Beyond Love (Middle East Literature in Translation) by Hadiyya Hussein Page B

wine-colored carpet. In a corner, there was a small stove,
and a hallway led to the bathroom. "This is a gift," I said
to myself, for I had never lived in a better place than this.
    "I forgot to mention that Friday is your day off," she
added.
    I didn't wait until the end of the month, the time
limit that Umm Ayman had given me. I went ahead
and gathered all my belongings in a big box and put my
unfolded clothes in a bag. As I was packing, a leather wallet that was among Nadia's belongings fell out. I wanted
to browse through it but refrained. "I have no time," I thought. "I'll look at it later on," and I buried it in the
folds of my clothes.

    The next day I was sleeping in another bed, tossing
and turning, smelling the odors of other people who had
slept there before me, the bed creaking at every move. I
needed a few more nights to become used to the place.
    HE WAS PERHAPS THIRTY-FIVE, elegant and pale
skinned. His eyes didn't seem like those of a blind person; when you talked to him, you felt as though he were
looking at you. He had been born with only four senses,
and when he was six, his mother had placed him in a
school for the blind. There he grew up, studied, and
developed a fine taste for music, specializing in playing
the lute. He had graduated with honors from the conservatory and taught at the same institute. He spoke quietly,
but when he laughed, his laughter resounded through
the air. He asked many questions whenever he couldn't
understand something or when he wanted to know more
about something. He knew the layout of his room, and
he could walk to the living room without stumbling over
the furniture. His clothes were always clean and elegant.
That was Samih.
    As for my job, I started at four o'clock in the afternoon
after Samih returned from the school and took a small
rest. My job was to read the newspapers for him, do some
of his correspondence, and look after his library, which
consisted of literature and art books and some cassettes
and tapes. Samih was fond of poetry and interested in
contemporary poets. Every day I would read more than
one poem for him. I had needed some time to get used
to the way of reading that he felt most comfortable with. More than once he would stop me, asking me to give him some time to think so that he could absorb the meaning and capture the image in his mind. He would repeat to me that slow reading helps to charge the words with feeling and that poetry is more about feelings than about mere words. He recited many poems from memory for me, and I was amazed at his control of the language. He had a profound stillness in his voice, as though it came from the depths of history. Words flowed from between his lips as if they were living creatures. He was fond of poems by al-Sayyab, and his lute never left his sideio

    One day Samih played for me the poem "A Stranger by the Gulf" with a melody different from the one sung by Sa'doun Jaber. While he played, I imagined al-Sayyab's pain in his exile. My tears flowed silently, hot and burning. After Samih finished playing, he said that he had never found a poem that depicted exile as al-Sayyab did in this poem. I didn't say anything for fear of betraying my emotions, but he sensed the state I had fallen into.
    "You're crying."
    "I remembered my family."
    He put the lute aside and began talking about beautiful things hidden in our souls and how we fail to see them. "These feelings are like buried ore. We only need patience and a little drilling to find them, like those who toil for gold in the mines."
    While he was talking, I was wondering about the limits of his knowledge of archaeology and relics-he who never saw the outer face of life. Despite these limits,
I felt as if he were trying to open a window for me to
a world that I wasn't able to approach, the world of the
innermost feelings that we usually ignore or lose sight of
in life's clamor. But those feelings soon vanished at night,
when my sorrows