It’s because drowsiness is always hovering, ready to pounce… Or let’s just say it’s sleep’s tyranny. I’ve never been much good at waiting for anything without nodding off, but here, for some reason, I haven’t had to work at resisting sleep. The doziness I can never normally shake from my head and limbs hasn’t come over me here, even though in this room I can’t find anything stimulating to keep me pleasantly occupied. All I can do is to go on taking stock of the room’s contents, sizing up the furnishings one by one as if they have some significance, as if every object will yield a grand meaning. When a person has nothing to do, when you’re just floating in a void, you can’t help trying to attach meanings to the objects around you, to find some connection with them. As if I can retrieve some memory of them, as if I’m already familiar with them, like they have some sort of place in my life or tell a story I already know. I’ve told myself, for instance, that the knob on the wardrobe door looks like the one I remember seeing in my aunt’s home, in the old flat, the one she left during the war.

I stare at the wardrobe’s double doors, following the patterns of the wood grain until my eyes are watering. Then I shift my attention to the drawer in the little bedside table, indecisive about whether to open it or not. I already know what is inside: a Bible, its pages thin and delicate, like you find in every hotel room in Europe, and an old telephone directory that no one uses any longer, and hasn’t for a long time. The hotel cleaners must have forgotten about it.

How many of those who’ve stayed in this room have spent as much time as I have contemplating every one of its objects? Apart from whoever it was who left the letter inserted between the pages of the hotel directory. And that directory is surely not something most guests would open. In the first place, there’s no need for a directory in a hotel as small as this. No need for it in any hotel, in fact, now that people have smartphones. It must be the owners’ attempt at giving their hotel a veneer of luxury, a touch of the dignity of age. The directory looks old, its pages slightly crumpled and eaten away. Neglected and forgotten here, like the Bible.

The letter I found inside the hotel directory perplexed me. It worried me, actually. It talks about a young man, the letter writer himself. He wrote it in a cheaply rented furnished room in a street nearby, a rather run-down one, it seems. So how did the letter get here? Plus, it comes to an abrupt stop: it doesn’t really end. All in all, because of this letter, I’m feeling very uneasy about the writer. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s in prison, for instance. The letter has it that he was full of terrible imaginings about the secret police from his country of origin mounting surveillance on him. So it looks like he went to talk to their man, and it must have ended very badly, and that’s why he couldn’t finish his letter. The letter is written to the woman he loves but she… I’m convinced that it was this woman who hid the letter, to prevent anyone who might have been looking into his activities from coming across it. Because, among other things, this writer confessed that he was living in this city illegally, and that he was taking drugs – things that could get him in trouble with the law. That woman might be why the letter landed in this hotel room, though I can’t fathom how it happened, not exactly. And then probably she forgot about it, or maybe she hid it and then couldn’t recall where she had put it. Whatever happened, the man never did return to the letter he had started. This might mean that his meeting with the man from the secret police – or the man he imagined was from the secret police – ended in some calamity. Maybe even a tragedy.

It’s possible, instead, that it was the man from the secret police who took this room, in order to carry out surveillance on the young man who wrote the letter. And it was he who found the letter – that is, if he went to the fellow’s flat searching for documents or papers – but then he forgot and left it behind here, perhaps because, in the end, it wasn’t of much interest to him.

It’s all this empty time, nothing to do. Idleness, the master of silly imaginings, stoking the explanations one comes up with for things.

Reading that letter, though, I could almost hear his voice. I could almost see that lonely, miserable, wounded man standing at his window, looking out at the emptiness of the night, alone without her – I mean, without that woman he loves, or who he won’t…

The letter sounded like a goodbye letter, it really did. But who knows if he ever meant to send it, since he didn’t finish writing it.

I’m more inclined to think it was the man from the secret police who got hold of the letter and hid it here, but then misplaced or forgot it. I mean right here in this hotel room, which does in fact overlook an area that must have a pretty bad name – all these dilapidated buildings bulging with furnished flats.

Why am I telling you all this? To entertain myself a little while I’m waiting, and also because the loneliness of that man, the letter writer, sounds a lot like my loneliness. Even if his story doesn’t resemble my life in any way. But I sensed, I felt, his cry of pain as though I were an old friend, or as though I myself was the woman to whom he was complaining. Maybe I felt that way because after reading his letter, there were things I thought about telling him, things I wished I could say to him, and because I wanted so much to wrap my arms around him.

This is so strange. Especially because I didn’t like her at all, that woman. If I were ever to meet her – which is a ridiculous thought, of course – I would give her a piece of my mind. I can even see myself accusing her of stealing the letter and concealing it here, so that it would be inaccessible to anyone searching her home, since possibly it was she who killed the letter writer and not the man from the secret police. Or maybe it was her husband. Hmmm. He discovered their relationship and sent a hired killer. The murdered man believed this fellow was an agent of the secret police from his own country.

Yes, true enough, I’m hopeless. I’m always like this, swinging easily between my fertile imagination – the fantasies I construct, that is – and the reality of things, without giving much thought to what I’m doing. I’m always mixing up what happens in my head with what happens in the real world, but that doesn’t worry me particularly. Actually, it keeps me amused. It’s like having a dream at night and then being completely immersed in the details of it for the whole of the next day, and maybe longer. A friend who died some time ago might return to me in a dream, and then for days his presence goes on comforting me. It’s not that I’m getting mixed up about whether he’s alive or dead. I mean, I haven’t forgotten that he did die. It’s just that he seems to be with me, and that gives me comfort even though I’m well aware that ‘comfort’ might not be the most appropriate thing to feel, since the situation really calls for feelings of loss and grief – after all, I do know perfectly well that he’s dead. It’s as if he has come to visit me because I missed him, or perhaps because he was missing me. He comes to visit me, but free now of the things that were so painful to me before, the images I had of each stage of decomposition as his body lay in the grave – swelling flesh, worms laying eggs, things like that.

But…what could be prompting me to write in this way? Such thoughts might scare you off, or convince you that I’m a bit ‘fragile’, a bit feeble-minded, perhaps. I think it’s the letter that man wrote. I think it’s the letter – that’s what has tugged at me, made me spin these tales that are so… Yes.

It’s just that I started writing to you as a way to fill up the time while I’m waiting. I don’t have any idea what people find to do when they have to wait.

What I would have told you, if you were here, is this: I am not someone who waits. I mean, never, not even at the dentist’s. Or what I mean is, when I’ve got to wait, I go to sleep. I have a really good nap. I wasn’t like this before. If someone was late for an appointment we’d made, I would have no patience at all. I would be on edge, livid in fact, and I would stack up all the angry rebukes I could think of in my head. For a while now, though, I’ve been forgetting who it is I’m waiting for, and why I am waiting for whoever it is I am waiting for, and then my eyelids start feeling heavy. If I am waiting in a café, my head drops between my shoulders and I slump down in the chair, spreading my bag across my lap like a little blanket, and I go to sleep. It’s not deep slumber, not like the way one sleeps at night. It’s more like retiring into a dark interior space where the day outside disappears completely, or like the soporific state one is in after drinking heavily.

Yes…once you’re here, I will be as chatty as I can, trying to entertain you, and also because you will ask me whether I got bored waiting for you. You’ll ask because you’ll be feeling a bit rattled, and a little apologetic, about being late. ‘It was the snowstorms,’ you’ll say. Because what words will you find to say, anyway, when you enter this room and you look at me, and then you see me, like this, just me, all alone? I’m a lot older now. I’m old and I’m not like I was. I mean, after all these years. What I would have been trying to think about, waiting for you, was what to say first. What to start with and how to say it.

Someone who is waiting knows something, even if only a very little, about the person or the thing they’re waiting for. Thinking about that person or thing keeps them amused, or distracted. Now, it’s not that I know nothing about you. It’s just that what I do know isn’t very much, and it’s ancient, and my memories are hazy. And anyway, when I’m mulling over what I know, bringing you to mind, I can’t disentangle my memories from my inventions. This puts me on edge; it’s not a pleasant distraction at all. This might sound odd to you, but to be frank about it, I can only keep myself happily distracted when I’m truly alone. To the point that even when I’m leaving the house, before going out I put on some music I like, because then I feel like I’m lingering a bit longer at home, in my solitude. As I’m returning, I can hear the music from outside, and as I’m turning the key in the door, I can think to myself, ‘There it is, the same music, my music.’ And while I’ve been out, no one has come in and stirred up the air in there. And so, really, I was there all the time, alone, with nothing to disturb me.

Little by little, day after day, my solitude has become the height of luxury. I cherish it. To be alone in air that no one else is breathing. It’s become so important that I react terribly if someone happens to touch me or brush against me or knock into anything of mine, unintentionally, in the street or on the bus or in the lift. It’s as though a terrible electric charge goes through me; I shudder and jump as if I’ve been bitten by a snake, and it is all I can do not to cry out with pain and anger. For example, this is what happens when someone stumbles and then seizes hold of my arm to keep from falling. I’m always aware that it’s insane to react as I do. So I take a deep breath, I smile, and I accept their apologies magnanimously, trying all the while to hide that I’ve broken out in a sweat and my heart is pounding, and I’m sure my colour has changed as well. There must be many people who suffer as I do when other bodies touch them or even come too close. Like me, those people behave politely without showing any sign of aversion or disgust. In restaurants, many people – and not just me – look for the shadows of fingerprints on clean plates or glasses, not because they are passionate about cleanliness but to convince themselves that the table bears no traces of anyone who sat there before.

Even so, the letter I found here, stuck inside the hotel directory, did not give me the feeling that anyone else was in the room with me, or that he had been here before me. Hotel rooms are forever inhabited by those who have passed through. Each new occupant enters cautiously, apprehensively, as though expecting to find certain traces of the last person who was here. But I found this room completely empty of any stranger’s presence. It was as if, as soon as my fingers even touched the written page, I sensed that the man who had left it here was someone familiar, a person I already knew. Even though it was written in a language foreign to this country, and it was complicated to read. There were words I could barely make out, and I had to read the whole thing several times. Not to mention his poor handwriting, letters curling into themselves like dead insects.

But why am I returning to that letter?

Probably I felt like telling you this because I had begun moving about in this room as he was doing in his room – his ‘home’. So I went over to the window as if we were going to it together. He and I. Then I pushed aside the curtains so that we could look out at the rain. As I was doing this, I nearly even spoke to him out loud, but then I came to, and I thought, ‘That’s the last thing I need!’ At least I haven’t begun talking to ghosts yet. Maybe I just wanted my voice to block out the sound of the rain. There’s been no break in this heavy rain since coming from the airport. The sound of it has filled my head with noise. Its relentless pounding must have melted the snow that covered the city before I arrived. Or, more likely, it didn’t snow at all here and I was just confusing this place with Canada, where immense snowstorms have moved in. Or perhaps I invented the snow as I journeyed from the airport as a way to tell myself that you would not be coming after all, not from Canada, since any snowstorm there would keep aeroplanes on the ground.

This is what I’ve become now. As I’ve already told you, it makes me happy to find things getting blurred in my head, or, to put it more honestly, to find myself blurring things in my head. So in the confusion of things jostling around in my brain, I’ve agreed to meet you at a certain time on a certain day in a small hotel at this location. But at the same time, I tell myself over and over that you can’t possibly come – even though I am really here, in this place, and I’m waiting. I believe this has something to do with the age I’ve reached. After all, I spent an awful lot of my life trying very hard to do things the way they were supposed to be done according to conventional ways of thinking. It was only after great fatigue and strain that I let go, no longer obliging myself to follow other people’s logic. Ever since my periods stopped coming, or more precisely after my father’s death, all at once I saw a fissure open in the wall of my soul. It’s true that this chasm allowed an icy cold to blow in, but at the same time it freed me from staring only at the blind face of a wall that had gone up around me, without my knowing by whom or when it was erected. It was sudden, this discovery: I began to see how fast the waters were rising around me, how the world was seeping in, pouring in, and how I had almost drowned.

My father had been my armour, protecting every part of my body from the things that threatened me. He was a magic helmet over my head, keeping out the lethal, black thoughts that might otherwise creep in. But because of his protection, and because of my love for him, I was bound in chains. I gave in to this submerged state of mine, protected by my ironclad armour and, for good measure, a full-body diving suit as heavy as lead. I may have been drowning, but I was protected. I was sinking into bottomless depths, where nothing could kill me, and nothing could rescue me.

After my father’s death, I became free to despise people as much as I pleased. Now I could vent my hatred for the men I had fallen for who never did deserve my love. It was as though I had emerged from a past where I glided along on the greased rails of happy security, safe in the railcar of naïve goodness, without exerting any will or desire on my part. It was just that I lost half my life for the sake of keeping someone’s love when I no longer felt anything for that someone. But since then, I’ve wanted to erase those men completely from the pages of my history. From my life.

It was in this spirit, I suppose, that I read the letter. It was a desire to insert myself into the logic of a man I do not know. To seek another place, a different place. An egotistical logic, freed of shackles, liberated and unattached to the point of being dissolute. A logic that doesn’t ask for the consent of others: of the moralists, of all those associations and institutions that come together around principles and laws and ‘the right way of doing things’. Such a logic means having one’s own measuring stick, assessing the balance of courage and feebleness, success and failure, so that in one way or another, frailty itself becomes a source of great strength. Imagine a woman tested daily, abused and worn down, emptied of her soul day by day. Like that woman who killed her husband with his own rifle after a marriage that had lasted decades. In court, she said she felt no remorse. She would be ready to kill him again, without the slightest hesitation or doubt. From that moment, she said, she felt a kind of power fill her heart, and it had raised her above the mundane world for the few years of life that remained to her.

Would you call this revenge? Treachery? Or is it recuperation of one’s most basic and primary right? The right to breathe.

One who is liberated does not have to be strong, nor does the strong person have to be free, as it is in the history books or in those legendary tales of heroes who are always and uniformly steadfast, staunch, courageous and bold, borne on a wave of light that bestows sage leadership on everyone in the vicinity. My neighbour, who threw himself from the fifth floor after his son was killed in front of his eyes, what concern did he have with the people around him, with the whos and the whats, with the priest who afterwards stood over his grave, rebuking his corpse because, he said, ‘Jesus doesn’t love suicides’? But everyone knows about Jesus committing suicide – everyone except the priest. My neighbour was an elderly man, with many ailments, weak in body and mind. But he decided on freedom, flying off the fifth floor. I might tell you, if you come, how I decided on freedom before flying here. We’ll see.

I’m remembering now that I turned off my mobile before leaving the house. I should have left it on until the plane took off. Maybe you tried to reach me, to tell me that you would be badly delayed, or that you had changed your mind and would not be coming. That seems plausible. Although it was you who searched for me, indeed who wore yourself out trying to find me, according to what you told me. Despite my having closed my Facebook account a long time ago, you found me there, somehow, I don’t know through whom. I will ask you, if you come. A person can change his mind, of course. But how will I know if you have changed your mind? The fellow in reception hasn’t informed me of any phone calls. Have the snowstorms cut off the lines of communication where you are? Maybe that’s it. Phone lines are always getting cut where I’m from.

A little before midnight, I remembered that I had not eaten anything all day. When I called down, and before I could order any food, the receptionist answered – even though I hadn’t repeated the question I had asked him earlier – that no one had phoned asking for me, or to say they weren’t coming. No problem! I opened my door and called the lift. I thought I would go out to the nearest bar or restaurant, but suddenly I felt exhausted, just at the idea of pressing through the rain without an umbrella. I was suddenly so tired and lethargic, and drowsy, that I felt almost paralysed. I got undressed and sank into the warm bed, keeping my clothes close by in case you should suddenly appear. I dropped off almost immediately but I woke up less than an hour later, with my knees throbbing and pain shooting through my lower back. ‘I’m not all right,’ I thought. ‘I think I may be about to come down with something, or I’m sick already. I must get back to sleep quickly. Because I would look very poorly if you…’

Waking up at dawn, I felt completely recovered. I asked for breakfast in my room and I ate everything on that large tray. I pulled back the heavy curtain. It was still raining.

Nothing to do, but in a good mood all the same.

If you were here, you would be watching this sparrow with me. He hops about below in the empty street, in the rain, as if the downpour hasn’t soaked him. A little bird without a flock to follow or be part of. A lone sparrow in high spirits in a big city of which he sees nothing. Maybe he is so old that he no longer needs anyone, though a sparrow never looks to us like it’s all grown up, let alone elderly. A little bird is always young and never ages, as far as we’re concerned.

Strange, isn’t it?

No one knows why it is impossible for us to think about a sparrow growing elderly, to the point where the infirmities of old age carry him off to a natural death, like any other living creature whose life runs its course. Perhaps it’s because we have never seen an old sparrow, or one that does the sorts of things we do that show we are getting on in life. For example, the way we stop erasing the names, or the addresses and telephone numbers, from the pages of our diaries even though they’re the names and addresses of friends who have died. We don’t feel we need to erase them in order to create more room on the page. Instead, we leave new names and addresses on the little scraps of paper where they were first written, scattered here and there, not transferring them to the diary. We’re not afraid that they might go missing. What I mean is, we no longer care if they go missing.

Another example. I went to buy a new mattress, hoping it would relieve me of my chronic back pain. Looking at a mattress, I told the keen, solicitous salesperson that I really did not wish to pay for one guaranteed to maintain its quality and form for the impressive number of years covered by the warranty, surely many more years than I would be alive. In other words, I was not interested in spending a huge sum of money on a bed that would still be in excellent condition long after my death. I would be lying on it dead, and it would probably still look brand new, my body as stiff as the fine-quality wood frame. As one says of wood, it would still be ‘breathing’ under my corpse. ‘I hate this bed,’ I said, ‘and I’m not interested in buying it.’ And I walked out of the showroom.

It would be like having someone crucify you, telling you as he did so that this cross was made of the highest quality wood or that he was using only the most dependably rust-free nails. Analogous things happen frequently in our daily lives but we are not always paying attention, or if we are aware of such things, we do not know how to handle them. It’s like a man in love destroying the woman he loves deliberately and methodically – precisely because he loves her so much he can’t stand it. In my case, for instance, it really began to pain me to hear a man promise he would love me ‘forever’. Such words terrify me, because that man is leaving me no space to change my mind, or to change, full stop. It’s like being sent to prison for life. What if I were to cease loving him ‘forever’? What price will be settled on the beautiful durability of the nails with which his passion fixes me to a cross?

You and I, we would have laughed and laughed if I had told you the story of the mattress, or of the cross. That is because you’re about the same age as me, or a few years older. And after all that laughter, we would remember (perhaps) the great quantities of medlar fruits we ate as we walked the streets, which we continued to eat in the car that took us from the big square in downtown Beirut, from Sahat al-Bourj, to the Jabal – I don’t remember now exactly whereabouts in the heights it was – so that you could meet up with a friend of yours. When we got there, I began searching for a rubbish bin or a barrel where I could toss my carrier bag now that it was full of medlar pits. I don’t remember anything about that little excursion except how sick and tired I got of looking for somewhere to deposit that bag of pits, which left my palms wet and sticky. No, that’s not quite true – I also remember the succulence of the medlar, which would never again taste as sweet.

This sweetness has nothing to do with the act of remembering. It’s not delicious and sweet because it is linked to the past, to the time of our youth, where nostalgia for that time gives everything we can’t bring back a more beautiful sheen. Nothing in my childhood or my adolescence has ever prompted a longing for the past, a past that seems to me more like a prison than anything else. I am not here in this room in order to return to what was, nor to see you and thus see with you the charming young woman I was, or how lovely and robust the springtime was that year, there in my home country. That country is gone now, it is finished, toppled over and shattered like a huge glass vase, leaving only shards scattered across the ground. To attempt to bring any of this back would end only in tragedy. It could produce only a pure, unadulterated grief, an unbearable bitterness. And anyway, seeing you, at the age you are now, is precisely what will immobilize my imagination, preventing it from ever again playing games with the image of myself that I’ve kept in my head, and forcing me to see that image very clearly and accurately – indeed, turning it into something nearly like my mirror.

I don’t put on my glasses when I’m standing in front of the mirror, before I wash my face or apply kohl. That is not because I’m afraid of what my image in the mirror would look like if I were to see it unadorned and unblurred, but because I know that I am much handsomer than that image is, vastly so, and that the precision with which it reflects the pores and wrinkles, the thin layers of loosely hanging skin below my chin, is all simply an illusion, an exaggeration of reality, a ‘scientific assessment’ that is unwarranted and unnecessary. For who would come close enough anyway to see those details! What could tempt a person to do that? What reason could anyone have to breathe into my face while peering intently at my skin and features? No one apart from the dentist, but the dentist looks only into one’s mouth. In any case, wrinkles aren’t an accurate guide to how old one is. Teeth are. When the teeth recede, a little, but enough so they can no longer give you the pleasure of biting into a medlar fruit as you sit in the back of a taxi, so that its juice runs down over your chin and drips onto your clothing… When the problem is no longer one of where to throw the medlar pits. At least, that’s no longer the only problem.

In your last letter, you mentioned some shared memories. My brain struggled to return to that past, and when it got there I didn’t find anything. I tried hard to imagine that puzzling house that apparently we visited together, which you said belonged to a relative of mine. I couldn’t come up with anything. And why would I have taken you to one of my relatives, anyway? And then, why were we eating shwarma from a spit, standing in front of the butcher’s shop, if there was a family home only a few metres away? What girl from the village would ever do that – something only foreign tourists like you would do? Are you the one who is inventing things? Or am I the one who is erasing things from memory? Are you getting me confused with another girl whom you met in that country and then forgot? What you’ve said about me doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or does the engine that keeps memories turning work differently for men’s minds than it does for women’s? For example, I remember very clearly that moment you brought your head close to mine, when we were sitting on the ground under a tree. I thought you were going to kiss me, but you didn’t. Was it because I didn’t respond by bringing my mouth any closer to yours? Where I’m from, girls don’t bring their mouths closer. Maybe they do that in Canada, and that’s what confused you, so that you thought I simply wasn’t open to a kiss like that. Maybe that’s it. Even now, and however much the desire might overpower me, I don’t believe I would dare to kiss a man in the open air. But this kiss – or the absence of it – is not a tale, or an incident, that we remember in common or have ever talked about.

All of this is why it will really be a disaster if you don’t remember that excursion to the Jabal. The medlar outing. It will be a huge disappointment to discover that you don’t remember it, because I won’t be able to think of any other expeditions we made, or things we did together that turned out to be fun. Or even any that weren’t much fun. I might not be able to dredge up any memories at all, of any sort. Then it will be up to you to tell me again what you remember, in greater detail this time, to help me out a little with inventing things to say. Because we will have to say something.

Whatever the circumstances, once one has got past the age of fifty this business of remembering becomes quite easy sometimes, but it is also pointless. The life you’ve led so far can come back to you with staggering clarity, an unending stream of memories flooding over you even if you’ve made no effort to summon any of it back. Things that are remote, completely forgotten, turn up as if of their own accord, as if there’s something automatic about the process. Places, smells, people’s faces, details that have no importance whatsoever. Such as what a neighbour said many years ago about the benefits of rubbing copper with lemon and ashes when you don’t have any copper pans or basins anyway… That sort of thing. Anyway, what use are memories like this when, even if you have learned certain lessons from the past, it is already too late to apply that knowledge? It’s all far behind you.

It’s very strange how much I want to see you.

By the way, I rarely travel. The few countries I have been to all disappointed me. They were true disappointments. Not because my country is more attractive – especially at war, going up in flames – but rather because the promises made by the travel companies were all lies. They have no shame, the way they lie! Total cheek. They come up with images of places that don’t exist, or they bang together scenes of places that do exist, in a montage, and then they Photoshop the montage into a single image. Besides that, I have no sense of direction. Almost immediately I lose my way, and then, once I’m lost and panicking, I can no longer find any of the landmarks I’d picked out in order to avoid getting lost. I can’t even see well, and in my fright I feel like a blind person groping along. I don’t dare ask anyone in the street how to get back to my hotel – that’s assuming I can even speak so much as a word of the native language. I don’t dare ask, because I am so certain that I must be just around the corner from the hotel – so close that it will stir up their suspicions if I ask. Or they will try to help me with gestures alone, by sketching out a mental map, and none of it will stick in my mind.

Despite all of this, I’ve travelled all this way to meet you. Yes, I’ve come here to see you as if I really miss you. And I do. A lot. How do you explain that? Longing arises from distance, a distance that has separated two individuals who lived happily together for a time, a period when they did things together and spent whole days that were full of the two of them, and only them; days that united them in a togetherness that was both sweet and bitter, for better and for worse. What was it between the two of us? And what remains of what was between us? And why might you come? What sort of misplaced longing for days gone by might propel you back to me? Can you tell me how many days they were? Myself, I don’t remember.

Whenever your features come to mind I get a lump in my throat, and the image of your face, so close to mine, your eyes gazing into mine, squeezes my heart.

The face I’m thinking of, naturally, belongs to a very young man, a man young enough to be my son now. If we were characters in an Arabic-language film, sensations like this would signal a hunch, an intuition, and then as the story went on, it would turn out that I really was that young man’s mother, and she had lost him or been torn violently from him by the Pasha – because, in these films, there is always a tyrannical Pasha who dispossesses mothers. And that mother – that is, me – would be guided wholly and absolutely by her heart throughout the entire long, tragic tale. It happens in life too. Why not? I love these films which you know nothing about. For I’m – no, rather we – we are…we are all sentimental creatures. I believe that you know about the Egyptian diva, Umm Kulthum, as far as I can remember, but you don’t know Abd al-Halim. Maybe I’ll tell you about my boundless love for Abd al-Halim, and how this passion for that beautiful young Egyptian singer led me to ruin… No, I won’t, because it is a very sad subject and it depresses people. And we didn’t come here for tragic confessions. But, in short, this man – Abd al-Halim, the handsome Egyptian singer – destroyed my life. Of course, you’d probably think that a silly thing to say, or just a stupid joke uttered by a woman keen to come across as original.

No, no, we will stay on happy topics. Maybe we’ll talk about those lovely spring days when we first met. About the streets and squares we strolled through, how we ate medlar fruits, drank freshly pressed juice, and all the rest. I hope you won’t go on about your job or your family or your country, or what your life is like now. Because if you do I will die of boredom, and I won’t be capable of hiding how disappointed I am, especially if you launch into questions about my job and my family and my country. That would be very disheartening! Fatal, even. What I mean is, it would bring our planned rendezvous to a sudden and dramatic end. Because probably the whole point of our meeting is precisely not to learn much of anything, and not to use words that carry any meaning. The point is just to have the kind of conversations that you hear between strangers: light, inconsequential, as quick to disappear as a feather in the breeze, no sooner lying stationary on the ground than picked up again, wafting upwards to circle overhead once more.

Forget about Abd al-Halim. We’ll find a lot to say on subjects we do both know something about. In the first place, there’s this music that plays constantly in the hotel corridors, and the lift, and the reception area, even in the en suite bathrooms. We know all about this music, you and me. They’ve chosen Chopin, a Romantic composer who will tickle the hearts of lovers who have their trysts here. They must be hoping this will motivate those lovers to extend their bookings. From Chopin, we might move on to cinema. You must have seen The Pianist by now, with its Ballade No. 1 (Opus 23). The Nazi officer will let the musician live because beauty has some power to lance even a Nazi’s heart. No, forget about that too. I expect way over in your region of the world, you have views about things we’d disagree on.

Any of the items in this room could furnish us with something to talk about. Any of it could launch a pleasant conversation. For example, you might pry open the little fridge in here, and then I would start telling you how, at night, I sit at home in the faint light of the fridge in my kitchen, and I eat whatever my hand falls on, in an agreeable state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. My sense of pleasure floats free – it is unconnected with my hunger or my insomnia, and I don’t feel any guilt about it. I feel secure and quiet and pleasantly lethargic. It’s a primitive sort of stillness, like the sense of well-being animal cubs feel. Then, once my stomach and heart are both nicely full, I go back to bed. And you?

Or, if you go into the bathroom, I might ask you, for instance, whether you normally use shampoo like the kind they provide in little bottles here, made with herbal ingredients to preserve the oil secreted by the roots of the hair, so it doesn’t dry up and lose its shine, and the ends don’t split. Do you? Or perhaps by now your hair is receding, or maybe you’ve gone bald?

If I go on talking to myself like this, I really will begin to look mad.

Yet we do have to say something, you know. Especially in the first quarter of an hour, if only to make out that we aren’t really so shocked by each other’s appearance, by how much we’ve changed and how old we’ve become, that we can’t say a word. So many years have come between who we are now and that long-ago spring. So many years that you won’t need your glasses to see, for example, that I have shrunk slightly – if you still remember how tall I was – and that now I am a bit stooped, my shoulders slumping and rounding. It’s the back pain caused by poor alignment in my upper spine and neck.

Since you never knew my father, you won’t be able to see how much I’ve come to resemble him. Yes of course, my father was a man, true, but with age my body has come to look like his, maybe like the physique of men in general. Now, when I cough, I think I’m hearing him. My lips are slightly lopsided, pulling my face down a little on the left side, exactly like his. Even the way I lie in bed when I’m going to sleep, or the shape of my toes: all his. At my age, I can’t help thinking how many female hormones I’ve lost and how I’m now at that crossroads where male characteristics start taking over, before we – men and women – come to look more and more like each other. And you? Don’t you have breasts by now, or hints of them?

I will try to orchestrate things – if you do come – so that I’m not standing up when you enter the room. So that I’m sitting on the bed or on the chair where I am sitting now to write. I’ll be in a far better position than you, because it will be your physique that’s in plain view, and it will be you who is nervous about facing my stare. But we are not in a contest! We’re not afraid of each other. I think perhaps this apprehension formed in me when I read the letter I found here. The letter’s lovesick writer is still a young man, as far as I can tell, or at least he is younger than we are, you and me.

True, passion has nothing to do with age. Right. But I myself don’t believe that. Of course it has something to do with age. If, say, I am in love and greatly attracted to you, in some sense at least, or if you are the same, enough to make you fly halfway around the world to come to me, enough to get you all the way to this room, that means that we, the two of us, are attracted to each other enough to go to bed together. But that will reveal things, details that will extinguish the ‘flame’ of this attraction, or this love, if that is what it is. We will quickly deduce that due to my back pain, lying beneath you I cannot bend my body enough so that you can penetrate. Or you yourself won’t be flexible enough to find a solution to this intimate dilemma. And if we keep trying and it just leaves us frustrated and tired, I will tell you that really, honestly, I don’t want it. I’ll suggest that we do something else, something more enjoyable. But what?

It’s an embarrassing proposition. Maybe you felt it before I did. That is, you confronted it before you boarded the plane, or even immediately after you made the reservation and bought the ticket and wrote to me with the details of your arrival time and airline and so forth. Speaking about reservations, I’m thinking now about changing my reservation and postponing my departure by two or three days, but not in order to give you more time, for I know you aren’t coming, since you haven’t sent me an email and you didn’t try to reach me via the hotel phone number. I’ll stay on a few days because I like this room so much, and because the rain hasn’t stopped, and I don’t want to go out in this torrent of water. I’ll wait, so that I can walk around a bit and see this city. And because I have the time. And because this little sparrow has my attention, as he hops incessantly around the same little space. And now, whenever I’m standing at the window to follow his movements, he has begun looking in the direction of the hotel.

No. I won’t stay here in order to watch a bird. I’ll stay here because something tells me that the writer of the letter I found here is coming back. I asked the very nice man in reception to tell him I’m here. True, the letter looks a bit old, because the paper it is written on looks old. It doesn’t offer any hints or clues that would help locate its writer. In spite of this, I am going to try. I might stumble across him here or somewhere in Paris. In one of the cafés where young Arab men gather when they don’t have anywhere else to go. The young men who are fleeing from something. Surely that will not be very difficult. Anyway, whatever the case, I am not going home. It would be impossible to go home now! And then I have nothing to do anyway, no one to meet anywhere. And since you aren’t going to come I will erase Canada from the list of places I was jotting down, the places with possibilities for

I will find him, or at least I’ll find some trace of him in Paris. Then I’ll know whether he returned to his country after the revolution they had there, once he got his passport back. People don’t just disappear like grains of salt dissolving in warm water. And when I do meet up with him, I will