Ghada Samman

Your face speaks to me of vagrancy once again. It brings with it the tang of rainfall on beaches, tender with its sadness and warmth.

Your face. Anguish in the green of your eyes, the lusts of Rome behind your stern features. How long will the beloved curse follow me ? When will you no longer appear in the gloom of my room when I put out the light to go to sleep? For it is then that your strange laugh, which smells of your cigarette smoke, comes to me and then I long to dissolve in its scent, disintegrate like a cloud that nobody regrets.

Midnight. The comic programme on TV has just finished, and the innocent, unforced laughter of my grandfather and young brothers and sisters has come to an end. I gaze at him, laughing among the children, the expression on his face as naive as theirs in spite of the traces left by the slow, forceful gliding of the vipers of Time. I am deeply fond of him: I long to bring back to his lips the smile that was buried with the body of his only daughter, my mother.

He, too, watches me, with contentment in his eyes as I sit there beside my fiance, Kamal; his glance steals to my hand lying lifeless in that of Kamal. Lying there only so as to bring a smile to that dear face at any cost.

My weary, broken-down grandfather never once complained of me and my brothers and sisters. Not once did he show any sign of irrita¬tion from the day my father left to go to a distant country with a woman who was said to be very beautiful; he left my sick mother behind to die soon after.

In spite of his annoyance at my passion for singing, my grandfather never once tried to stand in my way, though he could not conceal his pleasure the day Kamal, a well-to-do engineer, offered me his heart and fortune. Will I have the strength to go through with it? Wearing, for his sake, the mask of an innocent girl? Will I have the strength to go on for the sake of my grandfather's smile?

Your face is a dearly-loved tale of vagrancy; it lures me towards itself, it draws the lost gypsy within me. In your laughter I hear the ring of golden anchor-chains when a vessel strikes landfall. Your arms are my haven, and how can I escape? Night imposes its routine. My grandfather and my brothers and sisters have retired to their rooms; my fiance has left and everyone of my masks has fallen away. I lie in bed and suffer my nightly agony.

I plunge my face under the pillow in search of sleep, for it might be lurking there, but I only find your face - so near.. yet so far.

I open my eyes and contemplate the curtains. Sleep might be hiding there. My mind searches behind them. . behind the picture.. behind the dressing-table. . with my eyelashes. I shut out the faint beam of light that steals in through the small window and casts a shadow of bitter reproach over everything - over the image of your face which I see in all things.

It is a procession of bees that I watch in my room-- images merging one with the other in my head, thrown up into it by my sleeplessness. . a score of incidents, a score of scenes --- your face, adored in spite of everything that has happened. . yes, in spite of everything. I feel you waking up within my veins as you wake up every night to become one with me, your smile on my lips and the smoke from your cigarette coming out of my mouth.

Those faces, angry vindictive faces, sad faces that scream at me, others that have not yet learnt how to scream. I curse the hallucinations of insomnia. I curse the city of fears it awakens in my head, this weary life of mine torn into shreds of memories. . broken up into scattered whirlpools. .

There's nothing left for me but to remember.. re-live.

The sea lay indolent, glistening, naked and bored, heavy with the rays of the sun on her. You were so considerate, so charming that I quite forgot it was our very first meeting: you, the great composer who could make the city laugh and weep, and I, the young girl who longed to be asked to sing one of your songs.

"This is how I love the sea," I said. "Solid and naked, lazy and bored, and not shrouded in the masked veiling of moonlight. Groaning under the weight of the sun on her bosom, the sun that she loves so much."

Excerpt from: Street Walker, by Ghada Samman. Arabic Short Stories, 1945-1965. Edited by Mahmoud Manzalaoui. The American University in Cairo Press, 1985. pp 317-319.