He had guarded it from his mother and father for months and months, and here it was now, seeming on the tongue of Abul Khaizuran like a well-known, self-evident principle. “But … why do they do that? Why do they deny … ?”
He suddenly fell silent. Abul Khaizuran had begun to laugh.
“I’m glad you are going to Kuwait, because you will learn many things there. The first thing you will learn is: money comes first, and then morals.”
When Abul Khaizuran left him, having arranged to meet him again in the afternoon, he had lost, yet again, those wonderful sensations which had purified him inside throughout the morning. In fact it surprised him that the letter he had written to his mother could give him that marvellous feeling which made his disappointment appear less important than it really was. A silly letter, which he had written under the influence of a feeling of loneliness and hope on the roof of a miserable hotel at the end of the world. What was so extraordinary about it? Did he think his mother didn’t know the whole story? What did he want to say? Did he want to convince her that her husband’s desertion of her and her children was a fine and natural thing? Then why all that talk? He loved his father with a great and unshakeable love. But that changed nothing of the terrible truth, the truth that proclaimed that his father had fled … fled … fled. Just as Zakaria had done, when he got married and sent him a short letter, telling him that his turn had come and he must leave that stupid school, which taught nothing, and plunge into the frying pan with everyone else.
All his life Marwan had found himself at odds with Zakaria. In fact, they hated each other. Zakaria had been quite unable to understand why he had to spend ten years providing for the family while Marwan went off to school every day like a baby. He, Marwan, wanted to become a doctor. He used to tell his mother that Zakaria would never understand what it meant for someone to get an education, because he had left school when he left Palestine, and since then he had plunged into the frying pan, as he liked to say.
And here he was now, having married without telling anyone except Marwan, as though he wanted to confront him with his conscience. But what choice had he left him? Nothing except to leave the school, to plunge into the frying pan and stay there from now until eternity.
All right! All right! In a few days he would reach Kuwait. It would be better if Zakaria helped him, but if he pretended not to know him, he would find out how to start off, as many others had done. He would send every penny he earned to his mother, and overwhelm her and his brothers and sisters with gifts till he made the mud hut into a paradise on earth and his father bit his nails with regret.
Yet he couldn’t hate his father so much, for the simple reason that his father still loved them all.