It was dusk but not yet. The man and the woman were sitting on a bench at the outdoor platform, waiting for the train to come. They watched as the sun sank lower and lower in the crepuscular sky, slowly but uncontrollably. The twilight curled up around the old railway station, enshrouding everything in a lethargic haziness. Neither of them spoke a word.

It was the man who broke the reticence. “How beautiful.” he gazed at the sun, as if mesmerized by its perfect shape and gentle light; the sun was huge and round and moderately bright, like an illuminated pupil without the whites. In a second of trance he thought it was his own eyes, omnisciently overlooking the world. “But how transient.” The man added this comment with an audible sigh. His voice was too hoarse compared to his age; but hoarse as someone experienced, maybe a little weathered. He wore a crimson suit, slightly incompatible with this small, quite railway station; but its flamboyance remotely echoed something inside of him, thus this outfit looked less ridiculous than it actually was.
The woman imagined his aspiration coming out from his mouth, flying towards the sun. She gave a slight shrug, one that she was unconscious of, and tersely replied, “You can always chase the sun.” Her voice was pleasant and comforting, but with a lack of liveliness, like that of a domestic canary. She concealed her emotions with a phlegmatic voice just like she covered her hair with a plain, beige hijab. She cherished her hijab just like she cherished everything else in her life. It was not that she didn’t realize how high the mud walls were imprisoning her. She simply refused to walk out, refused to let go. Never a person to leave anything behind. She watched the sun so closely as if it were to slip away from the corner of her big, hazel eyes if she diverted her gaze.
“You can chase the sun with me. That’s why we are here now.” The man turned to the woman, who appeared to be studying every single electromagnetic spectrum emitted by the dying sun. Not bothered at all by her nonchalance, he paused for a second and inhaled deeply, like one would do before he gave a long, informative speech. “Listen, Mariam, I…” His enthusiasm was cut off by her cold, stiff voice.
“I never said I agreed.” This time her tone was lofty, but he heard some bitterness. He wondered if that was because of the lemonade she always liked to drink. He was actually surprised of himself remembering her favorite beverage. She turned a little bit towards him, judging from the wrinkles on her modest black abaya. One would think her eyes were still fixed on the sun, which was now bouncing over the canopy of a giant olive tree; but he bet that her peripheral vision was peeking at him through the layers of her hijab.
“Mariam, I’m sorry I left you behind in all these years. I know I was always away and hardly contacted you. I know I hurt you so much. Believe me I understand and I’m truly sorry for all what I have done. But it can still be fixed, Mariam, we are together now! Everything will be right again!”
He felt there were so many words crowded in this heart, like the cluttering piles of bricks and rubbles in their hometown Haifa after Israeli bombardment. Ever since their rendezvous last month he had been desperate to vent his feelings, but as all these words scrambled towards his vocal cord he was too overwhelmed to filter the right words to say. All conversation had been in vain.
“Mariam, I’m back! Let’s go somewhere we both love. We will settle down and find jobs and buy a house and, you know, everything will be right again! Where do you want to go? How about Baghdad? No, Istanbul –you always said you want to visit the Grand Bazaar- let’s go to Istanbul, Mariam, what do you think?”
Anticipation was burning in his eyes. He was confident that she could easily be convinced, given that she had always desperately wanted his love and yearned for his call and letters, although most of the time in vain. He did feel regret, for the oblivion on his own part, but he wouldn’t admit that a part of him actually took her love and presence for granted. He was losing confidence, though.
“I don’t know, Ali, I just don’t know. I don’t know what will happen if we go to Istanbul. Maybe, maybe I will get lost in the Grand Bazaar. Who knows? Who knows when you will get back to me? Who knows if I can get back to my own life? I’m just tired. You know? You can never stop the sun from sinking, but I have no energy to chase it now.”
The sun was stuck between two huge olive branches. The branches were in Y-shape, like a slingshot. And the sun was the pellet ready to be shot back towards the sky, where darkness already crept in and left some navy blue tinge. However the pellet was blatantly oversized and so it failed to be shot. Mariam was quite amused by her own imagination. She actually grinned at the sun like a child, with a little Schadenfreude, although her tiny drop of smile dissolved in a second, as if vaporized by the sunlight.
Let it drown. She thought. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Ali’s words resonated in her ears, oscillating back and forth like her own perplexity. But they grew fainter and fainter, finally engulfed by a newly-developed determination. You can’t always compel to him, Mariam! This is your own life. Look into his eyes and say no! She felt an urge –a precarious one indeed, since she was always a character of self-contradiction - to express herself, to turn around and leave him without ever looking back. The sound of the train coming from far away knocked at her eardrum. She had to decide.
“Mariam…” his voice was surprisingly low and sad. Exhaustion spilling from his sigh, flooding the small train station. She ignored the rare pleading tone in his voice. Finally turned away from the sun, Mariam fixed her gaze on Ali instead. His pupils were huge and round and reasonably bright, just like the sun before it sank. In the two little suns Mariam saw reflection of the landscape behind her. Vast but twisted, spectacular yet hideous to her. She closed her eyes, as if to shut the whole world out. Gadunk-gadunk. The train was getting closer, its sound knocking all hesitation out of her mind. She let out a long sigh, dragging in this thick air with a poignant dance.
“Ali, I’m not going with you.” Sounds hung in the air for a while before they took the shape of a voice. Like a dagger, her voice was quenched with perfect icy composure, piercing through Ali’s chest. He was frozen in place, the crimson suit dyed with imaginary blood. The little suns in his eyes dimmed drastically and so was the whole world. The sun seemed to be retrieving all dying spectra back to its feeble self for a desperate outburst. Gadunk-gadunk. She could see the contour of the train materializing from the end of the track: a red spot like a flower blossoming among the green fields, a blood drop on the faded line of horizon.
Suddenly the world came to move. A red shadow stormed by her. The dazzling sunlight blinded her eyes-or it was her hallucination. “A—” she didn’t have time to scream the second half of his name: the noise of the train submerged everything. A second later she realized it was vacuum sitting beside her. The track was choked by blood. Torn pieces of the crimson suit drifted overhead, flustered and sticky, staining air particles. The suicidal sun was shrunken and flattened as if a train just ran over it. It was dripping with its last few spectra, thicker than liquid and dull red.

It was dark but not really. Sunlight sneaked in from his right side and reddened the inside of his eyelids. Ali opened his eyes with great difficulty. The vast white ceiling stared at him in confusion. He blinked to make sure that there was no blood stain on it. He rubbed his eyes so hard as if to squeeze out the eyeballs. Blink. Now he saw clearly the huge poster hanging on the wall across from his bed. His favorite singer Stromae grinned at him with his unsymmetrical eyebrows. Half of his mischievous face was basked in sunlight, leapt through layers of curtains. They were plain, beige colored, just like her hijab in his dream.
Yes, it was but a dream. He assured himself. You are in your house in Paris right now, not any stupid train station in West Bank. Tomorrow you are leaving for Mariam; you will talk through everything and you will go to Istanbul together. It’s gonna work out fine. Ali yawned languorously and hugged his pillow. His finger tip came across a small crimson colored bead. As if struck by electric shock, memory from last night started flooding into his head. Perplexity streaming in his veins, intermingled with a subtle solute of fear. His encounter with that mysterious woman last night. Was it real?
He was sitting in La Caféothèque and searching for flight information, when a voice dipped in honey purred to his left before all her dangling necklaces bumped into his eyes. “Puis-je m'asseoir ici?” She had a charming Egyptian accent. “Ouai.” Ali replied curtly. The light in café was moderate, almost trop douce. Ali tried to pin his eyes on the café noisette, but its rich, dark color somehow reminded him of Mariam’s gentle hazel eyes.
Slightly lifting his gaze, the colorful necklaces bounced right into his vision from across the table, shimmering and intertwining. One second he thought the countless little beads were actually tiny eyes that could peek into everyone’s life and gather a detailed mosaic piece of this world. Maybe these beads were arranged in such order so that they connected the past, present and future. Stringed along the historical line, the beads filled in the equivocal crevices between different tenses. You tie up the string, head with tail, thus history repeats itself. Ali stared at the necklaces, mesmerized, fighting against an odd urge to tear them apart, to see how history unfolds.
“I know people don’t believe in fortune tellers these days, but you seem interested in my necklaces.” The woman whispered with a mischievous smile, head slighted tilted to one side, revealing a huge amethyst earring on her left ear but not on the other. She sipped her cappuccino, a strand of black curl submerged by the sea of cream. Shifting his gaze a little bit, Ali sized up the fortune teller. Her countenance remotely resembled that of the Goddess Isis, whose portrait he had seen in a temple when he traveled to Philae in Egypt. Isis, the goddess of magic and marriage. Isis, she whose eyelashes were as sharp as arrows.
“Yes, you guessed my name right.” She paused, amused at Ali’s astounded face. Her jet black eyelashes were abnormally long and sharp. Long enough to sweep her cheek bone. Sharp enough to inflict a wound. She deliberated lowered them for a second, as if to seduce. “And yes, I can tell you, these little beads know your future.”
Ali pondered on her statement, fixing his eyes again on the necklaces. The beads were quite multicolored, each color distinct from any other. Two crimson ones caught his attention. They were side by side and almost looked the same, but there was a nuanced difference of hues between the two. A difference of sentiments. They were not exactly crimson: the left one had a striking, almost alluring mix of ruby red, carmine and lustred; the right one was dominated by a perilous bloody hue, yet softened by a flimsy layer of poignancy, dyed with rusty red.
“Bien sûr. I would love to know my future. How about…what will happen when I meet my wife in couple days?” Ali asked tentatively. The fortune teller Isis tilted her head even more, eyes studying his face as if solving a puzzle. Her eyelashes, heavy with mascara, flew up and down rapidly like butterfly wings. Long as those of Zebra Heliconian butterflies. Sharp as their toxicity.
“Très bien. You have a good intuition, so I won’t charge you.” Isis took another sip of her coffee. The strand of curl sank deeper, forming a little swirl on the beige cream. Beige as Mariam’s hijab. Beige as Ali’s curtain. The fortune teller rested her fingertip between the two crimson beads he had been gazing at, her jet black nail polish peeling off.
“Pick one. You choose your own future.”
Ali hesitated for a split second. Isis pulled an invisible end of the string and peeled off the bead on the right side without breaking apart the whole necklace. It was faster than any magician’s tricks. Eyes wide open, Ali watched in amazement. The bloody hue of the bead was cloaked by the mild light in café. It looked like a turbid teardrop, somehow portentous.
“Does my choice determine what will happen?”
“Not this choice. What will happen is predetermined by you, but you can always interfere. In the end it’s all about you, more than anyone else.”
“Then what difference does it make if I chose the other one?”
“You didn’t. That’s the point. And you won’t. You had already chosen your future far earlier than you came here. One makes his own future, but when it comes he foolishly thinks it's not up to him. It’s in the nature of men to fall, but they never learn.”
“How do men learn their future? Not everyone is a fortune teller.”
“No one can ever tell precisely what will happen in future. Not even me, not any bead on my necklaces. There is no fortune teller in a literal sense. What we offer are but insights of people’s inner natures. One must be able to see himself first before he sees anything else.”
“Thank you, I think I know who I am.”
Isis sighed, in an annoying way. It somehow reminded Ali of how Mariam’s sister sighed when Mariam said yes to his proposal. The fortune teller devoted herself to her cappuccino for a while, without uttering a word. He could tell her brain was swirling much faster than her curl, covered in cream and thus slowing down. Soon she finished the beverage and stared right into Ali’s eyes. He couldn’t tell the color of her pupils: one second he was sure she had orange pupils, round and moderately bright like the sun at dusk, omnisciently looking into his soul. The next second they seemed to shrink, and the color became quite ambiguous, as if shrouded by turbid teardrops, somehow portentous. Isis pursed her thin lips for a while and finally spoke.
“Just put the bead under the pillow when you sleep tonight, and you’ll see. Maybe you have never recognized how wrong you are, or how wrong things can go. Maybe you never realized how much you actually love someone and how much you are loved back. Humans take things for granted.”
There was an imperceptible curve at the corner of her lips. That second she looked at Ali fervently as if anticipating him to suddenly realize something profound and fix whatever mistakes there were to fix. He returned to her a blank, innocent glimpse.
Leaning forward, she put the crimson bead in his hand. Ali noticed the remnant of her black nail was of weird shapes; one of them looked like a sun sinking between two Y-shaped tree branches. Like a slingshot. He wondered if she deliberately designed what parts of nail polish to peel off to make such patterns, or they just naturally formed.
“Remember, know thyself. Think about your past, make good choices in present, that’s the only way you can change future. You have no time to waste. ”
Her words drifted lazily in the sweet air of La Caféothèque, but before Ali noticed her person had already evaporated. He thought he heard behind him the melody of her dangling necklaces intertwining with each other, dancing with the past and the future –but when he turned around towards the gate she wasn’t there either. Walking out of the café, the damp air covered him like a sheet of wet black velvet. The misty moon mocked at him overhead. A remote white lie. Glancing around, the fortune teller was nowhere to be found. Isis, the goddess of magic and marriage. Isis, she whose eyelashes were as sharp as arrows.
What was dream, and what was reality? Ali sat in his bed, the crimson bead stained by sweat in his hand. He sat like a stone statue, as stationary as Stromae on the huge poster across the room. The two men stared at each other as if expecting an answer from the counterpart. Ah, forget about it, maybe everything was but a dream. Ali jumped off his bed and rummaged for a clean pair of pants. It was the most ridiculous version of future ever, lucky it didn’t cost me any. Never trust fortune tellers, not even Egyptians ones with layers of necklaces. Isis? BS! Yeah, that’s the lesson.
Shaking his head, Ali dismissed the whole thought from his brain. Enough to worry about already. Put on his favorite crimson suit. Adjust his tie as neatly as possible. Looking into the mirror with an arrogant stance, he felt like a successful businessman once more –regardless of hypocrisy- rather than a failing husband. Before leaving the house Ali paused for a second, as if some intuition was triggered in his cold, hibernating heart.
Just checking. Ali thought. He dialed Mariam’s cellphone number.
He waited. There was no answer.

It was dusk but not yet. Mariam was sitting on a bench at the outdoor platform, waiting for a train to come. She watched as the sun sank lower and lower in the crepuscular sky, slowly but uncontrollably. The twilight curled up around the old railway station, enshrouding everything in a lethargic haziness. Glancing further, the unoccupied regions of West Bank was sleeping like a baby. Oblivious to broken hearts and sad empty streets.
She was alone. Till eternity. Alone was no longer an adjective for her but a gerund. Like “alone-ing”, if there was such expression. Allah was counting the days and replacing them with years. He would never come back, she thought, Ali had probably forgotten he had a wife stuck in this small village in West Bank when he had hangover with French blondes in casinos.
The sound of the train coming from far away knocked at her eardrum. She waited. Paris. That must be so much better than her. She smiled sardonically. The layers of her plain beige hijab fluttered in the mild wind. The sun was stuck between two huge olive branches that were in Y-shape, like a slingshot. Mariam waited for the sun to be shot back towards the sky, like a pellet.
Gadunk-gadunk. The train was getting closer, its sound knocking all hesitation out of her mind. Just like he would never come back, the sun would never be shot. It was way too heavy, but her heart was even heavier. The treacherous years were vanishing in front of her eyes and all she could do was waiting. In vain. Yes, she was tired of waiting. More than tired, actually. But she would wait for a last few seconds.
Suddenly the world came to move. The dazzling sunlight blinded her eyes-or it was her hallucination. The noise of the train submerged everything.
The skyline glowed with the ashes of the burnt-out sun. The track was choked by blood.
Mariam’s cellphone rang.