“Well, if ruin is unavoidable, isn’t it better to go down together?”

He brushed the remark aside. “I won’t look back.”

“In fact, you’re running after nothing.”

Is the ecstasy of the dawn nothing? Does truth then lie in nothingness? When will the torture end?

“Imagine if all the intelligent men in this world followed your example,” Othman said.

“Let the intelligent men concern themselves with the world.”

“But you’re one of them.”

He wiped his forehead, then thrust his fist toward the ground. “Trample my mind under your feet,” he said disdainfully.

Othman asked sadly, “What’s the use in arguing?”

“It’s futile, for tomorrow you won’t see me.”

Mustapha sighed. “I don’t believe a word of what’s been said.”

He answered, his eyes on the ground, “It’s best for you to forget that I ever existed.”

“It’s too hard to bear,” Mustapha said.

Othman’s face hardened with suppressed grief, while Omar assumed a mask of indifference. As he gazed at them, their figures disintegrated into two groups of atoms, effacing their individuality, but the conflict he felt showed that his love for them, as for his family, was still rooted in his heart, causing him more anguish than he could bear. How his soul longed for the moment of victory, the moment of complete liberation!

EIGHTEEN

When your heart achieves its desire, you will have transcended the confines of time and space. But you still feel oppressed in this cottage, in the midst of a grassy lawn surrounded by a fence lined with cypress trees. And you await the day when the cypresses and all they enclose will disappear, the day when the plants will no longer whisper of the night’s sorrows, the day when the scuttling of the cockroaches and the croaking of the frogs will fall silent, the day when memory will lose its tyranny and you’ll merge into nothingness. Then the chants of India and Persia will no longer echo and the rosy beams of ecstasy will fall directly upon you. That precious, hard-won ecstasy of dawn will draw you with all the force of the unknown into heaven’s dome, where your heart will awake while the bodily senses sleep.

Buthayna stood in front of him, like a graceful cypress, and turned her green eyes to the garden, to the canal running between the acacia trees, and to the fields stretching beyond. “For the sake of this?” she asked reproachfully.

Affected by her presence, you stroked the wavy locks of her hair and murmured, “For the sake of nothingness.”

“Aren’t you afraid of loneliness in this empty place?”

You whispered in her ear, “I was oppressed by loneliness in the midst of the crowds.”

She retreated a step. “Yesterday, Othman said…”

He interrupted her gently. “My girl, haven’t you realized yet that I’m deaf?”