The Researcher

The last time he had seen her was in secondary school, back when the khaki cadet uniform buried every feminine line of her and made her look like a soldier in a besieged army that hadn't seen supplies in months. The shape of her body behind that green uniform was utterly neglected; it never caught his eye. He only walked behind her because she walked with Hanan, the girl he was in love with to the very limit of love, who sat enthroned in his heart, and whom he wanted to know it. But Hanan was never alone. The two went everywhere together, to their neighbouring houses, and if one fell ill the other fell ill too, so she wouldn't have to go to school alone. He always wished Hanan would be by herself, so that he could dare to declare his love, even from two metres behind.

As for her and Hanan, they knew perfectly well why he trailed them, and they laughed and made up jokes at his expense. He was no lion himself back then, but a scrawny thing; the cadet uniform made him look like an ant among the herds of khaki ants pouring out of the schools' mouths at the end of the day, and the fuzz on his upper lip, like a pale coat of paint brushed on, was a joke in itself.

He never managed to declare his love to Hanan back then, but several chances later came for the three of them to become acquaintances. The first was a march of support they were herded into to celebrate some victory, where he struck up a conversation with the two of them, a conversation he no longer remembers the subject of, meant only to pave the road to Hanan's heart so that he could tell her he loved her. He was just about to do it when he received a slap on the back of the neck that bent his head forward, and he turned around to find the cadet instructor yelling at him:

"Why aren't you chanting, you animal?"

Then he scolded the two girls too:

"And you two, why aren't you chanting?"

The three of them joined the roaring, chanting crowd, waving their fists and shouting with everyone else:

"With our souls, with our blood, we redeem you, O so-and-so..."

And the rest of that familiar circus that everyone knows.

After those occasions they could be said to be acquaintances who exchanged greetings, and little by little he began to walk part of the way with them, up to the edge of the security zone around their houses, where they would part, for fear of running into one of the men of either family, who would certainly, most assuredly, pull out his moustache.

Hanan married right after failing her final exams. As for her, one of the top students, he heard nothing of her throughout the university years, and never sought news of her or even thought to. But lately her name had begun to reach his ears: a university professor whose research was scoring remarkable scientific successes. He had started seeing her name above or below scientific articles in the peer-reviewed journals he had always hoped to publish in. And today he met her in a cafeteria in Beirut near the university, where she had been invited to a scientific conference he had also been invited to. When she greeted him and he returned the greeting, he was half convinced it was really her; he smiled, hinting that he wasn't sure who she was, and she reminded him. He held out his hand to shake hers, and she invited him for a cup of coffee, and he accepted gladly.

After the usual small talk between acquaintances who haven't seen each other for ages, he asked what was new in her life. She started telling him about her interests and quickly got absorbed, pulling some papers from her bag and laying out the results of her research. He, meanwhile, was spellbound by what her body had become; it seemed that once it shed the cadet uniform that had wrapped it, it had come out of its cocoon and turned into a beautiful butterfly in love with life. Her light hazel eyes struck him, each with a narrow black pupil at its centre; he felt as though they were two focal points gathering a tremendous positive energy, sending out two beams that wound around you and led you toward her with joy flooding you. Her curly light-chestnut hair, which turned almost blonde in the sunlight and which the ceiling fan played with, dropped a lock over her eye that she flung away with a sharp, impatient toss of her head.

As she spoke, his eye was caught by her full lips, full without any injections. They had been like that in secondary school too, but he had only ever had eyes for the lips of Sana the fool. He called Sana that offhandedly, then corrected himself: (I'm the fool, really, not Sana. I should have moved my gaze between them more, to have more choices. Where were Hanan's lips, the ones I dreamed of kissing, compared to these full lips? Her mouth was like a slit in her face; she had almost no lips. These are dates.)

His eyes slid down her plump, gazelle-like neck, from beneath the chin all the way to the neckline of her blouse, and he bowed his head a little so she wouldn't notice his Adam's apple rising and falling every time he swallowed, and it seemed to him he was starting to feel dizzy, so he went straight back to her face. And so that she wouldn't feel he wasn't interested in what she was saying, he would say every now and then:

"Aha... lovely... aha, wonderful... and so on."

His eyes could not resist the temptation of her chest and went back there again. If he could, he would have sent them through the opening of the yellow blouse that shackled her breasts, whose straining buttons suggested a volcano about to erupt, ready to snap them off and hurl them in every direction and leave what lay beneath to sing the anthem of freedom.

The researcher, absorbed in talking about her findings, seemed to want to tell him: (Look at you, who never gave me a second thought, and look where I am now and where you ended up. I was invited to lecture at the conference and you were invited to listen and learn from my experience. Students and specialists wait for my research, while Hanan, whom you were so crazy about, has no job left but breeding offspring for a worthless man who made her a vessel for it, and made her regret the hour she got tied to him.) Her immersion in her achievements kept her from noticing the invasion her body was suffering at the hands of his ravenous eyes, which, whenever they could not penetrate any further, let loose an imagination that nothing stands in the way of, to go in there instead.

The researcher's talk went on and on, which gave him the chance to stare at every detail he wanted to stare at, things he would have been ashamed to do had she been paying attention. When she glanced at her watch and gasped that she was late for her lecture, he had already carried out a complete topographical survey of her front terrain, and then hurriedly did the same with her rear as she hastened toward the café door. And after all this he could not help wanting her, and thought: (Surely every man at this conference does this survey when she stands at the podium explaining her lecture.) And he wondered: (What do her students focus on when she lectures them? The blackboard, or her chest that shakes whenever she moves despite all the restraints she has bound it with?)

She did not leave his mind all day. His friends, whom he met that evening at a café on Hamra Street, noticed he was absent-minded and began to tease him, and the usual accusation against an absent-minded man in our part of the world is love. But he answered only with silence and a few lukewarm smiles. At night she would not leave his imagination, and whenever sleep was about to overtake him, those straining buttons of her yellow blouse leapt up in his mind, until the herds of his instincts could hear them ripping and slamming against the walls, leaving marks that told of the force of the impact. He would close his eyes to give his imagination room to run the reel of images he longed to watch. After failing to sleep time after time, drowsiness declared a triple divorce from his eyes that night, surrendering them to insomnia, with which he had been fighting a fierce battle, and insomnia welcomed its two victims and began amusing itself with them with its usual sadism.

He got up, made himself a glass of tea and went out onto the balcony, drank it there and smoked five cigarettes, contemplating the view from the room booked for him in the three-star hotel that suited his station, while she now slept deeply behind her window overlooking the sea in the five-star hotel. (Could she be thinking of me now as I'm thinking of her? he wondered, then added: Impossible. She is in love with her research, she talks about it the way one talks about a lover. But why did she seem happy when she invited me for that cup of coffee?) He kept asking himself questions that led to despair, and answering them with answers that led to hope.

The next day he woke late, insomnia having battered his eyes until morning, and could not reach the university in time for the seminar on his specialty, so he went straight to the cafeteria where she spent her breaks. When she appeared at the café door in her black suit, a black skirt and a jacket over a white blouse ruffled at the top whose buttons were no less strained than those of the yellow blouse, he raised his hand so she'd notice him and called:

"Doctor!"

When she turned to him, a smile spread across her face and she came toward him, and he said as he shook her hand:

"Today I'm inviting you for a cup of coffee."

She sat in the chair opposite him with pleasure, and he ordered her coffee the way she liked it, with a slice of cake. He wanted to ask her a number of questions so as to know her better; it had begun to trouble him whether she was attached or not. He looked at her fingers, and they were free of rings, so she was neither engaged nor married. Wonderful, but it meant nothing; she might be in a relationship, and there was no need for rings for that. And as the day before, he expressed his admiration for her research:

"Aha... wonderful... aha, lovely..."

But he was surveying her topographically as he had the day before. Her chest today was on the point of escape too, and he noticed that it shook slightly in rhythm with her steps as she came toward him, a movement that set every cauldron of desire boiling inside him. He wanted to tell her something important, and waited for her to stop talking so that he could raise some subject through which to find out whether she loved anyone, hoping the answer was no. And he thought: are all the men in the world fools, that no one loves her? Then he answered his own question: impossible, at least ten men must be in love with this woman, but is there one among them she is in love with? Not knowing the answer to that question was what tormented him, and if it turned out to be true, he was sure to be crushed and suffer a long spell of depression, for he felt he loved her, and wished he could rise, embrace her and press his lips to hers in a kiss that would last forever.

Once again she suddenly stood up with a gasp, announcing she was late for her lecture, apologised and rushed off. He watched her from behind and admired her walk in high heels.

That evening, in the café on Hamra Street, he confessed to his friends that he was in love, and showed them several photos he had secretly taken on his phone while sitting with her, and each of them began praising her as he pleased. When one of them crossed the red line and expressed admiration for some details of her body in a not-quite-decent tone, making certain suggestive gestures, it enraged him, and he brought his fist down on the table so hard that a glass and the ashtray fell and shattered on the café's tiles, the waiter rushing to gather the pieces and everyone turning to look at him. He shouted at the friend, staring into his eyes with a piercing look the friend felt almost came out through the back of his head, telling him to shut up, and the friend, who had overstepped the bounds of decency, apologised. Then he left the place without saying goodbye, regretting that he had shown them his beloved's picture.

At night he clearly felt jealousy; that man who had overstepped his bounds would not leave his mind. He regretted not having landed a punch that would have knocked out his teeth in front of him, and whenever he was about to fall asleep, he remembered how that scoundrel had moved his fingers, suggesting an act he couldn't even bear to imagine, and he would get up, smoke, and go back to trying to sleep, and another sleepless night passed.

The next day he was at the café again, full of hope that she would come, and she did. She sat opposite him, still under the spell of the applause that had thundered in the hall in admiration of her findings, and launched into the new details of her research, and did not stop until she looked at her watch and gasped that she was late for her lecture, apologised and left, as every time.

Every one of his attempts to make the doctor fall silent so he could tell her the important thing he wanted to say before the conference ended failed, and then he would go back to a foreign country and she to Damascus, where they might never meet again. On the last day, after she had begun to talk and he realised she would never stop, he decided to settle the matter. He suddenly rose and stretched his body across the table, and found himself clamping his hand over her mouth and saying, before she could grasp what had happened:

"I'm so sorry, but there's something important I have to tell you, and I can't leave before you know it."

She was stunned. He took his hand off her mouth and she told him to say what he wanted to say. He said:

"I love you. I love you."

And he breathed a sigh of relief, while the doctor said nothing. She only felt a force wrench open the locked door of her heart, and inside it music broke out, a music stronger than all her scientific achievements.