Fire, destruction, and smoke, the awful hallmarks of the day, made even worse by the air of conspiracy that lurked on street corners. Waves of berserk demonstrators kept crashing into him as if they didn’t see him in his long gray coat. Swallowing hard, he said nothing, though he lost his balance, and the briefcase he was clutching knocked against his leg. All the details of the report he had to submit to the minister, describing the way the battle had gone and the commandos’ requests, had gone right out of his mind and he thought only about the future, which seemed to loom before his eyes like the smoke of the city burning. Heading toward a street where things seemed calmer and more quiet, he recalled the comment of a shaikh who was a member of Parliament on the subject of the annulment of the treaty, “It’s the end for us,” he’d said. “Now things are in God’s hands.”

He’d been sitting next to the shaikh at the club and had lost his temper at the time. “That’s how you people in Parliament are,” he had yelled. “You only care about your own interests!”

“This is the end,” the shaikh had repeated with great emphasis, in a tone of voice not entirely devoid of irony. “Now it is in God’s hands.”

“In our entire glorious past,” he had said enthusiastically, “there’s never been a situation like this one!”

The shaikh had toyed with his mustache. “Oh yes there was,” he had replied sadly. “Saad’s*, 32 time, for example. But it’s the end now!”

A seasoned old man might be justified in having put the age of enthusiasm behind him. But here was Cairo burning. And these traitors standing on the street corners—there were so many of them! Everything was quite obvious, but there was so little that could be done about it that the best plan seemed to be to get drunk on a cocktail of woes, to wallow in it until you drowned. The sky itself was strewn with blackened splinters from all the destruction, and a sense of grief seemed to materialize out of it as palpably as from an animal’s dead carcass.

He felt tired and decided to head for home, imagining that, tortoiselike, he would have to spend a long time on the road before glimpsing the high parts of Dokki.

* A linked number indicates that the name or term so denoted is explained in the Notes section at the end of the book.

TWO