This time the immense mansion gate swung open to witness the expulsion of Adham and Umaima. Adham walked out carrying a bundle of clothes, followed by Umaima with another bundle and some food. They cowered as they walked mournfully away, both crying from hopelessness. When they heard the gate snap shut behind them they wailed loudly, and Umaima sobbed, “Death is too good for me!”
“You’re right, for once,” quavered Adham, “but death is too good for me too.”
They had not gotten far from the house when they heard a mocking, drunken laugh. Looking around for its source, they saw Idris in front of the hut he had built of discarded planks and tin sheets, and his wife, Nargis, sitting, silently spinning. Idris laughed in gloating mockery until the astonished Adham and Umaima stopped to gape at him. Then he began to dance and snap his fingers, and Nargis looked annoyed and went into the hut; Adham looked on with eyes reddened from tears and rage. At once he realized how he had been tricked, and saw the vile and criminal truth. He saw his own folly and stupidity, which even now animated this criminal’s gloating, joyous dance. This was Idris, who had become the embodiment of evil. Adham’s blood boiled and rose until it filled his brain. He grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it, screaming in a voice choked with rage. “You trash! You abominable thing! Even the scorpions are more human than you!”
Idris answered him with even wilder dancing; he rocked his head right and left, raised his eyebrows playfully and kept snapping his fingers.
Adham’s anger rose again. “Depraved—rotten—worthless—that’s what liars are—and those are your good points!”
Idris’ middle now undulated with the same grace as his head and he mouthed obscene soundless laughter.
Ignoring Umaima, who was trying to urge him to keep walking, Adham shouted, “Go on, keep acting like a whore—you’re the lowest of the low!”
Idris shook his buttocks as he spun slowly and amorously around. Blind with rage, Adham threw his bundle to the ground and pushed away Umaima, who was trying to hold him back, and leaped at Idris. He got him around the neck and tried with all his strength to crush it. Idris gave no sign of feeling the stranglehold, and continued to dance gracefully. Maddened, Adham punched him again and again, but Idris went on teasing and even sang, in his most grating voice, a babyish rhyme:
Duckie, duckie, duckie, spin!
Where’d you get your kitty’s chin?
Then he stopped, cursed violently and hit Adham so hard in the chest that he was thrown back and staggered, then lost his balance and fell on his back.
Screaming, Umaima ran to him and helped him up, dusting him off “What do you want with this beast?” she said. “Let’s get out of here!”
He picked up his bundle without a word, and his wife took hers, and they resumed walking until the end of the property, when exhaustion overtook him. He dropped the bundle and sat on it, saying, “Let’s rest a little.” The woman sat opposite him and began to cry again.
Then Idris’ voice reached them, as strong as thunder; he stood before the mansion, looking menacingly up at it as he bellowed, “You kicked me out to please the lowest of your children—and do you see how he has treated you? Now you yourself are throwing him out into the dirt, just as you did to me, and you’re worst off of all. Take notice that Idris cannot be beaten! Stay up there with your stupid, sterile sons—the only grandchildren you’ll ever have will creep in the dirt and roll around in filth, and someday they’ll live by peddling potatoes and melon seeds. The gangsters in Atuf and Kafr al-Zaghari will slap them around. Your blood will be mixed with the commonest blood. You’ll squat alone in your room, changing your will in rage and failure—you’ll suffer from loneliness and old age in the dark, and when you die not one eye will weep!”
Idris turned to Adham and continued to shout frenziedly. “You weakling, how will you live by yourself? You have no strength, and no one strong to depend upon! What good will your reading and arithmetic do you in the desert? Ha, ha, ha!”
Umaima was still crying, until Adham grew annoyed and told her dully, “That’s enough crying.”
“I’ll have a lot more crying to do,” she replied, drying her eyes. “I’m the guilty one, Adham.”
“You’re not the only one. If I hadn’t been so weak and cowardly none of this would have happened.”
“The sin is mine alone.”
“You’re just taking all the blame to keep me from yelling at you,” yelled Adham.
Her appetite for self-criticism blunted, Umaima kept her head bowed and said softly, “I didn’t think he’d be that cruel with us.”
“I know him better. I have no excuse.”
She hesitated before asking, “How am I supposed to live here when I’m pregnant?”
“We have to live in this wasteland after having lived in the mansion! I wish tears could help us, but all we can do is build a hut.”
“Where?”
He looked around, and his gaze rested in the direction of Idris’ hut.
“We shouldn’t go too far from the mansion,” he said uneasily, “even if we have to end up near Idris’ hut. Otherwise we’d be all alone at the mercy of this desert.”
Umaima thought a little, and seemed convinced. “Yes, and so we can be within his sight, in case he takes pity on us.”
Adham groaned. “Grief is killing me—if it weren’t for you, I’d think all this was a nightmare. Will he never forgive us? I won’t be insolent to him like Idris—no way! I’m nothing like Idris—will he treat me the same way?”
“This place has never known a father like yours,” said Umaima bitterly.
“When will your tongue learn?” He glared at her.
“I haven’t committed a crime or a sin, for God’s sake!” said Umaima irritably. “Tell anyone what I did, and how I’m being punished, and I bet you he won’t even believe it. I swear to God, in the history of fatherhood there has never been a father like yours.”
“And the world has never known a man like him. This mountain, this desert and this sky testify to that—any other man would have avoided the challenge.”
“The way he acts, none of his children will be left in the mansion.”
“We were the first to leave, and we were the worst ones in it.”
“I am not,” said Umaima hotly. “We are not.”
“The true judgment comes only through a test.”
They fell silent. There was not a living thing to be seen in the desert except for stragglers far off, at the foot of the mountain. The sun cast its fierce rays from the clear sky, and baked the vast sands, which glittered with scattered stones or fragments of glass. The mountain stood alone on the horizon except for a tall boulder in the east that looked like the head of a body buried in the sands, and Idris’ hut at the eastern end of the mansion, planted defiantly but pathetically in the ground. The very air warned of hardship, trouble and fear.
Umaima sighed audibly. “We are going to have to work very hard to make life bearable.”
Adham gazed up at the mansion. “We are going to have to work even harder to make that gate open for us again.”