The Emptiest Quarter by Raymond Beauchemin

Author:Raymond Beauchemin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

V

If you were visiting London, you came to me. If Europe, I went to you. You did not press me to marry and I never answered your mother’s offer. The necklace was the first gift of many I received without obligation. And the first of many I wore when I accompanied you to dinner, the opera or the ballet, or any of those western things you felt you needed to appreciate, those things expected of you as you spent more time in the public eye.

In 1954, my book Greening the Desert: The Falaj System of Eastern Arabia was published. I was lecturing in Arab political geography and Bedouin culture at SOAS. I was a contributing writer to the Journal of Middle East Studies and had a regular newspaper column in the Times. My Arabic continued to improve. My Bedouin and Arabic teachers’ patience was immeasurable. But you were my best teacher, my vocabulary now extending to words of love and sexual desire.

Our first time was in a suite in the Europa Hotel in Heidelberg. The German translation of the book had recently come out and I was on tour. I’d flown into Frankfurt. You had a limousine pick me up at the airport and drive me an hour to the hotel. I was no sooner in my room than there was your knock on the door. I cast it open and you cast me on the bed. I removed your headscarf and pulled you down on me. Then your arms were tight around me as we kissed, long and deeply. I was conscious of nothing but you. You filled me, as you filled my thoughts, my heart, my world. With every movement of you on top of me, I grew more aware of myself and of you and what you were doing to me. Your hands on my hips, your lips on my breasts. I felt your hair brushing my breasts as you kissed my belly and then your hair on my belly as you kissed me between my legs. I wanted you inside me and me inside you. Then it happened. As I had wanted. I would be your lover. I didn’t need to be your wife. This was what we were meant to be, something free, conforming to no rules. You and me. Filling each other. No distinctions. No boundaries. And above us, against the ceiling, the crescent-shaped shadow of the lamp.

So our lives went on, separate and together. And Abu Dhabi continued as well, token steps, some small, some like leaps. Off the tiny rock outcrop of Sahoot Island, high tide struck in the middle of an exceptionally violent storm in the spring of 1956, destroying the harbour front, sinking a tanker and flooding the desalinization plant. Five hundred workers were left stranded. With no radio communication and no regular flights or sailings to and from Sahoot, officials in Abu Dhabi did not know about the incident for days afterward.

Protests materialized in the city when news of the storm damage made it to the mainland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.