One glance exchanged between you and Margaret would be a giveaway. So they left at his suggestion, and drove aimlessly in the cold night through the empty roads. There’s no need to be agitated, no reason to be. But her sudden return gave impetus to his vexation. You’ll stand at the edge of the abyss again, prey to the forces of destruction summoned forth by despair.

He called Warda from the office to tell her he’d been invited to a party in honor of a colleague recently appointed justice. He went to the New Paris and listened to Margaret sing while he waited. What brought me here, and why so quickly? What am I looking for? Is it all over with Warda?

Margaret came to the table, along with the champagne. Her face glowing, she said, “I’m sorry I had to leave so unexpectedly.”

“Unexpectedly?”

“I received a cable from abroad.”

He studied her, marveling at the force of her attraction. He asked her to leave with him, but she answered, “Not tonight.”

He tried to control his impatience. “When?”

“Perhaps tomorrow.”

When he returned to the nest, around one o’clock that night, Warda was sitting in the Oriental room. He kissed her and asked, as he’d once asked Zeinab, “You’re still awake?”

She said reprovingly, “Of course!”

She looked at him for a while, then remarked, “I hope you haven’t overeaten or drunk too much.”

Later as he was lying in his pajamas on the couch, she crept over to him and pressed her lips to his, but he felt no stirrings of desire. “Let it be an innocent night,” he said to himself.

She called him at work the next day, but unable to think of any excuse, he made no mention of his plans to be absent. He went off to the New Paris congratulating himself on his indifference. The red lights transformed Margaret into a bewitching she-devil, and her slender neck and rich voice thrilled him.

Spanish lamps hung from a ceiling covered with paintings of nude women. How can ecstasy filter into such a place, filled with cigarette smoke and the odor of wine? Peering behind a huge pillar, he saw a couple embracing as if in the throes of death.

Could Warda be uprooted so easily from his soul, as if only an artificial flower? Why are we reminded of death so insistently, whatever we do? Who can affirm that these drunken souls really exist?

They raced out to the pyramids in his car. “The night’s cold,” she objected. He turned on the heater, but she kept on. “Why don’t we go to your home?”

“I have no home.”

He stopped the car in the darkness. A heavy bank of clouds covered the sky. “Not a star in sight,” he said happily.

He pressed her to his chest with desperate force. She whispered breathlessly, “The darkness is frightening.”