Talib had the hots for her. The widower pushed to the front, and was the first to greet her with unrestrained kisses on her hands, her arms, and face. Zahia and Nahda jealously ran to pull him away from Rânia, as he shouted to Halim: “By God, I’d exchange my two daughters for yours.”
I envied the suitor of the evening when Rânia put out her hands to accept the bouquet. Afterwards, she moved away with an ethereal, enigmatic look, which made her gallant look bashful. But she accepted the invitation to dance, pretending to be shy and distant during the first steps; gradually her dusky arms twined round his back, her hands gripped his waist, and, with her eyes closed, she rested her chin on the dancer’s right shoulder. At that moment, Zana turned the lights off in the room, and prayed that a love affair, or the promise of an engagement, might come out of the dance. All that came out of it was a resentful man, who saw Rânia suddenly interrupt the dance and throw herself into Omar’s arms when he entered the room. The suitor, openmouthed at this intimacy between brother and sister, went off in a huff; some didn’t even say goodbye to Zana. Omar called them boobies, stuck-up imbeciles, groveling idiots with nothing to them; for none of them had Omar’s eyes, voluptuous and devouring. Perhaps Rania wanted to grab one of these imbeciles and say: “Look at my brother Omar; now look carefully at the photograph of my beloved Yaqub. Put the two together, and that’ll be my fiancé.”
She never found this compound. She contented herself with idolizing the twins, in the knowledge that their blood ties could never cancel out their enmity. Even so, Rânia’s admiration for both was, for a long time, visceral and almost symmetrical. She talked to Yaqub’s image, kissed his face on the dull paper, and whispered one thing after another to him—words she would put in her letter.
Year after year I heard Zana say to her daughter, on the day after the birthday party: “You missed a fine figure of a man, dear. You’re throwing your future out of the window.” Rânia reacted angrily: “You know very well … He wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve never felt attracted to any of the idiots that come around here.”
What for her mother was a blow of fate, for her was nothing more than a pleasure that lasted for three dances or fifteen minutes. Unlike Zana, she managed to conceal the jealous feelings she felt for Omar, and both women did everything possible to be the queen of the ball when he appeared with a new girlfriend. But on the night of the episode of the Silver Woman, they didn’t reign alone.
There were rumors that Omar was courting a woman older than himself. It was Zahia Talib who brought the news, on the night of Zana’s birthday. The two sisters and their father came early. Talib had brought a drum, the darbuk, and said he was going to play for his daughters to dance at the party. Zana thanked him and stopped smiling when she heard Zahia’s voice: