PART THREE
13
Chapter Thirteen – A New Beginning
Muna was now pursuing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Damascus University, officially admitted into the Department of Arabic Language—the very field her soul had long leaned toward in secret. She had spoken of it only late, when she finally sensed that within language she had discovered a mother and a homeland no one could take away.
From the very first days of that new semester, every visit Numan made to their apartment deepened her conviction: this young man, though still carrying traces of rural modesty in his manner, concealed within his chest a heart burning with love for knowledge, with a passion for books and for writing unlike anything she had seen before.
She encouraged him constantly. Whenever they sat together in the quiet corner of the room they had both come to love, she would repeat that he must nurture his gift—not aimlessly, but with discipline, with the rigor of an academic path worthy of a talent growing silently, waiting for someone to heed its call.
One evening, after finishing a phone meeting with Beirut, Mr. Ahmad glanced at Numan with a tone that blended both seriousness and hope:
“Why not enroll in an institute for technical drawing? A short intensive course could restore a piece of your old dream—and at the same time, it would help me in my work.”
Muna and Numan exchanged a quick look, a silent understanding flickering between them. Then Muna spoke, turning the pages of her university notebook in her hands:
“That would be wonderful. After all, engineering doesn’t contradict literature. They are twins, if you only knew—each completing the other.”
Since that day, hardly a single one passed without Numan visiting their apartment—whether Mr. Ahmad was at home or in Lebanon, following up on his business from the private office he had built there, a place set aside both as a workshop for his engineering dreams and as a refuge when the world pressed too heavily upon him.
Muna’s aunt, who lived with them, created the right atmosphere for those visits with her measured silence and the gentle smile that never left her face. Her constant presence lent the meetings a settled warmth, a quiet safety that made Numan’s visits feel like a natural thread woven into the fabric of their new life—something no one questioned, something that stirred no suspicion.
And so their days intertwined, unhurried: between university papers and project sketches, between the scratch of pens and the measured lines of a ruler, they traced the contours of a dream that stretched between the page and the blueprint.
14
Chapter Fourteen – Return to the Warmth of Family
After a long evening of conversation with Muna and her father, stretching until the hour before dawn, each went off to their room to rest. But sleep would not come to Numan. Restless, he slipped out into the street, walking without aim until he suddenly found himself at the stop where the first morning bus was waiting, bound for his hometown. He boarded, not to escape Damascus, but in search of a soil that might re-form his roots rather than his walls, of answers deferred that still echoed inside him without resolution.
The night’s gathering had ended only moments before, yet it still pressed upon him, keeping his eyes wide open—questions and answers circling within him, probing the heart of belief, not as a tradition handed down, but as a free awareness reaching into the unknown; probing the political order, not as a fixed reality, but as a chain seeping into meaning, freedom, and fate, breeding fear and dread.
When he reached the family home, the household had not yet woken. The outer gate, two wooden leaves that opened and closed with a light touch, no key required, stood before him. There, stretched across the threshold as always, lay the black dog.
He had raised her from a pup. She followed him to the fields, trailed after him into schoolyards, until her very name became bound with his in the tongues of the villagers. She had grown alongside him, as if she had spread her life across the paths of the countryside and the walls of the house. Once she fell ill, and they thought she would not live. He himself prepared her food—bread softened in boiled flaxseed. Days later she rose and walked again, defying death with a patience that seemed to say she would wait for him.
And here she was now, after his long absence, reaching him first with her nose before her eyes. She had not yet seen him when, all at once, she sprang up and ran toward him, as though sensing the shadow of his return. She did not bark, did not pant. She simply stood before him and laid her head upon his knee, as if she were welcoming home a homeland that had been lost.
He slipped into the concrete courtyard as if apologizing to its old trees for being late to the dawn. The olive leaves, heavy with dew, hung down like his grandmother’s fingers, pointing quietly toward the sky.
The house looked just as he had left it the last time, yet somehow smaller, as though time had sipped a year or more from its walls and left it short of a certain tenderness.
He moved toward the washbasin in the yard and rinsed his hands and face. He did not know his mother was watching him from the small window of the oven room, a woolen shawl wrapped around her shoulders, something simmering on a low fire. She didn’t speak at first. She only watched, long and steady, her gaze wrapping him in a silence that felt like an embrace. When he finished his ablution, her voice floated out, soft enough to seem like she was speaking to herself.
“Good morning, my son.”
He turned, surprised she was awake so early, and answered,
“Good morning, Mother.”
“I thought you wouldn’t come back this winter.”
He stepped closer, kissed her hand with quiet reverence, and she drew him into her chest, holding him with a tenderness that carried no words. Then he asked gently,
“I’ll pray the dawn prayer before the sun rises, and then I’ll return.”
After he prayed in the corner of his room, the one he had always used, he walked back with calm steps and sat beside her. He seemed like a child returning from some faraway wonder. Staring into the details of her face, a face he knew better than his own, he whispered,
“I missed you, Mother. Yes, I missed you so much… Your calmness… your waking before everyone else… even your silence… I missed everything in this house.”
She studied his features. He seemed calmer, yet the spark that once lit his eyes had dimmed a little. She poured him tea and sat across from him, watching in silence.
They drank a few slow sips before she broke the silence with a question that seemed to have been waiting for a year.
“Didn’t you once say you would study engineering? That you wanted to be an engineer, to build homes for the poor and place beauty in their lives? What happened?”
Numan hesitated. His eyes lingered on the steam curling up from the cup, then he answered in a low voice.
“I haven’t changed my dream… I just found myself searching for it somewhere else. A place called the College of Arts.”
He smiled, as if confessing and justifying at once.
“I wanted to understand the stories, Mother, before I began decorating their walls.”
She fell quiet, as though weighing the meaning. Then she whispered, her voice carrying the tremor of maternal worry.
“Stories don’t put bread on the table, and they don’t build houses, my son.”
He bowed his head for a moment, then lifted it again.
“Neither do buildings, Mother… if they’re built without a soul.”
She studied him for a long while, then smiled, shaking her head with a mixture of wonder and acceptance.
“Your words are like you… they don’t reveal themselves the first time.”
He laughed softly, the sound shaded with a kind of confession.
“And I… I no longer understand myself. No one does, except here.”
She smiled, reached out, and laid her hand gently on his shoulder with the pure tenderness of a mother’s prayer.
“What matters is that you know where you’re walking, even if you walk alone.”
In that moment, Numan felt the house expand suddenly around them, and time itself—despite its restless noise—sat down beside them too, bowing its head in quiet respect.
The chirring of birds outside was no mere chatter; it was a full choir of fluttering and ascending, as if the branches themselves sang with a living, green voice.
Numan returned to his room and stretched out upon his wooden bed, his gaze lingering on the clay ceiling above, which, in its humble way, retained a warmth no city summer could ever imitate or rival.
This morning was one of those rare mornings that demanded nothing and expected nothing. It was simply a morning open to memory.
After a pause of quiet moments, he descended once more to the courtyard, searching for his mother, and found her tending the firewood near the oven, kneading dough, preparing for the bread.
He picked up a piece of firewood, staring at it as though it carried a small memory, while his eyes, half-closed, listened to a distant call that could not be spoken.
Watching her ready the oven, he asked,
“Are you still baking on this old oven?”
Without turning, as if she had heard his voice before he spoke, she replied,
“You will find no bread in any bakery that tastes like your mother’s… Ask your own days, Numan, how you used to rush ahead of me in the morning to this oven, carrying the firewood and lighting the flames until it became embers, then standing beside me, shaping the dough with your tiny hands.”
He laughed and approached her lightly, like a boy returning to an old game.
“And I still do, Mother! If you wish, today I will do it all for you… Rest, you deserve it.”
She laughed, about to lift the cover off the risen dough, speaking in a teasing tone that hid a thousand memories between its syllables:
“And who guarantees you won’t scatter the flour over your clothes, just as you did in your childhood, insisting on kneading the dough with those weak little hands of yours?”
He reached for the basket of firewood with a childlike confidence that somehow carried the weight of experience and said,
“Back then, I was learning… but now, I am a master at lighting the fire, and a sovereign over the heart of the ashes.”
Their eyes met in a warm, teasing exchange, and he settled beside the hearth, watching the flames rise slowly, imperceptibly, yet irresistibly. In his gaze lingered a yearning that had never cooled, as if he were trying, with his own hands, to reclaim fragments of those years that had slipped by lightly, without asking anyone’s permission.
There was a note in his voice that spoke of a wish to remain, unspoken yet palpable, and in his movements, a buried desire for belonging… as if the city had never embraced him properly, or had offered nothing but noise that he was yet to understand.
The embers in the hearth glowed warmly, and the scent of baking bread wove itself into the air—an intricate blend of dough’s ripeness and the freshness of the first morning, filling the room with an aroma that memory and longing alone could conjure.
When he took a warm loaf and began eating slowly, she leaned toward him, one eye twinkling with jest, the other with hope, and asked,
“Will you stay with us this week? Or does Damascus allow no one the luxury of prolonged absence?”
He hesitated a moment, then replied,
“I’ll stay… as long as I can. Then… who knows? Perhaps one day, I’ll return for good.”
She regarded him with mild astonishment, then let her gaze drift afar, to a place only her heart could see, and said in a voice that seemed to emerge from some ancient well,
“Do not return… unless you carry a dream here. Longing alone cannot build a life, Numan.”
A gentle silence fell between them—not the passing kind, but the kind that whispers directly to the heart, without a word spoken.
Everything in the courtyard seemed in harmony: the scent of wet earth mingling with the rising aroma of bread, his mother’s soft voice murmuring an ancient prayer… and things that could only be understood within this house, this courtyard, this quiet assurance.
Numan’s chest swelled with the warmth of the bread, and with a rare serenity he had never known in the city. He returned to his room carrying that same warmth, a hidden calm unfamiliar to urban life. Slowly, he removed his woolen coat, as if lifting from his shoulders the accumulated longing and days themselves, then sat on his wooden bed, running his hand over a sheet embroidered with old roses—stitched for him by his mother during his first university year.
He lay back, closing his eyes, yet sleep did not come. Something inside him remained alert, pulsing beneath his skin like an old dream stirring from its silence, gently tapping on the doors of memory with a persistence that brooked no refusal.
Something within continued to wake him…
As if a dream sleeping beneath his skin had begun to stir, knocking on the doors of memory without asking.
“Was I running away when I chose literature instead of the arts?… Or was I seeking my own voice in words rather than colors?”
He murmured the question aloud, thinking it through in a voice audible to himself, while his eyes fixed on the wooden ceiling above, where tiny cracks ran like deep veins through the body of the ancient house.
He had believed that distancing himself from the city’s clamor would bring clarity… yet instead of answering, the distance asked him again.
He remembered the first drawing hall… how the scent of paint had intoxicated him, and how his own motor skills had betrayed him when he stood to explain his idea about light and shadow.
Numan remembered his stammer before the admissions panel, who had admired his pencil drawing. Yet, when asked to bring it to life in a real scene—executed by a practiced student recommended by the examiner to embody his painting—Numan faltered.
As his classmate prepared herself to enact what he would shape, to complete the scene, and began removing some of her clothing on the platform, he froze. His hands trembled, his body threatened to betray him should he approach, let alone touch her. His tongue recoiled, and the embarrassment became unbearable. He feigned a sudden stomachache and left the room apologetically, before his shame could turn into calamity.
Perhaps… it was not a flight from the dream, but from the shame. Or so he justified to himself—an incapacity he feared would be mistaken for failure.
And yet, why had he later agreed to Muna’s suggestion, when she said quietly, after their long conversation:
“Perhaps you don’t need colors now… perhaps you need words, where you can say everything without having to look at anyone.”
But…
Do words alone suffice to mend the inner self?
Is reading life enough, without painting it or living it fully?
At last, he sat down and drew from his bag a small notebook, humble and brown, where he had begun recording his earliest reflections since his first year at university. He leafed through it slowly, pausing at a line written in hesitant script one evening:
” The city tempts me, yet it does not recognize me. The countryside understands me, yet it cannot take me whole.”
Numan closed the notebook gently, murmuring to himself in a voice only he could hear:
” I need to write this chapter of my life with my own hands… not let it be written about me.”
Outside, his mother had finished kneading the bread. She washed her hands, then sat beneath the pomegranate tree, dabbing the sweat from her brow with the edge of her scarf, waiting for her son to come down once more.
But he remained there…
as if suspended in a distant height, a silent trace of the past, flipping through his life as one would turn the hurried pages of a hastily written novel.
Below…
his father had just risen, his deep voice rising in a gentle call:
” Numan! My son… breakfast is ready.”
The father sat with the family at the breakfast table, turning a warm loaf in his hands, waiting for his son to join him, as if between them lay a promise postponed for a year. But was it time now… to remind him?
Perhaps only now… the true chapters begin.
Numan descended with heavy steps, carrying upon his shoulders the weight of a dream left unfinished. He offered a soft morning greeting, kissed his father’s hand in his habitual manner, then sat at the table.
Yet not a word passed his lips.
He was like someone with a mouth to eat, but no tongue to speak.
The family around him carried on their morning chatter with ease: questions flitted through the air, “How have you been thinking, Numan? When did you return?”… Yet, he paid no attention, offering no reply, and the conversations meandered on—about the food, about a cousin who had given birth, about troubles at school.
He was there among them, a body without a soul, stealing bites with absent awareness. His sister cast him a fleeting glance and whispered,
“Numan seems… different today, somehow…”
He made no comment. Once he had finished eating, he wiped his hands and murmured softly,
“Excuse me… I must return to my room.”
He rose quickly, retreating to the world he had left behind, as if chasing something that had slipped away.
There, in his room, he perched on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, muttering as though judging his own memory:
“Was I really running away when I chose the Faculty of Arts instead of Fine Arts? Was I searching for my voice between lines, not in pens and colors? Was that an escape… or a search for a space that demanded no trembling, no shame before others?”
When his thoughts fell silent, the room was still—but within him, a noise raged that could not be borne.
Then Muna’s voice returned, as if replayed from a tape stored deep in sleepless depths:
“You did not run from art, Numan… you ran from your own body.”
He shook his head, seeing her now, standing in the corner, saying it with eyes that would accept no courtesy.
“I wasn’t ready…” he whispered inside himself.
“I didn’t know how to place my body at the heart of meaning… I painted because I loved the fractures of light, not to stand before anyone who would witness my failure.”
And then he heard her voice again… that tone that leaves no escape when he tries to slip away:
“But you painted in black and white what no poet could ever say… so why didn’t you stay there?”
“Because the canvas alone cannot protect its owner…” he answered, silently within, “and I needed a wall to cover my fear.”
He leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Anything can be art…” he murmured, “even silence… if it is written with honesty.”
He opened his eyes to the ceiling of the earthen room, noticing tiny cracks like the veins of an ancient memory split open by absence. His silence stretched, then he breathed slowly, as if testing the note of a resolution he could not yet complete.
Perhaps in that moment, the first escape from the dream occurred. Not from the dream itself, but from embarrassment. From the fear of exposing his inadequacy in a world that demands the body speak as fluently as the brush.
That day, he remembered Muna’s suggestion to join the College of Arts, where words could do what the body could not.
And he returned to the memory: the moment he stepped into the admissions hall, carrying his painting with a restless heart, the oily scent of colors intoxicating him as rain intoxicates the senses of those returning to childhood. How he stood before the committee, stammering, glancing at the classmate who would share the critique with him, into her eyes, her exposed features, a bare shoulder… perhaps… and he was afraid.
That day, as they walked through the city streets, Muna said:
“All it should have taken was to look at the painting, not at the girl’s body. Why did you confuse the idea with what that girl revealed?”
Numan answered, embarrassed:
“Because I have not yet learned how to dismantle beauty without feeling awkward in its presence.”
She laughed, a bitter sort of laughter:
“And are words any gentler? Aren’t poems bodies too?”
He bowed his head then, as he does now.
“Perhaps I accepted literature because it does not expose me as colors do. Here, I hide behind letters, rearranging my disappointment in a line, not in the tremble of my hand.”
Muna spoke again, the night air cold around them:
“But true literature will not let you linger behind lines. It will demand that you lower your mask. That you write yourself, rather than hide behind it.”
“And me? Am I ready for that?” he wondered inwardly, the question hanging in the room like the faint light in its corners.
“And do words suffice to mend the inside?” Numan whispered to her this time, aloud.
It was as if the answer had been delayed, or perhaps it had always been there, dwelling in Muna’s eyes as she said to him:
“Inner life is not mended by words alone, but by truth. Write, Numan… but do not lie.”
He lay stretched on the wooden bed, the air brushing his forehead with a soft, almost tender caress, yet his chest tightened, as if the room itself were shrinking, its ceiling pressing down the deeper he sank into his memories.
“I wasn’t sick, Muna,” he confessed to himself, “I only lied to escape. My body would not obey me… and my sight offered no mercy.”
Her voice, alive in his mind, pierced him with that tone that could probe beneath the surface of words:
“Do you know your problem? It is not fear. It is that you were never ready to see beauty in a living body without being unsettled.”
He remained silent for a long while, then answered in his mind, as if she were right there, seated across the room, or sometimes, standing by the door, closing all the windows of the room:
“I did not know how to look without faltering. She wore a tight cotton sweater and pants that revealed more than I could bear. I could not see the ‘form’ as I was supposed to on my canvas… I saw the woman, and I lost the ability to shape that body or to bend it to the painting I had drawn.”
“But she is a colleague, Numan. She did not reveal herself. You are the one who stripped her in your imagination.”
“I know that… but I do not think you could understand me. Imagination is not always bridled. And I have not yet learned how to govern my impulses. I was like someone suddenly confronted with reality without a veil, yet I am the one who painted her, who knows the essence of her being.”
” So, if you were asked to draw a naked woman, as they do in other art classes, would you run to the nearest window?”
” Maybe… or… I don’t know. But at the time, I felt impossibly small in front of the idea of embodying the language of the body. It was as if the canvas were larger than me, and the woman more than mere shapes and lines.”
He fell silent for a moment, murmuring to himself:
” I feared that if I tried, I might betray my own convictions. And if I didn’t… I didn’t know what would happen. Or how they’d judge me. Or perhaps I would only expose my ignorance.”
Muna’s voice returned, tinged with a sly, inner smile:
” So, you embraced literature because it allows you to clothe the body in metaphor?”
” Not entirely… but in part, yes. Or at least, because words conceal more than they reveal. Or they reveal what I choose to reveal, not what is imposed on me.”
” Which part exactly did you answer yes to, as you said?”
” Your encouragement, and your support in this field.”
” And which part did you answer no to?”
” My ignorance of the rules of language.”
” Yet I know that your high school grades qualified you for the Arabic language department. How is that?”
The door was tapped lightly as his father entered, speaking with a mix of urgency and surprise:
“Why didn’t you stay with us? … Your mother, your siblings, and I—we missed you! … I’m heading to work now, and we’ll talk when I return this evening… If you need anything, come find me at the shop!”
Before leaving, he added:
“Your grandfather is waiting for you in the garden. He wants to see you, to speak with you. And our neighbor is there too—don’t keep them waiting; they’ve missed you as well… Peace be upon you!”
He closed the door gently behind him.
The winter sun had already tilted toward the southern sky after hours of rising, sending warm rays that caressed the inner expanse of the vast garden at my grandfather Abu Mahmoud’s house. They draped themselves over the branches of the ancient walnut and apricot trees like a veil of pale silk, while gentle breezes toyed with the remaining leaves, making them sway as memories that refused to leave. Only the old olive tree stood with its dignity intact, guarding its leaves as a venerable elder preserves his grace.
In a humble corner, Numan sat, leaning against a straw cushion, watching the sunlight spill across his grandfather’s hands. Abu Mahmoud was fixing his prayer beads after a string had come undone, as if trying to gather what remained of an old order.
Nearby, the neighbor, Abu Rasheed, rested on a wooden chair, hand propped on a slender cane, listening in quiet anticipation, as though waiting for what comes after the wind stills.
Abu Mahmoud’s voice, slow and deliberate, pierced the serene air. His gaze held Numan’s with a mix of caution and bewilderment, and his words seemed to excavate the chest of time itself:
“Numan, my son… we have left the path open for you to read and learn, and praise be to God, I see you today as a man. It is time I speak to you as men speak, though, by God, I am not accustomed to such words—neither with my children nor with anyone else. Our conversations have always been: do and do not… that is what we inherited, and upon it we were raised.
And you… you know how much I have loved you, and how proud I was when you read to me as a boy, how my chest would swell with every letter you uttered. Yet I never showed it, lest you grow vain, lest you crave too much.
But what I have heard of late troubles me… They say you sit with girls in the gardens, you read strange books, and you say: ‘The city has taught me the light.’ What light is this, Numan, that draws you away from us, even from your mother? Is not modesty, as our Prophet—peace be upon him—said, ‘a branch of faith’? Where is your modesty?”
Numan lowered his head quietly, as if searching for words that might never come. Then, in a soft voice that seemed to tear his chest apart, he said:
“There’s no estrangement, Grandfather… I am… only trying to be a dutiful son. I am trying to understand who I am, between you and that world I live in.”
Abu Rashid shifted slightly and smiled—a subtle, knowing smile, as if he had found a hidden treasure within the lines of Numan’s words. Then, with a glint of long-held insight in his eyes, he said:
“I have heard, too, Hajj… but I believe Numan does not wish to sever his roots; he only seeks a particular shade for his own shadow. Do you not remember, as the poet said: ‘He who does not love to climb mountains… lives forever between the pits’?”
He paused for a moment, then continued, in a measured, penetrating voice:
“Time has changed, Abu Mahmoud… we once saw women as untouchable shadows, yet God said: ‘And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them’… And tranquility, my friend, comes not through fear, but through companionship.”
The elder shook his head slowly, his eyes slipping away into the shadows of memories:
“Our time was simpler, Abu Rashid… no questions, no faces to converse with, no voices to debate. We remained silent in the presence of our elders, speaking only when asked… and this is what the saying meant: ‘Of the goodness of a person’s faith is leaving what does not concern him.’”
It was as if a barrier within Numan had finally shattered. He lifted his head, and with a voice heavy with years of silence, he said:
“Yet I still believe in those boundaries, Grandfather… but you were always afraid for me, of everything—illness, school, mingling with society, even women… as if a clear gaze from a girl meant betrayal of values, or a misstep on the path. I felt it, and I could not name what I felt.”
His grandfather asked—not as one seeking understanding, but as one condemning—with a tone mixing pain and anger:
“And despite all our fears, despite our care for you, you go and choose a profession alien to us, alien even in its nature and in the nature of its people: concrete masonry! What craft is this that resembles neither you nor anyone in your family?
You say you love reading, so you learn from books the art of argument, to argue where it matters not, to trap yourself in prison… and what prison! Political prison!
Then, after all that, you look me in the eye and say that you still believe in those boundaries? What faith is this that drives you to such ends? Is this how belief is forged in the fire of suffering? Or is punishment the path to certainty? Are convictions built in the cold thresholds of jails? Or do you derive your way from your wounds? Or have you come to see loss itself as a path?”
It was as if a dam had burst within Numan. He lifted his head, and his voice, heavy with years of suppressed truths, rang out:
“Yet I still believe in those boundaries, Grandfather… yet you all feared for me—everything, from illness, from school, from mingling with society, even from women… as if a clear glance from a girl were a betrayal of values, a slip on the path. I could feel it, and I could not name what I felt.”
His grandfather looked at him—not as one inquiring, but as one astonished, a mixture of pain and anger in his tone:
“And with all our fear and care for you, you go and choose a profession so alien to us, alien even in its nature and the nature of those who practice it: concrete masonry! What kind of craft is this that neither resembles you nor anyone in your family?
You say you love reading, and so you learn argumentation from books, to argue about matters that concern you not, to place yourself in prison… and what prison! A political prison!
And then, after all this, you tell me, as you lift your head, that you still believe in those boundaries? What kind of faith is this that drives you to such outcomes? Is faith forged in the flames of suffering? Or does punishment pave the path to certainty? Or are the cold thresholds of prisons what shape convictions? Or have you begun to reason from wounds to find the way? Or do you now see loss itself as the path?”
Numan paused for a moment, as if savoring his grandfather’s words like an old bitterness that had long inhabited him. Then he spoke in a quiet voice, one that did not argue but rather reflected and interpreted:
“Grandfather, neither this nor that. I am not searching for what resembles you, nor what mirrors me in the past, but for what mirrors me in what I aspire to become. The trade of a concrete smith may seem strange, yet in my eyes, it was a way to earn quickly—always in pursuit of a reason, a livelihood that could support my studies. And you know that well. As for reading, I did not do it to argue, but to understand. I did not enter prison because I wished it, but because, in our time, truth has become a crime. I do not believe in those boundaries set in our path as stones meant to mark the land; they were set to bind people, to make them flee into silence and fear. I believe in them as glimmers that God placed to gather us, to protect us, to raise us in freedom and dignity. And if the cost of such faith is high, it is still less than what living souls deserve.
I do not claim to be right, grandfather, but I cannot live by what I do not believe.”
He drew a deep breath, then added, as if finally breaking:
“At the university, grandfather, I see them laugh, watch games, argue over songs and competitions. And I? I stand alone… thinking of things that do not amuse them, that do not attract them. Sometimes I envy them, sometimes I mock them—but in the depths of my heart, I understand that they prefer indifference to thinking about justice… or those who are tortured, or those who suffer, or the world that resembles me… or resembles what I fear I might become.”
Abu Rashid’s eyes glimmered with a hidden tenderness as he spoke in a voice whose calmness carried the weight of confession:
“It is not your fault, Numan… We all grew up in the shadow of fear that runs in our veins. We fear our dreams, our desires; we fear to laugh from our hearts lest the eyes of the envious and the greedy intercept our joy. And so, after every laughter, we say: ‘God, shield us from the harm of our own laughter.’ It has come to this, my son—we fear even to be honest with ourselves.”
Grandfather Abu Mahmoud murmured with a frown, striking the ground with a cane beside him, as if trying to wipe the dust of words from his hearing. Then, his voice, tinged with a restrained anger, broke the silence:
“Religion teaches us what is lawful and what is forbidden, not this chaos in minds and hearts. The Messenger of God said, ‘What is lawful is clear, and what is forbidden is clear.’”
A brief silence settled. Numan turned toward his grandfather, his eyes carrying a deep ache, as if splintering within his chest. His voice was soft but pulsating with feeling:
“Do you know, Grandfather… I used to think that prayer alone could soothe the heart. So how is it that my heart prays five times a day, and yet remains restless? I love God, and I fear Him, but I do not feel that He loves me back… and I tremble before Him as I would before a tyrant’s power. Did He not say in His Book: ‘Say, O My servants who have transgressed against yourselves, do not despair of the mercy of God’? Then why… why do I not feel this mercy?”
Abu Rashid drew a deep breath, as though recalling old, vivid scenes. His voice softened into warmth:
“You are right, Numan… these are the questions that have made us grow old before our time. They are the ones that keep boiling inside us, unquenched by silence or answered by words. Do you remember, Hajji?”
He leaned closer to Abu Mahmoud’s ear and whispered, as if sharing an ancient secret:
“Even our desires, the ones we feared to speak aloud… they were part of our humanity.”
Then he lifted his face, winked at Numan, and smiled with a sly intelligence:
“Have you not heard of Rabi’a al-Adawiyya? When she said, ‘I love you with two loves: the love of passion, and the love because you are worthy of it’?… She confessed that love is both body and soul together.”
Numan’s voice caught in his throat for a moment, then he steadied himself and spoke, cutting through the silence:
“It is neither you nor us who are the root of this crisis, Grandfather… It is you, it is us, and countless generations who have carried a fear passed down in their hearts.”
He gestured with his hand, as if pulling a memory from a distant past, and his voice rose gradually:
“That fear… it was drawn by some, and they painted God in it—a deity concerned only with punishing, with retribution and torment. Then came a power that sought to secure everyone’s obedience, even at the cost of their retreat into silence, or their preoccupation with mere bread, so that none would have the time to dream of the freedom they were born to, nor the mind that God had honored them with.”
He paused briefly, then continued with unwavering confidence:
“A person cannot truly be a believer until they acknowledge what God has granted them, the rights they are meant to seize—thinking, questioning, understanding. Have you not read His words in Surah Al-Isra, verse 70:
‘And We have certainly honored the children of Adam.’
This verse places honor before fear, rooting dignity in the human being—not humiliation, not submission to an image of an eternally wrathful deity… For God, in our faith, is merciful, generous, the one who bestows honor upon humanity.”
Numan continued, his voice threaded with a pained faith, his eyes alight with the fire of questions long held captive:
“Did not God Himself say in His Book, in Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 256, ‘There is no compulsion in religion; guidance has become clear from error’?
Then how can we terrorize hearts in the name of faith? How can we close the doors of reason? This verse affirms freedom in belief, it does not impose it. It shows the seeker the path to wisdom and leaves the choice of journey in their hands.”
A hushed silence fell over the room, as if his words had lifted a veil from hidden truths. Numan followed, his voice now calm yet carrying the weight of lived pain:
“And in His words, exalted in Surah Al-Anfal, verse 22: ‘Indeed, the worst of creatures in the sight of God are the deaf and the dumb, those who do not reason.’
A clear admonition for those who paralyze the gift of intellect, following what they do not understand, out of fear or mere imitation. Is this not exactly what we were doing?”
Abu Rashid shook his head slowly, as if acknowledging an old sin, then sighed and said:
“Yes… we prayed, we glorified, we wept at the thought of punishment, yet we rarely smiled at His mercy. It was as if we feared Him more than we loved Him.”
Numan looked at him with compassion and said:
“And in His Book, in Surah An-Nisa, verse 58: ‘Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice.’
Is anything clearer than this? The key to judgment is justice, not fear. Guardianship is a trust, not domination.”
Grandfather, Abu Mahmoud, listened intently, and his face softened, as if a rock had quietly cracked within him.
While silence draped the room like a summer cloud, the winds paused, and leaves settled in the courtyard corners, as though time itself had decided that Numan’s words should ring out uninterrupted.
Then came the hushed voice of Abu Rashid, more a question to himself than to anyone else:
“…Did we truly love God? Or did we only fear Him?”
A pause lingered, then, in a voice weighted with a long, heavy breath, he added:
“I would tremble whenever I heard talk of punishment, and I would weep. But when I read of His mercy, I did not smile… and there lies the difference.”
He asked permission to leave, having heard his son’s voice calling him from beyond the wall.
Abu Mahmoud leaned slightly, resting his hands on the trunk of an olive tree, then slowly lifted his head, eyes drifting into a distant space:
“Perhaps we forgot that love does not compete with fear; it shapes it… Whoever loves truly does not fear like one who runs, but fears as one who dreads harming the one he loves.”
Grandmother, Umm Mahmoud, who had been listening from her window, approached and sat beside her husband. She whispered, tears glistening softly in her eyes:
“This is the first time I hear religion told this way… not as a means to frighten us when we were children.”
Numan nodded in agreement and said,
“That is why I kept saying: we need to read the texts and listen to them, but with clean hearts, not with minds used for intimidation or control.”
The grandmother rubbed her hands slowly and murmured,
“We used to recite the verses like students recite anthems, without pausing, without questioning… Perhaps that is why they did not change us.”
A heavy silence fell after her words, as if everyone were recalling ancient prayers spoken out of fear, as if tears had fallen from trembling hearts, without ever asking: Where is the love? Where is the humanity in all of this?
Suddenly, the silence was broken by the sound of the wind, sweeping across the courtyard like a deep, cleansing breath. The leaves shivered, the branches whispered, as if affirming what had been said.
Numan looked into their eyes and spoke:
“We do not want a religion that terrifies us, that keeps us small, crying in the corners of fear. We want a faith that makes us grow. That helps us understand, that restores our stance, and lets us walk through life with our eyes lifted to the sky, not crouched upon the dust.”
Grandfather Abu Mahmoud remained silent for a moment, then cleared his throat and, in a voice low as if speaking more to himself than to anyone else, said,
“Perhaps we were too harsh on you, and too harsh on ourselves. We feared for you, and so we imposed more… and we never asked: was that love, or was it a fear of a wrath we imagined greater than the mercy of the One who created us?”
Numan looked at him, and his voice struck the old wound deep within. He spoke gently:
“Grandfather, we have not come to judge you, but to understand together, and to forgive. You had your times, and we have the right to build ours.”
A hush fell over the group, as if the air itself had renewed in their chests. The words seemed to sweep away some of the dust that had long clung to their hearts.
Then the muezzin’s call announced the midday prayer, and the voices around them quieted. Each one moved toward their prayer in solemn reverence.
15
Chapter Fifteen – A Conversation with a Friend
In the evening, Numan went to visit his old friend, after a long absence. It was not only the closed doors that had kept them apart since the beginning of this school year, but also time, distractions, and unspoken words.
His friend greeted him with a quick embrace, his weary features masked behind a polite smile. They settled into a room redolent of coffee, evening, and quiet complaints.
Numan’s eyes swept across the room as he said,
“Something feels different here… Is it the place, or is it you?”
His friend let out a short, almost sigh-like laugh.
“The place hasn’t changed, but a house without warmth cannot be called a home. Between me and it… there’s a wall. Invisible, yet it blocks the very air from reaching me.”
Numan was silent for a moment, then spoke softly:
“I’m not good at giving advice, but I am good at listening. Speak, if you wish.”
His friend took a deep breath, staring off into the distance where nothing existed but a faded wall, and said,
“So many words have piled up in my heart, Numan… A year of wanting to be understood, not judged; to be loved as I am, not as I should be. I’ll tell you, but… only after I’m certain about you.”
Then she turned to him suddenly, a glint of surprise flickering in her eyes:
“But before I forget… you told me you applied to the College of Fine Arts! What happened after that?”
Numan smiled, reaching for his cup of coffee, his voice calm yet touched with a trace of astonishment:
“I did apply… yes. I passed the first stage of the exam with difficulty, expecting to be accepted so I could continue in the Department of Interior Design. But I surprised everyone, as much as I surprised myself… I enrolled in the Department of Arabic Language instead.”
His friend gasped, genuinely astonished:
“Arabic Language?! Numan! You?!”
Numan laughed softly, a faint, warm chuckle:
“Yes… our language, my friend. Not merely to become a teacher, but to understand the letters that shape us, the words we speak yet fail to comprehend, and those we fear to utter.”
His friend slapped his hands together in visible disbelief:
“Impossible!” … “Numan, the one who longed to be an engineer… and now he abandons his dreams like this? No, I can’t believe it!”
Numan smiled faintly, as though the memory still scorched the edges of his heart, then said:
“The truth, my friend, is that after I applied to the College of Fine Arts, one of my former teachers visited me at home to congratulate me on my high school success… He paused at the doorway and asked: ‘What are you thinking of doing next?’”
His friend interjected eagerly:
” “And what did you tell him?” ”
Numan continued:
” “I told him… and in my hand, I held a sketch I had been preparing with pencil, meant to accompany me in a few days to the appointment I had secured a month earlier. I waited for it with a longing that nearly choked me from the chest.” ”
Leaning forward, his friend urged him on:
” “Hurry! Go on quickly!” … “Why do you drip the words at me like this?” ”
Numan laughed, a shadow of sadness brushing his voice:
” “Yes, I will continue… but it had to be prepared carefully, so that you would understand what this venerable teacher told me.” ”
” “I understand, I understand…” ” his friend waved impatiently, ” “Go on!” ”
Numan went on:
” “When he saw the sketch and realized that I intended to enter this field, he erupted with anger. Then he took me to one of his friends, a respected scholar among the elders… and there, after the teacher explained to him about the college and its contents, that sheikh flew into a rage.” ”
His friend furrowed his brows and asked,
” “What did he say?!”
Numan answered,
” “The words rushed from his lips… he spoke to me of drawings, of nudity, of what is carved and displayed in the college… and then he sealed his speech with a sentence that fell on me like a rock: ‘Do you wish to exchange your world for your hereafter? If you do, you know your destiny, and if not, you must immediately retract this decision.’ ”
His friend asked, sharply shocked,
” “Is that why you abandoned your dreams?!”
Numan replied, heavily,
” “Never! I did not abandon them… I went to the college, and Muna was with me that day.”
His friend pressed on,
” “Alright… and what happened then?”
Here, silence settled briefly, as if Numan were searching for words in a forgotten corner of his memory, before he said,
” “Ah… what happened… the memory returns to me anew… the first drawing hall… the scent of the colors intoxicated me, as if it were a rapture in my pores. But… my body betrayed me when I was asked to explain my idea of light and shadow. I stammered before the admissions panel, though they loved my painting, and I had drawn it in pencil… but… I was asked to enact the scene I had drawn, alongside a skilled female student suggested by the panel… and as she began to prepare herself to perform the role, removing some of her garments on the stage… I froze in place. I felt sweat pour from my forehead, an unbearable shame… I feigned a sudden stomach pain and left the hall, apologizing… Perhaps what I did was not a fleeing from the dream… but from embarrassment. From a helplessness I feared would be mistaken for failure.” ”
Numan fell silent for a moment, as if gathering the scattered fragments of an old scene broken inside him. Then he sighed and said:
“I left the hall, easing my steps, like someone hiding a wound they don’t want anyone to see. And she was there…”
His friend’s eyes widened with concern as he asked:
“Who? Muna?”
Numan nodded:
“Yes, Muna…”
He spoke almost into the silence:
“She found me sitting on the corridor steps, folding my face between my hands like someone concealing their disappointment… At first, she said nothing, just sat quietly beside me, as if she knew that sometimes silence is kinder than any word. Then she asked, in a voice so soft it was like the whisper of a shrub swaying in the wind: ‘Numan… what happened?’ I didn’t answer her right away. A moment of quiet passed, and then, in a hushed tone, I simply told her that I couldn’t go on… She looked at me with a gaze that felt like she was saying, ‘It’s alright, I’ll keep your dream safe until you reclaim it.’ Then she spoke again, and in her words I heard the same tenderness my mother used to speak to me with as a child: ‘Numan… you don’t have to prove anything to anyone… not to them, not even to yourself… If you love what you do, you will find a path that suits both you and your heart.’ She stood, extended her hand, and said: ‘Come, let’s have tea on the wall of dreams.’”
His friend chuckled softly, then said:
“Tea on the wall of dreams?! That’s truly Muna… her words are warmth in the cold.”
Numan smiled, nodding gently, then said:
“Yes… and since that day, the dream did not vanish. It transformed… and now, you may find it hiding between the lines of a poem, or in the nuance of a single phrase… in sentences I craft with care, as if they were invisible canvases, not seen, but felt.”
His friend patted his shoulder with a tenderness that needed no concealment:
“So… you did not betray the dream, but reshaped it, to the measure of your heart… but tell me, what did she think in the end?”
Numan smiled as if the memory itself had paused on the threshold of his heart, gazing in, then said:
“We continued walking together, our steps almost keeping pace with our pulse, until we reached a hidden corner of the old ‘Rawda’ café… We sat there, where the worn wooden chairs encircled tables that gleamed as though polished by the memories of those who passed before. It was a summer evening in Damascus, holding the breath of those returning home… as if the city itself had arranged that encounter for us in a rare moment of clarity.”
He paused, as if listening to the echo of those old footsteps, then continued:
“Silence came between us at first, not because we felt like strangers, but because longing, when it overflows… silences the tongue. On the table between us were two cups of bitter coffee, and a piece of dessert we either forgot or chose to forget.”
Numan resumed, his voice carrying what words could not fully contain:
“Muna said, holding her cup with both hands as if warming her very soul: ‘Do you remember?… It was a dewy morning, and the sky peered at us through its gray balcony. You were trembling, without saying a word.’ I looked at her for a long while, then whispered, ‘I did not know that day whether I trembled from the cold… or from myself.’ She gave a faint smile, tinged with a sorrow that resembled a light sprouting in a corner of memory: ‘And I… I did not want to overstep with questions. I feared you might drift further away. Your eyes… they spoke on their own.’ I bowed my head for a moment, then confessed, as one finally revealing a long-held secret: ‘I was afraid… afraid they would think I was a failure, afraid of the committee’s gaze, of my classmate, of my own body, of the very moment… But most of all, I feared looking into your eyes and not finding your respect for me.’ She lowered her gaze to the bottom of her cup, as if searching for a line she had forgotten to speak, then whispered: ‘My respect? It never left you. It grew, with every step you took on the path you chose, even when others thought it was an escape.’”
Numan’s friend, barely containing his eagerness, interjected:
“And then? What happened? Please, hurry!”
Numan shook his head lightly and said:
“Muna, staring straight into my eyes with a confidence that left no room for hesitation, said, ‘Let us speak clearly, boldly, with a candor that does not fear reopening the wound.’ I nodded for her to continue, sipping the last of my coffee. She spoke with an urgency that seemed long held back: ‘You did not run from the admissions committee, Numan… you ran from yourself.’ I lowered my gaze for a moment… then lifted it toward her, surrendering, acknowledging the truth: ‘I know.’”
Numan drifted, his fingers tracing the rim of his cup as if searching within it for meaning, then continued:
” I told her: because I didn’t really know her… I thought I had failed… just failed.”
Muna shook her head slowly, her eyes holding a comprehension that felt almost like consolation, then whispered:
” Failure is not daring to even admit that you were confused… that is natural, with the body speaking, with its presence… it’s always disorienting for someone who hasn’t learned to see it with innocence.”
Her eyes glimmered with a bolder note, and she added:
” Or how one deals with it beyond the call of instinct.”
She paused, as if watching the echo of meaning ripple through memory. Then, in a low voice, she said:
” I was there… I remember your face when you left the reception hall. It was as if you had returned from battle, having lost everything.”
I shook my head in sorrow and said:
” No… I would have become the loser, Muna. I would have lost myself… and I couldn’t have trusted myself again since that day.”
She turned her face toward the garden, where lilac leaves swayed quietly, and asked:
” And now… after all this, do you trust yourself?”
I sighed slowly, choosing my words from the depths of feeling:
” Do you know when I began to trust? When I could write about that moment, without hiding it, without condemning myself in it.”
She raised an eyebrow slightly, asking with sincere interest:
” And will you write about the girl?”
I smiled faintly, with a gentle reproach for my former self:
” No… not about her. About me, and how I see her… about the shock, about my eyes, not her body.”
Muna nodded, as if she understood completely, then said:
” So… you’ve begun to draw with words at last.”
I smiled and said:
” Yes… and I discovered that I needed another language to understand this world. Perhaps I was an artist, of another kind.”
She reached her hand toward mine slowly, as if testing an old heartbeat, then placed it gently over my hand and said:
” Don’t run away again, Numan… art is not confined to a hand that draws, but an eye that isn’t afraid to see.”
We fell silent… and she fell silent too. Yet something inside us had begun to settle, as if that old embarrassment, hidden in a shadowed corner of memory, had finally come out, sat between us at the table, sipping its coffee, smiling.
At that moment, a friend suddenly turned to him and said, with a hint of urgency:
” And after that? What happened? I want to know everything!”
Numan laughed, and replied:
“After that… last night we were in a room at Muna’s house, on the first floor of the building her father had bought and recently furnished… a room to which Muna had added everything she had ever dreamed of. The walls were lined with books, and small paintings she had made over her school years. The lights were dim, spilling softly from a side lamp and the ever-silent television. We spent a while talking about books, movies, moments… then everything quieted… leaving only exchanged glances, and a question that lingered between the lines.”
I couldn’t hide the note of anticipation in my voice as I scanned his face, then hers, when he asked me with a tone of affectionate reproach:
“Why didn’t you tell me before, my boy? Why didn’t you complete your journey into the fine arts? I always thought it suited you… perhaps even more than literature.”
Muna and I exchanged a fleeting glance, as if a warning preceded a shift in the flow of the conversation. Then I spoke softly, yet firmly, with a certainty that anchored my words:
“I’m not sure, uncle, if I left the college of fine arts out of love… or out of flight.”
Her father raised an eyebrow in mild surprise, while Muna placed her hand gently on her cheek, and said without attempting to soften the truth:
“It’s flight, father.”
I paused for a moment, looking first at her father, then at her, and lowered my gaze, as though drawing from an old well of memory long forgotten:
“Yes… I fled. I fled from… from my own body… and from another’s. From fear, and from confusion. From a scene I didn’t know how to live… nor how to move beyond.”
Muna’s father smoothed the edges of his woolen sleeves quietly, and said with a tone closer to interpretation than judgment:
“You mean what happened during the entrance exam, isn’t that so?”
I nodded slightly, words light on my tongue:
“Yes. The moment I was asked to embody the idea of the painting with a classmate I did not know. I had discussed the subject with Muna beforehand.”
Muna spoke in a warm voice, a mixture of reproach and tenderness:
“And I would like us to revisit it, to see what occurs to my father.”
I sighed before continuing:
“I had drawn a girl sitting by the window, soft light slipping onto her bare shoulder, tracing boundaries of light and shadow across her skin. I was not seeking to evoke any sensual riddle, but rather, with the anxious care of an artist, I tried to render in pencil the way sunlight moves through window glass, crosses the shadow of a plant, and then fractures…”
I saw her at first as nothing more than a simple canvas, innocent in intent and purpose. Yet, unexpectedly, she stirred astonishment in the eyes of the committee members. Between murmurs of curiosity and glances of admiration, they asked me to provide a tangible explanation of my vision, after I found myself unable to articulate the intricate interplay of light and shadow.
Then the head of the committee, a solemn man given to silence and contemplation, stepped forward. He called to one of the third-year students. In a calm voice, gesturing toward the canvas, he said, “Study it closely, and then place your body under the direction of your peer… let him reshape you according to the vision he desires on the stage, according to the angle and the light he chooses.”
The girl froze for a moment, then slowly shook her head in hesitant agreement and stepped onto the platform. The silence of the room at that instant resembled the hush of mirrors reflecting an image that exists only in the soul.
As I traced the lines of light, indicating the positions of hands and the tilt of the head, some in the audience breathed with difficulty, as if what unfolded before them were nothing less than a secret scene revealed for the first time. Even one of the elder committee members whispered to his neighbor, “How difficult it is to express a point of light without revealing the entirety of the shadow!”
And I, I was thinking of only one thing: how art can save us when words fail.
She moved closer to perform her role alongside me. I said to her: “What I want from you here is to shape a poetic canvas, a visual scene where shadows whisper to light. A shirt slipping from the shoulder, the classical touch in charcoal and ash only—black and white. And I want the light arranged perfectly, so that with you it transforms into a charcoal-and-pencil masterpiece, balancing softness with drama.”
“I described the scene to the audience: a girl sits quietly by a large window, her shoulder bare, receiving the gentle rays of sunlight that flow softly through the glass. She does not look outside, but inward, her gaze fixed on her outstretched hand, on something invisible to the eye.
The lighting must appear as if rendered in charcoal and graphite:
The light slips through the window, brushing her bare shoulder lightly, traced in delicate graphite lines.
On her shoulder, the boundaries between light and shadow intertwine, as if the skin itself were drawn by the hand of light.
The sunlight does not fall directly; it passes first through the glass and intersects with the shadow of a nearby plant, forming a fractured pattern of light and dark across the girl’s neck, as though nature sketches its intricacies upon the body.
Her outstretched hand reaches toward the light, shadows playing upon it like a mirror of the inner self, reflecting what cannot be spoken.
In the background and the atmosphere:
Beside the window stands a large-leaved plant, its shadow falling with meticulous detail on the wall and across the girl’s body.
The mood of the painting is secretive, as if the viewer intrudes upon a hidden moment, seen for the first time.
The high contrast between the dense charcoal in the shadows and the fine graphite in the highlights embodies the ‘complex interweavings’ between light and shadow.”
I felt, for a fleeting moment, that I… was powerless. Perhaps it was seeing her face, or the stir of her emotion, or simply that no one else had seen what I alone had—an exposed shoulder, arching toward me as if to circle my body. I thought I had committed a sin, or was about to… so I fled. I closed my eyes, surrendering to the memory, when I heard her voice, soft, almost like a whisper of truth: “You used to say you know bodies from books, yet you never learned to see them in life.”
I opened my eyes. I looked at her. Her features were calm, but her eyes spoke more than words ever could. I said, with sincerity, “I wasn’t ready for that, Muna. I never learned to see a body as presence, not as temptation. It was more than a drawing… it was a revelation, and I was not prepared.”
Her father set his empty cup on the table, then spoke with a tone that drew wisdom from decades of silence: “No, you weren’t ready to show yourself bare before reality. Art is not enough to see, Numan… it requires looking with a heart unashamed of vision.”
A gentle silence fell, as if making room for his words to settle deep within me. Then I spoke, with a tone that understood what I had failed to grasp days ago: “I suppose I will understand… but only after years. When I write of that moment, I will not blame her, nor the committee. I will hold accountable only that boy who did not yet know how to breathe before a woman.”
Muna laughed lightly, and said, with sweetness: “And yet, you are still learning, aren’t you?” I smiled, and answered: “Thanks to you.”
My father patted my shoulder, his eyes warm with light: “We do not blush at beginnings, Numan… only at failing to remain in them.”
The friend turned his palm over, eyes wide with curious astonishment:
“Then what happened?”
Numan smiled, a trace of nostalgia softening his gaze:
“After that, my friend, Muna suggested I paint with words instead of colors. So I enrolled with her in the College of Arts.”
The friend furrowed his brow, his tone hiding surprise behind gentle amusement:
“But how were you accepted into the Arabic Department with a science high school diploma?!”
“True, my friend…” Numan said, as if recalling an old, unfading chapter of a story:
“When I went to the College of Fine Arts to withdraw my papers, Muna was with me.”
The friend laughed, shaking his head lightly:
“So what’s the difference?! You mean they accepted you just because she was there?!”
Numan shook his head, a small smile touching his lips:
“No, never… not like that! But on the way back, Muna was flipping through my grade sheet. Suddenly, she stopped and fell silent for a moment, as if she had glimpsed something remarkable.”
I looked at her, puzzled: “What is it?”
She raised her wrist, glanced at her watch, then pointed toward the first approaching taxi. We climbed in. Once her shadow settled into the seat, she addressed the driver firmly:
“To the College of Arts, please!”
I asked, my voice tinged with unease: “What’s going on?”
She turned to me, eyes sharp with purpose:
“Didn’t you say this morning that you should look for an available seat to continue your studies?”
“Yes,” I replied.
Her eyes sparkled with certainty:
“You scored thirty-seven out of forty in Arabic with your science diploma!”
I blinked, confused: “And what does that mean?”
She studied my face, as if offering me a window:
“It means you can enroll directly in the Arabic Department without applying through the general admission. Its deadline has passed, and results are out… I was accepted because of it. So, what do you say, Professor Numan?”
I answered, regaining composure with a whispered prayer:
“May it all be for the best.”
We hurried to the College of Arts. It was nearly twelve noon. She held my hand, and we ran together, as if chasing a destiny hiding behind the windows. At the Student Affairs window, I submitted my papers, paid the fees and book prices. That very day, we attended our first lecture in Pre-Islamic Literature.
I drew a deep breath, feeling as though I were embracing a new destiny, and whispered to myself:
“Perhaps I was never meant to paint… but from this morning on, I will paint with words.”
Then I looked at her, and silently, without moving my lips, thought:
“You have always… without knowing it… been the cloud that drifts above my letters.”
“Truly… you were lucky to have a girl… yet she is worth a thousand men,” the friend sighed, admiration and astonishment mingling in his voice.
That night, when Numan returned to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed, sifting through the chaos of his thoughts as one might search for a lost key in the pocket of an old coat.
“Was I completely honest?”
“Did I reveal what was truly in my heart?”
“Did that conversation change anything in me?”
He began to replay the scene, as if rewatching a film that belonged to him alone.
“Did I say what I should have said? Or did I say only what he wanted to hear?”
Not all the words that left him were light, yet each was necessary.
“Escape… is it a stigma? Or a survival instinct?”
“Could I have held myself together in the admissions hall? Freed myself from the chains of shyness, fear, and a rigid upbringing?”
“Was Muna merely a safe haven, or a mirror reflecting the image I had lost of myself?”
Then he spoke to himself:
“Perhaps I was once afraid of the body, not because it was obscene, but because it was fragile. Like my own fragility.”
“I thought art was a canvas… but it revealed itself. I thought I was free… but I found myself trembling.”
“Yet, when I began to write, I began to understand.”
He now saw that what had happened was not failure, but the beginning of a deeper awareness:
“I was not unsettled by the female body, but by my ignorance of its boundaries… and my own. By that child within me who never learned to see a woman as a being, not as a source of confusion.”
“The admissions exam was a metaphor for my acceptance of myself… and at the time, I was not ready.”
Then he sighed softly, a sound barely caught by the walls of the room:
“I do not regret. I understand. And that is enough for now.”
“That day, when I faltered before my classmate, it was not her body alone that shook me… but all the old voices that had taken residence inside me.
The voice of Professor Ahmed, who once looked at him with shining eyes and said:
“Art is responsibility, not deviation… and you come from an environment that accepts only the surface.”
The voice of the Sheikh, striking the table hard:
“Do you wish to trade your world for the hereafter? To abandon modesty and walk the path of indulgence?!”
It was as if everything ever said to him rose from its ashes in that moment… before the light spilling over his classmate’s shoulder, before the committee’s request that he explain his painting physically… it was no longer him, but a handful of warnings, commandments, and fear.
But…
Was his fear of “sin”? Or of being “weak”?
Was he fleeing the allure of the body?
Or the truth: that he still did not know how to see the body… without linking it to sin?
“I did not invent this terror. I was raised on it. It took shape inside me like a wound healing crooked. I believed that purity lay in fleeing, not in understanding. That modesty lay in averting the gaze, not in seeing clearly.”
But Muna said something… something that never left him:
“Anyone who is never taught to see the body with innocence will always see it as a threat.”
Perhaps it was time to reorder his notions… not to destroy his faith, but to cleanse it of a fear that was unlike God, of religiosity inherited without scrutiny.
“The Sheikh did not hate me. The professor did not mislead me.
But both were children of an environment that did not know how to look at beauty… without placing a veil of fear between it and the eye. And now… I do not want to live with my vision stifled. I want to see… to understand… to love beauty as it was created, not as I feared it.”
Numan’s father returned that evening, ate his dinner in silence, then sat by the fireplace, staring at the embers as if their glow carried an old question left unanswered.
Numan entered the room holding two cups of coffee and set one before his father.
His father spoke without lifting his eyes from the fire:
“I used to see you measuring angles with precision, building houses from paper as if they could withstand an earthquake… I thought you would become an engineer who constructs dreams.”
Numan sat beside him, his voice carrying a shadow of apology:
“That was my dream, yes… but the path to it narrowed and would not hold me. I tried interior design afterward, tried to convince myself I was still building… but my heart found no rest, father.”
This time his father lifted his eyes, and in them something between sorrow and reproach:
“And did you choose to step away? Or did you tell yourself: what I did not reach was never mine?”
Numan inhaled deeply, then said calmly:
“I no longer chase what does not resemble me. I chose to begin with myself, not with a dream that broke. I entered the Arabic department, and there I found myself. I saw how a word can build a house that does not fall, open a window in a wall that has none. Muna told me one evening: ‘Language is no less than architecture, only its tools are deeper.’ And I… I believed her.”
His father remained silent for a moment, then spoke in a low voice:
“I was angry, yes… not because you did not enter engineering, but because I felt you had retreated before trying. I feared you had broken your wing with your own hand.”
Numan, eyes glowing with a mix of longing and truth, replied:
“I did not break it… I reshaped it. That wing became a pen, not a ruler. I no longer build walls of cement, but of meaning. I write to repair what I could not build in reality.”
The father smiled faintly, stirred his cup, and said,
“And have you made peace with that boy who used to look at the engineering college as if gazing at a mountain?”
Numan answered, glancing out the window where the rain whispered against the glass:
“Not entirely… but I write to him. I read to him every evening, as if to tell him: it was not in vain.”
His father whispered, as if confessing something long concealed:
“Perhaps I did not understand you back then… but today I am proud of you. Because you did not just build a bridge on paper, you crossed it toward yourself.”
In that moment, Numan felt that he no longer wrote to satisfy an old dream, nor to mend disappointment, but to see himself as he truly was: a man who had redrawn the boundaries of his own self after the maps of the road had been lost.
As the rain murmured against the window, his mother entered the room, wiping her hands with a cloth, her eyes keenly observing the two men.
She spoke in a tone that carried both seriousness and curiosity:
“I heard you speaking… so, have you decided, Numan?”
He straightened in his seat and replied:
“Yes, mother. I enrolled in the Arabic department.”
She stepped forward, seated herself opposite him, fixed him with a steady gaze, and said:
“Do you flee from the dream whenever the path narrows? Or do you hide behind words to justify retreat?”
His father intervened gently, his voice softening:
“Let him finish. What we thought was retreat may be a search for the truer path.”
She responded quickly, a trace of suppressed worry in her voice:
“I do not oppose him because he chose literature… but because I fear he might get lost. Life is not a beautiful text, Numan, that you edit whenever you wish. It is reality. It demands skill, a profession, a support.”
Numan looked at her calmly and said:
“I am not running away, mother. But I have learned that a dream that does not fit my stature may not be mine. I used to think that if I were not an engineer, I would be nothing. Then I realized that identity is not confined to a profession, but to the mark one leaves.”
She paused, as if weighing his words, then said:
“Yet you have changed your path so often. From engineering to design, then to literature… and the anxiety in my heart does not fade easily. I fear you may waste your life swapping facades without building a single home to inhabit.”
Here the father smiled, gently placing his hand over hers:
“But he has built something… he has built himself. And today I see him more mature, not less determined. What matters is not merely building bridges between shores, but establishing a bridge between himself and his soul.”
The mother lowered her eyes for a moment, then lifted them to Numan, speaking more softly, though still cautious:
“If you have found yourself there… plant your feet. Do not abandon this path as you left the others. And know that words are a responsibility, like buildings; they collapse if not founded on truth.”
Numan nodded, a gleam of deep gratitude in his eyes, and said:
“I promise… this time I will not turn back. I will not change the dream, I will deepen it.”