I Think of You: Stories by Ahdaf Soueif Read Free Book Online

magic. Why? They had still been together. She shook her head. Her expression too was different. The open, expectant look was gone. Instead there was—what? Repose? Something that people took for serenity. But she knew. She knew it was frail as an eggshell. She shook her head again and looked around. The shower curtains and matching bits and pieces had been bought in Beirut. Such a tight budget. And onion soup: her first taste of soupe à l’oignon gratinée eaten with melba toast in the Hotel Martinez at one o’clock in the morning as they’d planned their shopping list for the next day. She had loved it. The thin strands of the gratinée stretching as she pulled the spoon away from the dish, the melba toast crisply cutting through them. Could it all come back again? she wondered. She stroked her pearls.
    She put her hand out to the mirror. She lightly traced the outline of her face with her finger. But the mirror was a wall between herself and the warm flesh behind it. She could not feel the contours of her face: the nose marked no rise, the lipsno difference in texture. And it was cold. Her finger still on the mirror, it came to her that that was an apt metaphor for her relationship with him. She could see him, sense his contours and his warmth, but whenever she made a move to touch him, there would be a smooth, consistent surface. It was transparent, but it was unbreakable. At times she had felt he put it there on purpose and she had been furiously resentful. At others it had seemed that he was trapped behind it and was looking to her to set him free. She stood very still. Twice in the year she had lived in this flat she had locked herself in here: squeezing herself into the corner behind the door and crying till she could not breathe. Twice he had not come looking for her, and when she had finally crept out, exhausted, she had found him comfortable within his cloud of blue smoke in the living room, reading, with Bob Dylan on the record player. The bad times seemed to have been a succession of bathrooms. Hotel bathrooms all over the world had seen her locked in, head over the bowl, crying, or simply sitting on the tiled floor reading through the night while he slept alone, unknowing, in large double beds that mocked her.
    She turned and walked back through the corridor to the living room. The cane-backed sofa and armchairs sat quietly in the dark. She crossed over to the sofa and sat down, feeling again the softness of the down-filled green-velvet-covered cushions. She examined them closely. The feathers were still escaping from the seams. Years ago, she had thought, In a couple of years all the feathers will have gone! But here shewas, six years later, and they were still there and still escaping. She looked around. The books were all in place: economics and electronics to the left, art and literature to the right, and in the middle, history. The paperbacks were in the smaller bookcase built into the wall. On its lowest shelf were the records. There were far more albums there now than before. And the music center was new too. The old, battered record player had ended up with her. Together with a few of the old records.
    She lifted her eyes to the wall above the music center. Her portrait had gone. Painted when she was twenty-one and given to them both as a wedding present. He had vowed he would always keep it, and when he had a study of his own he would hang it there. Now it hung in her parents’ home, in her father’s study. In its place was an old Syrian tapestry. It showed the Arab knight and poet Antar on horseback, and his beloved cousin Abla in a litter on a camel’s back. Abla had been on a journey and Antar was proudly escorting her back to their settlement. His horse pranced, tail swishing and neck arched high, and Abla peeped coyly out to smile at him from behind the canopies of her litter. On one side were inscribed the verses:
And I remembered you
When battle raged
And as lance and scimitar
Raced for