About the Night (42 page)

He had tortured himself with thoughts many times over the years. The worst of them was not that she was married but that she was in love—with someone else. In the way she knew how to love, with all her strength and tenderness and ferocity. It pained him to think that she could tremble at the sight of some other man and offer up to him her abundance of emotions. Sometimes his eyes filled with tears when such thoughts seared his mind.

This war had caught him by surprise and provided the miracle of returning Lila to him. When the city had been severed in two halves, she had been pronounced dead; now, she had been brought back to life. All this time he had believed he would grow old in his family home, alongside his wife and children, and that was how his life would come to an end. He had come to terms with the fact that the biggest thing in his life had been left behind.

Under this tree in his garden, he wondered how all the years had passed with the knowledge that she would no longer be in his life. At times he had felt a sense of gratitude at having experienced this wondrous love, but he knew he would never be given such a chance again. And this, he also knew, was what he would have to attempt to explain to her: that this was what he had believed, and thought. This was what he had lived. This was why he did not carry around a feeling of having abandoned their love or broken an oath or stopped loving her. It was not guilt that he felt.

Now, sitting with his eyes closed against the morning sunshine, a question arose in his mind: If it had been promised to him that after a nineteen-year hiatus in their relationship he would once again be able to lean his head into her neck, would he have married?

He knew he would not have. Had he then believed that their love was not hopeless, he would not have married Nasreen. But he would have to explain that to Lila and persuade her to understand that at the time, this was reality as he saw it, and he had thus acted as he had and been led along. He wondered whether in their personal tragedy either one of them was right or wrong. Strong and weak. Visionary and faithless. Realistic and unrealistic. They had both paid a price no one could ever assess. While she had focused her life on this one hope, he had banished his desires and lived for others’ wishes.

At that moment he understood something with great clarity: that sacrifice exacted its price systematically, slowly, over the years and, like a crime syndicate, never forgot its due. Such sacrifice led to bitterness, and the bitterness in turn led to physical and mental pains, to chronic fatigue, to a fading away of one’s spirit, to a growing deficiency of the life sap that others possessed but which he did not. In his darker moments, which had increased with the years, he was overcome with fury at what had been decreed for his life.

At times, his temples throbbed, as if about to burst. He could no longer recall the last time he had laughed or cried deeply. He could no longer recall if he had always been irritable or if he had become that way. He reckoned this was something that happened to older men whose constricting lives brought them to their knees and whose charm—once so potent—had deserted them.

The sun continued southward, caressing the metal blinds that had not been painted for years and were peeling. The house looked in need of a handyman who could remove leaves from the gutters, tighten the gate that hung loose, fill in the cracks in the wall. But Elias was incapable of performing such tasks. He did not even have the strength to bring someone to do these things for him. He avoided the gazes of the women in the household. He was simply too tired.

Nasreen had wanted their wedding to take place in the evening; sunlight was too white for her tastes. He should have noticed that, he thought: a woman who hid from the sun, a woman who preferred shadows and coolness. But Elias was listless and indifferent to every issue that arose during the planning of the wedding and took no part in the decision making. She asked if he would like colored lights to be part of the decorations, and his answer landed between her eyes like a rock from a slingshot: “It’s your wedding,” he had said, shrugging his shoulders.

She had paled, and he tried to make amends: “It’s your wedding,” he repeated, “and on such a day you may choose whatever you like.” But the damage had been done.

As for the wedding itself, he had only scant and blurred memories, and a few photographs thanks to the Armenian wedding guest who snapped pictures of an unsmiling groom who looked older than his years. Once, when the children were leafing through the wedding album, they asked why he looked so unhappy.

“I had a fever,” he told them. “I could barely stand up.”

“Is that true?” they asked their mother.

“Something like that,” Nasreen had agreed, as though she, too, had only vague memories of that day.

The bride held a bouquet of lilies, beaming chastely in her white gown, her hair gathered in a dark chignon and her eyes expressing wonder at all that was happening. She had been told her groom was a wise and prudent young man from a prosperous family of excellent reputation and that he spoke little and pondered much, that his sleep was light and his wakeful hours heavy, that his dreams were active and his days fatigued. Her new husband was lofty, enigmatic, and full of promise.

This may all have been true, Elias thought as he basked in the morning sunshine, but there was nothing she could do about any of it. Everything was preordained; the nature of their married life had been determined.

And then, another black-and-white photo: her parents on the right, the bride and groom in the center, his parents on the left. There they were, he and she, like the links in a chain connecting the two families. Every time he regarded that photo, Elias could feel the sadness that had infiltrated his family like a virus and infected everyone in the picture. His parents’ pleasure lasted only a few weeks, as joy did not come to reside with the young couple. The groom kept such a distance from his bride that she never even stood a chance of falling in love with him. When she was young, she believed that that was how men behaved, and by the time she matured, it was too late to nurture any other ideas on the subject.

She had been presented to Elias at Easter as a distant relative when she was twenty-two years old. He had been spoken about often in her home as a charming man of the world, still unmarried—little clues that piqued her curiosity. She wore a plum-colored dress and sat with the other women, hunched over a table coloring Easter eggs. Elias felt he was being led to her, that his aunts were concentrating their efforts on bringing them together. The fact that nothing about the young woman bothered him was already saying something; he saw that she was aware of the ten-year difference in their ages, his full past and her tabula rasa. Her innocence and his secret, a man who had already experienced the love of a lifetime.

She had been present at the family picnic as well, pleasant to behold and unremarkable. A straw hat shaded her face. Her cheeks were full and pink, her lashes thick, her figure slightly round so that in her entirety she was moderate and modest and impressed herself upon no one and nothing. The clan worked feverishly to push Elias to her so that one day as he stood having his shoes polished in the street, and he pondered his desire for a normal family life, the decision to wed trickled into his consciousness, like a tear falling not from emotion but involuntarily, as when chopping onions. He would wed young Nasreen and quiet the storm swirling about him, and he would raise a family and sail into the encroaching years and perhaps with heavenly favor might even develop some warm feelings for her. He would shed this period of prolonged mourning and return to the living, setting aside his love and his beloved, setting aside, too, his sword and unclenching his fist.

He imagined that Lila, too, would mourn deeply and bitterly but would then do as he was, and she would choose someone with whom to endure the journey, someone stable and anchored who would not dig about in her past, someone whose sights were set firmly in a future without waves or storms. A future as flat and placid as the Dead Sea.

It was in this very garden above which he now sat and from which he plucked the stem of rosemary he was crushing between his fingers that the wedding reception was held. Elias moved among his guests detached and lost, all the while managing to make them feel he was overjoyed at their presence. Telegrams sent by tea merchants from India, Britain, Ceylon, and Kenya brought warm wishes and blessings. A crate with all manner of baked goods and delicacies that carried a scent of roses arrived from the Turkish government official who had invited Elias to Turkey in 1947, a trip that split his life into before and after.

Someone—he cannot recall who—supplied him with quantities of liquor. His body demanded more and more whiskey to reach the distance and disconnection he craved, which would carry him to the heights so that he could look down at the wedding from above as though it were someone else’s ceremony.

Although nearly two years had passed since the time he was tortured by the Jordanians, and all his broken bones and wounds had healed, he felt a stabbing pain in his ribs like some throbbing memory from those days of torture and from that night with Lila at the Christmas ball. That was the last time he had seen her and the last time he had allowed himself to dream.

As the wedding spun around him, he lost sight of the bride, and the guests looked as though they were walking on cotton wool, floating and sinking into airy white clouds. He heard no sounds, smelled nothing of the food, and he saw everything as though he were looking through fog-covered glasses. For long moments, he felt like an uninvited guest, an impostor who had snuck in from the street. Still, he was on his feet, drinking yet another glass.

Nothing could have predicted what would happen at the height of the dancing—no dizziness, no trembling, no nausea. He recalled being carried out on Munir’s back, his body dangling like a burlap sack and his head banging against the lights strung over the garden. Munir carried him upstairs, laid him fully dressed on his bed, and left him in his crazed swoon. He slept for nineteen hours. Who had ever heard of such a thing, sleeping for nineteen hours? From time to time, he would try to open his eyes, and he would hear his mother’s thoughtful footsteps and her voice informing one and all that he needed his sleep. She lifted his head from the pillow and held it as he sipped water.

It was not until the afternoon that he tried to get up. He stood on his feet, then immediately collapsed; these were his first hours as a married man. He stripped off his clothes and let the hot water wash away his nuptials as he pondered the fact that he had no clear picture in his mind of what would probably be his one and only wedding. Only bits and pieces came to him, like his new father-in-law—concerned, overwrought—telling him he was handing over his daughter to him and that he was certain Elias would bring her happiness and would protect her and keep her safe. It sickened him to think he would bring grief to such a fair and decent man, that he would fail to keep half of the promise. He stood toweling himself dry and looking in the mirror, and he made the decision to gather his strength so as not to cause any sadness to this wife of his who still had the aura of being a new bride and the innocence to believe that only good would come her way.

Later, his body exhausted and his head feverish, he sat facing his mother across the kitchen table. She was leafing through a book written by a British botanist about the plants of the Land of Israel, graciously giving her son the feeling that nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

“What was it you gave me before?” he asked quietly so that the other members of the household would not hear.

“A few drops of muskroot oil diluted with water,” she said.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“It calms you down,” she told him. “It used to be used as a painkiller.”

“What kind of pains?”

“Pains,” she said plainly.

Elias wanted to hug her but just before doing so he stopped himself. He thought that a few dozen gallons of muskroot oil might very well help him pass the next few years.

“You two will be just fine,” Nadira said as she placed her hand on that of the new husband. “I have complete faith in you.”