showing vulnerability and I'm deeply uncomfortable admitting that there is such an aspect at all. Poetry is the only way to express it, as it has been between us. And how else could it be in a world where people spy out each other's vulnerable points like snakes waiting to make their kill, in a world where nothing they say is ever true . Where all is pretence and double illusion, to a point where they can't even know what they really want and what they really mean and what they really feel. I, on my part, have always known that, and would like to keep it that way, and that may be what makes me appear uncompromising and uncouth: my insistence on seeing things for what they are. In this world people seem like drunkards at best, drunkards whose speech, whose actions have lost their cohesion, who will see anything but the obvious. They will stumble and blame the road, or say that there isn't any. They will close their eyes and say: there is no sun, there is no moon...

Must one be like that to be able to live with them?

What's the point in living with them if it means that one must be like that?"

"No", she said, "that is not what I would like our love to be like. I have lived in loneliness for much of my life, and I can live in loneliness again. Do not hold it against me."

And at that, she left. 

"You don't know what loneliness is", he called after her with passion.

"But I will", she replied without turning round.

His heart was a reed leaf that wafted in the wind, and the air was filled with burnt veils, with the heavy scent of dying roses and the slaughterhouse odour of blood drawn and poured onto tarmac roads, there to be blackened by tar and crushed stone. 

She never made her foreign call, in case the esteemed reader wishes to know.

Khamsin winds haunt the reed and cause its leaves to break into cries reminiscent of human voices. Their rising and falling goes unheard until silence eternal covers up everything. 

But there appeared one day a tomb at a place known to him and her alone. True, when they drew their lasts b

reaths their story perished with them. But couldn't it have been like that?