and no action,” I said, to say something. That was the closest she and I came to discussing my evening wanderings with her husband.
She was right, though: he was the talker. I told him that having him take me home was like listening to Scheherazade, but he laughed and said I had it backward, then, that I should be telling him the stories—“Where I come from,” he said, “it’s the woman who is the storyteller. The man is her prisoner.”
In my urge to read the runes at every moment, to find hidden import in everything, I took this to mean, in a flirtatious way, that he was offering to be my prisoner. I took it to mean he was attracted to me. Oh, come on, I took all those walks to mean that he was. Not straight away, not especially. But over time—the amount of time he gave to me, the attention—and who was I?—and that he gave it while his wife and son were at home, and his bed was calling. I took all this to have meaning.
What did we talk about? Sirena was right: he loved to talk; and he might have seemed a bore, but he was a wonderful speaker. Even when he told me a story two or three times, I was rapt.
On the first night of true walking, when we circled my block four times, he told me about his maternal grandmother’s village house in the mountains, and staying there when he was small, a boy of five or six, and how he was quite sure he’d seen a jaguar or a panther in the night garden, even though she’d insisted to him over breakfast and again at lunch that there were no such animals in Lebanon.
His big brothers scoffed and said he’d either dreamed it or seen the neighbor’s tabby, inflating it in his tiny mind; but in the subsequent days there were two nocturnal sheep killings higher up the mountain, and everyone in his family changed their tune.
Skandar, like every good storyteller, allowed for the possibility of ghosts and sorcery. “I always assumed,” he said, “that it was someone’s dark spirit, his avatar.”
And then he went on to explain about the local bey’s son, a boy in his late teens at that time, handsome as a god but cursed by rage, who’d beaten an old donkey so badly it had to be shot, that same summer. It was a famous incident in the village, for which the boy received no known punishment, and Skandar said he’d always wondered if the cold black cat slinking across the yard was not this boy’s black soul, or the devil who’d claimed it. And then, with a smile, and lighting another cigarette—the last of that first long walk—he said, “Of course, that black soul would have its moment, and its comeuppance, too, over ten years later, after the war began.”
“How so?” I was like a child, panting for the next chapter.
“Ahmad Akil Abbas,” he said. “By 1975, he was like all of us, that much older, his soul that much darker. A lot of drinking, drugs, a lot of so-called courage. And in ’77, maybe ’78, he organized a local militia—a band of bandits—that murdered Christian neighbors in their beds. Thank God my grandmother was already dead by then—hers was a mixed marriage, a true love match, and this sectarian warring would have destroyed her. The Khourys next door to her had their throats slit and their hands cut off. Their three children had gone to Buffalo, New York, and were too frightened to come back even to bury them; so the other Christian families in the village buried them instead. There weren’t many, already then. Those who could leave, left. But for Ahmad Abbas, when you live this way you also die this way, even if you’re as beautiful as a god, and not long after the Khourys, Ahmad was also murdered and left in the alley behind his father’s house, next to his precious motorcycle. He’d been fed his own testicles. And maybe that, too, was the work of a black cat. Maybe it was the spirit of Leyla Khoury herself. She was stout and placid with a gurgling laugh that came out of her like water from a pump, slowly and then faster, and she was a fantastic cook. Maybe it would have occurred to her to serve him his testicles for his last supper. Maybe she had the last laugh.”