I don’t remember how old I was when I asked my father about this person who gave his name to our street. Though it wasn’t actually our street’s name since we lived in a small, dead-end side street leading off Abdel Wahab El Inglizi. My father told me that Abdel Wahab had been a Syrian nationalist, executed along with some other people by Jamal Pasha, aka “The Bloodthirsty,” on May 6, 1916. “He wasn’t English, then?” I asked indignantly. “No,” my father said. “That was just a family nickname going back to his great-great-grandfather, who was said to be irritable and would blow up quickly, just like English gunpowder.” I won’t hide the disappointment I felt at the time about this Abdel Wahab, how he wasn’t English after all, wasn’t even Lebanese, and on top of all that, had been executed! In those days, I was inclined toward strong heroes. I hated losers and weak people, just like Thurayya did. Deep down, I was convinced that was the reason she hated my father, and I believed that if he were strong and firm, and if he treated only Thurayya, she would have loved him. Then she also would have loved me, his progeny, just as she loved Sa’id, her tough and brilliant progeny.

We arrived, and I gratefully gave the driver all the cash I had left in my pocket to cover the fare. I felt a deep sense of relief at the thought of being in my apartment very soon, close to my woman, possessing the freedom to remain right there or to leave for anywhere I wanted to go. I went up the stairs, in a hurry to reach my apartment on the fifth floor, and knocked on the old wooden door with two panes of glass set behind iron tracery. It was polite to knock, in order to let Shaygha know I was back. I was also feeling lazy and didn’t want to dig the key out of my pocket.

Shaygha did not come to open the door for me, even though I knocked and waited three times. I felt slightly concerned, afraid she might have left. My fear abated when it occurred to me that perhaps she was taking a shower, and I quickly searched my pockets for the key. That’s when I realized that my small leather wallet was not in its usual place in my back pocket. “I’ll have to look for it later,” I thought as I pulled out my key and put it in the lock. But then an image of the wallet popped into my mind, from the time I was paying for things at the store. It was followed by another image of my taking out twenty dollars to pay the Ethiopian woman at the bar. God! I had accidentally left it behind when I rushed out!