In the evening, he started walking along the Corniche till he reached Camp Cesare.6 There was a row of cafés and shops which were bunched together on the pavement in a riot of lights, and it was there that his eyes fell on Riri! He stopped dead in his tracks on the Corniche. Fear gripped him as he looked again more carefully. Yes, it was definitely Riri, no one else. She was in a small place which sold ice cream and ful15 and taamiyya40 sandwiches, and was sitting behind the till on the chair belonging to either the manager or the owner. He rested his back on the seawall at a spot out of the light and scrutinized her face in amazement. When he recalled the way he had behaved, he felt very uncomfortable—he was shocked by how cruel and unpleasant he had been to her. Riri! It was Riri, no one else; but she was no longer a girl. Certainly not! She was a woman now in every sense of the word, and had a personality of her own—which the waiter who kept moving to and fro with orders between her and the customers obeyed to the full. A serious woman and a real manager. The incredible thing was that he had walked this way for twenty days in succession without looking at this small place. Now he read the name clearly: Take It and Thanks. On the few occasions when he had spent the summer in Alexandria, he had thought of her and been worried about the idea of meeting her either by himself or with his wife and friends. But he had found no sign of her. Eventually he had come to the conclusion that she had left town or maybe the world altogether. How had it come about that she was sitting in that seat? Were five years enough—without a world war—for her to reach this level? Her teacher in Al-Ibrahimiyya would undoubtedly be jealous of the rapid way she had advanced. Her colleagues would never have dreamed of it!

He stood there in the semi-darkness, not taking his eyes off her, and recalled their old relationship which was now forever lost in the recesses of oblivion. The superficiality of human relationships amazed him. Without realizing it, he thought, we’re trying out death; we experiment with it time after time during our lives before death finally catches up with us. The whole scene with Riri sitting there in her place looked just like the Saadi Club when he used to walk in front of it, or like the House of Parliament. They were all lives destined to an early death, and the only things to benefit from them would be insects.