A Woman Unaware She Is a Woman

Description

The great Syrian novelist says in a passage from this novel: “He went out into the street, stopped in front of the hotel door. Should he go right or left? He laughed to himself and said, ‘You rascal, you’ve spent your life on the left. Is it conceivable, after all this time, that you’d go right?!'” Before recounting the events of his story, he concludes: “A human being, a creature who proudly proclaims their existence, must learn two things: love and forgetting love, hatred and forgetting hatred, and then bear both.” This book contains the details of a rare and unusual love story between Nimer Saheb, the brilliant journalist and renowned writer nearing eighty-three, and Raifa Wajdan, a forty-two-year-old woman “neither a prostitute nor innocent of prostitution,” whom he met at the Turkish border, where he rescued her from the clutches of customs officers who wanted to confiscate her money. The story begins with Nimer Saheb, whose motto was “always to live on the edge of danger,” and who was on “He was absolutely certain that misfortunes come in droves, and their solution is always individual,” yet “on his first trip between Latakia and Suwaidiya, he had no idea, not even a thought, that a catastrophe awaited him, and that there was no point in trying to avoid it!”

“Fahim al-Laith,” who resides in the United States with his family, undertook this journey with his wife, whose purpose was to attend the memorial service for her late father, and his daughter, “Wajda,” who also wanted to pray for her grandfather. “Nimr came for a more difficult task: to trace and honor his family tree…” Little did he know that Suwaidiya, “the birthplace of his ancestors and forefathers, was neglected and lacked a hotel, as he “left it at the age of three and returned at the age of eighty-three.”

After a sweltering night spent in a tiny, cramped room—barely large enough for a bed and piles of cockroaches—at Khadija Khanum’s motel, following a stop at the beach in Suwaidiya, he visited his relatives from the Sahib family. He then set off for Antakya, staying overnight at its luxurious hotel. “How profound that night left its mark on him, and how strange its consequences for his life!” he thought, for it was there that he would meet Raifa, and their unusual love affair would begin, extending beyond a single night. “He doesn’t buy women’s bodies with money; he avoided this vile act as much as he could throughout his life. But at the age of eighty-three, fate, or rather destiny, would have it that he would meet Raifa by chance, without ever suspecting that she was a prostitute.” But things would begin with a scheme to transform her into his “business manager,” so that she could stay at his hotel. The relationship quickly transformed from playful to serious, from the taint of sex to the intimacy of companionship, from vulgar language to sweet conversation between two hearts!

But what is the price of yielding to this experience, and what will its end be? Will it be a “separation by necessity” due to the age difference and the frailty of the eighty-three-year-old’s body? We leave the rest for the reader to discover.