The Open Door

Chapter Four

Four days passed before Isam made an appearance. Layla waited for him from noon on the ﬁrst day into the late afternoon, and on into the evening, and then into the second day, and the day following that. But still Isam did not appear.

At ﬁrst she made all sorts of excuses for him. Perhaps he was ill. Or he had had an argument with Mahmud. But she knew that he was neither sick nor at odds with her brother, and that sooner or later she would have to confront the fact she had been trying to avoid. She understood that Isam was avoiding her—no one else, just her—and when she ﬁnally admitted as much to herself, she was overpowered by an excruciating fear. She felt abandoned; she imagined herself alone, in a darkly frightening, forlorn desert. In this remote place she could see no reassuring wall against which to lean; at a moment when she was weak and felt unable to stand on her own feet she espied no one in that empty space on whom she might rely. She felt the ground giving way beneath her, yet she could not even give a glance behind her, for all ties between her and what was back there—all the ties that had linked her to her dreams—were sundered. And staring about her she saw only sullen desert. Yet to stare straight ahead was no help either, for before her lay only an opaque darkness.

Had she been completely wrong? Hadn’t Isam looked at her that way? And if he hadn’t, then why was he staying away? Why avoid her? Had she tried to force Isam to feel a certain way about her? Had she imposed herself on him? But she hadn’t said a word! Not a single word! God, what had she done? What had she done, that now she felt so humiliated, so paralyzed by her own puniness? How could she have done something that so disoriented her?

If only she could understand! If she knew the lay of the land her pain might be easier to bear. But try as she might, she could not understand why Isam had invaded her life in this way—and then why he had gone silently on by. She could always go upstairs to her aunt’s apartment, of course, where she would certainly see Isam, and she could demand an explanation. But that was not a possibility she could contemplate, even if nothing were to change for a thousand years! She would not try to force someone else’s hand; she would never impose herself, never. This feeling of ignominy was bad enough, this sensation of shame that she had had no part in forming. He had come to her; and then he had gone away.

All around Layla, the world followed its everyday course. She awoke in the morning, and went to bed at night; she went to school, ate, spoke to people, studied. It would astonish her to ﬁnd herself laughing now and then, and growing enthusiastic from time to time about something or other. The newspapers had begun to argue the necessity of organizing armed struggle in the Suez Canal Zone. Those who wanted to ﬁght could even volunteer now. Mahmud was anxious and nervous, hopping about like a chickpea in a hot skillet, as he suffered the agonies of trying to come to a decision. In every person’s heart coiled a desire to be there at the Canal, face to face with the enemy in a battle of life and death. Layla was no exception. But every time this longing captured her heart she found an obscure pleasure in scorning herself. After all—and ﬁrst of all—she was a girl, and a girl was not really a person. Even if she had been a man she would not be able to go, for she was weak, and the honor of struggling for the sake of Egypt was not the destiny of the weak!

But as she thought about this a confusing idea slyly invaded her thoughts. In the demonstration she had not been weak. In fact, she had felt very strong. She had been nimble and quick, and the crowd had protected and supported her. Even her father had not been able to frighten her then, amidst all those demonstrating people. So . . . ? Yet this thought gave way to others, and she reverted to self-mockery. Her strength—if it really had been strength of any sort—had not come from within her but rather from beyond. And anyway, she chided herself, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life marching in a demonstration.

The afternoon was drawing to a close as Layla sat with her mother in the living room. Gamila had decided to accept the bridegroom, her mother told her. The engagement ceremony would be held soon.

“But Gamila was with me all day long in school and she
didn’t say a thing?!”

“Maybe she was afraid she’d hurt you.”

Layla stared at her mother. “Hurt me?”

“I mean, because you’re the same age, and now she’ll be married before you are.” Layla wanted to object to her mother’s words, but she could not muster strength even for that. She sat silently as her mother recounted the story from start to ﬁnish. But as she listened, Layla began to take more than a polite interest, interrupting her mother to ask about details she found hard to accept, or perhaps to understand. The groom was the contractor who had supervised the construction of Dawlat Hanim’s home in the new residential area of Doqqi. He’d asked her to please ﬁnd him a bride, “daughter of a good family,” of course, and light-skinned. Dawlat Hanim had thought of Gamila. She had shown him a photo and he had proposed, offering to pay as an advance on the dowry the sum of 300 Egyptian pounds to cover the cost of furnishing four rooms for their future home. Layla’s aunt had thought the groom was a real catch; a girl would not be offered such a man more than once, she declared. But her ﬁnancial circumstances would not allow her to shoulder the expense of a marriage for Gamila, for she and Gamila and Isam lived entirely on the pension that her late husband had left. The costs of Isam’s medical school education “have just about broken me,” she wailed, and “prices have climbed like wildﬁre.” But she had not been frank about any of this at the start; after all, “one has one’s self-respect, you know.” Instead, said Layla’s mother, Umm Gamila had explained that the girl was still young. But she had not said anything that would cut off the lines of communication with the groom, and she had Dawlat Hanim’s abilities as an intermediary to count on. In fact, she’d tried deliberately and carefully to make sure that the tie grew stronger, too strong to cut. But Dawlat Hanim’s patience had worn thin and Umm Gamila was forced to tell her the truth, admitting it tearfully. And the matchmaker took it upon herself to arrange everything. She took Gamila to Cicurel, the department store downtown where all the best people went. She bought her a dress of pink lace. From Cicurel they went on to the coiffeur, where Dawlat supervised Gamila’s new hairdo and makeup. From there they went to Dawlat Hanim’s home, where the bridegroom was waiting.

That was the turning point. When the groom saw Gamila before him, face to face, ﬂesh and blood—“it’s just not the same as a picture to see her in the ﬂesh”—he fell for her, and he fell hard—“he fell in up to his ears,” as Umm Layla put it so gleefully.

What was beyond dispute, though, was that Gamila did not fall in up to her ears, at least not at ﬁrst. She told Layla that the groom was an old man, and he was vulgar, and he had a potbelly. But gradually things changed. The groom took Gamila and her mother home in his Ford, and on the way he showed them his villa out on the new and ﬂashy Pyramids Road. He would empty the villa of its tenants, he said, so that the bride could move in. Gamila’s head began to spin.

But Gamila’s mother had not solved her problem. How was she to furnish four rooms with only three hundred pounds? Not to mention the garments that Gamila would have to have, and the nightgowns, and then the underclothes, and the rest. But she did not ponder the problem for very long. The next day Dawlat Hanim visited her to say that “the fellow is crazy about Gamila, he can’t sleep through the night!” And that from his respect and desire to honor Gamila he proposed to furnish the house completely out of his own pocket, and to supply the kitchen with all it needed, too, including a Frigidaire and a gas stove. Moreover, he would still pay the dowry he had proposed, that three hundred pounds.

Well, said Umm Layla, the world was not vast enough to contain her sister’s delight. She began “ﬁlling the girl’s ear all the time; it doesn’t hurt, you know, to let her hear it.” Layla leaned her head back against the chair, imagining her aunt “chewing Gamila’s ear off,” as her mother put it. She could see in her mind’s eye the image of her aunt: her full body, that glowing dark skin, her carefully coiffed hair, the delicate and kindly features. She envisioned her aunt, bending over Gamila, kissing her, giving her a hug, teasing her as if she were still a little girl, and at the same time imprisoning her in her bewitching kisses, smothering her with loving concern. Layla smiled lightly. She knew her aunt’s ways. She knew them very well. Her aunt and her mother resembled each other only in their looks; in every other way, they could not have been more different. Aunt Samira was cleverer in the art of life; she always knew exactly what she wanted, and she got it, too, through her gentle persuasiveness, her kisses, and her affection. Perhaps Layla’s mother knew what she wanted, at least some of the time, but she did not always get it. Her strategies were the reverse of her sister’s: she mounted open attacks; she said exactly what she wanted; she reproached, and denounced, and lashed out. Aunt Samira, on the other hand, never said precisely what it was that she hoped for. She might hint, or make her desires known in a roundabout manner, now and then dropping a word to the wise, hemming and hawing and hedging. When she met resistance she would make a provisional retreat, just a step back, in order to regroup and advance once again. If Gamila said, “No, Mama, I don’t like him, I don’t want to marry him,” she responded simply. “Fine, then forget about it, honey. All I want is to be sure that you are happy.” A while later she would ﬂing an offhand comment in Gamila’s direction, about so-and-so, that girl who’d married for love but then had failed in her marriage, because after all, material security was the foundation of every successful union. Another time, she would say to her daughter, “Gigi, I just want you to have the ﬁnest automobile in town, the best dresses; you’re so pretty, you’re gamila, Gigi, and what a loss if such beauty goes to waste, my dear.”

“Clever indeed,” pronounced Layla’s mother, pulling Layla from her reverie.

“Who?”

“My sister Samira, your aunt, she’s so smart! She knows how to keep that girl under her wing. And the girl as well—her mind went to pieces when she heard this talk about the solitaire ring.”

“What solitaire?”

“The groom—may your future hold the like—is going to get her a solitaire, and—” A rap sounded against the front door. Layla got up to open it. Sayyida, her aunt’s maid, raised her sturdy face to Layla, her full lips opening in a smile.

“The young mistress says, ‘Please come up for a bit.’” She gave Layla a folded piece of paper, which Layla opened. “Sanaa and Adila are here,” she read. “I wish you would come up. And if you don’t, I’ll come down to get you. Kisses and hugs.”

“Wait a minute,” she said to Sayyida as the girl was closing the door. She grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and began to write, her face suddenly gloomy.

“Why don’t you want to go up?” her mother asked.

“Headache.”

“You know what they’re going to say—it’s jealousy! Do you want that?”

Layla chewed on her lip and bit back a ﬂood of curses rushing through her head.

“Me? Me, jealous?!”

“Then go up and congratulate your aunt and the girl.”

Torn, Layla stood in the middle of the room. She did not want to see Isam. Yet she could not cut herself off completely from her aunt, especially since if she did it would be explained in such a ridiculous manner, following on Gamila’s engagement. Anyway, no doubt he was still out somewhere with Mahmud. If she did see him, if he was there, she would simply treat him in an ordinary fashion, just as if nothing at all had happened between them.

She opened the door and called out to Sayyida. “Okay, Sayyida, tell her I’ll be there in a minute.” Sayyida walked off slowly, moving her hips extravagantly from side to side.

Layla stood before her wardrobe. Without consciously choosing it, she stretched out her hand toward her prettiest dress, the one as red as the inside of a ripe watermelon. Aunt Samira had declared that it set off the loveliness of her skin beautifully. No, she wouldn’t wear that one; she would not pretty herself up at all for him. She would make no effort whatsoever to get him back. She took her hand away from the dress and picked out a rose-colored blouse and plain black skirt. She ran a comb hurriedly through her short hair and climbed the stairs to her aunt’s apartment. She rang the bell.

Dressed to go out, Isam opened the door. In that striped navy blue suit of which he was so proud, he stood motionless, blocking the doorway as if he did not want her to come in. Layla forgot completely how determined she had been to treat him in an ordinary way. The moment she saw him her face fell into a frown and she averted her eyes as he ﬁnally stepped back and she slunk into the sitting room.

“Layla.” Isam called after her in a loud whisper. Turning to face him, she noticed a strange expression in his eyes. It was a look she had never seen in anyone’s eyes, the demeanor of a creature trapped and in pain, of a wounded animal. She could feel tears well suddenly in her eyes and she closed them, biting her lip to keep from crying. She turned back but he restrained her with a gentle hand on her shoulder, as if she were a fragile thing that he feared would shatter at a touch. By the time she turned to face him again, his face had relaxed and his eyes had grown softer, gleaming with a light that transﬁxed her body and settled somewhere inside. With her sleeve she quickly wiped away the two lone tears that ran down her face, shook her head confusedly, opened the door to the sitting room, and went in.

The door to the sitting room had just shut in his face, but Isam did not move away from it. No. No, she could not simply leave him like that—and with tears in her eyes, too. It wasn’t possible; she must still be here with him, in his body, his blood, his arms. She was here—her tears wiped away by his kisses, her cheeks, her ﬁne, rosy mouth, slightly open like a budding ﬂower. Isam felt the blood hot in his veins, massing at the back of his head, as if Layla really was pressed to his chest and he was kissing her, his kisses dissolving the deprivation that had lasted four whole days, and assuaging the fever of those four days, too. Yes—he was kissing her, ecstasy, madness, without pause: the curve of that mouth, the curves on that chest, the curved surfaces of that body. Isam shook his head, emerging from his dreamlike state. His face glowed like a beet. He sat down in the front hall, his eyes ﬁxed on the door to the sitting room. He was ﬁlthy! How could he even dare to think about her in this way, as if she were . . . as if she were a cheap woman he might stare at in the streets? When she was the daughter of his aunt, the sister of Mahmud. And when her face was still that of a child, or a mother; the face of a sister, a face that would turn the very Devil away from evil. But he had not been able to stop thinking about her once during those four days, thinking about her in this dirty, shameful way.

That day, when his body had touched hers next to the window, he had felt a sudden pang, a sharp pain as if a knife had gone into his back suddenly, and then . . . then she had looked at him, and . . . and he’d turned back into a child, feeling once again those same pleasurable sensations, those peaceful feelings of contentment that he had not felt for many years—a sensation still familiar from childhood, from that time long ago when his mother’s kind face would appear over his bed every night, descending close to his, and his body would bask in a tranquillity that lulled him. It was a paciﬁc state the like of which he had not experienced since, and its sudden return gave him to understand, with an abrupt awareness, that his life was now bound irretrievably to that young woman, that pretty young woman who had stood facing him. Linked forever. Forever.

How had he left the room that day, he wondered later? He had no idea. How had he managed to listen to Mahmud’s chattering, and then how had he found his way back to his apartment? He couldn’t imagine. Had he walked or ﬂown?

Lying in bed, he felt Layla’s presence. In his heart, in his blood, in his body—she was everywhere. But he felt tormented, too, by sensations that somehow, in their unfathomable nature, interfered with his happiness as they thwarted his desire. Lying in bed, his thoughts turned back to Layla, or rather to Layla’s body. Here he was, thinking about her again in this ﬁlthy, disgraceful way, as if she were no more than . . . than a woman encountered in the street. As the agonizing sensations that ﬂooded his body ﬂoated slowly to the surface, their outlines became clearer. Isam understood that he was in a painful and consuming dilemma. He could marry Layla—but when? It would be years, long years—after graduation, and after a year’s internship, and perhaps not until long after that, once he could stand on his own feet ﬁnancially. And what about those many long years? His desire, indistinguishable from the yearning one might feel for a mere woman glimpsed on the street, would wrong Layla. His longings would be an outrage against Mahmud and his aunt, too, and against his own mother and sister. For years and years, he would be dishonoring all of the moral values and standards he knew.

For the principles he had been taught—and in which he believed—decreed that two types of women existed in the world. There was the sort in the street, the sort that sparked desire, and then there were mothers, sisters, wives. Any woman for whom he felt desire must be cheap, something to be had that lost its value as that desire vanished. Such a female was prey to be hunted, a thing that a man would pursue and triumph over, taking his booty as happened in any war and parading his pride before others. A man did not feel desire for his aunt’s daughter, not even for the sister of a friend, not if one was a proper, polite person. Desire was to do with the body, and bodies were soiled. Nothing, in fact, could be ﬁlthier or lower.

Isam’s sleep that night was troubled. He tossed as if his bed were an angry sea, waking repeatedly, always to one dream. It tormented and pained him, stupid dream though it was, meaningless yet frightening. As he ﬂed through dark lanes and alleys that appeared abandoned and ferocious, he knew some sort of danger threatened him. He did not understand its import but he was conscious that it was gaining on him steadily. He burst into a broad open space in which stood a group of women, and the sight told him that he was safe now. But he hurried on, cutting a path through the mass of women; once surrounded by them, he fell to the ground in exhaustion.

He was able to look around, and he found his clothing soaked in blood; he saw the eyes of a dead man chasing him, eyes slashing open his head and chest, ripping through his body as if they were sharp nails. The corpse turned, faced him, beckoned him over. It was Mahmud. The blood was his. Isam tried to back away, but the women held him so tightly he could not move. They were nodding at him, their faces suffused with anger, one just like the next, identical faces in fact, the face of . . . of . . . of his mother. With an effort he cleared a path through their midst and now he did back away. But they chased him, they matched his pace, step for step, faces crowding in, ﬁngers trained on his face and chest, poking his body, sharp nails everywhere. Isam wheeled round to ﬁnd himself on the edge of a deep precipice whose darkness yawned, as the women moved forward, closer and closer, step by step.

Isam shrieked, and bolted up from his uneasy sleep.

The next morning he had made a decision. He would avoid Layla completely. He would consign his feelings to the grave. It would be easier, he also decided, if he were to strengthen his relationship with Inayat, his classmate at the College of Medicine. At the moment that relationship went no further than ﬁnding a mutual pleasure in each other’s company, but he was quite sure that there were possibilities. He had often felt that her big, black eyes were sending him a message, promising certain things. She might go out with him if he were to ask. She might even allow him to kiss her. Inayat was pretty, he had to admit: her black hair that she let fall in locks across her forehead, her slim waist . . . in fact, she was undeniably one of the most gorgeous females in the College of Medicine. She had been pretty since high school days, prettiest among the Saniya School girls even then.

He was able to hold steadfastly to his decision for four entire days. But now here he was, sitting in the front hall, his eyes and ears—and all of him—spellbound by that door to the sitting room. He was supposed to have left the house by now; there was a tea reception at the college and he was to have met Inayat, as they had agreed. But he hadn’t gone. Although he had duly dressed for it, he found himself incapable of leaving. And here he was now, sitting in the same place, as if lashed to the sitting room door by magical ropes. He could not move; he had no desire to move. He waited in patience, as if created to do nothing but wait. Yes, he existed only to wait for her, until the moment when she would appear in the door, coming to him; the moment when she would look at him with her deep eyes, encase him in her gentle loveliness, and return to his heart and body that serenity he had never experienced until those bright eyes had looked at him in that particular way she had.

He heard her voice. “Just a minute. I’ll pop in to say hello to my aunt and then we can go.” She came out of the room, Gamila close behind, and walked right by without a glance.

“Hey, Isam, you mean you haven’t left yet?” asked his sister.

“I have a slight headache,” he said shortly, not wishing to encourage anyone to prolong the discussion.

“Well, come in here, then.” He followed Gamila into the corridor and toward his mother’s bedroom where, he saw, his mother was kissing Layla.

“May you have the same luck soon, honey,” she was saying. She caught sight of her son. “My dear, you didn’t go out? What happened?”

It was Gamila who answered, as she held out her hand, cupping the aspirin. “He has a bit of a headache. Here’s the aspirin, Isam. I’ll bring you some water.” She left the room.

Isam strode to his mother’s chair. Layla, perched on the bed, was facing him. She seemed determined to avoid his unwavering stare. Isam’s mother took up a half-ﬁnished piece of Aubusson-style needlework. “What do you think of the design, Layla? For Gamila’s parlor?”

Layla studied the colors. “It’s lovely, Aunt Samira, and the stitching is very ﬁne. You’re amazing.” She got up to hand the piece back to her aunt, who grabbed her playfully, pulling her close for an affectionate kiss. When Layla raised her eyes they met Isam’s, but she quickly turned her head completely away.

“Do you know, Isam,” said his mother, “do you know who Layla reminds me of? She makes me think of myself when I was her age, she looks exactly like I did.”

Isam smiled. His eyes ﬂickered shut but he returned to gazing steadily at Layla, who was looking at her aunt. Her eyes roved to study the elegantly furnished room.

“That’s absurd, Aunt—how could I be as pretty as you? I’m not chic at all or clever either!”

“Now, Layla! You resemble me more than Gamila does. You should have been my daughter, not my sister Saniya’s girl.” Gamila heard half of this conversation as she entered carrying a glass of water, which she handed to Isam as she broke in.

“What are you talking about? I suppose you’re sitting around praising each other to the skies, hmmm?”

Raising aspirin and glass to his mouth, Isam stopped in midair as Layla gave him a sad, questioning look—a reproof, he knew. He gulped the water down and turned to put the glass on a nearby table, deliberately keeping his back to them until he could get hold of himself.

“Excuse me please, Aunt,” said Layla.

“Why are you in such a hurry, my dear?”

“I’m leaving with Sanaa and Adila.”

Isam turned, a smile on his face. “So, Sanaa and Adila have an errand, but what about you? What do you have to do?”

“You tell her, Isam!” said Gamila. Layla did not look at Isam; her eyes stopped on his necktie.

“Never mind, Gamila. Another time.”

When the elevator paused opposite Layla’s door, she tried to persuade Adila and Sanaa to come in, but Adila protested that it was late. Layla would not be deterred. “Just ten minutes, Adila, come on, please! I want to get your opinion about something.”

“Then, go ahead and ask me right now.”

“No-o-o—inside.”

So the three friends sat down in a corner of the gilt-furnished sitting room. Layla made sure the door was closed and only then spoke. “Did Gamila tell you this morning about this engagement business?”

“Is that your question? You really are a goose! Of course she told us. Otherwise why would we have come to see her? Didn’t we come to congratulate her?”

“I mean, I want to know, why was it hidden from me? Why me, in particular?”

Adila jutted her long neck forward and gave the armrest a series of quick taps. Her wide, jet-black eyes studied Layla knowingly. “That’s your question? Okay, ya sitti, I’ll explain it all to you. Gamila knew that if she said something to you directly, you’d have sat there philosophizing, going on and on as you always do. The proverb, you know, says, ‘Close the door from whence the wind comes and rest.’”

Layla laughed with a shrug. “What do I have to do with it? Why would I go on about it? As long as he pleases her, ﬁne, congratulations to her!”

“What don’t you like about him, Layla? Now tell me, what is it?” asked Sanaa.

Layla was silent. Adila stood up, clamped her hands on her hips, and bent forward toward Layla as if to interrogate her. “Is his pocket empty?”

Layla smiled. “It’s very full!”

“Does he have a car?”

“Ford.”

“And the villa?”

“The Pyramids Road.”

Adila ﬂicked her hand toward the ceiling in offhand despair. “Oh please, Layla! All of that and you still don’t want her to take him? You’ve always let the best things pass you by.”

Layla smiled. “Sanaa,” she asked, “why are you so quiet? Help me out, why don’t you!”

Sanaa’s delicate lips were turned down in a pout, and she poked her small nose into the air as she queried Adila. “Does she love him?”

Adila put her hand to her head in a theatrical movement that said the question was making her dizzy. “Stop it!” She glared at Sanaa. “This is a marriage, stupid, not a novel.”

Layla laughed so hard that tears glinted in her eyes. Sanaa pressed her lips together, trying to conceal her smile, and widened her eyes in feigned astonishment. “So how can she marry him, then?”

Adila knew her friends well. “Get up, you pitiful creature! Come on, let’s go.”

Sanaa didn’t move. “On the Prophet’s honor, Adila, how will she go through with this?”

Adila ﬂipped her palm up in a gesture of futility. “You really want to make me say something impudent, don’t you? How will she go through with it? Like people do—like your mother when she married your dad.”

Sanaa’s hand copied Adila’s as she shrugged. “Without any love, with no feelings, no desire, no—”

Adila sat down again as she interrupted Sanaa. “Okay, okay, that’s enough, you don’t have to go through the whole litany—don’t we know them all off by heart?”

“It’s no joke, Adila,” said Layla. “Are you just like your mother? Do you think exactly the way she does? Your mother married without love because she could not do anything else. She wasn’t in a position to choose. And anyway, if she had chosen, she wouldn’t have been able to marry the man she chose. Our mothers were the harem—things possessed by their fathers, who passed them on to husbands. But us?—we don’t have any excuses. Education—we’ve gotten that, and we understand everything, and we are the ones who have to decide our own futures. Even animals choose their mates!”

Sanaa gave Layla a loud, enthusiastic slap on the back. “Ya bitt ya gamda! What a girl! That’s what I like to hear!”

“So who said Gamila didn’t choose?” asked Adila coldly.

They could not miss the distress in Layla’s expressive eyes. “No, Adila, no. Gamila didn’t choose. It was Gamila’s mother who decided, and the folks around her, and all their tired old ideas. And—”

Sanaa chimed in. “—And the goods on the lovely man. Son of a good family, a real plum, seemly and solid and reeking with money, no relatives alive to come snifﬁng around, doesn’t get potted, doesn’t smoke.”

“Don’t be so stupid!” said Adila. “You’ve got to realize that people aren’t all alike. Gamila has an idea about what marriage is and she’s trying to make it come true. Gamila wants the car, she wants that Frigidaire, and the solitaire, and—”

Now Sanaa ﬁnished for her. “And the customer who pays the most, right?”

“Gamila wants all these things, yes,” interjected Layla. “Because people have told her they’re important, they’ve taught her that a person’s value is in the things he owns, that you’re not respectable unless you’re rich.”

“That’s not all, though,” protested Sanaa. “There’s more to it, you know. Didn’t Gamila want to marry someone else?”

“Someone else who?” asked Adila.

Adila didn’t know anything about Gamila and Mamduh, Layla realized, and it was not a subject that she wanted to broach. “That was just a bunch of talk.”

Silence held them for a while. It was Layla who spoke up, ﬁrst, her voice gloomy. “You know the story of Safaa? I can’t get it out of my head. It just convinces me all the more that no girl these days can possibly live the way her mother did.”

“The whole mentality has changed,” said Sanaa. “There’s no doubt about that. For our mothers, marriage was a fate written on their foreheads from the day they were born. No one could change it in the slightest or escape it. You had to accept it as it was. For us the situation is so different, because the harem mentality has changed. Today’s girl doesn’t accept what her mother took as a given.”

“Okay, Your Excellency the Grand Mufti of Islam, now get up and let’s go,” said Adila. “Come on, because its nearly eight o’clock, and your mother will be waiting for you with a cane in her hand.”

Laughing, Sanaa got to her feet. Adila stood in the middle of the room and declaimed in a tone of heavy sarcasm, “Wallahi, we’re the ones in a real bind! At the very least our mothers knew exactly what their circumstances were. But we’re lost. We don’t understand—are we the harem or not? We don’t know whether love is haram, prohibited by our religion, or permitted, halal. Our families say it’s haram while the state radio day and night sings love love love, and books tell a girl, ‘Go on, you’re free and independent,’ and if a girl believes that she’s got a disaster on her hands and her reputation will go to hell—now honestly, is that any kind of situation to be in? Really and truly, now, aren’t we pathetic souls?”

Layla closed her eyes. Her lower lip trembled, and on the edge of the chair her ﬁnger sketched hard lines that intersected and clashed.

“Hurry up, let’s get going,” said Adila. “I think you’ve both philosophized enough for today.”

Sanaa laughed again. “And you just sat quietly the whole time and didn’t do any grand debating?”

Adila shrugged, smiling. “I mean to say, I don’t have the stomach for it. You’ve been back-and-forthing about things that are already decided for us anyway.”

Layla stood up to wish them goodbye. She stayed on her feet until they disappeared from view down the stairs. She closed the front door slowly and headed for her room, but paused in front of her door. No. No . . . she really didn’t want to shut herself in alone. So she turned back and went into the sitting room where her mother, hunched over the sewing machine, worked on a nightgown for her daughter.

Her mother lifted her eyes from the cloth. “They’ve left?”

“Yes, they’re gone.”

She noticed the lines on her mother’s face soften immediately, and smiled inwardly. Her mother was never at ease until all of the guests were gone, no matter whom they were. Layla sat down beside her and reached for a book on the nearby end table. She rifﬂed through it until she found the page where she had stopped earlier in the day. As she read, the sewing machine caught her ears, the steady drone punctuated by an intermittent staccato.