“Let’s go to the Registrar’s Office at once!” he said with a sense of urgency.

“Sober up first and wait till morning,” she said, laughing happily.

He spent the night in her little flat in al-Shamashirji Close and in the morning he said to her, “Let’s furnish a new flat and then get married.”

“No, we get married first and then furnish a flat,” she retorted in tones of determination and finality.

The Marriage Registrar was called to the house. The contract required two witnesses and she could only find two pimps who used to procure men for her. He watched in a stupor during the simple ceremony. What was happening? A feeling of anxiety, almost of terror, took hold of him and tore him apart and he prayed that the unknown might intervene to rescue him from this nightmare. This feeling then gave way to one of resignation, almost of recklessness.

When he stated his name and occupation to the Registrar, both the woman and the pimps were amazed. He told himself they would declare him crazy, as others had done. Certainly he himself might as well admit, from now on, that he was out of his mind. A woman who was half Negress, gross as a fat cow, and laden with half a century of lechery and dissolute living. So the crazy longing he had sought to satisfy had come true: he had become a husband and Qadriyya, the companion of his youth, had become his wife. What had he done to himself?

“I must begin a new life…” he said.

Because he had come to like the Rawd al-Faraj quarter since he used to visit Hamza al-Suwayfi, he rented a flat there consisting of three rooms and a lounge and they set about furnishing it together. He forced her to wear the veil, ostensibly in the name of modesty, but his real motive was to guard against her being recognized by one of her old customers. They bought furniture for a bedroom, a dining room, a living room, and a study. They also bought new clothes for both of them, a radio, and a few other things. They contributed a hundred pounds each toward the cost, for with the same spirit of recklessness he had changed his policy and spent money freely wherever the need arose with a sense of desperate resignation which blacked out the pain he usually felt in such circumstances. A strong desire possessed him to enjoy the pleasures of life of which he had always deprived himself.

He said goodbye to Omm Husni in a touching scene. The old woman was taken aback at his decision to move. She wept and said to him, “Don’t run away from the place you were born! It’s not good.”