Free The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi

did I know that I had to make my decision at that instant, or lose him?
    I didn’t want to lose him.
     
    The first time I saw him. I was with the Palestinian film director. He was in Paris for just a few days and we had agreed that we’d meet at a café in the Quartier latin known for its Arab clientele. He was with two other men at the next table. I heard something in Arabic about the situation in Lebanon. I could see his face; the two others had their backs to me. He was opposite me, talking somewhat angrily, and his eyes never left mine. As one of his friends stood to leave he recognized the Palestinian filmmaker. Greetings and congratulations all round, and they put the two tables together. He sat next to me, and from that point on, never left my side. He talked and laughed, as though a sudden happiness had taken him unawares. His bare arm brushed against mine. How many times did his bare arm brush against mine? “I’m sorry. I don’t usually behave like that, but something stronger than me made me move closer to you,” he told me later, when I was in his arms.
     
    He was forever reciting poetry. Whole poems that he’d learn by heart. He’d read them to me and I’d imagine he was writing them over again, for me alone.
    Was poetry one of the keys to my body?
    Poetry was there between us. He loved me through the poems of others. When he was traveling, he would phone me to give me the name of a collection and a poem. I would look for the poet, read the words, and know that he was with me.
    Pessoa, Cavafy, Char, Michaux; others I didn’t know. I became like him. I would learn the Arabic poems that I loved by heart and recite them for him, and only him.
    Was poetry always there between us?
    With him, I started writing my short poems once again, and it became an opening ritual for each of our encounters. He’d ask me about my words. In silence, I would offer him the poem and he would read as though discovering the dark side I concealed with frivolity and laughter. He would discover things that I didn’t dare reveal even to myself. In silence, he would fold the paper carefully and put it in his pocket.
    Was my body one of the keys to poetry?
     
    The first time I saw him. I was at a Book Fair in an Arab capital. I was filling in for a colleague who’d fallen ill at the last moment; the director had chosen her to represent the library. I went in her place, somewhat grudgingly. When a representative of the fair came to welcome the five people arriving from Paris, he was next to me. His questions gave off a magnetic force, under the mask of legitimate curiosity. A form of conversation without end. He opened up to me, and I to him. He told me how he’d seen me at the airport, and how he’d watched me from his seat on the plane. It was as though he knew me. I told him the same story: it was as though I knew him. Our encounters do not end, and the body is always the preamble. The body was the basis of our story.
    Every morning, the Thinker accompanies my nudity. It’s enough for me to look at myself naked in the mirror to remember his words about my body. About my breasts, my ass, my sex, my skin, my smell, my color.
    I recall his words and I shudder. I recall his words and his touch and his gaze and I shudder.
    I recall and I shudder, but I want to forget, to get on with my life.
     
    The Thinker used to ask me, “Do you know what it is I love about you?”
    I would give him a knowing look and I laughed.
    “No, it’s not what you think, even though I do love your dirty mind .”
    Laughing, he repeated the well-known English phrase.
    “I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just waiting for the answer.”
    “I love two things about you. Your free spirit and your Arabness.”
    “Never in my life would it have occurred to me that a free spirit and Arabness could be the height of sex appeal,” I replied, with a light-heartedness that tried to hide the pain racking my consciousness, as the words penetrated deep