On the days when they had once had their assignations he would go and sit on the steps of the ancient drinking fountain and suffer the pangs of memory. He would indulge in them until they took form and substance in his mind. In moments of extreme passion he expected to hear her light footsteps and see her approaching, her face aglow with longing and timidity. He yearned for their long talks, their passionate embraces, and each precious spot he had washed with his kisses. But she did not come, nor would she. She had cut him off. Perhaps she had forgotten him, and if his image crossed her mind, would curse him as he well deserved. One afternoon as he was passing under her window, he thought for a moment that he glimpsed her head behind a pitcher placed on the sill to be cooled by the air. But she was not there. Or perhaps she had hurriedly drawn back in disgust. Man was sanctified by suffering, he told himself. Work and worship were inseparable, he told himself again.

One Friday morning he bumped into her in al-Khiyamiyya, in her mother’s company. Their eyes met for an instant before she turned them away indifferently. She did not look behind her. He had a revelation of one meaning of death. Like the voluntary exodus of his ancestor from Eden. Like his own lofty struggle with agony.

In his emotional wretchedness he continued to pay cautious visits to the prostitutes’ quarter. Time strengthened his relationship with a girl of the same age as he who called herself Qadriyya. Her dark brown complexion, like Sayyida’s though darker, attracted him. She was plump but not excessively so. Once their paths had met, quite a long time since, he had never looked elsewhere. Her room reminded him of his. Nevertheless, it was more primitive with its bare floor, its raised bed, its mirror, its solitary chair used both for sitting and for hanging clothes, its washbowl and jug. Because of this he was not able to take off his suit on wintry nights. Years had passed without a word exchanged between them except for greetings on arrival and departure. Deeply devout though he was, she taught him to drink the necessary little amount. A glass of the hellish Salsala wine at half a piastre was sufficient to blot out his mind and infuse madness into his blood. So much so that one time he said to her in a moment of ridiculous ecstasy, “You are the mistress of the universe.”