Yes it’s over …
That smile that used to wait around the corner of the left turn before the mosque is gone.
It was put away in some tiny muscle now triggered only by a scent, not by a feeling.
The scent of talcum powder under sweaty armpits, or the scent of someone who wants to commit suicide.
It was a rainy summer evening.
Wet, I walked down the empty narrow streets from the university to my apartment.
Tiny drops of rain taking me as their shelter.
Me, the massive body, sheltering drops of rain.
Flowers huddling with dew.
We walked together, alone, creating an illusion of light.
As if I became more than one, more than me.
It was a warm rain carrying the taste of all the smells of daylight.
The taste of car exhaust mixed with a little boy’s hand selling a gardenia necklace, topped with a delicious woman’s French perfume wrapped in freshly baked thyme bread.
It was still there.
That same red car that stood like a statue on that corner.
On, but not moving. On for a very long time. On for a very long distance.
It was pouring.
I started running when one of the doors of the red car opened.
A hand signalled me in.
I went into the red car without thinking.
I just went in.
The car was still on and not moving.
I was in it and could not make out the face of that inviting hand.
The bored streetlights played games with me, creating a silhouette of long hair, big head, small nose, broad shoulders, an unlit cigarette and a running engine.
I am sorry for getting your car wet.
I was drying myself.
That hand handed me a handkerchief.
Thank you.
The handkerchief smelled of my grandmother’s drawers.
A mixture of lavender and no light.
Strange that this smell would make its way from an earthy past through the city walls.
Even the sound that it made on my skin reminded me of my grandmother’s little hands looking through her linen, sifting through her memories, bringing her mother’s embroidered scarf to her face and taking in all the scents of many years of widowhood.
This handkerchief belonged to my grandmother.
I could hear our breaths.
There was a bird-feeder clinging to my window.
Perhaps it was waiting for a rebellious night bird courting its companion.
Dripping seeds overflowing, holding onto the glass, sliding one after the other in hectic lines, moving slowly to the gutter, or to the sole of someone’s shoe, or to the beak of a lonely bird, or to grow somewhere.
I like the idea of these seeds growing somewhere.
Strange, a car window for hungry birds.
The hair was dividing the space between us.
The car was shaking from the heavy rain.
Are you waiting for someone?
I felt the drops of water running along my breast, resting in the ripples of my stomach only to continue their journey and curve around my crotch.
Their final destination.
Silence.
We just sat in that small red beating heart.
I felt that I was breathing through the tiny wind-chime, hanging from the rear-view mirror, twinkling humid notes.
You should call the wind-chime a breath-chime.
I could feel a smile crossing from one side of the hair border to the other.
I was not afraid of this stranger who seemed so familiar to me.
In the distance everything was blurry and wet.
The sound of falling rain was not the romantic one that we hear on tile, it was more like the sound of my mum pouring dirty washing water from the balcony into the street.
I hope I am not keeping you from going somewhere, as soon as it stops…
Where are you going?
I am going to my apartment. It is just around the corner…
I know.
Rainy silences.
I am sorry I can’t drive you there. My car won’t move. It just turns on.
I love the feeling of being wet without getting wet. When it rains at night, I sit in my car, turn it on and pretend to travel. I just sit.
I wait for the rain to give me the courage to pour myself like it does, to part with the travelling clouds forever.
I sit and wait for you to cross the street.
Silent smiles.
Do you know the ‘I once’ game?
No.
It’s very easy. Each sentence has to begin with I once and the meaning of all the sentences has to connect in some way. It goes on until one of the players has nothing to say. You start.
I once forgot
I once found a tear
I once cut a cloud into pieces
I once set fire to a stream
I once killed myself
I once was a butterfly
I once jumped on a spring mattress
I once saw you crossing the street wearing a red dress and I have fallen in love with you ever since
I once believed you
I once waited for you to cross that street again to see you before I kill myself, but I fell asleep waiting for you and eleven o’clock the time of my death went by wearing red
A dry silence.
A fast car splashed the red statue on wheels, shattering our vision into miniature rain drawings.
Strange how the rain changes its mood so quickly.
I am going to walk home.
The three of us are wearing red tonight.
Goodnight.
That same hand stopped me.
Please stay with me tonight.
The shadow of the raindrops was running along my hands like the veins of an old person, drawn by light and erased by gravity. Seeping through the sound of silenced rain and smiles was the sound of Muslim evening prayers coming from the mosque’s minaret just around the corner. It was one of the very few mosques left where the muezzin still prayed, not some tape recording plugged into a speaker, screaming its prayers out and scratching the listener’s beliefs, plunging my neighbour into justified modernism whereby he would take a recorded prayer tape with him to work and play it on his walkman at the time of the noon prayer, because his work place is in the Christian part of the city. ‘No mosques there,’ he says, with a sweaty moustache, wearing his blue trainers and carrying his rolled prayer rug under his arm.
This is my father chanting. Isn’t his voice beautiful? I wish he talked to me the way he talks to God.
That hand slipped into mine.
A silent fall leaf, breathing in the same heat, sweating to dissolve into my blood, leaving me no space to speak, to ask, to utter. I did not move. Why was I smiling?
Spend my last night with me.
To be asked to spend the last night of someone’s life with them is as if they are already dead. A delicious butterfly that lands in my belly button the night of its ephemeral melting.
Gentle kisses were dropped in my palm. Secrets you whisper to the night pillow right before you surrender to sleep.
I turned the car off.
The beautiful voice of the muezzin was relentless, as if he was savouring every verse, chewing every note, releasing light.
A warm tongue was rolling around my fingers, one by one, encircling them. A nebula. A luminous vapour glowing in the dark.
I could hear the fallen cigarette rolling gently between my feet.
Left right. Right left. Left right.
I rested my head on a soft, tender, warm belly.
I could trace with my lips the hairline leading to the pubic grove.
I dipped my mouth in a shy belly button and scooped out a rolled umbilical cord and chewed on all its innocent childhood. My eyes were now resting on a hard nipple, my nose teased by sweaty talc powder while my mouth was crossing the river of life.
Two lines of sensuous moisture met with two stitching lips, with two entangled tongues, with two beating breaths. We hummed mutely.
Our hands were clapping on skin, applauding our desire. Our eyes finally met. We both stopped and just looked at each other for the first time. We looked deeply into each other’s eyes. I felt we had just met after a long forced separation without having ever met.
I have a key to the mosque, let’s go up to the minaret and look at the wet city. Don’t worry my father won’t be there now.
I did not resist the offer.
I had always admired minarets and envied men for their easy access into such ethereal flying spaces. We walked out of the red car towards the mosque in complete silence. Hand in hand we crossed the wet streets, we went around the corner where the mosque laid, a reclining figure of a tired wave, an odalisque hand picking the stars. The door of the mosque cringed under the key, but then relaxed and opened up.
A smell of naphthalene rugs filled the darkness.
The outside lights seeped through the many small windows, tracing the travelling dust particles into beautifully intersecting lines.
We started twirling around the lines of dust.
Our laughter bounced off our shadows.
Our shadows bounced off our laughter.
The walls glided around us as if someone was drawing an endless curtain.
We fell on the rugs, dizzy, and just stayed there staring into the expanding ceiling.
Let’s go up to the minaret.
We used a red torch that was inside a small cabinet. Tiny staircases. Winding around themselves. Unwinding to themselves. No end in sight. The sound of our footsteps resounded an echo of a distant marching band.
What if the entire city could hear us?
Dom tak dom dom tak tak tak.
Hand in hand we walked up and up and around and inside and up and around.
We stopped from time to time touching each other’s faces as if to check that time hadn’t left us there and walked away. I would like to imagine leaving time behind us but it scares me to think of time leaving us behind.
The stone was getting humid. I could feel the fresh air opening up.
Close your eyes and just follow my arms.
Held from the back I let myself be led to the sky.
Open your eyes
Only if you kiss me
Open your eyes
Only if you kiss me
Only if you kiss me
We kissed under moving clouds and erased stars.
I opened my eyes to a dripping city and to a woman wearing red, holding me tightly on the cliff of enchanted prayers.
We sat in the alcove of the minaret with our legs hanging in the vast city sky. I took her hand and traced with it the path that led me every day for the past month to the red car, to a destiny I would have never imagined.
A path that was as big as her hand.
We walked it with our fingers. We followed the streetlights and the corners. We stopped at the different military checkpoints. We crossed the streets and we met around the corner of the left turn before the mosque. We looked at each other. We smiled. We kissed endlessly.
She leaned over, gently took one of my red shoes off and whispered something in it.
Where is your favourite part of the city?
The sea.
My shoe was beautifully flying westward.
Look, a red shooting star.
I said with tears caught in my throat.
It flew so far.
I was sure I could hear it falling in the sea.
Now you know where to go every time you want to hear what I have whispered.
A red shoe was to become my anchor in a city of war with a seafront but no shore.
I was crying.
She was crying.
It was raining again.
Very warm and soft rain.
I started undressing her.
First the red shirt.
At every button she whispered a name or a place in my ear.
And between every button her tongue pierced the silence in my ear.
Maybe they are places she has loved, people she has met.
I bathed the red shirt in warm rain and pressed it against my face.
My red dress was twirling above the city. A red rain poppy.
Some things end before they begin.
And some things do not have a beginning but they never end.