7
On New Year’s Day Sami came by, unannounced. His hair was shortly cropped, about as short as his beard. He was wearing a parka, beat-up jeans tucked into heavy boots, and a neatly ironed bright blue shirt.
He followed me into the living room and sat down on the couch. He opened the bottle of wine that he had brought and we watched a movie on TV.
Sami had been born in Beirut during its civil war. Albert, Sami’s father, was Swiss, the son of Italians who later became French. He was the manager of a bank in Beirut. Shortly after Sami’s birth they were relocated to Paris and French became Sami’s real mother tongue. When he was thirteen, the family moved to Frankfurt. When he spoke Arabic, he always had to rely on French words to fill in the gaps. Beirut he only knew from short trips, images in the papers, and his mother’s long phone calls with Lebanese relatives that always ended in her crying.
Sami had an older brother, Paul, from his father’s first marriage. Albert’s second wife, Sami’s mother, treated Paul and Sami the same. Her favorite child was her youngest, born after their arrival in Frankfurt, whom she had named Leyla. Neither Sami nor Paul were jealous of Leyla. They both loved her sincerely and boundlessly. When Paul graduated from high school, Albert decided that it would be better for Paul to study economics in the United States. So Paul went to California. Sami had spent every summer with his older brother and soon moved in with him in the States in order to get his high school degree there. In his new school none of his classmates could figure out why he had both a hard German accent and an Arabic name. He was supposed to return to Germany, but didn’t because he fell in love.
A few weeks after arriving in the States, Sami met Neda. She was fourteen, had long, black hair, almond-shaped eyes, slender ankles, and, to Sami, she was unreachable. They became friends and sometimes went to dinner or to the movies, but Sami wasn’t even allowed to hold her hand. Neda fell in love with Paul, who didn’t much care for her, and besides, he would never have betrayed Sami. Sami and Neda remained friends. Sami finished high school and went off to college in a different city in California.
Two years passed and on one warm spring day when the campus was fragrant with lilac they happened to see each other again. Neda wore her hair down and—inevitably—a romance ensued. Except that Neda was from a traditional family. Her parents expected her to marry the older Persian doctor who had been chosen for her. Sami supposedly had a lot of women and supposedly he was looking for Neda in every single one of them.
When I fell in love with Sami, Neda had been married for a month and Sami had just returned to Germany to get his master’s degree. I had worked up the courage to talk to him at a bar. He had sat with a friend two tables down and hadn’t even looked at me. I was insanely bored that night. I was there with a woman who crushed my hand and had got her Ph.D. in gender studies. I had known about Neda from the very beginning and I also knew that Sami would return to California in two years to get his Ph.D. We stayed together for those two years and I loved Sami in a way that I had never loved anybody before, and he loved the memory of Neda.
I had asked him if he compared me to Neda. It was a lazy Sunday morning, the bedroom draped in a wan gray light. We were lying on the bed. He was reading the Sunday paper, I was reading a dictionary. Now and then I read a word out loud and he corrected my Arabic pronunciation. Sami said that he didn’t think much of comparisons, and anyway, Neda and I were too different. I wanted to know what he meant. He explained that I was strong and independent. That I didn’t really need him. That Neda was fragile. He had fallen in love with her the very first day, and when he saw how she suffered it broke his heart. Crocodile tears, I said. She left you. I didn’t have the energy to stop her, Sami said. Did he compare our bodies, did he think of Neda when he was lying in bed next to me? Or when he was making love to me, did he think of her then? Sami got up and left the room. He didn’t even slam a door. He left, quiet and determined. But if somebody tells you that he loves another woman and if she happens to love him as well, there’s no use in going on talking, especially if you love him.
I had searched the Internet for photos of Neda and finally found one on a social network. Neda wasn’t particularly pretty and what she had written on her page wasn’t particularly smart. For a while I had her picture up next to my mirror and compared our faces in the morning, afternoon, and at night. I wanted to understand why he loved her and not me.
Sami had fallen asleep during the movie. When the credits rolled I placed a blanket over him and turned the TV off. He woke up.
“I’m going to go home now.”
“You can stay.”
With great effort he propped himself up: “No, I’m going to drive now.”
“You can’t drive. You’ve had too much to drink. Sleep here.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I’ll wake you up tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Sami turned toward the back of the sofa and went back to sleep.