He said, rather vexed, “So you think it’s a symptom of middle age. However, this is easily cured when the respectable husband rushes off to the nightclub or marries a new wife. And maybe I, too, will run after a different woman. But what aggravates me is more serious than that.”

Mustapha couldn’t refrain from laughing. “Is it really a strange intoxication or simply a philosophical justification for adultery?” he asked.

“Don’t laugh at me. You were once in a pretty bad way yourself.”

A smile spread on his face as he looked into his memories. “Yes,” he said, “I was starting to write a new play when suddenly I lost my grip. Art shattered in fragments, disintegrated into dust in my hands. So I exchanged it for another type of art, one which has given happiness to millions of our citizens.”

“Well, I’ve missed the way. I turned from art to a profession which is also dying. Law and art both belong to the past. I can’t master the new art, as you have done, and like you, I failed to study science. How can I find the lost ecstasy of creation? Life is short and I can’t forget the vertigo caused by the fellow’s words: ‘Don’t we live our lives knowing that our fate rests with God?’ ”

“Does the idea of death disturb you?”

“No, but it urges me to taste the secret of life.”

“As you found it in the movie theater?”

He doesn’t know of your walks through the streets and squares of Alexandria, yearning for a face which promised the long-sought ecstasy, of your lingering under the trees by the stream which swayed with the cries of your burning emotions. The mad giant searching for his lost mind beneath the damp grass.

He referred to these times at some length, speaking with a solemnity befitting the mysterious and strange. “Those nights I was not an animal moved by lust, but I was suffering and in despair.”

SEVEN

“I can’t help wanting you more every time we meet.

The flame leaps higher with each heartbeat.”

“A passionate song. Who’s the singer?”

“Margaret. The star of the New Paris.”

The crescent-shaped garden which bordered the dance floor was cooled by the autumn breeze. The music came from a stage set inside red walls and lit from within.

“She looks English.”

“That’s what the owner of the nightclub claims, but what passes for English in the nightclubs could easily be something else.”

The fine lines of her face, a certain look in her eyes, the lightness of her movement—perhaps it was the harmony of all these which evoked something of the long-sought ecstasy.

“I envy your expertise in these forbidden pleasures.”

“Just part of my job as editor of the magazine’s art section!”

“Bravo…You said her name is Margaret.”

He answered laughing, “Or twenty pounds a night, not counting the liquor.”