To marry him off to Nada! Who told him that he wanted to marry Nada? Just because his father had recited the Fatiha* with his uncle when he and Nada were born on the same day? His uncle considered that was fate. Indeed he had refused a hundred suitors who had asked for his daughter’s hand and told them she was engaged. O God of devils! Who told him that he, Assad, wanted to marry her? Who told him that he ever wanted to get married? Here he was now reminding him again. He wanted to buy him for his daughter as you buy a sack of manure for a field. He tightened his grasp on the money in his pocket and got ready to get up. But when he touched it there in his pocket, soft and warm, he felt he was holding the keys of his whole future. If he allowed his rage to get the better of him now and gave the money back to his uncle, he would never be offered the opportunity to obtain fifty dinars by any means. He calmed himself, firmly shutting his mouth and tightening his grasp on the bundle of money in his trouser pocket. Then he remarked:
“No. No. I will give you the money when all the preparations for the journey are made. I will see you once a day. I am staying in a nearby hotel.”
The fat man smiled. He went on smiling, and then burst out, laughing loudly:
“It’s better for you not to waste your time, my boy. All the smugglers ask the same price. We have come to an agreement among ourselves. Don’t wear yourself out. All the same, keep your money till the preparations are made. It’s up to you. What’s the name of the hotel where you are staying?”
“The Shatt Hotel.”
“Ah, the rats’ hotel.”
The wild rat ran across the road, its little eyes shining in the car’s headlamps. The blonde woman said to her husband, who was concentrating on driving:
“It’s a fox. Did you see it?”
The husband, a foreigner, laughed. “You women! You make a rat into a fox.”
They had picked him up a little after sunset, after he had waved to them in their small car. When the husband stopped the car, he looked through the window. He was trembling from the extreme cold. The wife was frightened of him, but he gathered together in his mind all the English he had learned, and said:
“My friend had to go back to H4 with the car, and he left me —”
The man interrupted him:
“Don’t lie. You’re escaping from there. All right. Get in. I’ll take you to Baaquba.”
The back seat was comfortable, and the girl handed him a blanket, which he wrapped himself in; he could not tell exactly whether he was trembling because of the desert cold, or from fear, or exhaustion. The man asked:
“Have you walked a lot?”
“I don’t know.