Othman waited until the servant had brought in a Coca-Cola and a coffee, then said, “Years and years have passed. The day is as detestable as the year; the year as trivial as the day. But I’m not going to reminisce about prison life.”

“I understand, I’m sorry…but when did you get out?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Why haven’t you come before now?”

“I went straight to the village, where I came down with influenza. When I recovered, I returned to Cairo.”

There’s no use in trying to escape. Your sense of guilt increases by the moment. “It tortured us that we couldn’t visit you.”

Othman said with an expressionless face, “Any visitors other than family members would have been arrested.”

“We longed for reassurance about you.”

“We were badly treated in the beginning, but after the Revolution, of course, things changed.”

Omar winced.

“If we were thrown into hell, I believe we’d get used to it eventually and to its fiery minions.”

He yielded to his sense of guilt. “It would have been more just if we’d gone with you to jail.”

Othman said sarcastically, “It was the law, not justice, which threw me in jail.”

He murmured submissively, “In any case, we owe you our freedom, perhaps even our lives.”

“Wouldn’t you have done the same thing if you’d been arrested and I’d gotten away?”

Embarrassed and ashamed, Omar remained silent.

Othman continued bitterly. “Here I am, back in the world again in my mid-fifties.”

Omar tried to console him. “You’re still young and have a long life ahead of you.”

“And behind me an experience more bitter than despair.”

He said sadly, “We lived outside the bars without, I’m afraid, accomplishing anything important.”

Othman protested, “Don’t say that. Don’t rob me of my only consolation.”

The sense of dread returned, and a feeling that he was a corpse, lying forgotten on the earth’s surface.

“We practiced our professions, married, had children, but I feel I have nothing to reap but dust. You must excuse me, I have no right to talk about myself.”

“But we are two integral halves.”

The past is over, and the reckoning is hard. Othman had boasted in the basement of Mustapha al-Minyawi’s house, “Our cell is an unbreakable fist of iron. We work for humanity as a whole, not for one country alone. We propose a human nation, a world of tomorrow founded on revolution and science.”

After he’d been chosen by lot, he’d said, “I’m glad. Mustapha’s nervous and you’re a newlywed. Tomorrow a bomb will be thrown on those pigs. They’ve sucked our blood long enough.”

“The planning was perfect. If a stray bullet hadn’t hit your leg, they’d never have caught you.”

“True. What did you do, you and Mustapha?”

“We stayed up till morning, feeling miserable.”