experienced. It was longing—“longing” is a better word than “desire”: it carries its quality of reaching but not attaining, of yearning, of a physical pull that is intense and yet melancholy, always already a little sorrowful, self-knowing, in some wise passionate and in some measure resigned. Desire suggests a burning, fervid, unreflective, something that wants, above all, satisfaction. And what you have to see about my Shahids is that always, at any moment—even when I briefly allowed myself to believe otherwise; even, in that one, precious instance, when I held one of them in my arms—I always knew that my desire could not be satisfied, that it would never be satisfied; but that I was still close enough to hold on, intermittently, to the fantasy of its satisfaction, and that this, this was enough to keep it, for so very long, alive.
So the fact is that I longed to touch his face—to have that contact, to feel his skin against my fingertips—but I also fully understood and accepted that it was not, in that visit, in the cards. (Although, how not to wish that I were different? What would the undergraduates have seen, if I’d dared to do it? What would they have cared, of two dull old people huddled in a corner? And what might have unfolded, and how might it have altered fate’s course, if I’d had the temerity simply to stretch my hand out across the table, to press it gently to his sweet, slightly pouchy cheek?)
Skandar had with him a plastic shopping bag that he placed awkwardly on the table between his Turkish coffee and my urinously bright mint tea.
“I’m having to finish the packing alone,” he said, with his most apologetic look. “I’m not very good at it. At first I think we must simply keep everything, but when I realize how much trouble it is to pack things, to send them, then I say we must throw everything away. It’s much better Sirena’s job, this kind of thing.” I could tell that he’d never before been left behind in this way.
“So then I thought of you,” he went on, “who’ve been such a friend to us all. I thought perhaps you might like to have one or two things that it doesn’t make sense for us to take back.” He pushed the bag across the table toward me, almost knocking my tea. I reached to take it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “No need to look at it here. Because whatever you don’t want to keep, you can just get rid of it.”
I laughed.
“No, no—I’m not saying this is a bag full of garbage; quite the opposite. But these are things that no matter what, I won’t take home.”
We didn’t stay long in the Algiers—he was flying to DC early for meetings, and still had a lot to take care of—and in the brief time we spent together the only thing he said to acknowledge what had happened between us was this: “Live, my dear Nora. Satisfy your hunger. There’s food all around you, you know.”
“What kind of food, I’d like to know?”
“Ah”—he smiled—“you must taste all things, actually to know if you like them.”
And what good is that, I wanted to ask, if the most delicious fruit is forbidden?
When we parted on the sidewalk, he put his arms around me in a close embrace—I was enfolded—and he held me to him several good beats longer than form required. It was the sort of hug in which no passerby would have seen anything upon which to comment, and yet which I knew—or could claim to know—meant more than it appeared to. It was to be my sustenance for a long time to come. He was shy and averted his eyes, afterward, and he shuffled off down the pavement in the direction of his house. From behind, he looked small and his gait seemed an old man’s, a short man’s, and I was briefly, in a new way, touched by him yet again.
As for the bag, which would play so intently upon my imagination in the months—what am I talking about? In the years!—that followed: What was in the bag? I wish I were properly able to tell you. I opened it and glanced in at its contents under the light of a storefront at the corner of Brattle and Church streets. I could see that it contained a copy of his most recent book in English—a gift which, I imagined, he’d inscribed to me; and