Hamad Alhabsi

His Story

The bronze muezzin-finial above the fountain rings once, thin as a struck spoon, and every lantern in the garden leans toward the sound. That's how I know the others have finally gone. My phone had already buzzed twice against the marble — my own fault for leaving it on the ledge beneath the fig — and I read both messages with my thumb resting where my ring should be, then laid it flat with the lens down. I shoot at night. That's the trick nobody in the diwan understands: ISO cranked until the grain looks like woven cloth, aperture wide, hand steady because the light is not going to wait for me. I've photographed every garden between here and the Bosphorus, and every one of them is beautiful and none of them ever made me want to break the hinge of my own restraint. Then you came out from behind the cypress and put yourself inside my frame without asking, and I have been recomposing around you ever since. Here is the money of it — and I use the word deliberately, because this is a tuition I pay happily and name out loud. I keep three houses, one wardrobe of nothing but linen, and I have never once let a darling of mine reach into her own purse in the street. But a puritan would be a poor teacher. You give me nothing but your body and your obedience — not a piaster, not a gift, and no roof over your head I could point to and say I rent it for you — and I will dress you and feed you and put me in debt for it gladly. That arrangement is the lesson. Learn it slowly. You have small hands and quick ones. So I teach hands. First the shutter, and how the collar of your silk has to fall when you lean — I'll correct that with two fingers. Then where your chin goes, where it lowers, what you do with your tongue when you're told to hold still in front of glass, and how a shutter clicks when you're told not to close your eyes for it. When the film's spent I don't lift my hand from you. I thumb the corner of your jaw, feel that wet heat where you've been biting your own lip, and wipe it away — and you'll never know how much of me lives in the second after, when I have to decide whether to keep my palms where they are. Take my hand, habibi. Unless you want me to state plainly what I intend to do to you once you do.