It's summer in the global north (which is winter in the global south), and for the month of August Literatur.Review is bringing them all together, publishing previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the north and south of our world.

Iman Humaidan, born in Ain Anub in Lebanon, studied sociology and anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She has published five novels and various short stories, all of which have been translated into international languages. In her novels, she lets women have their say and tell their own stories. Her fourth novel ‚50 Grams of Paradise‘ was awarded the Katara Prize (Qatar) in 2016. She teaches Arabic and creative writing at European and North American universities. Her creative writing course at the University of Saint Denis in France is the first course to be taught in Arabic. Humaidan was a jury member of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction IPAF 2022. She is a co-founder of the Lebanese P.E.N. Centre, of which she was president from 2015 to 2022, and a board member of Pen International from 2017 to 2023. Humaydan’s books translated into English are available from Interlink Publishing.

Dragging her suitcase behind her, she left the arrivals hall at Beirut airport through door number four. The scorching summer heat hit her. "Now you're here alone... This is the first time you've arrived here alone. You'll have to get used to it," she whispered to herself. The few taxi drivers made themselves heard: "Taxi, madame? "

There was no air conditioning in the taxi, or perhaps the driver didn't feel like switching it on. From her seat behind him, she looked at the back of the driver's head. A thin line of sweat ran down his neck. Once they reached the outskirts of the city, it seemed almost impossible to go any further, even at walking pace. Suddenly Mona realised that the driver was speaking - she hadn't noticed when or how he had begun. The man seemed unhappy, even angry, at everything. She was still grieving the death of her friend and life partner and was unable to concentrate on what he was saying. She had been away for a fortnight, though it had seemed like months. The weather in Switzerland, in Basel, had been grey. She had travelled there for the cremation. The next day, the man from the crematorium had handed her a silver-coloured metal container. It contained the ashes, he explained - all that was left of Thomas. At that moment, she didn't know what to do, where to put the container, what to do with it. Several times, she was on the verge of telling the man that she didn't want it. Back home in Beirut, this would be viewed rather negatively. In her culture, the dead are not cremated but buried - laid to rest so that family and friends can bring flowers to the grave, speak to their dead and mourn them. What would her aunt say, she who firmly believed that the souls of the dead remain with the living? Her aunt, always finding a silver lining in every cloud. But in the end, Mona said nothing to the man, especially as he held out his hand to her - condolences and goodbyes. He turned and walked away, duty done as best he could, while she stood there in silence with the urn in her hand, not knowing what to do with it. She watched the silhouette of the man she had only met twice before as he walked towards the long, rather gloomy building and disappeared inside.

Thomas had lived in West Beirut for years. He was called 'Tom, the foreigner'. It was probably the concierge who came up with this name, and it had stuck for the resident of flat no. 2 on the first floor of the Haddâd block. When Mona moved in with him, she became known as 'the foreigner's wife'. She also had no family and practically no relatives, unusual in Lebanon where great importance is placed on relationships with family, relatives and religious groups. It was perhaps this shared lack of any family ties that unconsciously brought her and Thomas closer together. Thomas told her that he was an only child and had no relatives in Switzerland. Mona herself had only an aunt, her father's sister, who lived in a small village far away in the western Bekaa Valley. She believed in spirits, practised jinn exorcism on women, lived in the past and told the stories of the family, none of whom were still alive. On Mona's rare visits, her aunt assured her that she could still hear the footsteps of ancestors in the various rooms of her house. "Their souls still live here." Mona had heard these stories many times before, but her aunt always concluded with a long sigh, adding: "After all, every one of us ends up on the final rubbish heap."

Mona didn't feel like listening to the taxi driver or even saying anything back. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. In a few months, she would have to move out, clearing furniture and personal belongings from the flat where she and Thomas had shared a life for over fifteen years. She could no longer afford the rent, not even her monthly share of the concierge's wages. Thomas had left behind no life insurance policy, no pension. A large part of their joint savings in the bank had been swallowed up by her travelling expenses. She had accompanied the body to Thomas's home town and stayed in a hotel there for a fortnight until the cremation and all the arrangements had been finalised. After taking early retirement in order to be able to stay and live in Beirut, Thomas had worked as a freelance journalist, writing articles for various European newspapers. She, Mona, ran Arabic courses for foreign students and journalists who came and went. That's how, one day, she had met Thomas. At first she had taught him Arabic, and then, after their relationship had solidified, she had moved in with him. Now she had to say goodbye. Thomas had died leaving her nothing but a scrap of paper on which he bequeathed all his belongings and his bank account - it wouldn't cover the rent for their flat; she would either have to move out or find some flatmates, like when she used to sublet to students. But her student years were behind her now - she had no desire to share her bathroom or greet a stranger with a 'good morning' as soon as she had woken up.

Although it was never quite clear whether their relationship was based on love, siblinghood, friendship or neighbourliness, Mona enjoyed living with Thomas, probably because he was quite a private person. He much preferred to talk about God and the world than about himself, and the knot in his tongue only really loosened after a bottle of wine or several bottles of beer.

There had been no physical contact for years. They only slept together a few times at the beginning of their relationship. After that, she doesn't know why, their intimate life had reduced to touching each other at night. He would run his hands over her body and as she fell asleep in his arms, she would think their life together was pleasant enough, but somehow like child's play. After his arrest at the Lebanese-Syrian border, he stopped touching her altogether. She never found out what had happened to him there, how badly he had been tortured, but she experienced all too clearly the change in him, how he spent most of the night in his study, only coming to bed late.

"I like the colour of your nightgown," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, ready to lie down. She was getting used to phrases like that. Was he trying to discourage her from lying naked in bed? Perhaps. She also got used to other kind remarks, for which he always found an opportunity. They were like apologies for something he was incapable of doing. Apologies that he made in one way or another every night before he turned his back on her and fell asleep.

She also began to feel old in bed. Too old, in fact, to ask him to sleep with her or kiss her intimately, as he had often done at the beginning of their relationship. She couldn't. She imagined that physical love followed the laws of physics: she couldn't force him to feel attracted to her if he no longer felt anything - a thought that made her feel ashamed and guilty. But life is no coincidence, she told herself. They had not met by chance, and despite the loss of their physical relationship and the death of desire, there were certainly reasons for love, hidden in other qualities that connected them. How else could they explain their mutual empathy, even if it had no sexual expression, no physical desire? They liked going to the cinema together, strolling hand in hand along the Corniche or shopping for organic produce in the mountain villages. They shared the same taste in food, especially for spicy Asian dishes, and they enjoyed listening to the news together in the kitchen while she prepared a delicious dinner and he poured her a glass of white wine and told her about the article he was working on. Sometimes she would also tell him about the novel she was reading and hadn't been able to put down the night before. He would pour her a glass and she would ask him to put the bottle back in the fridge to keep the wine cool. At moments like this, she smiled and tried to imagine the same scene in twenty years' time, when they were old and doddery, wine and spicy food a thing of their past. She also wondered whether two people, one of whom felt no sexual passion for the other, could live together and grow old. Their cat was a comfort to her. Under the table, she rubbed her head against their legs, wanting attention. Then she would ask for food, loudly meowing. Mona had brought her home one evening, a kitten only a few weeks old. She had meowed incessantly at her heels outside the Smith supermarket - it was as if the cat had chosen her and Mona felt she had no choice but to take her home. Now, the cat had grown old and could no longer run around and play in every corner of the flat like she used to.

Sometimes Mona watched Thomas while he slept. She imagined the silence between them as a vast plain on which scenes from their shared past played out: from the brief early days after they had met and their desire was still boundless, when the bed celebrated their naked bodies, when their sweat, their whispers, their saliva and the moisture of their mutual lust soaked the sheets and enveloped them the night long in their own scent . All this was only for a short time, no longer than a few months, and stopped after she moved in with him. But apparently Mona didn't want to admit that it really had been so brief. She gave free rein to her fantasies and let herself imagine a sexual relationship that had spanned the whole of their lives together.

She thought about all this while the taxi driver went on and on about the foreigners who were ruining the country. "What's going on? A catastrophe has befallen us. Our country hasn't had a good day since it became independent. First came the Palestinians, now the Syrians ..." His face had become so red that it looked ready to explode - now, his dissatisfaction centred on the chaos on the roads, now the air pollution, now the summer heat. After each sentence, he paused and looked around, ready to do battle with one of the passengers. But there was no one sitting next to him. Mona was the only passenger, and she sat silently in the back of the car. And the more worked up the driver became, the more intently she gazed out of the window. From outside, she must have looked like a statue. From time to time, the driver looked in the small rear-view mirror, seeming to address himself to Mona directly - was he expecting her to actually answer his questions? He also ended every sentence with "They should leave us alone! We don't want any strangers. Madame, I swear by the Gospel, by the Koran and by everything written in holy books, our life was as pleasant as you could wish for until they all came..." This time Mona smiled to herself. Amazing how this man swears by all the heavenly books at the same time. So everyone is happy. He swears by them all yet is full of hatred at the same time. Yes, at any moment he seems ready to resort to violence. If only the heavenly books were in the feminine, Mona thought, how much gentler faith would be! How much more feminine God would be! All wars would end, she assured herself.

Mona had lived with Thomas for many years, so naturally people thought they were married, and although the unmarried cohabitation of a woman and man was no longer unusual in Beirut, this misunderstanding did bother her occasionally. It played on her insecurities, and periodically she would ask Thomas if they shouldn't get married, even though the thought stirred up contradictory feelings in her. Because she was also convinced that she was somehow special and that she had chosen and was leading a life of her own, an independent life that differed from other women's lives, those around her who simply married and became housewives. It was a life that allowed her to maintain her personal independence and the privilege of being different from the women at home or at the university where she taught evening classes in Arabic. Being different like this made her happy and boosted her self-confidence as a free, independent woman. But then, on his return to Beirut, Thomas was kidnapped by the Syrian secret service on the Lebanese-Syrian border on a cold February morning in 2012, and after that he viewed his life differently and no longer even objected to talking about marriage.

Thomas was in his fifties and not really cut out for marriage. He had never thought about starting a family and having children. He was born in the 1960s and grew up at home under the influence of the hippie movement and the rejection of social norms in favour of individualism. But the experience of being kidnapped and imprisoned for two months had broken something in him. He was afraid of something. Perhaps of becoming ill, of being alone, perhaps of growing old. He had come to Beirut as a correspondent, reporting on the Lebanese wars; despite these wars, life in Beirut appealed to him and he decided to stay and settle in the city permanently, especially as he had become a freelance journalist and was working for himself. He would disappear for days, sometimes even weeks. He reported on the wars, later on the events of the Arab Spring, first in Tunisia and Egypt, then in Syria - the Arab Spring, which shifted from place to place and ultimately gave rise to bloody wars that robbed people of any hope of change.

Thomas would always recount his experiences from these trips to Mona, and describe the articles he had written about the places he'd visited.  However, he never spoke about the circumstances of his abduction, nor about the intervention of foreign embassies to secure his release. Two months after his disappearance, he returned accompanied by a friend and carried on as though he had simply been on one of his usual research trips, the kind he'd been making ever since she had moved in with him. They could travel to Cyprus and have a civil wedding there, he suggested to Mona. After all, Lebanon does not allow civil marriages on its territory, but does recognise them - one of the country's many incredible contradictions. Soon afterwards, however, he was diagnosed with cancer and all thoughts of marriage were forgotten as they both focused entirely on their frequent visits to the nearby hospital. But the year of chemo and radiotherapy only prolonged his life for a short time before he then succumbed to the deadly disease and died.

She thought of all this now, arriving in Beirut with Thomas's ashes in her small suitcase, sitting in the taxi as it made agonisingly slow progress through the suffocating traffic towards her flat in West Beirut. She had been away for a fortnight to fulfil the will of the man she had lived with for years, about whose life before he came to Beirut in the 1980s she knew almost nothing.

Imagination helped her to cope with this. It also helped her to endure a silence that she tried in vain to break again and again. Despite everything, many things had made them happy together: for example, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon or the outbreak of the Syrian revolution. Thomas had seemed to have an old score to settle with powers he didn't want to talk about. He seemed to experience their shared joys as something public, far removed from any intimacy.

She didn't realise that the taxi had arrived in front of the building. The driver had to repeat: "Here we are. That's 25 thousand lire," several times before she handed him the money and stepped from the car as though sleepwalking.

In front of the lift in the Haddâd apartment building where she lived, she was approached by a woman from the second floor, who was then joined by another. Both offered their condolences. She had now become the foreigner's widow. Should she tell the two women that she was no more anyone's widow than she had been anyone's wife? But she had been his wife and partner, she missed him and her life would now be difficult. She deserved comfort despite the lack of a marriage certificate. All this went through her mind, but she said nothing. She went through the motions, quietly thanking them for their kind words. Pausing for a long time at the door of her first floor flat, she gathered herself. As she rummaged in her handbag for her bunch of keys, she suddenly realised that they were his. She also realised that during the journey here from the airport, she had not only remembered their life together, but had also had a long conversation with him. As if he hadn't left at all. As if his absence was a lie. As if her heart was capable of forgiving to the death.

The days passed. Days during which she began to learn how to live alone. Days when she would have liked to talk to him. Only now, after his death, did she seem to enter his life. But more than two months passed before she found the strength to open the door to his study. It had become unavoidable as she had to vacate the flat by the end of the year. There were countless drawers in the room, some of which were locked. She found the keys to them on one of the shelves behind a book - Letters to Milena by Kafka.

Mona had to open these drawers alone. They were full of pictures and letters, arranged in cardboard boxes. Among many other belongings, she also found strange and shocking things: a pair of women's knickers, larger than the ones she herself wore, and another pair that was no longer quite in fashion. Perhaps he had once told her that the items came from the first woman in his life. But she found a third and a fourth pair, all different sizes. She also came across pornography and pictures of naked women. There were several bars of dark chocolate and some small plastic cars and bicycles, like the ones little boys play with. There were pictures of his father which Thomas had defaced with a bushy beard and moustache. Some were torn. To think! - she had never known about all these secrets in his study! He kept them in the drawers she never rummaged through. From the very beginning, he had kept a watchful eye on his study and it's contents. He had lived in the flat long before she moved in, and she had got used to taking her designated place: next to him in bed, on the sofa in the living room when she wanted to lie down to read, and on the chair in the dining room; also in the kitchen and on the balcony, where she grew gardenias in pots.

Mona picked up some of Thomas's private and secret things and stood motionless in the middle of the room. At that moment she finally realised that she hadn't really known him at all, that she had never known what he really liked and what he couldn't stand. She had never learnt about the very intimate things he was attached to, the things he eagerly bought and looked at, the things he used or even imagined. She knew neither the child in him nor the teenager. He had never told her about his father, about his relationship with him. She seemed to have been living with a stranger for many years. Suddenly she remembered the day she'd had an abortion and lost a lot of blood. It had been only two months after they had met. She had to go to the American University Hospital on her own. If only she hadn't had an abortion then, she thought now; if only she had kept their child. The nurse was desperate to know the father's name. "But I'm not married," Mona explained, lying on the hospital bed with her eyes closed. She felt the nurse's disapproval when she gave her a jab in the back of her hand as if to punish her. When she went home the next morning, she fought the urge to vomit.

Mona was still standing in the middle of Thomas' study. Through the open window, she could see the sun edging towards the west. The lights of passing cars were reflected on the wet pavements outside. The water in the dirty puddles sparkled. It was late autumn. Suddenly she felt the cold and realised that she was dressed too lightly for the temperature. She closed the window, switched off the light and left the study.

Then one morning she woke up with an uncontrollable desire to whistle. She put on her raincoat and headed for the sea. The staff at Café Rauda were still busy mopping up the traces of the previous night with soapy water. She walked across the wet floor to the terrace. The café was deserted. Mona sat down, ordered a cup of coffee and pondered.

She is not able to control time, but she tries not to let time control her. This allows her to experience the pace of life and discover that she will not experience what she has experienced a second time. The moment, once lived, is in the past, but happiness, once experienced, ebbs and flows: coming and going, like the waves of this sea before her.

She looks at the blue stretching out in front of her and thinks back over the years. "I'll think about it tomorrow." She can no longer say this as easily as she used to, even during the war. But she will say it today, she whispers, as she drinks the last drop of coffee in her cup. Once again she looks out over the wide sea. It's getting old, she thinks, the waves seem too weak to reach the shore. Then she starts whistling, loud and strong. But the melody soon fades and Mona has to take a quick breath in order to continue whistling. The sound she makes must also have grown old.

About the translator

Hartmut Fähndrich, born in Tübingen (Germany) in 1944, studied Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature there and in the USA. He has lived in Switzerland since 1972, where he worked as a lecturer in Arabic and cultural history of the Arab world at ETH Zurich from 1978 to 2014 and is a freelance translator of contemporary Arabic literature. From 1983 to 2010, he was in charge of the Arabic Literature series for Lenos Verlag in Basel. He is a co-founder of the Swiss Society for the Middle East and Islamic Cultures (SGMOIK).