The words were barely audible beneath the din but grew louder demanding to be heard. All he had to do was open his mouth; all he had to do was trust her with his most precious work.
“I do not study relics in my cellar,” he said, his tongue thick as he formed the words.
“I know,” she said, and his heart shot up into his mouth. “It’s just a figure of speech. I imagine your study has the best light.”
Gabriel shook his head. Now that he had found the courage to start, he had to finish. “I do not study relics,” he repeated, “because I conduct … experiments in my cellar.”
Her hand dropped from her mouth forcing her to place her glass back on the table. “Experiments? You mean with substances, like an apothecary?”
“No, not like an apothecary.”
“Experiments on what then?”
“On organs,” he said, feeling beads of perspiration form on his brow.
“Organs!” She jerked her head back from the shock, her eyes wide with alarm and he had no choice now but to try to make her understand. “Please tell me you don’t mean human organs.”
“No. Not human, but the closest thing — pigs organs.”
The truth seemed to startle her, and she stared at him, her nose scrunched and wrinkled. “For what purpose?”
Fear choked him as it wrapped its spindly vines around his neck. What if she didn’t understand? When he told her, would she look at him differently? Would she struggle to find him desirable; would she see a man who had lost his grip on reality?
Half of him felt relieved, glad she knew the depth of his obsession, even though he had so much more to tell. Half of him wanted to smack his head on the table until he was incapable of thinking anymore.
“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” she said, as though she understood the torment raging inside him. “You can trust me, Gabriel.”
“You will think me a fool,” he said downing what was left of his wine. “But you must understand, I was still a boy when my mother died.” His thoughts drifted back to a time of pain and sadness. “Everything changed after that. I felt alone, isolated and I clung to her memory because it was all I had. My mother used to tell me stories of Egypt, of the Arabian Nights and the Tale of Nur Al-din Al. I remember the sultan crossing from Cairo to Jizah on his way to the Pyramids and wished I was riding with him.”
Now he had started the words flowed freely. Rebecca did not try to interrupt or question him, but sat quietly and listened.
“From then I read everything I could about the wonders of ancient Egypt. Years later, I met your father. His lectures were inspiring. He was a man I admired, the sort of man I wanted to become. He made me question the need for preserving the dead, helped me examine ways of preserving the organs without removing them. The mummification process was a way of leaving something solid, something tangible that did not crumble away to dust.” He shook his head and laughed, as it sounded ridiculous, even to him. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this … but I thought of my mother. If only I had a body preserved in a tomb, then perhaps the hole in my chest would become smaller somehow.” He stopped and thrust his hand through his hair. “It is the logic of a madman, I know.”
“It is the logic of a man whose heart is filled with sorrow,” she whispered.
His head shot up, that one sweet sentence making him feel normal, making him believe his obsession was a natural conclusion drawn from years of suffering. “The strange thing is, I can’t stop searching for the answer, even though I still do not really understand the que
stion.”
Rebecca smiled. “You do not have to search anymore, Gabriel,” she said, “because I understand the question. I know the answer you seek.”
Chapter 20
It took every ounce of strength Rebecca had to stop the tears from falling. Gabriel looked so tortured, so heartbroken; her heart was bleeding, too.
She understood grief, and now she understood love because she would give everything she had to ease his torment, to lessen the burden he had carried around all these years.
The room fell silent, except for the sound of his ragged breathing and she pushed herself out of the chair and walked around to kneel at his side.
“Now I know why God saw fit to bring us together,” she said stroking his arm. “Why I seem to understand what you’ve been searching for.”
He dragged his hand down his face, the strain of suppressed emotion evident. “How can you know the question? How can you know what drives me when I don’t even know myself?”
“Because I know what grief is, Gabriel. I know what it is to want to turn back the clock and make everything right again. I know how it spins us into its web until there is no life beyond, so we are stuck, clinging to the silken thread hoping we can survive a bit longer. I know all we can do is search for the answer to the question — what can I do to live a day without the pain of grief?”
He looked up at her, his weary eyes growing bright with wonder, as though he had crossed oceans and continents on a fool’s crusade and had finally stumbled upon a wise mystic with the power to banish ghosts.
“If that is the question,” he whispered, “then what is the answer?”