“We have a system of pipes in the ground,” I said. “The water comes from the tap to the kitchen and bathroom, and you can even adjust their temperature from the tap—cold or hot.”
“Holy mother of God.” He was struggling a little with his undertaking but did not lose patience. “I do not know whether to badger you with questions or leave it at that. I feel as though my head might explode.”
“Me too,” I mumbled. If all we were going to talk about were the technological innovations since the Middle Ages, it would be an exhausting evening for me. He cast me a glance and ran his hand over my hair.
“It will be dark soon,” he said and looked at me woefully. “You should get back to your time before it is too late, and likewise I must return to the Pilgrim Castle before sunset. But if you will permit me, before that, to kiss you again …” I rolled onto my back and opened my arms to him.
I replayed my conversation with Jean and everything that came after it again and again in my head while putting away groceries with Halimi. Then, I peeled potatoes for lunch and put them on the grill, sliced vegetables, and roasted a chicken. Halimi lay down to take a nap before picking up Lily from preschool.
Out on the balcony, I lit a cigarette and opened my laptop. Fingers trembling, I typed “Jean d’Ibelin” into Google. I did not expect any results.
As I clicked Google’s magnifying glass search icon, spots swam before my eyes. The first link for “Jean d’Ibelin” referred me to French Wikipedia. “Jean d’Ibelin, Lord of Beirut.” The second link also led to Wikipedia. As my eyes skipped between the lines of the first entry, I felt like my insides were swirling.
It was a very short entry, about the Lord of Jaffa and Ashkelon and his achievements and titles. This did not sound quite right to me—after all, my Jean was Count of Arsur, but maybe later on in his life he also became the Lord of Jaffa and Ashkelon? I proceeded to the second entry, which was longer and more detailed. “Jean of Ibelin (c. 1179–1236), called the Old Lord of Beirut, was a powerful Crusader noble in the thirteenth century, one of the best-known representatives of the influentialIbelin family … He served as regent and constable of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Cyprus …”
I speed-read the messy description of Jean’s father. The cigarette slipped between my fingers. The entry included a quote mentioning the castle in Beirut, which sounded exactly as Jean had described it. Nothing was written about his family. I clicked on the corresponding entry in English, which immediately displayed the Ibelin coat of arms: a broad red cross against a golden background. I quickly scrolled to the part about his family and there, black against the screen, appeared the name of my Jean, Lord of Arsuf. With a beating heart and a pressing sensation against the inside of my eyes, I clicked on the entry, “Jean d’Ibelin, Lord of Arsuf.”
“Working?” asked Halimi from behind me.
I leaped in surprise and turned to him with a smile that might have been overly broad.
“Yes, I need to do a little research for the French book,” I said casually.
Halimi lit a cigarette and stood with his back to me, leaning against the railing of the balcony and gazing at the horizon.
I did not leave and take Lily to my parents’ place the day after Halimi and I had our big fight about Nina. The doctor diagnosed her with strep throat, and she was very sick for the next four days. My red eyes and exhaustion were probably chalked up to parental concern—disproportionate, if common. Not only did I not leave Halimi; I didn’t even have the strength to tell him to get out.
I was afraid to be alone with my worries and Lily’s illness. I was so worn out, I barely had the strength to do basic things—eat, shower, make Lily swallow her medicine. Apart from that, the apartment had originally been his. I knew that this was stupid, but I was unable to kick him out of his own home, an apartment that he continued to pay for himself despite my pathetic attempts to contribute to the rent.
“So. Tell me exactly how and when it started,” I said suddenly on one of those long days, when Lily had finally fallen asleep after a particularly harsh coughing fit followed by crying. Halimi had ordered delivery from the coffee shop, and we ate in the living room in tense silence. I had no idea if he had told Nina that he’d been caught or what they had agreed between them. I continued to follow her profiles like a woman possessed, and there had been no notable drop in her mood or the remarkable quantity of selfies.
Halimi pushed his plate away with a frown.
“I will never understand your obsession with knowing everything,” he said coolly.
Without saying a word, I collected the plates, took them to the kitchen, washed them, and went to the bedroom. I got under the duvet. I knew I needed to look for a proper job. And find a divorce lawyer. And an apartment. I sighed and turned over.
“Ditush,” Halimi came into the room and sat down beside me. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ll tell you.” He stopped and gently pulled the blanket from over my head. “I just don’t want to hurt you even more. I promise you that you are the person I love most in this world.” He felt around for my hand underneath the duvet. Ambivalent, I released it and let him kiss from my hand up my forearm. He smelled of whiskey.
He lay beside me and told me that at first it was just flirting, like a million other flirtations. When they got a little closer, she told him that she wasn’t very interested in sex, because most of the partners she had had in her life had been disappointing, and that she did not want a relationship, because people expected things from her that she did not know how to give. He did not need to tell me that this only further stirred his conquering impulse.He’d show her a partner who was not disappointing and a relationship with no expectations, I thought to myself with tears in my throat. Halimi went on and said that all my dalliances had made him feelfreer than ever. He told her that we had an open relationship. I couldn’t help but snort with disdain.
“In open relationships, people talk about everything, sweetheart,” I said but didn’t remove my hand from his.
“Well, now I’m telling you everything,” Halimi said impatiently. “The question is if you can handle it.”
“I want to know,” I said stubbornly.
“Mama …” The faint voice came from Lily’s bed. I rolled my eyes, and both of us even chuckled, like accomplices on death row.
CHAPTER 15
I spent the days that followed frantically reading up on the Ibelin family, the Crusades, and the fortress at Atlit. I researched secretively, wary of Halimi’s prying eyes. I was surprised at the extent of my ignorance. I thought that as an educated person, I knew the history of my country, but I had scant knowledge of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, that two-hundred-year-old kingdom that the Crusaders established that, at its peak, extended over parts of today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Starting in the late eleventh century, generations of Catholic warriors and nobles, mainly from France, had created a kingdom here, believed and dreamed and built and conquered and wrote, and then destroyed themselves through in-fighting and scattered to the four winds, leaving behind buildings that crumbled over time.
I was obsessed, but I didn’t quite know what to concentrate on. I skipped from one topic to another. I looked tirelessly for material about my Jean, but there was little of that to be found. I discovered that his father was indeed one ofthemost powerful people in the kingdom, at the point when it no longer had an acting king. I learned everything I could about the wars between Jean, the Old Lord of Beirut, and Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. With a growing sense of solidarity, I let outa snort of contempt every time I came across mentions of Frederick II’s political achievements and educated court.
When we parted ways, Jean had taken back the clothes he had lent me, claiming that he had to return them. He promised that until we next met, he would obtain clothes that I could keep with me or hide by the spring. Now, I was sorry that I had not requested at least the shift, or the headscarves. His scent existed in my head—a hint of lemon and rose water mixed with a light whiff of sweat—but I longed to really smell him.
I discovered, awestruck, as I regularly found myself in those days, that Thibaut of Champagne had also existed; he was the King of Navarre, just as he had said. “The Troubadour,” he was called. Feeling faint, I read everything I could find on the crusade that he led between the years 1239 and 1240. I even found a number of modern recordings of some of his songs on YouTube. When I came across the first one, I had the impulse to send it to Jean, before remembering that was impossible. But my discovery was met with overwhelming euphoria—I could not have imagined historical figures whom I had not had the slightest notion of previously, and this, to me, was the triumphant proof that my experiences were not the fruit of madness.
