Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

Tarik had apologized and said, “I warned you. I told you it wasn’t your style.”

Tarik had suggested going to a different place, “somewhere a little cleaner,” but the lawyer insisted on staying. They sat in the corner, around a heavy wood table near the little square of a dance floor, which was still empty because it wasn’t yet ten, and started off the evening with two pints of Taybeh. Tarik said that Ha’sira, the Boat, was one of the strongholds of the young Jerusalem left-wing crowd, and that most of the patrons were students at the city’s art schools — Bezalel, Nissan Nativ, and Sam Spiegel. They sold Palestinian beer on principle.

“Arab students come here, too.” He said. “Not many, but they come.”

“Arab girls, too?” the lawyer remembered asking, and Tarik had nodded.

“Yeah, not a lot, but some,” Tarik said, turning his head toward the door and the young couple that had just entered.

“Looking for someone?” the lawyer asked, smiling at his friend.

“Not sure,” Tarik said, and it seemed to the lawyer like he was a little embarrassed by the question, since the two of them had never before discussed personal affairs. But personal affairs were all that mattered to the lawyer at this point and that was why he had called Tarik. He felt blind, or like a deaf man at a loud wedding, as the Arab saying goes, and he wanted to know what it was like for young Arabs these days, especially the girls, what had changed since his days in university. Even then he had felt that a new, accursed wind of sexual freedom was blowing through the campus. The lawyer never partook in any of that, had never slept with an Arab girl other than his wife, even though the university was seemingly beyond the reach of parental and societal restraints, a place where different rules applied and he could have done as he pleased. There was an unwritten rule on campus whereby what happened on campus stayed on campus, and as soon as school was over all was forgotten and returned to its earlier state.

The pub began to fill up and the lawyer got them each another beer and offered to buy them a round of fine whiskey, but the pub did not have anything that matched that definition. There were no single malts, no malt whiskey at all, and the two of them had to make do with Johnnie Walker Red.

After the whiskey the lawyer asked Tarik what he thought of marrying a girl who’d had previous sexual partners, and Tarik had responded with a shrug, “I don’t have any problem with it.”

“I used to think the same way,” the lawyer said.

“And then what happened?” Tarik asked.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what I think these days.”

“You know what,” Tarik said, draining his whiskey and seeming on the verge of a proclamation. “Not only do I not have a problem marrying a nonvirgin, I have a serious problem marrying a girl who is one.”

“What do you mean?” the lawyer asked, trying to smile encouragingly at Tarik.

“I want to marry an Arab girl who, for all I care, has fucked half the guys in the city. But only of her own free will. Someone who has used those Arab boys for her own means, slept with them and then dumped them. A wild girl, that’s what I want. That way I’ll know she picked me because she wanted me and not because it was the best of the choices she was offered or because I was the most socially acceptable option. I want to know that this girl chose me after rejecting all the other options.”

The lawyer, lying in Tarik’s bed now, deep under his comforter, didn’t attach much significance to what Tarik had said. He’d been able to say those things because there was nothing serious in the works, but he knew his parents would hang him by the balls if he did anything that tainted their honor. He remembered also that he had continued to drink whiskey while Tarik had made do with beer. At some point the pub had filled up entirely and everyone there seemed young and attractive to the lawyer. It was around then that his inhibitions drifted off entirely and he became convinced that he was as young and beautiful as they were, and with that knowledge he sauntered onto the dance floor. With all of his heart and soul the lawyer wanted to get a girl. Acting on information he’d amassed while watching television, he knew that the key was in the eyes, and with several long glances he told the girls around him exactly what he was after. On this night he would do what he had never before done. He would cheat on his wife. He’d take whichever woman fell for him to the most expensive hotel in the city. To the King David.

He looked at the women dancing nearby and got to thinking about how he’d find the perfect one, smart and beautiful and full of life, and already he began planning their lives together. He’d divorce his wife, and no one would say it was because she had an illicit affair. They’d say he was a creep, a skirt chaser, and they’d talk about how he had run off with a girl ten years younger than him. Yes, that’s what he would do, that would be respectable. And if she was the kind of young and bold Arab girl Tarik had talked about, all the better. A girl who’d fucked around, who’d used Arab men like socks, trying them on and tossing them aside. The important thing was that she not lie, he thought, that she be forthright.

None of the girls around him seemed like the type he was looking for and he waited for her to come through the door and for her to realize at first sight that he was the one, and for her to choose to come dance with him, to choose to get into bed with him, to choose to sleep with him, and he would be an amazing lover, using his trick — lying on top of her, or perhaps the other way around — recalling each and every check he had deposited that month, moving in and out of her as he worked out all of the bank charges, the VAT and the payments to the income tax authorities. And the next morning, when she told him he was the one and only, his friends would be stunned and jealous, especially his wife, the whore. He continued to look around at the girls, feeling he had found what he was looking for and then changing his mind, until he realized that his stares were not being well-received. He remembered now how his confidence had crumbled and how disgust and humiliation had taken its place and how his rooster dance had turned into a tremor in his knees. It was then that he felt his way to the bathroom to vomit his guts out.

The lawyer moved his head left and right and saw his pants and shirt on the chair in Tarik’s room, alongside the big futon. He jumped out of bed, clad only in his boxers, and his head spun. His leather attaché case was on the chair, too, and he opened it and looked for his phone while making sure not to let his eyes rest on the book or the rest of the evidence. The screen on the phone said that the time was eight in the morning and that he had missed twenty calls, all from his wife. The last one had been made just after two in the morning. The notion that she had been worried was comforting, but the comfort soon turned to fear when he wondered where the calls had been made from and whether she had gone back to her parents’ house. Maybe it wasn’t concern or remorse that had driven her to call but rather the urge to let him know that she had taken the kids and left, and that she just wanted to let him know that she did not want to see him again and that she thought he was a nothing, always had. Maybe she wanted to say that she had been an idiot, spending her best years with a creep like him, that he made her sick, or maybe she’d just hit him over the head with the truth, tell him about her true love, her unblemished lover, his support and devotion. Now that she held all the cards, she could tell him whatever she wanted. What a mistake he had made, the lawyer thought; he, the cold and calculating lawyer, had thrown half his net worth away in one moment of recklessness. By letting his guard down for one moment he had robbed himself of the chance to leave her penniless, to strip her of everything she had, to take away the children. All he had to do was wait one more day, until Sunday, when the Sharia courts opened, and file for divorce. His only hope was to get up and wait outside the Sharia courts and file for divorce before she made it to the civil court. But she had surely already consulted with her parents and family and was certainly at this very moment seated before some lowly lawyer from the Galilee with a crude accent and together they were, at this moment, wording her plea. Who knew what she might accuse him of? For a moment he really was curious about the nature of her accusations. Perhaps verbal violence, neglect of the children, oppressiveness toward her; perhaps even a charge of physical violence. The closet incident of last night would surely loom large in her allegations, along with jealousy, feverish suspicion, and baseless accusations.