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I received him, returned from his own people a third time, at night. It was under a fishnet of stars: I had seen him coming by their light for I watched for him, alone, at the edges of our camp. When he came at last I found, as I did after he returned to me last time, that I had forgiven him in his absence. He fluttered the fabric of the dull green thawb he had travelled in like the wings of a beetle, halting under the moon. He looked into my face with an uneasy expression I had not expected.
After he had left me last at Dera’a, I felt certain that the English would spit him back out to us again; I was certain, however, he would return a man made of gold rather than porcelain. His troubled expression disturbed me, seeing as in his absence, I noticed the ways in which I alone missed him. The other men had never made a habit of seeking his council more personally, as I had. It had been this way all along the many treads we had made. I was the only one who suffered for having turned to El Aurens for such a thing, for each time he left he took with him my buttresses. To the rest of them he was as white, ridiculous and untouchable as a star. I could have understood this perspective once, perhaps, if I did not know the man, and I had not dressed him in his whiteness.
I felt an encroaching regret marbled in the anticipation that swelled as he approached me on foot once he had stepped down from his camel, as I knew I would dress him so again.
The first thing from his mouth was an assurance: that battle-cries would come with the morning. He told me this as though in Jerusalem he had received a premonition; as though I had any thought of battle-cries in that spare, quiet night. I told him I did not want after such a thing, frank as I ever was with him.
“Good old Ali,” was all he said — it was a certain impression of English influence, though he touched my arm unexpectedly. I watched him, looking at the ground in a strange coldness which seemed somehow novel. It angered me, surely the most injured party at our last parting.
After our removed greeting I led him to his tent wordlessly, which had been made up in anticipation of his coming back. He pushed aside the fabric which hung at the entrance, saw the brilliant white of his robes, which we had cleaned in the meantime, and immediately began to tremble. I thought he was crying — for the look on his face was so distraught and he shook so violently — but no tears came. It was all I could do to touch his arm as he had mine.
“I’m alright,” he said, abrupt and unconvincing. “Only — I —”
“They have been cleaned. Sit.” I pressed him, and he went.
“They’re so bright.” He cradled his shins once his legs were crossed, reminding me of the hottest days of my adolescence, when I had always sat up and squinted at Qalb al-Asad and Ad-Dubb Al-Akbar through canvas above me to remind myself that I was, at all times, prepared for whatever might come. It was a habit I still succumbed to some nights. He looked, still, so stricken against the reddish fabric behind him that I wanted to reach out and pry his interlocked fingers one-by-one.
A minute passed, and he did not move nor look at me.
“What are you thinking of?” I asked as soon as I perceived that the expression had softened slightly, and his head bowed out of sight between his knees..
“I am remembering your treatment of me the last time we saw each other,” he said. “And I am remembering the way that I repaid it.” He paused. “You have been very good to me, Ali.”
“I have,” I replied, and he laughed a little, as I had hoped he would. I did not know how to speak to the assertion that he was wanting in his gratitude — for he was. I did not know, further, how to express that my treating his wounds was no grounds upon which to venerate me.
“I have not been good to you, nor have I been good to your men.” I stared at him. His head, then, which had been bowed between his knees, looked up at me. It was the first time he had looked into my face in some weeks, and I looked into a changed face. I could not precisely decide what it was, but he looked as though much of the softness in him I had wanted to shroud, and be anchored by was now calcified. What was not seemed painfully sore and fibrous.
“I want you to have…” he began. Looking at him was beginning to give me the sensation of watching a piece of cloth be darned. After a moment of this hardening, he looked at me again. “All that you might. For what’s to come. The possibility of returning home with no resistance from our side is one such thing.” He looked down, momentarily, to say: “Money’s another.”
I became suddenly aware of my mouth, which I am sure had hardened into one solid line. I hesitated a moment. “I do not speak for anybody in the camp beyond. But I do not want your money.”
He looked at me. “You must see,” he said, pleading with his eyes where he used to demand. “There is nothing for us now but the inevitable road to Damascus. You must see that — I want to do right by you while they’ll listen to me.”
I thought, hearing him beg, discordant, about tactical matters: this is the first time we have seen each other since we ceased pretending we were equals. There was a strange freedom in admitting it, even if it was dreadful.
“Is this the impression you were given in Jerusalem?” I asked.
He nodded, imperceptibly. I wondered if this was what he had told Faisal, or if the words were being tested on me first. Either way, it would be, and was, difficult for him to say it: “It will be all we have.” The muscles in his jaw were moving as they did. It was very dark. I looked at the oil lamp, small and giving off a pathetic flame. I reached over to breathe onto it in hope of fresh light.
“What else did they tell you,” I asked, and the lamp-flame grew large again, “to have you come to me this way?”
I knew that such a thing would hurt him, but we had never been in the business of protecting each other unduly. Although when his face moved in silent agony once more, I could not help but regret what I had made him feel. I wrapped my arm around him, and he pressed the line of his cheek to the inside of my shoulder. I suddenly regretted all that had happened over the last months with a childish ferocity.
“You must understand,” he said quietly, against me, “I begged not to come back. I begged them, and they denied me.”
My regret surged, and became more childish. It was circumstantial, our trouble: I wanted our freedom. I wanted nothing to do with the English but their weaponry, and had known this from the first. I wanted everything to do with Aurens — this I had not foreseen — I wanted him to have what he wanted.
“I wish that you had never come back”: the only way I could think to tell him. The truth of it calmed my despair, and confirmed what I suspected this meeting to be: final in the constant partings and returns. I was so grateful for the feeling of his flesh against mine, my palm around his bicep for I knew it could not last, nor change a singular thing.
He was certainly crying now, but his voice was calm. I thanked God had pushed a tide of peace where it was most needed, between us. “Do you wish that we had never met at all?” he asked me in a low voice.
I looked up where my familiar lights watched above. I looked at them as nothing but lights at that moment. I was thinking only that we were beyond wishing, and so the bareness of what we once wished did not cut. It only meant we would understand each other. “I found myself wondering so often,” I said, haltingly: “That if you had come here as a pilgrim, and not a soldier — or a refugee, or wandering poet, it may have taken me some more time than it did — that I would have loved you as much, only more completely.”
He was still as ever in my arms after I said it. We sat, his tears drying, for a long moment in that imperfect stillness.
“I would deny you the possibility I could have been any of those things,” he said, eventually sitting up. “But there is no point to that. They are each, in their way, possible.” He looked at me, the feeling in his face seeming oppositional to his clipped words. “But what I could have given you as a poet was not Damascus. I am not certain it would have been better.”
I was not certain that, whatever it was, I would have wanted it more. It was these words which I thought of the following day, when he left me at daybreak in preparation for his rally. I had no choice, that day, but to take my place in the thrall. When he spoke to us collectively, he was like an old, forgotten language to me: unfamiliar, strange, having changed much in my absence — but reading him was instinctive and complete.
In private he would never be a stranger to me, but we would not be together in private again for some time.