Loneliness and the old house were the two companions of my childhood. I knew it inside out: the big, arched portals, the door with its small hinged panes of red, blue, and brown stained glass, the reception-room window with its iron bars, the upstairs and downstairs rooms with their high ceilings and painted wooden rafters, their floors covered with Masarany tiles, the old, shabby couches, mattresses, mats, and carpets, the undaunted tribes of mice, cockroaches, and wall geckos, the roof, crisscrossed with clotheslines like streetcar and trolley-bus wires, overlooking other roofs that on summer evenings were crowded with women and children. I roamed around the house alone, my voice echoing from its corners as I repeated my lessons, recited a poem, did a part from some play, or sang. Looking down on the narrow street for what might have been hours at a time, following the flow of people, I’d yearn for a friend to play with. A boy would call to me, “Come on down!”
“The door is locked, and my father has the key!”
I got used to being alone night and day; I wasn’t afraid of anything, not even evil spirits.
“The sons of Adam are the only devils there are,” my father would say.
“Be an angel,” my mother would hasten to add.
When I had nothing to do, I would amuse myself by chasing the mice, the geckos, or the cockroaches.
My mother told me once that when I was a baby she used to take me in a leather cot to the theater and set me on a bench in the ticket booth. “I often nursed you in the theater,” she said. I don’t remember those times, of course, but I do recall events from a stretch of time when I must have been four years old. I used to wander around the theater in front or backstage, where, among other things, I’d listen to the actors memorizing their parts. My ears were filled with lovely songs and speeches—and with wicked oaths and blasphemies giving me an education I’d never have acquired from my parents, who were always either sleeping or working. On the opening night of every new play I was there with my father, half the time bedazzled, the other half asleep. It was about that time that I was given my first picture book, called Ibn al-Sultan and the Witch, a present from Fuad Shalaby.
That was how I came to understand heroes and villains in plays. Neither of my parents had time to give me any guidance; my father took no interest in education in any case, while my mother was content to repeat her only piece of advice—“Be an angel”—explaining that to be an angel was to love good, not to harm other people, and to have a clean body and clean clothes. My real tutors were, first, the theater, then books, when their time came, and finally people who had no relation to my parents.
As soon as I started school I loved it: giving me so many companions, it rescued me from my loneliness. I had to be self-reliant, though, at every step. I’d wake up early in the morning, eat my cold breakfast of cheese and boiled eggs from a plate that had been covered with a napkin the night before, dress, and leave the house quietly so I wouldn’t arouse my sleeping parents. I’d return in the afternoon to find them getting ready to leave for the theater. I’d stay alone doing my homework, then amuse myself with games or books, at first only looking at the pictures, then reading the printed words—I’ll never forget the generosity of Amm Abdu, the secondhand bookseller, who crouched on the sidewalk beside Sidi al-Sharany Mosque—and finally, after a supper of cheese and halva, I’d go to bed.
So I never saw my parents except for a while before sunset, and even part of this brief period was lost as they got ready to go out. Perhaps because there was so little intimacy or attention given to me, I was all the more attached to them. I yearned for them. My mother’s beauty, sweetness, and tenderness bewitched me and I was enthralled by a vision of that angelic nature she urged me to acquire. His gentle way of playing with me and his hearty laughter likewise made my father seem wonderful. He was full of jokes, full of fun, and the limited time we had together was never spoiled by instructions, threats, or warnings. There was only an occasional reminder. “Enjoy being alone,” he used to say. “You’re the king of the castle. What do you want more than that? The only son, independent of everyone. That’s what your father was like, and you’ll be even more wonderful.”
“He’s an angel,” Mother would hasten to add. “Be an angel, dear.”
“Did Grandfather and Grandmother leave you alone, too?” I asked him once.
“Your grandfather?” he replied. “He left me before I ever knew him. And your grandmother—she worked at home.”
Mother glowered, and I sensed that these words carried a secret meaning. “Your grandfather died young and your grandmother joined him, so your father was left alone,” she explained.
“In this same house?”
“Yes.”
“If these walls could speak, they would tell you the most fantastic tales,” Father said.
It was a lonely house, but a harmonious one. At that time Father and Mother were an agreeable couple, or so, as I saw them in the gathering twilight, they always appeared to me. They shared conversation, jokes, and a deep affection for me. My father had a tendency to express himself a little freely, but Mother would stop him with a warning look, which I noticed sometimes and wondered about. The moment of leave-taking was painful and I would await Thursday with dwindling patience, for that was the night I could go with them to see a play.
As my learning increased, enabling me to read more, I asked for more pocket money to buy books, until I had accumulated a library of secondhand children’s books. “Aren’t you satisfied with going to the theater every week?” Father asked.
But I wasn’t satisfied. My dreams took me far away to new horizons. One day I went so far as to tell him that I wanted to write plays!
He guffawed. “Dream about being an actor! It’s preferable and more profitable.”
“I have an idea, too.”
“Really?”
I went on to outline the story of Faust, which was the last thing I had seen in the theater. I’d added nothing new except that I made the hero a boy of my age.
“How did the boy triumph over the devil?” asked Mother.
“You beat the devil by using the same tricks he does!” answered Father.
“Keep your thoughts to yourself!” shouted Mother. “Can’t you see that you’re talking to an angel?”
From an early age I was saturated with the love of art and virtue. I used to make lengthy speeches about these things to myself, in my solitariness, and I also learned about them from my schoolmates, among whom I was pretty conspicuous. Most of them were mean little devils, to be sure: whenever the teacher got fed up with them he’d shout, “You whorehouse brats!” There was a select little group, however, who were known for their innocence and good behavior, and I gravitated to them. We formed a Morality Squad, to battle against obscene language, and used to strike up the anthems of the New Egyptian Revolution, in which we believed implicitly. When a few of us pledged ourselves to unprecedented bravery, military or political, I pledged myself to the theater, seeing it as a platform for heroism, too, and one that would suit me, with my weak eyesight, which had obliged me to wear prescription glasses while I was still at primary school. Whatever differences there may have been among us, we all dreamed of an ideal world in which we made ourselves its most exemplary citizens. Even defeat failed to shake our basic ideals. As long as the slogans did not change and the leader remained the same, what did defeat mean?
Mother’s face had grown haggard, though, and she muttered words I could not understand while Father would shrug his shoulders, as if things didn’t matter, then burst out singing the national anthem in a raucous, mocking voice: “My country, my country, I have shed my blood for you.”
The theater was shut down for some days, and for the first time I was able to enjoy having my parents at home all day long. Father even took me with him to the coffeehouse on Sharia al-Gaysh, a new experience. Defeat that time was not without pleasant side effects, but they were short-lived.
Mother was pouring tea. “Abbas,” she said, “we are going to have a stranger living with us!” I stared at her in disbelief. “He’s a friend of your father’s. You know him, too. It’s Tariq Ramadan.”
“The actor?”
“Yes, he had to leave the place where he was living, and what with the housing shortage he hasn’t been able to find a good place to go.”
“He’s a rotten actor. He doesn’t look nice.”
“People should help each other. And you’re an angel, my dear.”
“He’ll come at dawn,” said Father, “and sleep until the afternoon. So except for his room, the house will still be your own special domain.”
I was never aware of his arrival, but he usually left with my parents or immediately after them. He was insolent-looking and rough-spoken. He took a sham interest in me to flatter my parents, but I had no respect for him. One day, having spotted my library from where he was sitting in the hall, he asked me, “Schoolbooks?”
“Literary books and plays,” Mother answered proudly. “You’re speaking to a playwright!”
“Damn the theater! I wish I were a junk peddler. Or a hawker of meat from animal heads.”
At that I asked, “Why do you only play small parts?”
He coughed abruptly. “My fate! I’m stalked by such crippling luck that if it weren’t for your father’s decency I’d have to sleep in public toilets.”
“Don’t scare the professor with such talk, Tariq,” cautioned Mother.
He laughed. “A playwright must learn about everything, the good and the bad. Especially the bad. The theater has its fountainhead in wickedness.”
“But good always triumphs,” I declared with naive fervor.
“That’s the way it is—in the theater!” he answered.
Like the coming of night, a vague change crept over them. Their silence wasn’t the same silence, their talk wasn’t the same, Father wasn’t the same, nor was Mother. Our household had not been by any means without its minor differences or petty bickerings, but in general our life together had flowed along quite congenially. What, then, was the dark mystery that had slipped in between them? Her radiance had vanished; and he, who had always been an extrovert, laughing boisterously, making fun of everything and treating everyone amiably, had now become withdrawn. My mother’s attachment to me—though still full of the same old tenderness—was tinged with a kind of grief which she could not succeed in hiding, while Father neglected me completely. An anxious dread of something unpleasant and unknown penetrated my soul.
At teatime one day, before they left, I heard Tariq advising them “not to give in to the devil.”
“There is no devil except you,” Mother answered bitterly.
“I’m not an adolescent,” protested Father.
In deference to my presence, I surmised, Mother said nothing more. After they left the house I was struck with a sense of sadness and loss.
It was painfully clear that something had happened. I asked Mother about it, but she evaded the question, pretending nothing was wrong. When she and Father were alone in the hall I would hear them arguing fiercely. I would cower behind the open door listening.
“There’s still a chance to be cured.”
“Keep out of my private affairs!”
“But what you’re doing reflects on us. Don’t you realize that?”
“I hate being preached at.”
“Opium killed my aunt’s husband.”
“Which proves that it has its uses.”
“Your whole personality has changed. You’re unbearable!”
I was seized by fear. I knew what opium was. I had learned about it watching a play, The Victims, from which the scenes depicting those doomed addicts had haunted me. Was Father to become one of them? Was my beloved father headed for ruin?
Before Father and Tariq returned I found myself alone with Mother. I gazed at her sadly.
“What’s the matter, Abbas?”
“I know all about it.” My voice was trembling. “It’s something dangerous. I haven’t forgotten The Victims.”
“How did you learn about it? No, son. It’s not quite as you imagine.”
Father arrived at this point, upset, revealing that he had heard me. “Mind your own business, boy!” he yelled.
“I’m afraid for you,” I said.
He shouted, in a voice more terrifying than I’d ever heard before, “Shut up, or I’ll bash your head in!”
In my eyes at that moment he was transformed into a beast. The happy dream I’d had for so long was shattered. I retreated to my room, there to conjure up the whole panorama of a play that began with Tariq’s eviction from the house and ended with my father’s rehabilitation—as a result of my efforts, naturally. I told myself that good would still triumph if he could only find someone to help him.
But conditions went from bad to worse. He became more withdrawn; the father I had known no longer existed, and in his new personality he cut himself off from us on every occasion except when his anger was aroused for whatever reason. Then he would rain down curses and insults on us. I began to be afraid of him and kept my distance. Mother was miserable and didn’t know what to do. “My salary isn’t enough for the household,” she told him once.
“So go butt your head against a wall!” he said.
We were certainly no longer living as we used to, spending much less and eating very simply. Food and money didn’t interest me, but how was I going to buy books? It is unfortunate that the life of the soul cannot do without money. The most terrible blow, however, was that I had lost my father. Where was the man he’d once been? The look in my eyes seemed to anger him. “You’re a poor specimen, not fit for life,” he’d tell me. Things between him and Mother deteriorated to the extent that they each went their own ways and had separate rooms. Our home was disintegrating and we were living as strangers under the same roof. My mother’s fate was hard for me to bear. In my mind sprang a scene revolving around a fight between Father and Tariq: Father kills Tariq and is arrested, and as he’s leaving he turns to me and says, “If I had only listened to what you said,” after which the old house regains its purity. Later, of course, I felt remorse for the cruelty of my imagination.
I asked Mother, “How do you manage to make ends meet all by yourself?”
“I sell little things. Pay attention to your work. You’re the only hope we have left.”
“My heart is with you.”
“I realize that, son, but the time hasn’t yet come for you to bear our burdens. You must study, to get a good job.”
“My ambition is to become a playwright.”
“A profession that won’t guarantee you security.”
“I scorn material possessions. You understand my nature.”
“You may hate materialism, Abbas, but don’t try to ignore it altogether.”
“Good will triumph, Mother,” I assured her fervently.
I was as addicted to my dreams as my father was to his opium. I imagined changing everything around me and shaping it anew: I swept the gravel market, sprinkled the streets, and dried up the ever-flowing sewers; I tore down old houses and replaced them with towering apartment blocks; I smartened up the policemen, improved the conduct of the students and teachers, condemned drugs and drink, and conjured food from the air.
One afternoon the two of them were sitting in the hall, Father plucking his mustache with a pair of tweezers, Tariq darning his socks.
“Don’t be taken in by the destitution of the poor,” Tariq was saying. “This country is full of rich people no one knows about.”
“Al-Hilaly is mining gold,” said Father.
“Don’t talk to me about al-Hilaly and his gold. Talk about women—and the petrodollar glut!”
“This scheme appeals to me. But our hands are tied.”
“Abu al-Ala*1 used to live on a diet of lentils,” I piped up.
“Deliver these pearls of wisdom to your mother!” Father yelled at me.
I fell silent, telling myself that they were just a couple of savages.
—
There was Tahiya, standing right in front of me, so incredibly attractive with her captivating eyes that I looked at her in a daze, not believing what I was seeing.
During the period before exams I used to stay up late at night and sleep in the daytime. The door had opened while I was pacing up and down in the hall studying, and Tahiya had come in, with Tariq Ramadan close behind. Father and Mother had already gone to bed. I knew Tahiya. I’d often seen her onstage, doing bit parts, like Tariq, and I stared at her now in bewilderment.
“What’s keeping you up at this late hour?” she said, smiling.
“He’s a striver. He stays up at night in the pursuit of learning, and next week he is going to take the middle school exams.”
“Good for you.”
They went upstairs to Tariq’s room. My head spun; my blood boiled. Was he bringing her to his room behind my parents’ backs? Didn’t she have a house they could go to? Was our house being brought down to the lowest depths? I couldn’t concentrate. My head was aflame with all the unquenchable desires of puberty. Temptation had launched an attack, which, in my struggle for purity, I fought off by sheer willpower: my whole being raged furiously until at last sleep overcame me.
In the afternoon, when they were sitting in the hall, I approached my parents, and at the sight of me Father asked apprehensively, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Something very strange! You’d never imagine!” I burst out heatedly. “Tariq brought Tahiya to his room last night!” His heavy eyes turned toward me, fixing on me. He said nothing, so I assumed he didn’t believe me. “I saw it with my own eyes!”
“What exactly do you want?” he asked me coldly.
“I wanted to let you know, so you can set him straight and make him understand ours is a respectable home. You must tell him to leave.”
“Pay attention to your studies, and leave matters belonging to the house to its owner,” he replied sharply.
“She’s engaged to him,” Mother explained, in a voice that was muffled and abject.
“But they aren’t married yet!”
“He wants to die of starvation,” Father said to Mother sarcastically, pointing in my direction.
“We have made ourselves poor,” I remonstrated in a burst of anger.
He seized his glass of tea to throw it at me, but Mother jumped between us and took me to my room. Her eyes were threatening tears. “There’s no use hoping for anything from him,” I said, trying to comfort her. “Just don’t have anything more to do with him. I wish we could go away together, but where could we go? Where would we find a place to live? And where would our money come from!”
I couldn’t find an answer. The truth stood before me in all its naked ugliness: Mother’s moral reserves had collapsed in the face of the circumstances created by my father’s addiction, for which he was obviously responsible, but from which he was helpless to escape. But even apart from his addiction, it struck me at times that he was totally without principles. I despised him and I rejected him. He’d made a brothel out of our old home. But I was weak, too. All I could do was cry.
I passed my examinations, but my success didn’t make me as happy as it should have. I couldn’t rid myself of my sense of shame; sorrow had settled deep within me. During the long vacation I took refuge in the library, and there I wrote a play. I begged Father to show it to Sirhan al-Hilaly, but he only replied, “We’re not a children’s theater.”
Mother volunteered to submit it to him. Two weeks later she brought it back, saying, “Don’t expect your first play to be accepted. What you must do is try again.”
I was upset, but I didn’t despair. How could I despair when my only hope was the theater? One day I happened to meet Fuad Shalaby in the reading room. We shook hands, I reminded him who I was, and his cordiality gave me the courage to ask, “How can I write an acceptable play?”
“How old are you?” he inquired. “What grade are you in now?”
“I’ll be in secondary school next year.”
“Can’t you wait until you finish your education?”
“I feel as if I can write now.”
“No, you don’t understand life yet.”
“I have a pretty good idea what it’s all about.”
He smiled at me. “What is life, in your view?” he asked.
“It’s the struggle of the soul against materialism.”
“And what role does death play in this struggle?” he asked with a broadening grin.
“It’s the soul’s final victory,” I answered confidently.
“If things were only that simple.” He patted my shoulder. “You need a lot more experience. Find out what interests people and what arouses them. I’d strongly advise you to plunge into life, taste it to the full, and wait for at least another ten years.”
His words made me retreat even further within myself. He imagined that I’d been sheltered from temptation! Perhaps he was ignorant of what was going on in our house. And ignorant as well of the struggle in an adolescent soul, the unabating conflict of lust and loftiness, the battle in the mind between the erotics of Omar Khayyam and the epic romance of Magnun Layla, divided by the same contrast as between Tahiya, the wanton in the room upstairs, and the vision of her that haunted the imagination, or as between dirt strewn on the ground and banks of white clouds floating in the sky.
Strange things were going on in the room next to Tariq’s. The old furniture had been sold, replaced by beautiful new things bought at a public auction. A table covered with green baize stood in the center on a large carpet that had been laid over the Masarany tiles, and against the middle wall was a buffet. These were mysterious preparations. When I asked Mother she said, “Your father is getting it ready to spend his evenings there with friends and colleagues, as all men do.” I stared at her suspiciously, the very mention of Father filling me with misgiving. “They’ll spend the rest of the night here after the theater closes,” she added.
I got into the habit of crouching in my room in the dark so that I could see things.
The truth of what was going on in our house could only be seen at night. These friends used to arrive very late. I would watch them come dribbling in—first Father, then al-Hilaly, Ismail, Salim al-Agrudy, Fuad Shalaby, Tariq, and Tahiya—then I’d sneak up to the top floor in the darkness. They would be seated around the table and the cards would already have been dealt.
It was gambling, just as I had seen it in the theater. The dramas of the stage, with their heroes and victims, had moved into our house, with the difference that these people, who contested with each other on the stage, here stood solidly together all on the side of evil. They were all actors, even the critic, and nothing was sure except lies. If the Deluge came again and if good intentions are worth anything, only Mother and I would deserve a place in a lifeboat. These changes were not our doing. But even Mother went so far as to prepare the food and drink. “You shouldn’t have to serve these riffraff,” I protested.
“They are colleagues, and I am the mistress of the house,” she said by way of excuse.
“What house? It’s nothing but a whorehouse, a gambling den.”
“I’d like to get away from it, if we could only leave together. But what can we do?”
“This is why I hate money,” I said, exasperated.
“But we can’t get along without it. That’s the tragedy. In any case, you are my only hope.”
What is goodness? What is it without action? I had no energy for anything but daydreams, imagination, the domain of the theater. The house was infested with obscenity, and youth was no excuse for accepting the situation, but my hands were tied. I had no other recourse. The lives my schoolmates lived I could share only in the fire of my imagination, where beautiful words became images, not deeds, a Danse Macabre that I could only applaud from the edge of the ballroom floor.
Then Fuad Shalaby began bringing Doria, so that they could whisper together in the third room under the framed Bismallah*2 that had been a gift from my grandfather. “Shalaby and Doria, too,” I said to Mother. “We must leave.”
“Not before you’re able to,” she replied, her eyes red.
“I’m suffocating.”
“So am I, son, and more so.”
“Is only opium responsible for all this?” She didn’t answer. “Perhaps this opium itself is the result of something else. Perhaps it’s not the real reason.”
“Your father is mad,” she sighed. “But it’s my fault that I let him mislead me.”
“I’d like to kill him.”
She patted my arm. “Lose yourself in your studies,” she whispered. “You are the only hope I have left.”
The night that burned away my last illusion: through the doorway of my room I made out Sirhan al-Hilaly staggering downstairs in the dark, his hair disheveled, his eyes dull, driven by what looked like a kind of blind madness. I wondered why he’d fled so enraged from the battlefield of the card room. Mother came out of her room—I’d thought she was upstairs—to see what was happening, and met him below the last step. They whispered something I could not catch. She went into her room, and he slipped in after her. I jumped up, impetuously, but then stood stock-still, sensing that it was more important to me to learn the truth than to try to stop her. My mother, too? It is possible that for a few minutes I even lost consciousness. This was the blow that would leave my world in scorched ruins, echoing with the jeers of demons. I darted into the hall, then into her room, drowned in darkness, where I switched on the light. It was empty. I turned the light off again, backed into the hall, switched on the light there, and stood in a quandary. At that point my father came leaping down the stairs to confront me.
“What woke you up at this hour?” he said brusquely.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I answered, not knowing what I was saying.
“Have you seen Sirhan al-Hilaly?”
“He left the house.”
“When?”
“A while ago. I don’t know exactly when.”
I returned to my room and stood there, in the dark, my head burning with insane thoughts, oblivious to the passing of time until the sound of footsteps brought me to my senses. People were leaving. Then no one was left in the hall except Mother and Father. I put my ear to the keyhole to hear what they were saying. “What went on behind my back?” I heard him asking her. She didn’t answer, so he asked her another question. “Did Abbas see?” Again no answer. “He’s the one who gave you the job. It’s common knowledge that al-Hilaly hasn’t spared anyone, not even Umm Hany.” I didn’t hear a sound from her, and he went on: “Everything has its price, that’s what concerns me. As for you, though, you aren’t worth being jealous over.”
At last she spoke. “You’re the lowest kind of vermin.”
“Except for one little worm.”
This was the reality. This was my father and this was my mother. The flames consuming my world grew fiercer. Sheathe your dagger, for even Caesar has been slain. Cyrano de Bergerac fought against ghosts.
I disowned both my parents, the pimp and the whore—whom I now remember having seen once whispering together with Fuad Shalaby, when I hadn’t thought anything of it, and another time with Tariq Ramadan, when I hadn’t had any doubts or suspicions. All of them, all, without any exception. Why not? She is my foremost enemy: Father is insane, an addict, but Mother is the engineer of all the evil in the world.
My mother’s voice, calling my name, reached me in my room. How strange that my hatred of Father had taken a definite form, while my feelings toward her expressed themselves not in simple aversion, but in a confused tumult of resentment.
She hurried in and took me by the hand. “Leave your reading for a while—it’s not often we have the chance to sit together and talk.”
She took me into the hall, sat me down beside her, and served me tea. “I’m not pleased with you these days,” I remarked.
“I understand what’s grieving you,” she said, “but don’t make my suffering worse.” I avoided looking at her. “The time of deliverance is drawing closer and we’ll leave together.”
What an impostor she is! “This house can only be purged by fire,” I muttered.
“Isn’t it enough that my heart worships you!” Shall I dump the ashes of my burned-out heart? Shall I bury her? But my fantasies had so destroyed every response within me that I could only stand bewildered before her gaze. “Are you writing another play?” she asked.
“Yes. It will remind you of the play called The Drunken Woman,” I said, referring to the one that dealt with the dark world of fallen women.
“Oh no,” she said, “in your plays, son, you should let the light in your heart shine forth.”
At that moment Father came out of his room, and Tariq and Tahiya came down. I got up to go back to my room, but Tahiya wouldn’t let me pass. “Sit with us for a while, author,” she said gaily.
It was probably the first time she had paid any attention to me, so I sat down. Tariq laughed. “He’s going to be the author of a tragedy,” he remarked.
“He’s sick with the disease of virtue!” my father muttered.
Tahiya took a sip from her glass. “How beautiful,” she murmured, “that anyone could be virtuous in these days.”
“As you can see, his eyes are weak,” said Father, “so he can’t see what’s going on around him.”
“Leave him in his heaven,” replied Tahiya. “I’m also a lover of virtue.”
“Your virtue is the kind that puts everyone in a good humor,” said Tariq, chuckling.
“He has his mother’s good looks. He’s strong like his father. He should be a Don Juan,” said Tahiya, sipping her tea.
“Just look at his glasses!” scoffed Father. “His trouble is he can’t see.”
They went out, leaving me furious and full of rebellion. In my imagination I eagerly set about tearing down and rebuilding.
When Tahiya stood in my way, however, she had brushed against me and set a new dream in motion. She was no better than my mother. What made her seem so much less objectionable? Later, alone, I recalled her touch, and a new idea for a play sprang from the inferno inside me: it revolved around this old dwelling my grandfather had built by the sweat of his brow, and how it had become a whorehouse. This was the central conception. The only inkling I had that it might be a success was the trembling joy that permeated my being. Would such a plot serve as the basis of an effective play? Could there be a play without love?
A faint knock at my door. I answered it and found Tahiya dressed to go out. What had brought her here before teatime? With one remark—“Everyone’s asleep except you”—she walked in and stood in the middle of the room. Her eyes took in everything. “A bed. A desk,” she noted. “This is a home, not just a room. Have you got any sweets here?”
I apologized for having none.
Her ripe body spread an aura outward from the middle of my room, exuded allure. For the first time I noticed the translucence of her eyes, the color of honey.
“I guess I should leave, since you have nothing here except books.” But instead of turning to go, she said, “You’re probably wondering why I’m ready to leave so early. I’m going to my apartment in Sharia al-Gaysh. Do you know it? It’s one streetcar stop from Bab al-Shariya. Building 117.”
Her feminine fragrance had already intoxicated me. “Wait!” I exclaimed. “I’ll get you some sweets.”
“I’ll find what I want in the street. You’re very nice.”
For an instant, because of her presence, I forgot the struggle that had raged in my conscience. “You’re the one who is really nice,” I answered.
She gazed at me with a look that inspired dreams, then moved languidly toward the door. In spite of myself, I murmured, “Don’t leave. I mean, there’s no hurry.”
She gave me a winning smile, said, “Until we meet,” and went away, leaving behind her, in that tranquil room, a storm of the most delightful excitement. Why would she come without pretext, and why would she mention the number of her apartment so casually? How my deprived, obstinate, and naive heart throbbed. For the first time it had discovered a real woman to take an interest in, rather than Layla, Lubna, Mayya,*3 Ophelia, or Desdemona.
Over the next few days every furtive glance we exchanged was imbued with a new meaning that confirmed our fascination with each other. Heedless of those present, we would converse warmly. I asked myself, with puzzled persistency, whether I was being transported upward or pushed down to the depths.
—
In spite of the Amsheer*4 wind howling outside, the shouting and the ruckus reached me from the upper floor. I leaped up the stairs to investigate and saw Tariq slapping Tahiya’s face in the hall. Astonishment froze me in my tracks. She retreated into their room.
“Did we disturb you?” Tariq said coolly.
“Excuse me,” I spluttered, suppressing my agitation.
“Don’t be upset. This is part of our daily routine. Enjoy it.”
“This time I’m not going to come back!” said her trembling voice, raised almost to a shout, from inside the room.
Tariq went in, closing the door behind him, and I went back down, a new sadness plunging me deeper into despair. Why would a beautiful woman like Tahiya put up with a life of abuse from a man like Tariq? Does love give light only so as to reveal tragedy?
For two days she stayed away, but on the third she came back, her face glowing. My heart contracted and my grief grew greater still. I despised her conduct, but my love for her now was so obvious that it could not be ignored. It had probably come into being, taken root, and continued growing for a long time without my being aware. That day as they were leaving she stopped to straighten her stockings and let fall a small piece of folded paper before catching up with the others. I opened out the paper, my heart trembling with joy, and read the address and the time.
—
There were only two rooms, with a small entrance hall, but her flat was attractive, clean, and redolent of sweet incense. A round orange vase on the table in the hall held a bouquet of roses. She received me wearing a dark blue dress. Pointing to the flowers, she said, “To celebrate the day of our meeting.” Pent up desire drove me into her arms. We embraced for a long time, and if the choice had been mine, the encounter would have been finalized before we separated, while I was still tasting the delight of my first kiss. But she freed herself gently from my arms and led me into the blue sitting room, simple but tidy, where we sat down side by side on the large sofa. “It’s daring of us,” she breathed in a low voice, “but it is the right thing to do.”
“The right thing!” I repeated emphatically.
“We can’t possibly hide what’s between us any longer.”
“The right thing,” I said, determined to do away with childishness. “I have loved you for a long time.”
“Really! I’ve loved you, too. Can you believe that I am in love for the first time!” Incredulous, I said nothing. “You’ve seen for yourself,” she said earnestly, “and possibly heard more. It’s been groping around, not love.”
“A life unsuitable for someone like you,” I said sadly.
“A beggar can’t choose what’s suitable and what isn’t,” she said.
“Everything has got to change.”
“What do you mean?”
“We must begin a proper life.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she said with fervor. “They were all beasts.”
“All of them?” I protested.
“I don’t want to hide anything from you: Sirhan al-Hilaly, Salim al-Agrudy, and finally Tariq.” I was speechless, my thoughts turning to my mother. “If you’re the kind of person who can’t forget the past,” she went on, “there’s still time to change your mind.”
I took her hand in mine, possessed by a strong inner drive to meet the challenge. “The only thing that concerns me is true worth,” I assured her.
“My heart always told me that you were bigger than any of my petty fears.”
“I’m not a child.”
“But you’re still a student,” she said, smiling.
“That’s true; I still have a long stretch ahead of me.”
“I have a little bit saved up,” she said simply. “I can wait.”
But I had been captivated not only by love but also by longing to escape from that sullied, joyless house. I therefore decided to take a step that would irrevocably open a new path.
“On the contrary,” I said quietly, “we must get married right away.”
She blushed, looking all the more beautiful, but seemed too shaken to speak.
“That’s what we have to do,” I repeated.
“I want to change my way of life!” she said, full of sudden excitement. “I want to get away from the theater, too. But are you sure your father will still support you?”
“He certainly won’t do that.” I smiled sadly. “And I’m certainly not going to accept his filthy money.”
“How in the world are we going to get married then?”
“I’ll be finished with secondary school quite soon and I won’t be drafted, because of my eyesight. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t get a job. My talents depend on individual study, not on taking courses.”
“Will your earnings be enough?”
“My father has asked to be relieved of his work in the theater. He can live easily on what he earns from gambling and other sources and he’s been looking for someone to take his place as prompter. I’ll apply for the job. At least I’ll be in the theater, in the kind of world where I belong. And since you hold a lease on this flat, we won’t have the problem of finding somewhere to live.”
“Shall I go on working in the theater until our circumstances improve?”
“No!” I said sharply. “You must keep away from those men.”
“I have a little put by, as I said, but it won’t last until you can stand on your own feet.”
“We’ll just have to make do,” I said fervently, “until we achieve our goal.”
At that point we surrendered to passion and forgot everything for a while, not saying a word until she freed herself tenderly from my arms and whispered, “I have to get away from Tariq. I’m not going to see him again.”
“He’ll come here,” I said. The very mention of his name upset me.
“I won’t open the door to him.”
“I’ll tell him everything,” I declared.
“Abbas,” she said uneasily, “please don’t let things get out of hand.”
“I’m not afraid of facing him,” I boasted.
I returned to Bab al-Shariya a new being. For the first time I had seen her through the eyes of a lover saying goodbye, and she appeared even lovelier and more worthy of sympathy. I’ll be moving soon, I said to myself, out of the audience to play a role on the stage of life, out of the putrid atmosphere of the old house to breathe a purer and newer air.
I sat waiting in the empty hall until I saw Tariq coming downstairs. He greeted me and asked, “Hasn’t Tahiya arrived?”
“No,” I answered, jumping up to confront him.
“I didn’t run across her at the theater.”
“She’s not going to the theater.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s not coming here, and she’s not going to the theater.”
“Where did you discover all these secrets?”
“We’re going to be married.”
“What?!”
“We’ve agreed to get married.”
“You son of a…! Are you crazy? What did you say?”
“We decided to treat you honorably.”
He took me by surprise, hitting me hard enough to make me angry. I punched him back and nearly floored him. All of a sudden, there were my parents, rushing blindly toward me.
“It’s ludicrous!” Tariq yelled. “Mama’s boy is going to marry Tahiya!”
“Tahiya!” Mother cried. “What kind of lunacy is this? She’s ten years older than you!”
Tariq began to threaten us, so Mother told him to take his belongings and get out.
“I’ll stay here until Doomsday,” he shouted as he left.
For a while, no one spoke. Then Father muttered the words of an old song—“In love, you whom I mourned for”—tingeing them with scorn.
“Abbas,” Mother said, “This is just a rash infatuation.”
“No, it isn’t! It’s a new life.”
“What about your dreams, your future?”
“I will attain them in the most praiseworthy way possible.”
“What do you know about her?”
“She told me frankly about everything.”
“A child of the theater,” Father sneered, “who knows all the tricks. And you’re a strange boy! Your knowledge of your mother should have made you forswear the female species.”
At that my mother took me to my room. “She has a certain reputation and a history,” said Mother. “Don’t you understand what that means?”
I avoided looking at her, the old pain stabbing again. “Unfortunately you don’t understand what love is,” I retorted. “We’re going to start a new life.”
“No one can escape his past!”
Alas, she was unaware of what I knew about hers. “In spite of all that,” I asserted, “Tahiya is virtuous.”
I wish I could say the same about you, Mother.
No sooner had I completed secondary school than I went to see Sirhan al-Hilaly about taking over my father’s job. Tahiya and I got married at once, and I bade farewell to the old house and its inhabitants without any ceremony, just as if I were going off to school or to the library. Father didn’t utter a word of congratulation or wish us well. “What made you put so much effort into your schoolwork,” he said, “if all it amounts to is a prompter’s job?”
Mother, however, hugged me and burst into tears. “May the Lord help you and protect you from evil people,” she said. “Go in peace, and don’t forget to visit us.”
But I had no intention of ever coming back to hell. I was eager to lead a different life, to breathe pure air, and to forget the abyss I’d been mired in, the pain I’d suffered.
Tahiya was waiting for me and so was love. With her I found all the happiness that can arise from the union of two harmonious people. She was bewitching, whether talking or silent, serious or having fun, even cooking or cleaning. What my salary could not cover, she made up from her savings. The sense of peace I gained from her replaced all my earlier unrest, disorientation, grief, and suppressed anger. I would come home about three in the morning, wake up around ten, and after that there was ample time for both love and writing.
We pinned our hopes together on my expected success as a playwright. Until that success came, we were willing to live simply, even frugally, doubling our efforts, patience, and hopes because of the joy we shared. Tahiya proved her strength of will in a fitting way by not touching a drop of wine, thus breaking a long-standing habit. To save money, she even stopped smoking. She confessed that she would once have sunk to opium smoking if it hadn’t made her sick and given her a permanent aversion. She was such a proficient housewife that one time I remarked, “Your house is always clean and tidy, your food is delicious, and you have good manners. You shouldn’t have had to…”
“My father died and my mother married a bailiff,” she said, interrupting my train of thought. “She neglected me, and he mistreated me, so I had to run away.”
She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask her to. I nevertheless imagined what had happened to make her one of Sirhan al-Hilaly’s actresses. And in spite of myself I recalled that my mother had worked in the same theater, likewise at his mercy. I was privately waging war, a campaign against all the kinds of enslavement to which people are exposed. Would the theater be enough of a base for this war? Would my concept of the old house, which had sunk so low as to become a brothel, be a sufficiently strong ally?
Tahiya’s gentleness and sweetness never failed; even in my happy childhood, my parents’ relationship had never been like that. She was an angel, the proof of which was her determination to cast aside the way of life that had tainted her sad past. And she truly loved me as was clear from her desire to have a child. I didn’t want that to happen, however, being afraid, with our limited income, that it would interfere with my life as an artist, which was dearer to me than anything else in the world, dearer even than love, though I hated to disappoint her, and my own ethics forbade me to give in to selfishness.
—
At exactly the time when the cost of living had soared beyond both our expectations and our means, and we found ourselves forced to think of different ways of surviving, Tahiya’s hope of being pregnant was fulfilled; and I was beset by a new anxiety, obliged now to take into account both the near and the distant future. Our state of affairs convinced me that there was no way out except to find another job, if that were possible.
I’d heard that American and European writers used typewriters instead of pens, so I’d learned to type. On my way to the theater I used to pass by a typing bureau called Faisal, and I applied there for a job. The owner immediately accepted me on his terms: I agreed to work from eight in the morning to two in the afternoon and to be paid by the piece.
Tahiya received the news with mixed feelings. “You’re going to go to bed at three in the morning, wake up at seven, at the latest, instead of ten, work from eight until two, then come home at three to get another two hours’ sleep, at most, between four and six. You won’t get any rest. You won’t have time for reading or writing.”
“What can I do?”
“Your father has lots of money.”
“I’m not going to accept one filthy millieme,” I said indignantly.
I refused to go on arguing. She was certainly an exceptional woman, but she was quite practical when it came to matters of living, preferring in the depths of her heart to ask my father for help rather than see me bury myself in work that would impinge on my time, my creativity, and my strength.
I took two days off from work at Faisal in order to finish my play, which I offered to Sirhan al-Hilaly. He looked at me smiling. “You haven’t given up?” he asked.
During the days of waiting for his reaction I lived with my beautiful dreams. Art had become not only the one way I had of satisfying my deepest longings but also my only route to actual living. I’d begun writing this particular play, however, before I’d had the idea about the house as a brothel; it hadn’t yet jelled, but I’d finished it anyway, still happy with its idealistic moral philosophy.
Sirhan al-Hilaly returned it to me with one remark: “You still have a long way to go.”
“What does it lack?” I asked, sighing.
“It’s a story,” he said crisply, “but it won’t do as drama.” There was no encouragement for me to continue.
What unparalleled agony! Worse than what I’d gone through in the old house. Failure in art is death itself—that’s the way we’re made—and art, in my case, was not just art but the surrogate for the action that an idealist like me is unable to take. What will I have done to combat the evil around me? What will I do if I have not the strength to carry on the struggle in the only field granted me, the theater?
The days went by. I worked nonstop, like a machine, making hurried love, cutting myself off from the life of the spirit. No reading. No writing. Living—reduced to daily encounters with universal blight, the filth and slime of overflowing sewers, and a beastly transportation system—lost all its joy. Examined during brief intervals of relaxation, with Tahiya close to me, my life seemed a calendar of days dwindling away in sterile mockery. It was in such an oppressive atmosphere that we exchanged endearments, buoyed by cautious daydreams, the life that pulsated in her womb playing on the strings of my hoped-for, dreamed-of success—though sometimes the dreams burned with wild anger, against shame and sin, with visions of fire destroying the old house and the fornicators in it. I could never have such visions, however, without feeling ashamed and self-recriminatory afterward. It’s quite true that my heart held not one speck of love for my father, but I had a sort of wavering compassion for my mother.
When I expressed this inner conflict, Tahiya said to me, “A secret gambling den is a crime in the eyes of the law, but the rise in prices is just as bad.”
“Would you be willing to have that go on in your house?” I asked.
“God forbid! But what I want to say is that there are people who, when they are in trouble, act like a drowning man and grab at anything to save themselves.”
I told myself that I was acting like that drowning person, even though I had committed no crime according to the law: to earn our bread, I had filled all my time with worthless work, and life in consequence had become a dry reed. Wasn’t that somehow criminal, too?
The days passed by, my agony increased, and some satanic power enabled me to give form to my innermost desire: sitting at the typewriter, I was suddenly overcome with a longing for freedom, for my lost humanity, and for my dissipated creativity. How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.
Ah! What a dream. What kind of devil lurks in the heart that has consecrated itself to goodness? The image of my angel brought me remorse. I should feel mortally ashamed before that woman, who exudes love and patience. May God protect my wife and forgive my parents.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
I touched her hand tenderly. “I’m thinking about the new arrival and what we should have ready for him.”
One day, about to sit down at Amm Ahmad’s bar, I noticed a morose look on his face that portended bad news. “Are you all right, Amm Ahmad?” I asked.
“It seems you haven’t heard yet.”
“I just arrived. What’s happened?”
“The police,” he began. “Last night—I mean at dawn—they made a raid on the house.”
“My father’s?” He nodded. “And what happened?”
“The same as always happens in such cases: they let the gamblers go free and arrested your parents.”
I was absolutely devastated. Filled with a suffocating anxiety, I forgot my former sentiments, forgot my enduring anger. My father and mother’s dreadful fate stabbed me so deeply that I broke into sobs. Sirhan al-Hilaly summoned me at once. “I’ll engage an expert lawyer as legal counsel for them,” he told me. “The money has been confiscated. They came across quite a lot of drugs. There’s some hope, though.”
“I want to see them right away.”
“No doubt you’ll be able to, but I’m afraid I can’t let you off work tonight. That’s a matter of course in the theater. The show must go on, even when there’s been a death. I mean, even the death of a loved one doesn’t prevent a professional actor from playing his role. Even if it’s a comic one.”
I left his room feeling defeated, and the guilty memory of my frightful dreams intensified my suffering.
Taher was born just before the trial, into an atmosphere so heavy with dejections, so teeming with sorrows and humiliations that Tahiya hid even her joy in front of me. Before the baby was a month old his grandparents went to prison. He was sickly, which worried us both, but I fled, to drown my anxieties and sense of guilt in endless work. I was destined, however, to face another blow, so cruel that it would make me almost forget the sorrow I felt then.
When Taher was just over five months old, Tahiya’s health broke down. We diagnosed the malady ourselves as influenza, but after a week had gone by with no signs of improvement, I fetched the local doctor. “She must have tests done,” he said when we were alone. “I suspect typhoid.” As a precautionary measure he prescribed some medicine and suggested moving her to a fever hospital.
Having made up my mind to look after her myself, I rejected the idea, though I had to quit my job at Faisal’s typing bureau. To make up for the loss of income and to cope with added expenses, I sold the refrigerator. I became Tahiya’s nurse and Taher’s nursemaid, moving him into the other room and giving him his bottle while I tended her, applying myself to both tasks with devotion. Unlike the baby’s, Tahiya’s health improved.
Driven by love and a sense of grateful indebtedness to this woman who had always been so sweet and good to me, I did all I could for her. After three weeks of care she’d recovered enough strength to leave her bed and sit in a comfortable chair in the sunshine. She had lost most of her fresh beauty and all her vitality, but she asked incessantly about the baby. Her recovery gave me a little respite, despite Taher’s continuing misery. He received no attention during my long hours at the theater, from eight in the evening until two in the morning, and I had hoped that Tahiya would soon be able to take over my duties. Suddenly, however, her condition deteriorated, so much so that I called the doctor again. “She shouldn’t have got up,” he said. “She’s had a relapse. It often happens, with no serious results.” I went back to my nursing feeling twice as depressed but with twice the determination. Umm Hany got to know about our predicament, and offered to stay with Tahiya during my absences.
Despite the assurance of the doctor’s repeated visits, my heart contracted, and I had a sense of imminent sorrow. Was I going to have to go on living without Tahiya? Could I bear to live without her? Torn between her and the weakening baby, I worried about how quickly the money was running out and wondered what else I could sell. I would gaze at her sallow, shrunken face, summoning up recollections of our beautiful relationship, as if I were bidding her farewell. The whole world seemed black to me. When the final warning came, I was outside the flat, returning from the theater, had just rung the bell, and heard Umm Hany’s loud wailing. I closed my eyes in acceptance of my fate, and opened my heart to the blackest sorrow.
—
A week after Tahiya’s death Taher joined her, as was to be expected. The doctor had predicted it. I hadn’t had a proper chance to learn what fatherhood was like: his tortured existence had always been a source of pain to me.
I don’t remember anything about those days except Tariq Ramadan’s weeping. Having cried my heart out alone, I had been able to bear up fairly well in front of the people gathered for the funeral, when all of a sudden Tariq’s outburst made everyone from the theater turn to look at him. I wondered what lay behind this show of emotion. Had he loved her, this animal, who had moved his canned imitation of love to Umm Hany’s house? I couldn’t help speculating on the meaning of his tears, not only in my capacity as a widower but also as a dramatist; for not even in my dazed grief had I forgotten my dormant aspirations.
This was loneliness: a silent house filled with memories and ghosts, a heart ravaged not only by sorrow but also by a sense of sin, for the icy reality that stared me in the face also whispered in my ear that my imaginings had been realized. I wanted to forget the imagination, even if it meant grieving more deeply.
Yet when grief is so intense, plunges so deeply that it finally hits bottom, it begins to radiate a strange intoxication, bringing a little solace with it. Could it be that Tariq Ramadan, when he affronted the mourners with an outburst of tears, deep down inside had been laughing? This, too, is loneliness: grief, accompanied by forbearance and challenge. Together they showed me a prospect that tempted me: lifelong bachelorhood, satisfied pride, and immersion in writing until death.
I had already begun drawing up plans for a play to be entitled The Old House—The Brothel when in a flash came a vision of Tahiya as she had been, strong and well, lusciously full of joie de vivre. A new idea sprang up: the setting would actually be the old house, its actual transformation into a brothel would still pertain, and the characters would be actual people themselves; but the plot would be what I’d imagined and not the actuality. Which—what I’d imagined or what had actually happened—was theatrically stronger? What I’d imagined, unquestionably. In reality the house had been raided by police and sickness had killed Tahiya and her son, but there was another murderer: my imagination, which had informed the police and had killed both Tahiya and the baby, and was thus the ultimate protagonist in a plot that fulfilled all the requirements of a drama—a plot through which I would confess, do penance, and write a real play for the first time. I would challenge Sirhan al-Hilaly to reject it, though he and a few others might think I was confessing to outward reality rather than to the substance of a dream. Inwardly, art is a means of expurgation, outwardly a means of battle, incumbent on men born and reared in sin and determined to rebel against it. Nothing else matters. The fever of creation had infected my whole being.
On my way to keep my appointment with Sirhan al-Hilaly, the month allotted to reading the play having now gone by, my heart had been beating wildly. A refusal this time would be beyond my endurance. It would finish me. The glee I saw hiding in his eyes made my heavy heart tremble, however, and I sat down where he indicated with increasing optimism, to hear his booming voice say, “At last you’ve created a real play,” and to feel him staring at me interrogatively, as if to ask, “How did you do it?” At that moment all my cares momentarily evaporated and I could feel my face going red. “It’s wonderful, terrifying, potentially a great success! Why did you call it Afrah al-Qubbah?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, bewildered.
“Artists’ wiles are beyond me,” he said with a resounding laugh. “I wonder if you’re alluding to the joys—shall we say?—of moral struggle in the midst of spreading vermin? Or are you being ironic, the way we are when we call a black servant girl Sabah or Nur?”*5 I smiled in agreement. “I’ll give you three hundred pounds,” he said. “Generosity is, probably, my sole virtue. It’s the largest sum ever paid for a first play.” If only you could have lived long enough to share my happiness. “But don’t you expect some embarrassing questions?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.
“It’s a play. There’s no need to look beyond it.”
“Well answered. I’m not interested in anything but the play. It’s bound to arouse a storm of suspicion, though, among people we know.”
“I don’t care if it does,” I said calmly.
“Bravo! What else have you got?”
“I hope to begin writing a new play soon.”
“Good for you! It’s the rainy season for you. I’m all anticipation. I’ll spring it on the company as a surprise this coming fall.”
—
My little flat made me subject to frequent fits of gloom and I wished I could find another place to live, but where? Changing the rooms around, selling the bed, buying a new one, I realized that Tahiya had penetrated much further into my life than I had ever imagined. My mourning was not the kind that began deep and became lighter. It had been comparatively bearable to begin with—probably because of the state of shock I’d been in—but then became so entrenched that I could only hope for forgetfulness through the passage of time. My apparent lack of reaction would look to many people like evidence that I had killed her. But she knows the whole truth now.
—
Shortly before the onset of autumn, my parents were released from jail. A sense of duty, which in my mind always overrides sentiment, led me to welcome them with sympathetic charity, but to see them so broken deepened my depression. I proposed to Sirhan al-Hilaly that they return to their former jobs in the theater; I would make work available for them, freeing myself from the job so as to spend all my time on my art. He agreed, but they absolutely refused, making it clear that they wanted to have nothing more to do with either the theater or its people, none of whom, with the exception of Amm Ahmad Burgal and Umm Hany, had even taken the trouble to visit them.
I was glad. Father now conformed to the picture I had drawn of him in the play. He was still strange, despite his forced withdrawal from opium; we had nothing in common, and I didn’t understand him. But then I don’t lay claim ever to have understood him with any certainty. It was the play that had willed me to present him as the victim of poverty and drugs. I wonder what he’ll say about his role. Will I be able to face him after its performance?
As for Mother, she was still attached to me and still wanted to live with me, but I wanted to be unencumbered, to discover some new place to live on my own, even if it was only one room. If I didn’t feel any love toward her, neither did I harbor any feelings of hate. And she will be dismayed when she sees herself portrayed on the stage and realizes that I was aware of everything she had tried to hide from me. After that, would I be able to look her in the eye? Never!
I would leave them to themselves, but in some security. The idea of the shop—Amm Ahmad Burgal had suggested it—was a good one. I hoped they would make a living, and sincerely repent.
I was face-to-face with Tariq Ramadan. We’d always exchanged the usual greetings in passing. This time, however, with typical insolence, he actually intruded into my solitude. Tariq is one of those few who have no notion at all of what it is to feel awkward or embarrassed over doing anything at other people’s expense; I’d scolded Umm Hany several times for living with him.
“I came to congratulate you,” he said, “on the play.”
I didn’t believe him. You came, rather, to conduct a cruel inquiry. I tried to be courteous, however, and thanked him.
“The hero is totally disgusting, an odious person,” he said. “The audience won’t have any sympathy for him.” The remark was mainly his sly way of letting me know the director’s opinion and I ignored this criticism completely: the hero wasn’t like that, either in real life or in the play. I saw that Tariq was simply attacking me, nothing more or less, and I looked at him so contemptuously that he asked, “Didn’t it occur to you that the events of the play would make people think the worst about you?”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“What a cold-blooded killer you are!” he blurted out, suddenly showing agitation.
“Now you’re going back to the past,” I said disdainfully. “As far as I’m concerned, the main thing was an attempt at love, whereas with you it was all nothing but an ordeal marked by your own spite.”
“Are you going to be able to defend yourself?”
“I haven’t been accused.”
“You’re going to find yourself in the office of the prosecuting attorney.”
“You’re a stupid ass.”
He got up. “She deserved to be killed in any case,” he said contemptuously. “But what you deserve,” he added, “is hanging.” Then he left.
This hateful visitation made me feel as if I were being caught up in a whirlpool; it convinced me that I had to hide myself somewhere, out of reach of these ignoramuses. Did I really deserve to be hanged? Not in the least, not even if I were charged with my own hidden desires. My imaginings—symbols of escape from actual burdens, not of flight from love or my loved one—had arisen out of temporary agitation, not out of deep-seated feelings. Anyway, I could no longer go on living where this devil could get at me.
An agent suggested a room in the pension La Côte d’Azur in Helwan.*6 This again was loneliness, but of a different kind: myself, my craft, and my imagination. Keeping mostly to my room, I set aside time during the night to get some exercise by walking. As I’d resigned from my job and had nothing to do but write, I told myself that I had to sit down and choose one of the dozens of ideas floating around in my head, then concentrate. When it came to it, however, it became quite clear to me that after all I didn’t possess a single idea. What was wrong?
I wasn’t living merely alone, but in a vacuum. My grief for Tahiya returned, penetrating, deep, and subjugating. Even the image of Taher took shape before my eyes, innocent, emaciated, struggling against some unknown entity. In my attempt to escape from my depression by writing, I would encounter only a void. I was burned out. And what had extinguished the flame had not only smothered my creativity but left nothing in its place except endless listlessness and aversion to life itself.
Meanwhile, much to my bafflement, I read a great deal about the success of the play, dozens of critiques lavishing praise on the author and predicting how much the theater would profit from his talent. This critical reception, coming on the heels of my tortured attempts at writing in this hell of barrenness, this hell of sorrow and want, with my resources dwindling every day, was sheer mockery. To the gloom enveloping me I said aloud: “You never expected this.”
Far from enjoying the rainy season that Sirhan al-Hilaly had predicted, I could not even think. Any idea I conceived came to nothing, shriveling as the wells of contemplation dried up. It was death, a living death: I saw death, touched it, smelled it, and lived with it.
When the money was all gone, I went to see Sirhan al-Hilaly at home. He didn’t begrudge me an extra hundred pounds over and above the contracted price.
I’d entered a race with death, but I was so dried up within me that mine had become a living body without a soul. The voice of annihilation stole into my ears, jeering, letting me know that I was finished—it had played with me as it wished, baring its fangs to pronounce a sentence of death.
When the money ran out again, I rushed off a second time to Sirhan al-Hilaly, who politely but firmly made it clear that he was ready to grant me another sum whenever I showed him a portion of a new play—and only then.
Returning to solitude, with destitution now added to grief and sterility, I contemplated seeking a haven—Bab al-Shariya—but something stopped me. At that point, willfully parentless, soon to be homeless, and no longer belonging to any quarter, I said to myself that nothing was left except the end I’d assigned to my own protagonist. And eventually I hit upon the appropriate exit line. I despised my burdens and afflictions. No mention of them. I would die keeping them to myself.
Shortly before the call to afternoon prayers, I went to the Japanese Garden*7 and sat down on a bench, oblivious of what was going on around me, aware only of my own thoughts in lurid collision with one another. By what means? And when?
I’d only slept an hour the night before. The wind blew, my head grew heavy, daylight was rapidly fading. Lassitude crept over me.
When I opened my eyes it was dusk, darkness falling with ponderous slowness; I must have slept for an hour or more. I got up from the bench—to find myself rising with unexpected buoyancy, filled with energy. My head was free of fever, my heart from its weight—how marvelous!—gloom had dispersed, depression had vanished, and I was a completely different person. When had he been born? How had he been born? And why? What had happened in the space of an hour?
I hadn’t slept through an hour, but an era, from which I’d awakened into a new one. Something had happened during my sleep, something so preciously significant that surely, had it not been for this joy at sudden recovery, this joy that had loosened at last my death grip on memory and cast into oblivion even the recollection of priceless things, I might have been able to call to mind at least an inkling of the onset of this miraculous change. I could only think that somehow I must have completed a long and successful journey. From where otherwise—and how—had the resurrection come? Incomprehensible, unbidden, perhaps undeserved—but so tangible, so real that it could be seen and felt, in the very midst of spiritual emptiness and physical destitution, despite all opposition, obstacles, losses, and sorrows—this joy was all I wanted to cling to, this ecstasy, as if to a talisman. Let its strength remain unfathomably in its mystery! Lo, its life-giving force marches forward, bearing with it the fragrance of triumph!
I set out at once for the station, which was no mean distance away, and with every step new vigor rushed in, as full of promise as great clouds laden with rain—potentiality, feeling, responsiveness, far above and beyond the fact that I was penniless and pursued and carried sadness with me. Only after I’d covered a considerable stretch did I suddenly remember the note and realize that it was too late to retrieve it. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered now—let whatever might happen to that letter happen, whatever the outcome might be—except to keep on going. This ecstasy at its peak may glow on a body stripped by penury, bared to its own aridity, but on a will that the challenge of joy has made free.
Translated from the Arabic by Olive E. Kenny.
Edited and revised by Mursi Saad El Din and John Rodenbeck.
*1Abu al-Ala al-Maarry (973–1057), born near Aleppo, was a blind poet-philosopher who is said to have been a skeptic, freethinker, and materialist.
*2The first verse of the Fatha, Sura I, Qur’an.
*3Female characters in well-known Arab love lyrics.
*4Coptic name of the windy month that follows Touba, the coldest month, corresponding to January. The rich weather lore associated with the Coptic calendar has kept it in use throughout Egypt by both Copts and Muslims.
*5Meaning morning and light.
*6A town about twenty-five kilometers south of Cairo. With its warm, dry climate and mineral springs, it was once a famous spa.
*7A public garden at Helwan decorated with Japanese statues and laid out in Japanese style.