And when I was a slave in Savannah, I toiled my life away looking for you, God.

There in the fields at sunrise in the bright mornings, I sang your songs and tried to remember your words. There in cold sunset in the evenings, I could feel you approaching with the night. I would try to keep my eyes steady over the firelight, trying to see your face in the flames, trying to see as Aaron and Moses had seen.

We were that generation that dreamed of it. Who whispered of great men in the quiet. Who heard words whispered down to us about people far away. People who imagined us free. It was what we saw in the still nights. It was the substance of all our dreams. Falling asleep every night of my enslavement, I would think of you, my Lord, and I would think of freedom. And I would know anew that you and it were one and the same.

And when our elders saw us pray to this new God, they told us those were the visions of the Devil. God was here, in the rest you get to enjoy between cotton shrubs, they said. He was here in the love you have for the people you get to keep. He was here in the back of your mind, in its stillness at night. He is not far away. He is not falling from the sky. He is not coming in a wave of fire.

But they belonged to a moment before time. When I was a child, I asked my father what year it was. And he said he did not know what I meant, did not realize that there were men who called each year they lived and each year that had passed by its own number. He counted my years by the summers I had lived and, by the time I had come to my manhood, had long forgotten the tally.

He imagined time in circles, observed only that night follows after day and winter after summer, and imagined all of existence as only the cycling through of the same moment. Day after day. Season after season.

But we were that final generation of enslavement. And we knew time well. We knew the names and numbers of the years we lived through, and those of the years we had passed, and those of the years to come. We knew of change, dreamed of progress, knew that the ideas of one age are but rarely the ideas of the next, and let our prayers be filled with dreams of freedom.

Going to sleep around the campfire, night after night, I would imagine it spreading through the whole field, climbing over the master’s manor, and setting us free. I imagined myself seeing it from the slave quarters, approaching it, and hearing it speak to me, and knowing it was the same fire that called to Moses from a burning bush, promising to bring his people out of the hands of their enslavers, to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large—unto a land flowing with milk and honey.

And when I was a child in Bleeding Kansas, I asked my father if God was angry at us. And, called back to life in the dusk, he looked up from his scythe. He rested its blade on the earth and leaned upon its handle. And he said no, that we have done what he has commanded us to do, and that that was enough.

And I asked him as we walked home after sunset, as I carried the scythe and he the grain cradle, how it was that we knew that all we were doing was all God had commanded us to do. There in the night, I could see nothing but the light from the house when I raised my head, and nothing at all when I lowered it. And in the darkness, I heard him ask if I knew what was right and what was wrong. And I told him I think did. “That is enough,” he said.

And when I was Captain, of Company A in Kansas’ 8^th Infantry, I knew there was a God when I brought my men down for their final campaign. And I knew there was a God when I saw proud Atlanta entrench into its fortifications and shell us from afar; I knew there was a God when we encircled the city and lay it siege; I knew there was a God when I saw it starve and buckle, its fortifications fall, and its people surrender; and I knew there was a God when the rain began to fall as I held fire in my hand and spread it liberally about me and let it consume a century of another people’s labor in a single evening.

I knew there was a God when I heard them cry to heaven. And I knew God heard them when I burnt down their homes and seized their land. I knew it was God crying for mercy through them. And I knew it was God in me and God in them. One corner of divinity of calling out for mercy to another. Closing my eyes, listening to the sound of the rain and the fire and the wails become one and then many and one again, Solomon’s words in scripture rang through me. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. And I knew what time it was then. And I prayed that the times of peace, and the times healing, would come soon, only because I knew it was right to pray for it.

And I knew there was a God when I rounded my men up from their spoils. And I knew all belonged to him, and that all would return to him.

I knew there was a God in the rising morning, as the sunlight and the firelight each veiled themselves with the other. I waited for hours in the downpour with my men, who wished only to be given a moment in General Sherman’s audience.

And when he came, dusty in cannonfire soot, he descended from his horse and shook each of my men’s hands, and mine last. And when I saw them march out from camp the next morning, I knew that they knew that there was a God as well; that, just perhaps, he truly does care for us; that he truly does reward the righteous and cast down the wicked, in this life, as so in the life to come, on earth, as in heaven; that life is full of pain but that there are men who bear their yokes with pride, with diligence, with labor, and strength.

But for all I knew of God, I had never seen his face, nor had I had his voice. I believed they were not for the present living to witness, that they belonged to another time, to a time beyond memory. This I believed when I saw Atlanta fall.

And this I believed when we began our march to Savanah upon the coast. And this I believed when we camped outside Bethleham, a two-day’s march from once-Atlanta. And this I believed when I fell asleep that night, and when I was roused awake by my men, and by the sound of a marching army.

I emerged from my tent and spied the fields around us through my glass. And I saw them. And I saw who they were. I called for my horse and rode it to the meet them, shouting my orders at my men as I approached.

And I stopped before them. I saw their faces coming in and out of the darkness. Faces of men and women and children. I heard their voices. Singing and praying. Hopeful but afraid. Singing the name of the lord. A long procession of freedmen, their wives, and their families, asking to be among us for protection. I spent an eternity there, watching from my horse. Watching them seek refuge amid our banners. And I listened to their prayers and untangled their words. And I knew then for certain that they knew God as I knew God. That was when I saw your face, my Lord God, forming slowly from theirs against the firelight, marching one behind the other. That was when I knew you had saved my soul. That was when I knew that, for every part I was their savior, they were mine a thousandfold.

Because when the war fell upon us, I hadn’t believed it had truly come. To slaughter ourselves in the midst of this new world, with all the work of a new civilization yet to be complete, nearing only a century into this grand, God-given experiment, I thought, was beyond all the folly I believed all the fools in this land were capable of.

And in my continuing disbelief, I saw the finest regimented men of my generation, and all the armies they led, slaughtered for no gain.

And it was long then since I could feel much. I did not care if the union was kept whole. I did not care if all or none who were enslaved were set free. All I felt then was my fury. So, I followed her. And I would have followed her to the end, that strange woman, who flattereth with her words, whose house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead. I would have followed her unto my own sprit’s destruction, and I would awoken to all my sin too late to finally know that Solomon spoke true when he said I would have mourned at the last when my flesh and body are consumed and say, How have I hated instruction! How my heart has despised reproof!

Because I knew that there were other men who were cruel in their rage as I am cruel in mine, that all that kept me from hell, and them hurtling towards it, was the causes we fought for. And I knew I had put so little thought into what I fought for. I had done so much out of anger. And I knew then that, if I had done so much so mindlessly on behalf of the freed, I would have done the same on behalf of a tyrant, against the meek. And that the lord would have let me fall through his sieve before his judgement seat. And that I would be in hell.

And I knew then, watching their mourning, joyous, freed, yet burdened procession, that it was them, they who were freed by our violence, and only them, who may let me be a cruel man in life but be remembered a great man in death.

I saw the procession until its end that night, almost unto the dawn. I lined my men around their makeshift camps and held the first watch alongside them. And when the sun was high, we received our orders to begin our march anew, with a third of the army flanking the new procession upon our rear. And there was talk throughout the army of what to do with them. But we cared for them for as long as they were our charge.

And on Sunday of that week, when were camped outside Zebulon, a deserter from General Davis’s brigade came upon our division and, before he was whisked away to the Major General’s tent, made a small crowd telling everyone, as everyone would later tell everyone else, what Davis had done at Ebeneezer Creek.

He said that a similar procession of freedmen had come upon their camp outside Ebeneezer Creek; that they asked for refuge; that Davis accepted, had let them believe they were free. But that the night after, he had his engineers build a bridge as they freedmen slept and had crossed his army onto the other side of the creek by morning.

He said that David knew there was rebel calvary approaching; that he had known they would slaughter and re-enslave any freedmen they found; that he let them be slaughtered; that the rebels came upon them and chased them into the creek, and killed everyone who emerged up on the same side alive; that he had cursed Moses, had chosen to close the sea not upon Pharoah and his chariots, but upon the slaves marching to freedom through the desert.

And I knew then that Davis was going to hell. And I knew that if I do nothing different after hearing of evil than I did before, he would drag me down with him, by my negligence wrapped around my neck.

And I pondered alone for a time, well into the morning. I knew for certain then God was good. He had made a place in his heaven for people as lost as I. He did not lead me astray. He loved me. He kept me on his guided path, I who have no eyes to keep it myself. I who am so oft blinded by my rage. He has made a savior of me. He has placed my name in happy remembrance, I who could so easily have been damned to another fate.

And, though it ought not have, news came down to us that General Sherman was to meet with a group of freedmen pastors and ministers to ask them what they wanted done for their people, and to finally decide what our duty to them must be. And so, as we neared Savannah, I wrote to my colonel and asked if I could be there with the general when he met with them.

And I received a letter back in the evening saying I was to join his retinue. And so, I set out. And when I reached that old house-made-headquarters, I saw that, of the soldiers who joined the general, there were only a few other pale faces. And when the general arrived, we all rose to salute him. He motioned to us to sit, and we sat, waiting for Pastor Frazier to arrive, and to deliver the evening’s first remarks.

With the windows open, the breeze streamed through the room and stopped in a slow rhythm. I had never been to the sea. But you could taste its salt against the wind down every street in the city.

The pastor was late. But none in that room said much to even remark it. Pastor Frazier who had grown vegetables in a thicket outside his slave quarters for 20 years to purchase his freedom, selling them to a white foreman who took his own cut before selling them again; Pastor Frazier who worked another 10 years to earn his wife’s freedom before presenting the total sum to his owner one evening in 1856. I don’t think any of us would have had much to say to him about waiting and patience.

But when the pastor came, we rose. At the head of his party, he seemed a small, frail man. But he moved with steadiness, as if he considered every action before he made it. As if he had questioned the purpose of all things under the sun for so long and through so much despair that he was left with nothing but purpose, had infused it into all his being, did nothing without its presence, but when doing anything, did it with the conviction he must have found hidden somewhere between the roots of the vegetables he grew there in the thicket at night, away from his master’s eyes.

I remembering only wondering then what it was they would ask for. Watching them tug up at their collars and down at their cuffs, wishing they themselves did not have to see the scars that stretched out like branches, down past their wrists and up past their necks, I knew that perhaps they had the right to ask for it all; to ask for all the wealth owed to two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil, to ask for every drop of blood drawn with the lash to be paid by another drawn with the sword, that such would be their right if they knew, and knew that we knew, that the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.

After the general had shaken their hands, he motioned them to sit and sat down himself. Only we, the soldiers in his retinue, and Pastor Frazier remained standing.

And soon he began speaking, as the breeze passed anew through the room. He spoke gently, but in that voice pastors know well, that voice that is loud even when it is quiet, one that fills a room, though it sounds as if it was speaking only in an aside to a spouse.

And he asked only for their own labor. For their right to till the ground, and for their right to collect what they plant after they have tilled it.

I listened to very little else that whole evening. At night, I rode back to camp alone, through the darkness that draped over the land like a miles-long curtain, brushing over my head as I pressed back into country.

I vanished from myself for a long moment. It was only when I saw a light climbing up a broad hill that I became real to myself again. It was a small campfire, alone on the peak of that knoll, at a distance from the rest of camp down in the valley, which only appeared to me clearly now as I approached.

The men around the campfire were few. Their uniforms shined that brilliant blue from miles away, but it was only when I was close enough to feel the heat of their fire that I saw that they were black. And I understood why they were resting far from the main camp. I understood that it might not have been their choice. I tipped my hat towards them as I passed. They tipped theirs in return.

They must be the only ones in that city of tents, I thought as I approached the main camp, who had never doubted the cause for which they were fighting. The union, its unity, its promises, were not fictions to them. And so, now they could not be fictions to us either. Why do we then keep them far from us? They have who made this country real. They who, for all our good, held us to our own promises. Especially after we have come here all the way to give them freedom, though not all of us had known so when we decided to come.

Under the full moon, the land seemed to glow. I looked upon this new Canaan, which they and we had killed for. This new land of milk and honey. This once-pure land, bespoiled by sin. And I knew it could only be remade pure by them, by their labor, by them growing the fruits of their freedom for themselves, by them enjoying all of it except that which they wish to give away in kindness.

And so, when the field order came down from General Sherman four days later, setting apart the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, for the settlement of negroes now made free by the acts of war, I wrote to my colonel again. And soon, I received the orders I wished for. I asked half my men to make halters out of all our spare rope and went out with the other half to lead one mule and then another to the center of where one freedman pulled an odometer until it read 1,320 feet and another pulled a second perpendicular until it read the same.

“I will return,” I thought, handing one mule’s halter and then a second to a wife or a child, “to this the land of their once-enslavement. For now, let them spend their own labor wisely. Let them work over this land. Let them make it young anew. Let them collect all its fruits. Let all be repaid. And when it is, I will return, and I will ask for only a portion of its fruit. And they will give it to me in kindness. And it will be cease to be mine, and it will cease to be theirs.”

And when I was a freedwoman in Macon, helping my husband till the soil not far from where we had once been enslaved, I watched myself question life’s worth again. And I began to realize I was sinking back into despair.

Soon after, I began to taste metal in all my meals, saw spotting upon my loincloth, and knew what was coming. And when I saw my belly swell, I knew for certain I was creating life, just as you had created life. I felt it take all my strength from me. I felt my needs increase to create it. And when I gave birth, I knew it was more painful than all the lashes I had borne.

And looking upon my daughter, this being created entirely within me, whose flesh my flesh labored to create, I thought of you, and thanked you. For I had felt your burden, my Lord. If this little life had taken so much from me, I could not imagine how much it had taken from you to create life itself.

That was the first year we were free. And the day after, a white man from the freedmen’s bureau came to our door, gave us his blessings, told us of the school they were building on the main road, and told us to please send her there when she is able.

My daughter spends all the sun’s time in school, as my husband and I work over the field. Soon after her first day, a kind quaker family from the north sent us a bible. And once my daughter knew the symbols well, she taught them to me as well. Every night I trace my finger over your scripture, my Lord. Under candlelight in the summer, in the fireplace light in the winter. And I bring the words out of the page. And I make your words mine. As they were once spoken by you, now they are spoken by me.

My daughter is as tall as my shoulder now. And she is beginning to have her own sadnesses. And I feel helpless to stop them. I reach into myself, trying to find what happiness of mine I have to give her, and return, always, empty-handed.

The day I knew I was free was the happiest day of my life. I believed that once I was free, nothing else would matter to me. That I could simply spend the rest of my life knowing I was free. And that that would be enough.

And I only knew for certain I was wrong only when I had her, when I spent her first early, joyful years, in a deep personal sorrow, thinking only of how little I had to give her.

I knew I was free. But not free from toil. I knew I was free. But not free from want. I knew I was free. But not free from ignorance. And I asked over and over again when my deliverance—my true deliverance—would come.

And I thought myself ungrateful. After all you had delivered us from. I imagined you sending me back to enslavement after seeing how little freedom seemed to mean to me. And I would repent.

I would witness my daughter at play and see how little it took to bring her joy. Her for whom all the world was new. And I would try and imagine myself happy, as she was happy.

And I would work, toil over that land, summer after summer. And I would do so thinking of her, thinking of it as what I needed to do to set her free. I would remember that Jacob’s ladder is long, that it will only end when I die, that I will work for the rest of my days fighting to set my daughter free. It helped me find peace, but I still despaired, knowing it was never freedom for myself.

But that peace let me see beyond myself. Late at night, when despair would come to haunt me again, I would pull myself back into that peace. And it would teach me slowly. It would bring back into my mind the words you said:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done

And I began to know that I will soon be my children. And the children of others. I feel, so often, that I am them already. Just as I am already all the things that once existed.

And so, I work. I work to set them free. And I know I am setting myself free as well.

When I first came to Beirut, I thought it was the center of the world. Where I grew up, in Halba, an hour away from Tripoli on the French roads, it was Tripoli that had always been the big city to us. Beirut seemed another world. The way I heard it spoken of at home, of expensive trips to Beirut that the neighbor’s neighbor took but which we could never afford, it might as well have belonged to another country.

Sitting in Religion and then Quran class after, with the tight hijab my mother tied around my head, it melted into my mind the same way Babylon, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cordoba, Mecca and Medina did. Distant faraway cities, where people once found God, or found wisdom, or found love, around every corner.

But walking through Hamra, in soon-to-be-West Beirut for the first time when I was 26 years old–with my hair down, with my steps close in my long French pencil skirt, with the neon signs hanging from the Parisian-style buildings shining light off the rain over the Ottoman-paved cobblestone streets, with the young men and the young women, their hair shorter and skirts tighter than mine, their arms crossed within each other’s, walking into and out of bars together–I thought, surely, this must be the center of the world.

Damascus under the Umayyads. Baghdad under the Abbasids. Istanbul under the Ottomans.

Did all those great cities of the past also only realize they were the center of the world when it was clear a great war was at their steps? When their crowns had already fallen from their heads, though it hadn’t yet hit the ground?

This was the winter of 1974 into 1975. And the whole country knew where it was heading. They knew it even when they didn’t know it, even when they denied it because they didn’t want it to be true.

Everyone living in Beirut knew it, with one bomb after another set off one month after another. And the people in the countryside knew it, because no ever told them the old war ended. And though we believed we knew better, those of us closer to the cities also knew we didn’t know better at the same time. This world of uncertainty had made us no wiser than every peasant who could not tell you the name of the language they were speaking. It was cruel for us young people then, fresh from school, whether educated in Arabic or French or (more recently) English, to know that, for all our knowledge, we were none the wiser about all the things in life that actually mattered.

And once it started, in a way, we weren’t even really sure which war it was we wanted to end. Perhaps war had ended for others, for the people in countries strong enough to remove themselves from it. But it never really ended for us. It could not have ended, because we could really remember a time in which we had peace.

Perhaps it was the war that started in 1947 in Irsael-once-Palestine or Palestine-once-Israel. Perhaps it was the war that started in 1939 in Poland. Perhaps it was the war started in 1099, when the Christians first returned to Jerusalem and turned the sandy streets muddy with blood. Perhaps it was the war that started in 624 when Peace-Be-Upon-Him declared war on the Qureshis. Perhaps it was the war that was started before time was made or after the first time was lost, when the Israelites, led by Joshua, crossed the Jordan and encircled Jericho and slaughtered everyone within.

Perhaps it was the war that started yesterday, though we didn’t know it yet, with the last bomb set off in East Beirut.

But the lights and music down Hamra Street made you forget. It made you forget war. It made you forget heartbreak. It made you forget God, and it made you forget that it is when you forget Him that He is there, beside you, the closest.

After ordering a single drink–looking and then looking away at the men in the bar and the men in the street with their shirts open halfway down–I walked back home, stumbling on the cobblestone streets in my heels, back home to my small apartment the music label rented for me on Rue Alfred Nobel, between Rue Marie Curie and Rue Moustafa Kamel.

I chuckled every time I had to give directions home in a taxi. I imagined the three of them, Alfred Nobel, Marie Curie, and Ataturk, sitting there smoking on that street corner, unsure of what to say to each other.

The day after, I was going to meet Ziad, the composer. I had always sung, all through my younger years. And I couldn’t help but think of all those years as I walked into my apartment complex, past the lobby where I would ask the man behind the front desk to ring my parents’ number. I knew it would take a moment for my mother to get to the phone. It was the number to the village pharmacy, and it would take time for them to call up to my mother on the third floor above them, and it would take time for her to come down the stairs slowly, panting. So I went upstairs first to change into my house clothes before heading back down.

When I came back down, the man behind the counter said, “Now he-rings.” I thanked him and walked into the phone booth with the receiver and the handset, leaving the door only slightly ajar to make for the phone cable.

Listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, I thought back to the tight hijabs she wrapped around my head; I thought about the singing lessons she gave me as a child; I thought about the song contests she made me enter as a child; I thought about when I was 13 years old and I told her that I didn’t want to be to one to have to fulfill her dreams, that I never wanted to sing again.

And I thought about the day my father explained to me that women were not allowed to sing the call-to-prayer, and that it was correct that it was so; and I thought about the week my father came home with a new word: Osteosarcoma.

I thought about the week he died, as it settled on me that I was finally free; I thought about how we drove to Tripoli the morning of the first song contest I would sing as an adult, in the taxi with Ummi, as she screamed at the driver to go faster, as I rested my voice; I thought about the way I only looked to her for confirmation as I sung on stage, her there in the audience in her night-black niqab. All I could see of her was her face, like the moon, sobbing as she watched her only daughter singing Ya Aachikata el Wardi in front of an awed crowd.

When someone finally picked up the phone, I first heard the pharmacist, “Ya binti, stay-you on-the-line. Here-she mother-yours. Now she-comes.”

And soon I heard my mother’s voice, “Allô? Allôo?” We spoke quietly, for about five minutes. She asked me if I was nervous. I said no. “Akeed! Of course!” she said then defiantly, as if it would have been stupid of me if I had been nervous. “With-you the-loveliest voice in-the-world, ya binti, o daughter-my, and-this-composer in-the-self called-had-he-for-you. Hope-his, not will he-fail, and if failed-had-he, he the-fool.”

***

When I met Ziad the next day, he was who I expected him to be. I got to the studio early. He got there late, leaving me and the label’s executive waiting: waiting for 30 minutes for the phone call informing us why he was running late, and another 15 for him to be at the door.

When Ziad finally arrived, he was wearing sunglasses, and when he removed them, revealed two dark, hazel, barely-rested eyes. He had a thin face and thinning curly black hair and a full beard. It was clear he had been out all night. But no one bothered accusing him of it. Nor would he have been bothered to have been accused of it. He simply gave us a short apology and said that he had had a late night.

He was 31 then, and I was 26. He had spent the last five years making a name for himself, singing in Arabic and in French, with men and women, with Christians and Muslims and Druzes, in stern support of the Palestinians but then in mockery of their fanatics. Making a name for himself and making an enemy out of every political faction in the country while doing so.

But his songs drifted down Hamra Street every night, from the clubs, from the bars, from the car radios. And they enchanted you when they did.

And I was here with him now, having spent my last five years waiting for my father to die. And we were going to make an album together: love songs. But I already knew, and he already knew, and the label’s producer already knew, though didn’t know that he had already known, that it was soon going to become about something much more than love. As little as love could be torn away from history, politics, society, God.

He showed me to the studio room. He pointed to the live room where I would sing. A control room where he would listen and produce. And the label executive smiled at us and told us cheerfully to get to work.

And we did. We spent the entire day singing, with me in the live room, and him across that misty glass in the control room. He never had songs written down. “Writing-of-them,” he said to me that first day, “she-kills-them even before-what they-being-born-they.” So he would sing what he had in mind, and I would sing it after him. And he would sing his corrections, and I would sing it back to him until he was happy. And we moved through our first song like that, slowly, line by line, then couplet by couplet, then verse by verse.

That was the first day I had to remind him that it needs to be “Enta (‘you’ when said to a man),” if it’s going to be heard in my voice when singing to a lover, not “Anthee (‘you’ when said to a woman).” But he just waved off the suggestion. “You knowing what intended-had-I,” he said.

He couldn’t help it. When he was there, lost in the music, it came to him “Entee,” and he couldn’t bother, perhaps couldn’t risk, taking himself away from the music long enough to remember to say, “Enta.” That’s what convinced me that that song was about someone real. Some woman whose heart he must have broken but who broke his heart even worse in return. Enough, Enough, Oh love, Enough.

And we fell in love. Of course we did. That very day, though we hadn’t known it yet. He wasn’t the most attractive man, but if you watched him lose himself in the music, you would see how easy it was to fall in love with him, watching all his facades fall off one by one, seeing his heart slowly shine through, seeing him turn back into a child, overcome by emotion, sitting there alone beyond the glass, without comfort, without love.

Sitting with him on his side of the studio in the control room, at the end of the day, finally getting to hear all the best and worst takes we recorded that day, listening to him talk about what he thought the song still needed, I saw the wisdom in many of his suggestions but none in many others.

Then we sat quietly, letting the best takes we recorded that day play on repeat over the bare instrumentals he recorded in his apartment, each drinking a short glass of cognac that he had poured.

He closed his eyes when he felt it reach his head, and leaned back. It’s almost as if the rhythm came clearer to him then. I watched him, there with his eyes closed, as I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen watching him with his eyes open, and I thought of Hafez. All those poems about wine and music and love.

I walked home that night still tipsy from the cognac. The car radios that passed informed me another bomb had been set off in East Beirut. But all I heard was our music.

***

When I returned to work the next day, he was already there.

I marched into the studio. “I know where to take the song.”

“That, known-had-I from-before,” he said. “But let-us we-see if have-arrived-we to-same the-place.”

So, I walked into the live room, turned on the microphones, took a long breath, and began singing. I opened my eyes only sparingly to see his reaction across the glass. But every time I did, I saw him only nodding harder, only smiling wider. And I knew that, though kept separate the whole night, we had come to the same place, had perhaps even followed the same path.

We both knew, though neither of us knew we already knew, that that song was over. All that remained was us to find the perfect takes and the right mix. But its soul was here, between us, trapped somewhere in that glass, from where we weren’t going to let it escape.

***

And then, the river took us. And we let ourselves be taken. I remembered what my mother told me once, of how in Al-Andalus, in then-Muslim Spain, when people saw singers taken in by that river of song, they cried “Wa Ilah! Wa Ilah!”, believing they were possessed by the Holy Sprit, and did so for so many years so many times that they continue to call to God to this day, though they don’t realize it: “Olé! Olé!”

But I didn’t care then if I was possessed by God or by a djinn. I wasn’t going to let this river of song let go of me.

And neither was he. That back and forth, of songs, of ideas, of lyrics, of words, of voices, was all we wanted to do, day and night. Me with my hair up, sans maquillage, in the pajamas I had brought and kept in the studio to change into every morning. Him with his uncombed hair growing more from the sides of his head than it wanted to do anymore from its top, with his beard growing out in every direction, like rays from the sun in old paintings.

There were so many times I would push a voice into him, knowing it was imperfect, which he would swallow whole, and come back the next day with it perfected. I knew then that we were making my voice his and his voice mine.

We would end so many days with tired, tired voices. And so, we would speak low. And that was the voice of his in which I remembered him telling me everything about himself. Growing up in a suburb not far from the city, he had always seen it as his playground.

“But the-city humbled-had-she-me, returned-had-she-me to-size-my, when finally come-had-I lived-had-I here,” he said. “When tried-had-I make-I-her mine to-me. These-the-five years the-first spent-had-I all days-my in-the-studio and all nights-my in-the-clubs and the-bars and the-drinking, trying-and I-trying become-I to-Beirut like-what been-had-he Solomon to-Jerusalam.”

He was quiet for a long moment after, reminiscing over the wildness of memories that, with them, came so much pain.

“There-are cities,” I finally said. “where God he-lives for a time.”

“Like Baghdad days-of the-Abbasids,” he said.

“Like Damascus days-of the-Ummayuds,” I completed him.

“Like Jerusalem days-of Solomon.”

Could it really be Beirut now? I wondered that night. And I would wonder it every night I ever spent in Beirut.

***

Singing late into the night for weeks on end, as the loud city outside tried to drink and dance itself into forgetfulness–forgetfulness of war, of life, of heartbreak–I thought, so many times, this is better than sex, because if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be all we were doing.

But the sex came. The day I learned to give into him. The day our voices, which had been growing towards each other then for a whole month, finally touched. The day I finally heard his voice when I heard his voice. The day I could understand its every plan and intention from a single note.

The day I finally learned to let his voice enter me, when I finally felt it possess me and leave its seed. The same day I saw him sing it “Enta (“you” when said to a man)” in a love song. That was the day I knew our souls had touched for the first time.

And after our last take was done, for the last song we wanted to record that day, I simply looked at him, across the glass, and he looked at me.

I took off my headphones and left the room and ran downstairs to the lobby and asked them to ring my mother’s number.

When I got back to the studio, I entered the control room without a word. He spun his chair to face me, and I walked over, and placed one knee over his left thigh on the other over his right, and lost the fingers of my right hand in his beard and the fingers of my left in his hair, and kissed him and then made love to him, right there on his control room chair, as he moved his feet under it to lock its wheels, one by one, in place.

***

And I barely saw my own apartment anymore. That night we had gone home to his place. We made love and fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night, called back to life, by the same God or the same djinn, and sang to each other, sang new songs. Songs about love. But also songs about war. Songs about unity. Songs about togetherness. Songs about a dear Shia friend of mine because I was Sunni. Songs about a dear Sunni friend of his because he was Shia. Songs about all the Christians murdered by Sunnis and Shi’as, each of whom fought with each other so much that they forgot what it meant to be Muslim. And songs about heartbreak seeing your old, tender, country fall into war and war and war, over and over and over again.

It was clear to me then that music is how we both had always chosen to forget. Through every heartbreak, as children or as adults. I remember Edith Piaf singing that first night in his apartment, off the record player in the living room as we made love in the bedroom.

“This-is the street to-the-songs. We no-there meet not loves unhappy. We ourselves-love, we no-ourselves-love not. We ourselves-kiss, we ourselves-from go. We sing, and then voilà.”

The next night we drove up to my apartment, past Alfred and past Mustafa and past Marie sitting on the curb outside, and emptied my closets of all the clothes I bothered wearing anymore and threw one half in the closet in the studio and the rest in the closet in his bedroom.

Our lives were on fire, and our country was on fire, and our love was on fire, and the music came, like a river that we couldn’t let go of, because it couldn’t let go of us. And with the river still flowing inside us, we would work through the day and into night and sleep in each other’s arms, often in the studio, or finish a song to perfection as the sun was just about to set, then when every night was the eve of war, when every night was turning into Thursday night and Friday night, and get dressed as the tapes burned a song into a cassette, as I applied my makeup in the reflection of the glass before he rushed me downstairs to the car with my heels in his hands.

I drank his cognac in the car, and the world and everything in it would be spinning by the time we reached the front of the line and the bouncer saw us and recognized him and let us in as an entire city block that had been waiting hours to be let in jeered at us, drunk already and drinking more whenever they felt the alcohol loosen its hold.

He crossed his arms in mine as we entered the club, and we waded through the dance floor until we were at the DJ booth. Ziad’s face and his hand raised with a cassette tape within it was all the DJ needed to see before he snatched it from his fingers, before we heard the music we had recorded all morning roar through the speakers, before we saw a city of drunk mourners mourning for their country flood into the dancefloor and press into the crowd pressing against the DJ booth.

I remember thinking then, listening to my voice come down upon us as if from heaven, seeing the crowd lose itself in ecstasy upon the very first note, seeing their souls reach for where our souls lay, making love in the music, feeling my tears of ecstasy and my tears of fear and my tears of mourning all flood like rivers down my face.

I’m ready to die. Ya Heavenly Father-my up above. I am ready to die. Ya Rabb al-Alamin, Lord of the Worlds. Ya Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim, the most gracious, the most forgiving. Take me if it is my time. Thank You for giving me at least this in my life. If this life won’t last much longer, let its last memory be this, this moment of pure ecstasy in the arms of a lover, in the arms of Your chosen city for a time.

Or is this death already? Had a suicide bomber already entered? Was he already priming the charges, as we all looked away, lost in music, lost in each other? Or had he already planted it this morning, under our feet? Was this moment the last moment of ecstasy we would spend here on Earth, in this Eden-for-an-instant, before He in Jannah upon high, with Yousef and Moussa and Issa and Peace-Be-Upon-Him at his side, was going to turn us back into the dust we came from? Or has it already gone off? Has he already trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? Has he already sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat? Is he already sifting our hearts before his judgement seat?

Or will my life continue on afterwards? Will I live to see this country fight itself to nothingness, as its always fought itself to nothingness? Simply for who gets to own it, for who gets to call their God the only God over it.

Will I live to see Ziad fall out of love with me? I know he had made songs with so women before, sitting there in the control room with them singing in the live room. Am I only the last in a long line? Will he leave me like any other? Will I only be his for as long as this river flows and then forgotten the second it turns dry?

Or will he leave me only after I have given him one son and then a second? Will another woman my age now, half his age then, simply walk into that same recording studio and leave me with half a husband?

Will I forever just be thought of as the woman made famous by his songs? The one who all the producers in our label, and the one across the street, think they have the right to bed, just because I had bedded Ziad? The one they will then destroy for rejecting their advances? The one they will leave to rot to obscurity? The one they leave to be thought of forever as the one without the brain to sing for herself, the one who vanished into obscurity the moment her man left her and took his famed genius with him?

Or will he be faithful? And will I be faithful? And will we kill our music by choosing to stay with each other, in unhappy love that we remember this moment too fondly to let go?

Or will everything be fine? Will this country find its way out of its problems in peace? Will Ziad be my faithful husband and give me one daughter and a second? Will this river of song never stop? Will we spend our old age singing in the garden of the house we bought together in the mountains?

And then I heard my mother speak to me. Her voice I had forgotten I had called to ask her all of this, every single question, that night I walked downstairs from the studio room to call her, and ask her for advice, because I knew I loved Ziad and that Ziad loved me.

“No you-worry-you, ya binti,” I heard her say. “You lived-had-you life more from-me. What-what it-happens, ya habibti, o beloved-my, please I-beg-you, no you-forget-you: will be-you happy. With-you the music, ya binti. Whether become-had-you the-beloved-of Ziad, there in-the-house-yours in-the-country, surrounded by-the-grandchildren-yours, singing-you with-him until-last-of lifetime-your. Or-whether left-had-you-him, or left-had-he-you and-thus you-remain in-Beirut, and-you-become the singer songs-of the-love who been-had-she famous, you-inspiring the-girls who they-recognize-her in-the-street, even only by living lifetime-your by-self-her in-peace. What-what it-happens, ya habibti: will be-you happy.

“So no you-worry-you, ya binti, please. Let-you just river-of the-desire in-heart-yours she-takes-you. He, the one who placed-had-He-it there. And-no would-have-He no-if not been-had-she necessary you-hear-her.”

“Thank-you, ya immi, mother-my” was all I said.

“Surely, ya binti.”

And I hung up and waved thanks to the man at the front desk and walked back up to the studio. And when I walked back into the control room, he turned to see me.

He smiled and said “Hey, Enta!”

And when I was in his arms and he was in mine, with Beirut outside on fire, I simply said back to him, “Hey, Entee!”