“Weren’t you in love with me?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“But no longer?”

“I love you, but the illness is starting again.”

She said impatiently, “I’ve been noticing a change in you for the last few days.”

“Since the illness set in.”

“The illness…the illness!” she shouted with exasperation, then asked, her expression distorted, “Are you going to meet her again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you enjoy torturing me?”

He blew out a breath. “A rest break, please.”

He took Margaret one cold, starry night to the rest house on the Desert Road, and on the way back she said tenderly, “Wouldn’t it be better to have a place of our own?”

“No…” he said vaguely, having decided there was no point in continuing with her.

Displeased with his answer, she said coldly, “I really don’t enjoy affairs in parked cars.”

He drove her back to the hotel without saying another word.

THIRTEEN

The ecstasy of love fades and the frenzy of sex is too ephemeral to have any effect. What can we do when we find no food to satisfy our hunger? You’ll be swept into the tornado and annihilated. There is no way to bring back stability after it has died.

A brunette dancer at the New Paris attracted him with her gaiety and lithe body, so he went after her. He saw Margaret on the stage, returned her smile, then invited the brunette to his table. To Margaret it must have seemed a clumsy ploy in the game of love, but in the storm he’d lost all sense of humor. The brunette left with him, enticed by money. It didn’t really make things better, but he thought his heart stirred slightly as she laughed. If his heart didn’t stir, it would die. Poetry, wine, love—none of them could call forth the elusive ecstasy.

Every night he picked up a woman, from one club or another, sometimes from the streets. At the Capri he sat with a dancer called Muna. Yazbeck rushed over to greet him, exhibiting obvious pleasure. It angered Omar, for he saw it as a kind of death notice of his frustrated hopes.

“My good man. Did…?”

Omar looked at him sternly and left with Muna. As he pressed her to him, he trembled with an unaccountable urge to kill her. He imagined himself ripping open her chest with a knife, and suddenly finding what he’d been looking for all along. Killing is the complement of creation, the completion of the silent, mysterious cycle.

“What’s wrong?” Muna whispered.

He awoke, startled. “Nothing, just the dark.”

“But there’s no one around.”

He raced the car at such a speed that she grasped his arm and threatened to scream. Later, as he was undressing, he felt that the end was coming—the answer to his search—insanity or death. Warda sat on the bed. “I’m going away,” she said.