Читать книгу The Girl with Braided Hair - Rasha Adly - Страница 7

2

Sherif didn’t expect her to text him back, no I’m on the way or Sorry, I can’t make it. He would just let her know where he was. Sometimes she came; sometimes she didn’t.

They had met at a conference on architecture. He was an architect who owned his own company, a firm that specialized in building luxury hotels and mansions for the wealthy; she was a professor of art history who specialized in Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-Baroque art, well-known in architectural circles as a consultant to major construction firms. She had been recommended to him by a consulting architect he usually worked with, who had been forced by illness to excuse himself from working on a project. She had received a phone call from Sherif some days later, asking her to oversee the plans for a new construction project in the Baroque style.

Their romance had lasted a year; he had loved her passionately, and she had whispered “I love you” into his ear a few times. Suddenly, like a light switch flipping off, her love had winked out, all her passion and desire for him gone. His eyes had always held a question; she always avoided answering it. One time he asked her straight out, “Why did your feelings for me change?”

She was truthful and cruel: “There’s someone else.”

Strangely enough, he did not argue or blame her, but nodded and left. He knew that it was no use talking: he was experienced enough to know how labyrinthine and changeable the paths of human affection are. He also knew that he was not a skilled lover; he did not string together honeyed words, nor did he purchase gifts and flowers.

They met less frequently; the silence between phone calls stretched longer and longer. Tedium crept into their time together, and her feelings toward him cooled even further. Without realizing it, she had fallen in love with someone else. Oddly, that man did not return her love; he was, however, adept at the art of romance. The question remained, as it always does: should we stay with the one who loves us genuinely, though they be an inept romantic; or be with a master of romance, although they do not truly love us?

She had thought that love—and love only—makes puppets of us all, pulling our strings to take us where it will. However, with the other man, she had discovered that it was not necessary to love in order to woo someone. From the first, he had been honest with her: he told her he knew nothing of love, and could never tie himself down to one woman for the sake of something as worthy as love. Still, she pressed on, swept away by her feelings for him. Something about him attracted her, something charming and magnetic. She never did manage to put a name to it. Then she came to herself, as though slapped awake from a dream, when he told her he had found someone new, his voice ringing in her ears: “I never promised you anything.”

She went back to Sherif and cried on his shoulder. Generously, chivalrously, he listened. “Don’t ever blame yourself,” he told her, “if you genuinely loved him. Emotions are the most beautiful thing one can possess.” He told her, “It’s enough that he lit the fire of love in you, even if he didn’t intend it. Such feelings are rare. This is why we must be grateful to anyone who makes us feel them, ever. There are people who live out their lives in the illusion of eternal love, deliberately forgetting that love is the result of complex and changeable chemical reactions.” What he said made sense to her—after all, she had loved him once, and it was over. Wasn’t it?