Auburn Ivy runs away from her problems even if it means running away from her family, friends and familiar life. Anthony Kroff is a footballer on the rise but is lonely and lost in the new city he finds himself in. Their lives would have never inte...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
0.29 | when interluding |
"Read me something," Carlotta looked up suddenly.
Sabah had been smiling as she listened to the story and it took her a second to realize what Carlotta had just said, "You want to hear something? A poem?"
"Anything," the older woman said.
Sabah blinked and then nodded vigorously, "Yeah, sure. Uh...I think I've got just the thing. It's this poem...it's called...um, just a sec." She rummaged through her heavy slingbag and a diary fell out, followed by a couple of books. Carlotta picked up the House of Incest by Anais Nin and The Iris of Kubra by Nehal Jaan with a raised eyebrow, "I'm guessing these aren't part of the syllabus."
"Yeah but those two are really nice. The writing is out of this world. I could lend them to you if you want."
"I think I'll pass. Not really my kind of fun...books," she scoffed. She watched with a smile as Sabah proceeded to ruffle through odd-shaped pages that looked like torn out of an assemblage of pamphlets, tissues and lined notebooks. "Do you usually just swoop down somewhere and start writing on whatever you can lay hands on?"
Sabah stopped and thought, "Yeah, I do. I would go crazy otherwise. Aha, found it." She held up a piece of paper triumphantly, "Here it is. It is from Eleven Stars over Andalusia by Mahmoud Darwish. Pity I can't read the Arabic original but this will have to do. Ready?"
Carlotta sat up straighter.
"On our last evening on this land, we chop our days," Sabah began, "from our young trees, count the ribs we'll take with us and the ribs we'll leave behind."
She spoke with the magic of words, well-loved and held closed, of nights spent by memories that felt more like dreams, of the story of lives living on in myth—
"On the last evening
we bid nothing farewell, nor find the time to end...
Everything remains as it is, it is the place that changes our dreams
and its visitors."
Carlotta closed her eyes and let the words, letter by letter, wash over her. She heard the pain, the soft anticipation, the deep soul stitching itself through the ink and when she heard of tea, she could taste it on her tongue.
"Our tea is green and hot; drink it. Our pistachios are fresh; eat them.
The beds are of green cedar, fall on them,
following this long siege, lie down on the feathers of
our dreams. The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors:
enter them so we may exit completely. Soon we will search
in the margins of your history, in distant countries,
for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves:
Was Andalusia here or there? On the land...or in the poem?"
The smallest of moments that signal the end of something great or subtle feel like an eternity and it was after an eternity that Carlotta opened her eyes, something like a dream decorating her face, each line, each wrinkle betraying that she had slipped into another world, that she had woken too soon and would have liked to linger some more at the threshold of another life—maybe lives; it was blurring into a breeze now.
And it was after an eternity that Sabah folded back the paper with a small smile enigmatic in its reverberations of what she had just read. She looked up expectantly.
Carlotta took a deep breath and nodded.
"Well?"
"Well, that was...quite something. Thank you."
"No, thank you. I've never found anyone to share this with before."
"You, Sabah, are quite something too."
The girl looked proud, "That I am."
Carlotta got up, "Let's go."
"We're going somewhere?" Sabah asked, quickly packing her stuff, awkwardly tripping over a chair in her hurry.
"I assume you've never been to Seville?"
"Wait, we're going to Seville?" she stopped short. "I have a curfew at the hostel."
"If you stop grumbling, we'll catch the train and be back by eight." She took a breath, "I'm not telling you what happened at the match otherwise."
"Carlottaaa."
"You youngsters come to Spain and don't even see the best stuff. If you had to stay cooped up in silly little café, I'm sure there are plenty in Delhi."
"Fine but we have to be back by eight."
"Live a little, Sabah. Come on, let me give you a tour of a lifetime."
***
I especially love the Sabah-Carlotta interludes. A writer and a storyteller, they're a different kind of duo but I love them.
