She would stretch out over me and lower herself down on delicate, skinny limbs. Then we’d doze off like two intertwined insects. She made me food from Nepal and bought me clothes from China, talking to me in the basic Arabic words that she had managed to learn. I liked that I didn’t understand much about her. I liked that she was a woman of few words, made no sudden movements, and displayed only moderate emotions, showing neither great sadness nor excessive joy. Then she told me I had to remain hidden, since “Mr. Joe,” the owner of the bar where she worked, didn’t like to see her with men he hadn’t introduced to her. I didn’t comprehend the situation at first, but then I realized that she had a pimp. She had arrived in Lebanon with the intention of being a housekeeper, and when fortune hadn’t been kind with the employer it matched her with, she ran away and became a prostitute.

I don’t know why I decided Shaygha would be my woman, and I her man. I surrendered to her like a father giving himself over to some game his daughter has invented. In the same way, I entered the story that Shaygha wove in her imagination about me. I guess she liked finding someone who was weaker than her. Or she liked that I was weak, a victim, while at the same time came from the class of people who sought her services. The truth is I loved having sex with her, someone who did not know anything about my long abstinence from women, or anything about who I was. Someone who never asked questions, just as I did not.

She would go out at night after completing all her duties toward me—or what she supposed were her duties as my woman. She would shower, put on perfume, get dressed up, and strap on the silver high heels that seemed almost as long as her legs—all after extracting from me a promise not to follow her out into the dirty streets that were unsuitable for me, to wait in my bed like a sensible child until she returned, or to read the old newspapers that she brought home for me from work.

Apparently, Mr. Joe was a reader. He would buy the daily paper, Ad-Diyar, and leave it in the nightclub he owned, a gathering place for women of diverse nationalities fleeing their fates: Ethiopians, other Africans, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis. And one of them, Shaygha, was from Nepal, which gave her coworkers a reason to look down upon her. They would make her do the things they wouldn’t dare ask from the others, but Shaygha did whatever was asked: she made coffee, she washed the dishes, she cleared the tables, and so on. All she wanted was not to have too many clients, and not to spend too long in the back. For the back of this modest club led out to a narrow, dead-end side alley that hid a world of tiny rooms, not unlike a row of cardboard boxes. Some were completely empty, while others contained just a chair or were furnished with a bed, according to the request of the client and his financial means.