A woman who is unaware that she is a woman

The great Syrian novelist says in a passage from his novel: "He went out to the street, stopped in front of the hotel door, to the right or to the left? He laughed to himself and said: 'Oh mischievous one, you spent your life going left, is it possible, after all this life, to go right?!' And he concludes before telling the events of his story: 'It is for the human being, the creature who proudly proclaims his existence, to learn two things: love and forget love, hatred and forget hatred, then bear both.'" This book carries details of a rare and unusual love story, combining "Nimer Sahib," the brilliant journalist and famous writer who is nearing eighty-three years old, and "Ra'ifa Wijdan," a woman in her forty-two, who is "not a prostitute, and not innocent of shame," whom he met at the Turkish border where he saved her from a predicament with customs officers who wanted to confiscate her money. The events begin with "Nimer Sahib," who was "always living on the edge of danger," and who was "completely certain that calamities come all at once and are resolved individually," but "on his first trip between Latakia and Swedish, he had no idea, nor did it cross his mind, that a disaster was waiting for him, and there was no use in avoiding it!" "Fahim Al-Lith," residing in the United States with his family, undertook this journey with his wife, whose goal was to participate in the mass for the peace of her late father’s soul, and his daughter "Wajda," who also wanted to pray for her grandfather's soul. "Nimer came on a more difficult mission: to identify his family tree and glorify it," and he did not know that the Swedish, "the birthplace of his ancestors and forefathers," was neglected and lacked a hotel, as "he left it at the age of three and returned to it at eighty-three." After a night of intense heat spent in a small, shabby room that only fit for sleeping and filled with cockroaches, at Khadija Khanum’s motel, after everyone stopped at the Swedish seaside, he visited his relatives from the "Sahib" family, then headed to Antakya and stayed at its luxurious hotel for a night, "and how much this night left an impression on him and strange tails in his life!" Because he would meet Ra'ifa to start their strange love story, and the nights exceeded just one night... "He does not buy women's bodies with money; he avoided this ugly act as much as he could, throughout his life, but, at eighty-three, luck, or rather fate, made him meet Ra'ifa by chance, without him thinking she was a prostitute..." But things would begin with a game of turning her into "his business manager," so she could stay in his hotel. Their relationship quickly shifted from frivolity to seriousness, from lust to companionship, from rude words to sweet talk between heart and heart! But what is the price of submitting to this experience, and what will be its end? Is it "parting out of necessity" because of the age difference and the sagging body of the eighty-three-year-old? We leave the rest for the reader to discover.