Fortunately she did not know anything. Walking slowly around the house, he thought about how expensive it was. He couldn’t possibly keep it now. Two years’ salary, even added to what was left in the bank of the umdas’ gifts, wouldn’t last longer than two years. All those objects decorating the entrance, the reception room, and the library were “gifts” too. Certainly the crooks outnumbered the people who had been dismissed for crookedness. He was guilty, though, and so were his friends: what had happened to the good old days? Gifts were forbidden, after all, a mark of corruption. But this sudden loss of everything, just when he was on the very threshold of a senior position, which would have led to the minister’s chair! How could you live in a world where people forgot or pretended to forget, where there were so many others who gloated over the whole thing with unfeeling malice, where hard-won honors were being stripped away and vices trundled out and exposed, unfurled like so many flags?

In the afternoon, he went to Ali Bey Sulaiman’s villa. The sky was lined with clouds and a chill breeze stirred up the dust blowing like the khamsin23 winds. As he climbed the broad marble steps, he thought to himself that if it were not for judicial immunity, Ali Bey Sulaiman would have been thrown into the street along with him. The Bey was outside, but Susan Hanem was in bed with a chill. Salwa appeared in a blue velvet dress. Her face gleamed out from the top of the dress like a beam of light—beautiful, but so expressionless that he could detect no reaction to recent events. His worried heart fluttered when he saw her and a spasm of love throbbed inside him like an escaped melody. He told himself she was the only thing of value he had left, and in the very next moment asked himself if she really belonged to him! “Salwa,” he blurted out abruptly, anxious to put an end to any doubts, “they pensioned me off today.”

Her beautiful, languid eyes blinked. “You?” she whispered in astonishment.

“Yes, me. The same thing is happening to many people these days,” he said, entrusting things to fate.

“But you’re not like the others!” she replied, staring at him.

Her words stabbed like a spear through the eye, and his mind reeled, his thoughts hanging suspended only by the gifts and the bank balance. “They’re taking advantage of us in the name of the purge,” he said.

Salwa glanced casually up at the bronze statue of a Maghrebi25 horseman mounting his steed, as if asking it for an opinion. “What an insolent thing to do,” she murmured.

“I’ll find a better job than the one I’ve got at the moment,” he went on, feeling encouraged.

She smiled at him as if to apologize for always seeming so listless. “Where?” she asked.