“Thank you very much. You saved me from falling. I don’t know what happened to me.”
“The main thing is, how are you feeling now?”
“I’m fine, just a slight headache.”
“An earthquake of emotions usually leaves behind an aftershock, because of its internal laws,” replied Kwaku.
Leah smiled, and trembled slightly. As Kwaku took her back into his arms, she apologized to him for her aftershock, and then gently withdrew toward the check-out girl.
They both made their purchases, put them in plastic bags, and paid. Leah reached the door before him, and paused. She turned around and looked at him over her shoulder. She saw him smile, and his smile awoke her whole life, cleansing it of the suspicious thoughts that had surrounded her since childhood, when her mother Jennifer had impressed upon her: “Don’t mix with strangers, Leah. Keep away from black men, Arabs, and Muslims, my dear.”
He stretched out his hand, and Leah did not hesitate to take it. She was consciously taking him back, reproducing the moments she had lost when she’d fainted in his arms. At that moment, she felt her wall of fears collapse.
“My name’s Kwaku. Kwaku Wol.”
“I’m Leah, Leah Portman. An expressionist poet.”
“Wow, that’s exciting! I’m a guitar player. We could work together, then. We’d make a fabulous artistic duo.”
She invited him for a cup of coffee in the Café Rouge near the supermarket. He accepted, and they walked together, carrying their plastic shopping bags to the café like old friends. When he had finished his drink, she took his cup, turned it over, and said, “If there was Arabic coffee in your cup, I could read your fortune in it.”
Kwaku laughed and asked her, “Have you really learned to do that?”
“Yes. I was taught it by an old Palestinian woman I met during my visit to Jerusalem two years ago. It’s just an amusing way of uncovering what is in people’s hearts.”
Since that first meeting, Leah had opened up to Kwaku a long corridor that she strewed with her emotions, which Kwaku walked through contentedly to her heart. Every time they met, the corridor became wider, until it became a way of life that effaced all the hatred that Jennifer had inflicted on Leah’s childhood.
Leah really surprised herself. She had never imagined, it had never occurred to her, that she would make friends with a British man like Walid, who had sown Palestine in the cells of his body and made them into pools of mint, or that she would live a real love story, the only real one in her life, with a black man like Kwaku, whom she really loved. She never asked him about his origins or his religion, or about his one testicle (which didn’t bother her), or about any of the other details she had heard from him which were the subject of gossip but never quite added up. At least, that is what she several times said in front of Walid and Julie.
The guests didn’t stay long in the sitting room before the hostess invited everyone to make their way into the dining room. The six guests sat around the rectangular table in the middle of the room, three on each side of the table facing each other, while Ivana, as was her habit, sat at the head of the table, beside the window that looked out over the street, opposite John’s seat, which had remained empty since he died. She gazed at it for some time.
“Where are the wine glasses, Mother?” asked Julie. Ivana apologized for her unintentional lapse, and asked Julie to fetch seven glasses. Julie excused herself and went off into the kitchen, with Walid following her, pretending to be wanting to help her.
In the kitchen, she whispered some thoughts to him that she had quickly put together.
“Mother is planning something big, Walid.”
“What do you mean?” he asked in a whisper.
“It seems that it’s more than just selling a house.”
“Listen, darling, if it’s to do with your mother’s estate and her property, leave her to deal with them as she wishes,” he said forcefully, though still in a whisper.
“I’ve never thought about that at all, Walid,” she replied, then corrected herself with a measure of seriousness, as she put the seven ribbed glasses on a silver tray. “Oh, I remember . . .”
She hesitated a little before finishing her sentence, raising the tray between her hands and lifting her eyes toward him: “Mother is thinking of . . .”
Ivana’s voice interrupted her: “Come on, guys!” she called.
Julie picked up the tray and went out, leaving the rest of her sentence between her lips. Walid took a bottle of wine from a shelf in the bar and followed her.
Ivana welcomed her guests formally, and asked them to listen to her without interrupting. The lawyer nodded to show he understood. His wife Lynn smiled at an anticipated feast of words sufficient for gossip to fill all the remaining months of the year. Kwaku lowered his chin onto his clenched palm, watching expectantly as he waited for what Ivana would say. Julie’s green eyes were fixed on her mother’s lips, ready to pick up her words the moment they were formed. Walid contented himself with following the
