Samah Shahadeh
361 Words
Samah Shahadeh
I asked Fawaz what Uroub had said to him. He grinned so wide I could see all his white teeth and his pink gums below his mustache, too. “You know fortune-tellers are full of lies.”
I had seen that grin once before, about thirty years earlier, and at the time it stirred up in me many unanswered questions. He had come back from Paris missing me tremendously; he tore off my clothes the moment he arrived. He made love to me with the vigor and fire of a young man, after having been away from me for ten days. When he was finished, he got up and walked to the bathroom and I could see two long scratches down his back. When I asked him about them, he smiled, and I could see his teeth and his gums, which were much healthier and pinker back then. He told me that the Turkish masseur from the hotel fitness center was extremely thorough and scrubbed him with loofah and pumice.
That same grin that had been etched in my memory thirty years ago reappeared when I asked him what Uroub had said to him.
He had spent quite some time alone with her and Sari in his office before coming back to join his guests at the party.
It was possible she said something to him worth being concerned about.
“And what lies did she tell you, exactly?” I asked.
“She said I was going to die at the hands of a thirty-year-old man.”
I was startled. “We should look to God to know our future, not to her. How dare she?”
He smiled. “I told you it was a bunch of lies.”
I grumbled. “But I think she got to the truth about your astrological sign. Haven’t I told you before that you’re more like a Leo than a Cancer?”
He answered with a single word: “Maybe.”
I asked Sari what Uroub had said to Fawaz and he told me he hadn’t been able to hear her, because he was too busy taking care of party matters and the needs of the guests that night.
Sari was the one person who was never too busy for things having to do with the Basha.
- Writer
