True Arab Love

by Issa J. Boullata

  “Indeed, Jim. This is a short visit but we’ll make the most of it.”

  I drink my coffee. I look at you, I enjoy being with you, and in my heart I hope the moments in your company will keep rolling on and on, endlessly. Then I say, “Yes, let’s make the most of it. Are you ready to go out?”

  You disappear for a few moments into your bedroom then come out in a grey skirt, a white blouse, and a blue jacket, with a red-­and-­black flowered scarf around your neck. You are as elegant as can be.

  “I’m ready,” you say blithely. “Let’s go out.”

  Then we leave your apartment together.

  To be in Boston with Nadia—a poem, a dream.

  No, Nadia. That is not what happened. That is not what will happen, either. You know very well that what happened was totally different. Why should you or anyone suppose that I came to Boston to see you and that I actually did see you? You know how much I love you, Nadia. The idea of loving you inhabits my whole being, Nadia. It’s obsessing me day and night. I keep thinking of nothing and of no one but you, as though thinking about you will bring you to me in the flesh, and then I can see you, touch you, talk to you, listen to you, laugh with you, and feel as free as a bird, as I do when I am with you.

  No, that is not what happened, Nadia, and you know it. So what use is it to send you this letter and repeat to you what actually happened, when you and I know what really did happen? Yet, I dare to repeat to you what happened, only so it may sink down into your consciousness as I think it did not when it actually happened the first time. You are so carefree, Nadia. You are as lighthearted as a butterfly, and you keep going from one notion to another as a butterfly goes from one flower to another, without thought, without care, without any interest in what your movements do to the man who wishes you would stay with him for just one moment and hopes that perhaps then you would make him happy or, at least, he would feel happy.

  What really happened, Nadia, is that I did not come to see you in Boston. I only sent you an email message saying I was coming to Boston. As I told you, I was very busy preparing the lecture I’d be giving at Columbia, but the moment I learned that you were back in Boston, I left my lecture preparations to be done during the airplane flight from San Francisco to Boston. I thought I could do that, spend two days in Boston conducting further research, spend a couple of hours with you, and then go to New York and give my lecture. But, no. That is not what happened. That is not what was destined to happen. Why? Because you immediately sent me an email message in reply, saying you could not see me because you were not able to free yourself to see me.

  Not able to free yourself to see me?

  Look at me, freeing myself of all my important commitments in order to come to Boston to see you. And look at you, unable to free yourself to see me. And what is your excuse, pray? If it were death in the family, God forbid, I would understand. If it were a medical appointment with a strict physician who required six months’ notice for appointments, I would also understand. Even if it were a meeting with your publisher, who was considering your love poems and wanted to see some paintings that you planned to include in your publication, I would understand. But you said you could not see me because you were busy and overworked, because you were not in the mood on account of your concerns and worries over your investments that were not doing well on the stock market, because you were tired and needed rest. Well, all I needed was an hour or two with you, Nadia.

  Why don’t you say you don’t love me any more? That would be more honest and straightforward, and I could understand that. You once said, “Love is fragile, Jim.” You also said, “If the flame of love dies down, one should let it go, for there will be other flames.” I understand all this philosophy of ephemeral love, but my love is not like that. Mine is a true Arab love that clings and does not let go.

  What galls me is that you always said to me during our year-­long correspondence, “You are beautiful,” “You have a generous spirit,” “You are sweet,” “I think about you always,” and “You are and will always be in my heart.” And the American way you always ended your email messages, “With all my love, always.” Always? Always?! How long is “always” in your love dictionary? How stable and firm is to “be in your heart,” Nadia? How steadfast is your love? Am I your first love, your tenth, your hundredth? You constantly said that I was the first, that there was no one like me. You always ended your telephone calls by saying, “I love you.” And I believed you because I needed to believe you. I loved you and had come to accept you and accept my lot in life with you. You had become part of my life, even through emails, letters, and telephone calls, and my hope had been that we would soon agree to be together for ever.

  That is what happened, Nadia. You have broken my heart. I was in love with you, and the flame of our love was burning bright but you did not care to keep it bright by seeing me for one hour or two. To my Arab way of thinking, love is not fragile when two people work on it to keep it alive. Love is a splendid experience, Nadia. It is a wonderful miracle that gives human beings wings to be free, to be above all the cares of this world: physicians, investments, publishers, overwork, exhaustion, whatever. Love is the balm that soothes our concerns and worries, that allays our fears and uncertainties, that heals our wounds, that erases our loneliness in this world, that unites us and makes us able to face life, and teaches us to give and give and give. In love, we don’t lose when we give, nor do we gain when we take. In true love, there is joy in giving all the time. Taking is never thought of, the lover takes what the beloved freely gives as a recognition of their love.

  “Don’t come,” you said. “It is not a good idea. We can plan to see each other later, and I will send you another email message about this.”

  Thank you, Nadia, I appreciate the fact that you replied. But in this you are truly American, so I am writing to let you know that I am through with correspondence, email and airmail alike, I am through with telephone calls. Thanks, but no thanks, Nadia. I will keep you as an idea in my mind, a beautiful idea I will always cherish. I will always remain devoted to my beautiful idea of loving you.

  I will fly directly to New York and I will give my lecture. I will speak about your poetry, about your images and dreams, about your innovative ideas and vivid imagination. But that is all I will do, that is all I can do. Then I will return to San Francisco to carry on with my life, alone and in love with the beautiful idea of loving you. Crazy, perhaps? A Majnun Layla in America, perhaps? Some people may think so. Not I, for that is who I am. And you’ve always said you like who I am. I am your loving friend who will not see you but will keep his sanity.

  Jim

  A RETIRED GENTLEMAN

  After Margaret Lutfi got married, thirty years ago, William Shibli avoided being with her alone or being seen with her alone. He even refrained from sending her birthday cards or Christmas greetings, let alone gifts or flowers, as he had done in the past. He thought she was now happily married and he should suppress any feelings for her that he had in the past or still entertained. At social gatherings, where he occasionally saw her with Jack McConnell, her husband, he tried to make his conversation with her or him as brief as possible, and only when he could not escape it. He had established himself in the society of greater Montreal as a confirmed bachelor whose main interest was his successful children’s wear factory.

  William was now in his early seventies but, deep inside, he still felt he was only thirty. He often acted as if he were indeed thirty, for he was healthy and had retained his muscular frame, his elastic step, his erect posture, and his youthful outlook on life. He was still handsome and had a full head of hair only slightly greying. His friends knew him for his outgoing character and his coveted quality as a raconteur and a jolly good fellow. Now a rich man, living alone in a beautiful villa in Westmount with a garden, a manicured lawn, a swimming pool in the backyard, and an indoor one in the basement, he continued to be for them a man of desirable company, and they all liked to be invited to his well-�
�attended afternoon or evening parties.

  When he came to Canada as a landed immigrant from Lebanon in 1950, he was twenty years old. The only child of a humble family, he had completed his high school education a couple of years earlier and had left Rashayya, his hometown in the southeast of Lebanon, to work in Beirut. But he was not happy with his unpromising job there and decided to emigrate to Montreal, where many of his townspeople had established themselves in businesses he heard good things about.

  In Montreal, he worked as a sales manager for an older, distant relative of his who owned a women’s garment factory. A few years later, he felt he knew the ins and outs of the business and was confident enough to start his own. The Royal Bank of Canada gave him a loan, and he established his Children’s Clothing Company, later famously known in the market as CCC with its 250 workers and forty years of commercial success. His business benefited first from the post-­war baby boom and then from the provincial government’s policy of encouraging families of Quebec to have more children by offering family allowances to mothers.

  A multimillionaire at age sixty-­five, he decided in 1995 to retire and wanted to sell his business. He had several offers, but the best one was from the Jewish businessman who had been his main competitor. Some of his Arab friends in the Montreal clothing industry advised him against it, mainly due to their support for the Palestinians who, under Israeli occupation, were fighting for their liberation and a separate state of their own. He gave the matter some thought but finally decided to go ahead and ignore his friends’ advice. He argued that those friends themselves continued to trade with the thread factories in Montreal that were owned mostly by Jews, who virtually monopolized the thread that everyone in the industry needed. Besides, he believed that in Canada everyone should have equal opportunity.

  And so William Shibli became a retired gentleman. He had not gone back to Lebanon even once for a visit since he immigrated to Canada, but he often thought of his old country, especially as it was constantly in the news during the fifteen-­year uncivil war that started in 1975 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, as well as during the continuing fighting against Israeli domination in the south of the country. He contributed money to St. Nicholas’s Orthodox Church in Rashayya and to specific poor persons in his hometown parish; he also made donations to charitable groups assisting displaced families in Lebanon and to groups sponsoring and helping Lebanese refugees in Canada. He wanted to alleviate people’s misery and did his best to keep his good works anonymous.

  In his retirement, he spent a long time remembering his past, especially the first twenty years of his life in Lebanon, but also his later days in Canada, as he sat alone at home listening to music, watching the birds and enjoying the flowers in his garden, or looking at old photographs of his family and friends, many of whom, including his own parents, had departed this life.

  Occasionally he gave parties to his friends, and his servants liked the atmosphere of conviviality that these parties brought to his usually quiet home. He took up playing golf once a week and continued a routine of daily swimming. He also took a fancy to the recently developed internet and to correspondence with his friends by email. He never felt lonely, his memory and imagination being his inseparable companions when human company was not available.

  He remembered the olden days with Margaret back in Rashayya and the beautiful experiences of innocent, adolescent love they had had. He remembered the long walks he took with her in the fields, in the orchards and in the olive groves as well as their endless conversations about nothing. He remembered the games they played with other youths of Rashayya and the dabka dances they danced at weddings and on other festive occasions. He remembered the gnawing jealousy he felt when Margaret spoke with other young men, while he pretended not to care. He remembered the pain he felt when she played hard to get, when she did not want to go for a walk with him, and he especially remembered when she had once devastated him by going for a walk with another young man. Now he smiled—how innocent those experiences were! Yet how deeply genuine and true, and how beautiful. Oh yes, and he still remembered how sweet their first kiss was.

  He particularly remembered one spring day, when their relationship was at its best, William said, “Margaret, let’s go to Mount Hermon. That will be the longest walk we’ve ever taken together.”

  “It’s a long way, William.”

  “A few hours’ walk. We’ll take water and sandwiches with us. We can do it and it’ll be enjoyable.”

  “What will people say?” she cautioned.

  “Let them say what they want. They won’t see us, anyway.”

  She looked at him lovingly, then at Mount Hermon looming on the southern horizon of Rashayya, with its eternally snow-­clad top. It looked like the hoary head of an old man, a venerable hermit watching Rashayya and the docile countryside it towered over.

  She finally said, “All right, William. Let’s go.”

  It was on this walk that he told her he was leaving Rashayya. They had reached the foot of Mount Hermon and he suggested that they should rest before the ascent to the snowy summit. They chose a shady spot facing north toward Rashayya, which was bathed in haze at a distance.

  He asked, “You haven’t been to Beirut, have you, Margaret?”

  She said, “No. But I’d like to visit it one day.”

  He asked, “Would you like to live there with me?”

  “With you!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, I’m going to Beirut to work there.”

  She hesitated, then said, “No, I can’t go with you.” Then she added, with innocent youthful wisdom, “Unless we’re married.”

  He said, “You know I love you, Margaret, and I intend to marry you. I thought we were agreed on that. But since I have no certainty of income yet, I can’t marry you immediately.”

  “Oh, what an unlucky girl I am,” she sighed. Trying to suppress her tears, she finally added bravely, “Go to Beirut, William, but do keep in touch, you hear me? I’ll wait.”

  Margaret then grumbled she could not go uphill to the mountain top and wanted to return home.

  William still remembered how sad and how long that almost silent return home seemed.

  A couple of years later, William returned to Rashayya from Beirut, but only to tell Margaret he was emigrating to Canada. She cried and sobbed on his shoulder, and did not believe his promise that he would bring her over to Canada and marry her as soon as he was financially in a position to do so.

  After his departure, she began to make her own plans to go to Canada to be with him, and she succeeded in accompanying her uncle, who was also going as a landed immigrant. In Montreal, she went to McGill University to study History. William was working for a distant relative of his, and she continued to see him now and then, but he was usually too busy with his sales duties, and he was even busier later on, when he started his own children’s clothes factory. His gifts to her, his flowers, his birthday and Christmas cards, could not replace the moments of intimacy she craved but could not have.

  Meanwhile, Margaret began to develop a liking for Jack McConnell, an engineering student she had met at several social activities of the Students’ Society at McGill. She enjoyed being with him at the parties of various fraternities. And before you knew it, after they graduated, Margaret married Jack McConnell. Jack was immediately hired by Bombardier Inc., one of Quebec’s biggest engineering firms. He and Margaret led a happy married life.

  Thirty years on,William Shibli had been retired for more than five years and had adapted to his quiet life, pleasant pastimes, and occasional social functions. One of the pastimes that had really grown on him was his email correspondence with friends, and one of his most interesting email correspondents was a graduate student at McGill’s Faculty of Management who had obtained his email address from her professor and introduced herself as Lena McConnell—she was studying for a Master’s degree in business administration. The name rang a bell, but, more importantly her research project on the Mo
ntreal clothing industry intrigued William, and he determined to give her all the help she asked for. He had never met her and became increasingly interested in meeting her as the days went by and she showed a growing knowledge of the industry she was researching.

  At the beginning, her email messages were short and mostly in the form of questions sent once a week. She wanted first to know about “Mr. Shibli’s” experience: how he had started out, how his business had developed, and how he had thought he had achieved his success. She also wanted to learn about his competitors in the industry: what he had thought of them, and how he had dealt with them. Eventually, at her request, he arranged for her to visit several of his friends’ clothing factories.

  Her email messages became more frequent, arriving every other day, then almost daily, as she started to ask more knowledgeable, technical questions about supply and demand, purchases and sales, resources and raw materials, labour relations and wages, advertising and publicity, profits and losses.

  Then came questions about his past experience in the actual production of goods in his own children’s clothing factory. She asked about graphic artists and designers, sewing and cutting machines, pattern-­making, needlework, grading and quality control, packaging, division of labour and ranks of workers. She also asked about the impact of labour laws on the business, the evident lack of unionization among workers, the proportion of men to women in the workforce and their relative wages.

  Then she wanted to know (“if possible”) about his personal relations as a male employer with his workers of both genders. She said she had come to know that, in the Montreal clothing industry, most workers were women, with only a few men in each firm, usually working as sales managers, accountants, machine repairmen, shippers, and truck drivers.

  At that point in their correspondence, William Shibli decided to invite Lena to his home so that, as he told her, he might get to be personally acquainted with her and answer all her remaining questions before she wrote her thesis. He was not sure she would accept his invitation, and was surprised to note that she was more than eager to meet him.