Red Star, Crescent Moon by Rosenstone Robert A.;Budniak Aldona;

Author:Rosenstone, Robert A.;Budniak, Aldona;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9780985569839
Publisher: New Academia Publishing, LLC
Published: 2012-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

9

Aisha

With the first touch I know. His hand on my cheek, gentle, familiar, a touch without my knowing until that very moment that I have always wanted to be touched in just that way, as if touch were a kind of blessing. Benjamin’s words during dinner brought bumps to my arms and made my nipples grow firm. It was not just what he said for I could hardly keep up with the dates and places and names, and the sound of his voice drowned meaning as if he speaks a language I have all my life been waiting to hear. Can you fall in love with words and hands I wonder as I try to get to sleep, but a voice comes to me, the voice of my great aunt Farah, who always wore a chadour and was the only relative I ever saw in a burka, I can hear her as if she’s sitting in front of me puffing on the chalam she loved so much, saying beware for its Shaitan the devil disguised as a Yahudi to fool you as they always fool us. But then I don’t really believe in Shaitan, do I?, yet I do very much believe in the sound of Benjamin’s voice and all the words he said and all I want to is hear him speak again. He knows so many words that I want to learn them all for myself.

My own words are startling enough: What do you want from me? Maybe you can teach me something! It’s as if I have become a character in an American movie, one of those tough women in a two piece suit in those old black and white films from the forties we saw sometimes at Cinema Zeinab, films that were too talky for we teenagers who weren’t supposed to see them anyway. My Mom was on the government censorship board that made sure all the kissing and hugging scenes were cut, but we used to see them anyway for I knew how to sneak into the theater, leading friends through the back door and up to the balcony on the afternoons when it was closed for all except the censorship officials who were there for private screenings. The American movies, except for the Westerns, how we loved cowboys! were not as much fun as the Bollywood song and dance films but in the films from America like detective stories and love stories, the man and woman eventually do get to kiss and hold each other very close and this is makes us feel all warm and giggly which is how we once were discovered because we couldn’t keep ourselves from laughing out loud and my Mom heard us and came storming up to the balcony outraged and forbid us ever to come there again but of course we didn’t listen to her.

Imagine me talking about Communism and Uncle Ahmed and Babrak and Anahita when for my family it’s always been such a shame that

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