Sonallah Ibrahim - That Smell and Notes From Prison

This is how it always was. The first time I kissed her, she acted shy. I was sitting next to her and the light was falling on her cheek and we had stopped talking. I rested my head on her shoulder and she didn’t object. I kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips. When we’d gathered a little more courage, she gripped my lower lip and bit down on it hard. It hurt. I wanted to feel her soft lip in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough of it. If I could have held her in my arms all day, I would have. I felt the heat in her face, in her thighs. Every time after that I would make her stand up naked and contemplate her thighs. They were beautiful and soft and dark. I would ask her to bare her forearms so I could kiss them and feel them against my body. But she hesitated. We would lie pressed together in the dark to forget the world, to forget everything. We thought of nothing, feared nothing, and when my cheek brushed her cheek, when our noses touched, when our heads rested against each other, when our eyes stared at the same place on the ceiling, then nothing else had any importance. Soon I would move my head and my lips would sneak over to her lips. We shared delicate kisses and rough kisses and then she would pull her head back and sigh. The first time she held me violently and said, Where were you all this time? Another time she said, Lover. I was quiet. The word echoed in my ear for the first time. I didn’t trust myself. But soon she turned away and said, I want to sleep. I lay on my back, eyes up on the ceiling, hoping she would turn and embrace me but soon I felt her regular breathing, the contented and peaceful breathing of someone sleeping. So I turned and raised myself up to look at her. Her head rested on her arm while she slept. Her hair was spread across her neck and her other arm rested on her side. I let my look linger all over her body, then dropped back on the bed.

She stretched out next to me and laid her cheek on my hand, offering me her face lit by a little moonlight. She said, I’ll do the talking. She talked for a long time, then stopped. I told her I was worn out, that I had always wanted her. I pulled her toward me but she pulled away. I asked her to bare her forearm and she did. I kissed her forearm and her shoulder in the moonlight but soon she said, It’s cold, and she covered them. Then she stretched out on her back. She must have been thinking the same thing I was thinking. Something was missing, something was broken. She said, I want to sleep. I pulled her toward me and kissed her. My lips wandered from cheek to ear, kissing her there until she shivered and raised her eyes to mine and smiled and said, And this, where did you learn this?

How could she remember while I had forgotten? When my lips climbed up her thigh and I kissed her there for the first time and she looked at me with a mixture of pleasure and surprise and shyness, she said, Where did you learn this?

I reached my hand toward her chest but she pushed it away and said, No. I rolled away, then stretched out beside her. I waited for her to turn and embrace me but she didn’t. I was awake. I felt the pain between my legs. I got up and went to the bathroom. I got rid of my desire, then came back and stretched out beside her. I slept and woke and slept again and when I opened my eyes it was morning and she had already put her clothes on. I’m leaving now, she said. When will I see you? I asked. I’ll come by, she said. I stayed there stretched out on the bed, then finally got up and washed. I put some powdered soap in a basin of water and stirred it until the foam rose, then put my dirty clothes in. My sister and her fiancé came by. I put my clothes on and we went out and I bought the morning papers. In the entrance to the building we met a friend of my sister and her uncle and we went to a café. My sister’s fiancé said, We want to be happy for you. That will take time, I said. Why? he asked. Love isn’t easy, I said. He shrugged and said, Here’s my advice, love comes after marriage. The uncle said, I’ve been married five times. I left them and went to see Sami at his place. I was brought into the living room and waited for him a long time. A little girl came in whom I recognized as his daughter. She walked up to me. I felt uncomfortable. I needed to use the toilet and I broke wind and the little girl smelled it. Caca smell, she said. I pretended not to smell it. But again she said, Caca smell. So I started sniffing all around, saying, Where? until the smell went away. Finally I gave up on Sami and got up and left. The traffic was terrible. I went to the offices of the magazine but no one was there. A radio was playing loudly in the street — it was a song in English about children and I realized that Muhammed Fawzi’s new song was the same song. I got on the metro and the crowds were horrendous and I almost suffocated. I looked at the faces of tired women with eyeliner running down their faces. I went to Samia’s house and found them eating. Samia smiled when she saw me and said she had waited for me for a long time before starting to eat. Really? I almost said. I asked about her boy and she said he was sleeping. I felt myself smiling. Her smile was simple and sincere. I hadn’t thought that she was so simple and so graceful.

So what? She has her husband and her child and there’s no place for anyone else in her life and soon I’ll leave and that will be the end of everything.

Every now and then she sighed hotly and said, O Lord. I said to her, If Freud heard you, he would have something to say about that. Lots of things, she said. We finished eating and she stood up. She was wearing a light shirt with nothing under it and just beneath her armpit I saw the side of her breast where it bulged out from her chest. I was surprised it didn’t droop. It was milky white. I looked away and into her eyes, so frank and so straightforward. She went in to sleep and I slept too and when I woke up I looked for her in her room. Her bed was on the far side of the room and she was lying on her back with her head turned away from me, gazing at the wall opposite, with her son at her chest, still sleepy and looking around in confusion. Her leg was bare — it was milky white — and she quickly covered it. She got up and put on an orange skirt and we sat on the balcony and she said that her little boy liked me. I loved her easy, honest voice, her simple gestures. I told her that I felt like an old man. I hardly smiled or laughed. All the people I saw on the street or on the metro were unhappy, unsmiling. What was there to be happy about? We talked about books. She said she’d stopped reading a while ago, when her boy was born. I asked if she had read The Plague . I felt as though a lot rode on her answer but she said, No. I was about to tell her that I envied her simplicity and her grace. I told myself that I would say so when we said goodbye. I looked at my watch. I had to go. I stood up and so did she and I said to her in a low voice, You know, you’re really strange. She looked at me in surprise. Today, I finally figured you out, I said. She bent over her little boy and busied herself straightening his clothes and I couldn’t see her eyes very well. Her husband came home and I said goodbye to both of them. They accompanied me to the stairs. At the garden gate, I turned around. She was going back into her nice cool home and I watched her orange skirt disappear behind the door. I walked back to the apartment and saw a nice-looking girl walking next to the train rails as if she was having trouble with her shoes. I went into the building. The light was on in the wood-paneled room by the entrance and the door was open. I peeked in and saw my sister’s friend Husniyya. I went up to my room and my sister came. I said to her, Samia’s nice. Then I said, Is she happy with her husband? Of course, she said. I bet she doesn’t love him, I said. Impossible, she said. Where else will she find a man like that, as far as personality and position? And she said they had met before getting married.