But she wanted to talk about her past. “My father was an English teacher, a wonderful teacher, the sort that students never forget. If he’d been alive when I decided to enter the Drama Institute, he would have given me his blessings and encouragement. But my mother’s a very pious, narrow-minded woman. I entered the Institute against her wishes, and when I decided to take up dancing, she was furious. So were my uncles, on both sides. It ended in our cutting off relations. I deserted my family.”

“And how did you manage on your own?”

“I lived in the house of one of my actress friends.”

He fondled her soft hand and asked, “Have you always loved dancing?”

“Yes, I loved to dance, but I had aspirations of being an actress. I tried, and failed, and so ended up as I started, as a dancer.”

He asked, disturbed, “Did Yazbeck bully you?”

“Actually, he’s kinder than the others, and I knew what working in a nightclub entailed.”

“You’re my first and last love,” he said fervently, pressing her to him in gratitude. Then he asked, “Why didn’t you return to your mother after you’d failed in acting?”

“It was too late. I have my pride, and failure only intensified it.”

Failure! The curse that never ends. It’s awful that no one listens to your songs, that your love for the secret of existence dies, so that existence itself loses all mystery. Sighs of lament will one day destroy everything.

The office witnessed sober visits from his uncle, a justice, and from his only sister. They besought him not to marry “the dancer” and his uncle observed, “If this relationship continues, you won’t be considered for the justiceship.”

He said rather abruptly, “I haven’t striven for it or wanted it.”

He defended his happiness fiercely, with all the force of despair which had seized him. He seemed so childishly gay and innocent that Mustapha remarked, laughing, “Now tell us about the meaning of life.”

Omar laughed loudly. “That question nags at us only when our hearts are empty….A full vessel doesn’t produce hollow sounds. Ecstasy is fulfillment, so I can only hope that love will bring everlasting ecstasy.”

“Sometimes I pity you, other times I envy you.” Omar’s eyes shone triumphantly as Mustapha continued. “As fast as I speed through life, now and then the old sense of failure, buried deep in my heart, returns—perhaps on one of the dusty days of the sandstorm season, and I’m bedeviled by questions about life’s meaning, but I soon repress them, like shameful memories.”