Sacha kept his eyes closed, breathing, waiting for the agony of emotion to ebb and willing Ren to keep her hands to herself until he could get his racing heart under control. To his surprise, she did. Her hand was limp in his. His shoulders began to shake with the effort of keeping his weight off her. He had no idea what came next.
He made it to the bathroom bin without risking a look at her. His steps slowed as he made his way back over the polished floorboards and thick-pile rugs of what was supposed to be the worst room in this chalet, but was bigger than his apartment. He lifted his gaze to find her watching him. She propped herself up on one elbow and there was a frankness in her gaze that he hadn’t expected. She’d pulled on the shirt he’d tucked under the pillow that morning and the neckline gaped. When had the understandable attraction to her transformed into this unbearable tenderness?
His feet propelled him eagerly back to bed, where he tugged on his boxers and slipped under the covers. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘But if it’s “sorry” or “thanks”, then I’ll…’ Her smile brightened, and his words petered out.
‘I was just thinking the world would be a much better place if there were more Sacha Mourads in it,’ she said.
‘One wasn’t enough for you?’ he asked with a huff.
She laughed and her fingers wandered, up to his collarbone and down his tattooed arm. ‘This is a beautiful tree,’ she said, skimming the picture on his forearm and down to the bones of his wrists as she followed the roots.
‘It’s a cedar,’ he said. ‘A symbol of Lebanon. A bit… banal, you know? But I was only twenty when I got that one.’
She kept blessedly quiet after his confession, but her fingers continued on their curious path, tracing the patterns in the background of the tree. ‘Is that a hand? And an eye?’ He nodded, but didn’t volunteer an explanation for the Middle Eastern symbols of protection. A prickle on his skin was warning him that her frankness hid her inexorable charm that had a way of making him talk. She traced the two swords on his biceps.
‘I still like those,’ he admitted, ‘although my interest in ancient weapons did decline in my thirties.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve seen you pretty excited about swords just this week.’ It was impossible not to smile at her. ‘Are you a poet or a soldier, deep inside?’
His smile faded. ‘Neither.’
‘Why not both?’ She studied him and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
He couldn’t hold in the question. ‘What do you want, Ren? From me?’ He was afraid of the answer, afraid he’d want to give her whatever she asked, no matter the consequences for his life – and hers.
She sat up slowly, her gaze fixed on him. Her back was straight. He’d sensed this in her all along, but seeing it made his breath stall. She was a powerful woman.
‘That’s not the right question,’ she said.
‘You deserve happiness. You deserve love from your grandmother and healing and people who appreciate who you are without forcing you to be someone else. You deserve everything. And I don’t know what you think you’ve found in me, but… I don’t have what you deserve. My life, my family, my history are all I have and, Dieu seul sait, they are complicated enough. I don’t have anything more to give. You should have light and sometimes… sometimes I only have shadows.’
She shook her head and grasped his chin in a firm grip. ‘Then give me the shadows.’
‘What?’
‘If that’s what you have, then it’s what I want. I don’t know what will happen… But if shadows are what you have, then I want them.’
He blinked at her as thoughts crowded him – flashes of memory, images, feelings, not all of them his own.
Before he realised he’d made a decision, his lips were moving and words tumbled out.
‘Before he was a taxi driver… my father was a journalist.’ He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face, drawing his knees up. Ren settled next to him, not quite touching, but there. ‘He arrived in Paris in 1980, after reporting on the war for five years. He was about my age when he came to Paris. He never told us, of course. But… he was a man who had seen war crimes in his own country.’
Sacha was surprised that this was where he’d needed to start. He only worried where he would be at the end. ‘He came here to leave it behind, but it followed him. He had periods of depression, occasional… hallucinations. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital a few years after he arrived and he couldn’t work as a journalist, even though his French was excellent.’
He paused to breathe and she settled her head on his shoulder, waiting.
‘As a child, all I knew was that Papa was sad sometimes and needed to shut himself in his room, but he had some good years after he met my mother and they had Nadia and me. They were both in their forties when they met and they appreciated the good times. He would… paint his dreams for me. I think it was his way of coping. He told me about Paris, the city of his destiny, he said. And we visited everywhere we could that was free.’
‘Not the Eiffel Tower,’ she murmured.
‘And the Louvre only once, on my birthday. He wanted to publish a book of bestselling poetry, a literary bridge between Lebanon and Paris, and support Maman and the family with not only the royalties, but the legacy of the world he wanted to create. But we lived in a small apartment in Aubervilliers – Grand Paris, but not the Paris he dreamed of. It didn’t deter him. It must have hurt to see his dreams growing further and further from reach, but he held onto them. He had a much… bigger soul.’
‘Sounds like someone I know,’ she murmured.
‘You think I inherited that from him?’ He felt her nod. ‘I hope so… He had an even bigger heart. If his dreams were in Paris, his heart was firmly in Aubervilliers. He knew everyone. He talked to everyone, no matter who they were. Christmas was celebrated the whole month of December for him, and he cooked and shared, and it was completely normal to me that we exchanged gifts with our Muslim neighbours, at al-Hijriya New Year, too, and we received the most decadent baskets of exotic fruits in the evening during Ramadan.
‘He drove a lot of people in his taxi for free, in particular late at night. I would wake up hearing his phone ringing and he’d go and collect someone. He never asked questions. He just wanted to get people to safety. He had a collection of CDs that he would play in the taxi. He had recitations from the Qur’an for the Muslim troublemakers, hymns for the Christians. He used to laugh that they put up with his gentle reprimand because of the free trip.
‘But I understood later that he was reacting to the war he’d seen, the country of his birth, which was supposed to be a safe place for Muslims and Christians of different types to take pride together in their nation.’
‘A big dream,’ she said under her breath.
‘The biggest,’ he agreed with a sigh. ‘And then Maman died. I was twelve. She’d always been sick. She had heart problems and fatigue and Papa was used to looking after her. We all were. But when she died, he lost… his orientation. He looked after us as well as a single parent can, but he was restless and unhappy and he was gone more and more often, although we had less and less money.
‘One night, he drove the wrong people. There had been a death. The police came to our door. They banged and shouted and the guns on their belts terrified him – and Nadia and me. They arrested him for… complice, for helping the criminals, tu sais? He was guilty of that.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ren sighed.
‘The judge had enough pity not to send him to prison, but he had to pay. And he was so shocked that his… troubles came back and he had to go to the psychiatric hospital again and Nadia and I were… in the charge of the state, you know? Not long after he got out, he died.’
Sacha stared straight ahead, his hands limp between his knees.
‘I’ll never know why he died,’ he said bitterly. ‘Perhaps it was suicide; perhaps just a mistake with medicine. He didn’t leave that information. He just left unfulfilled dreams and the best intentions.’
‘And books,’ Ren finished for him.
Sacha nodded slowly. ‘I didn’t touch his books for over a year after he died. I was angry with him for putting some local criminals ahead of us, for falling apart without Maman, as though we weren’t enough to keep him on earth.’
‘And that’s when you got into trouble.’
‘We were put in a welcome family, you know? And it was okay, but it wasn’t home and it wasn’t Papa. Nadia turned eighteen and moved out and I was desperate to do something. I stole some jewellery from a shop in the Marais. I think it was to prove that I could, to feel capable of something, even if that thing was just… screwing up. The stealing was not exactly easy, but I unfortunately could do it. But trying to sell the pieces, I fucked up. I got caught straight away and… Joseph called the police.’
He would need her to say something, soon.
‘It was a first crime and Joseph spoke for me, recommended the service work at the museum, and… it felt like Papa was still there in spirit. I opened his books again. The notebook he left me, it doesn’t all make sense and half of it was blank, but… he tried. “With only the little love I have, I can do more than nothing.” That’s on the second page. Then I saw that Joseph was grieving for his husband and… I found what I had to do.’
‘You had to carry on your father’s legacy of helping others,’ she said, ‘and thereby give his life and his death meaning.’
The breath whooshed from his lungs as she said it and his head fell into his hands.
He stared at the bed, not seeing anything. It stunned him to realise how deeply he still felt the failure, the pressure to keep the memory alive until he could accept the strengths and shortcomings of the man who’d shaped him.
The silence of the room was heavy. These mountains were so foreign, and yet he could feel them outside, the thick snow that dampened sound and amplified light. He stared at the window up under the eaves, glowing with bluish moonlight.
He stood, walking to the window and pulling it open. The sharp air burned his lungs, but a wide world opened up with each breath. His father would have loved hearing about today, when he’d conquered a mountain with the woman he loved.
Sacha knew he should stop pretending that the last part wasn’t true. He should stop railing against the conflicting interests that kept them apart and start accepting that their short time together could still be worth something.
To his surprise, Ren followed him, shivering in the frigid air that floated through the window and staring up at the dark sky.
‘It’s beautiful out there – up there,’ he said softly.
When Ren finally spoke, she didn’t say at all what he’d expected. ‘Joseph said your father’s name was Karim?’
His throat was suddenly thick. Karim would have immediately seen past her designer clothes and socialite lifestyle to the woman beneath. Karim would have loved her like a daughter.
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice alarmingly rough. ‘His name was Karim.’ A gasp emerged from his mouth and he realised his cheeks were wet. He glanced at Ren, to find her eyes shining and her face also glistening with tears.
He took her face in his hands and kissed her – hard and deep and a little clumsy. He had no right to make her cry, or to hold her down with his past. He shouldn’t kiss her like this, wanting something, but she didn’t push him away. She wrapped her arms around him and drew him closer and kissed him back. She was afraid of the dark, but she held him as though his shadows were precious.
And as they made love again, this time with echoes of the conversation between them, Sacha knew they were writing a love story into the notebook of his life.
