“I’m happy in my job even though I haven’t got private means like you.” She hit him where it hurt, unintentionally of course. How he wished he could tell her all. But he did not dare. Loneliness enveloped him when she left him to go back to the office. Despite her charm and gentleness, she aroused the animal instincts in him. He imagined her shock and horror at seduction and his ensuing shame and defeat. But to him seduction was a natural instinct, one could even say a hallowed tradition. That was his defense mechanism. To destroy every possible virtue. Elham was a shining beacon in his life but also a threat to his ego. She shook the world he was accustomed to. He could only forget his torture in Karima’s fire. The beacon lighting the other half of his newfound dual life.

He walked out into the nippy November evening and strolled back to the hotel. The newly familiar sight greeted him: Khalil bent over his desk and Mohamed el-Sawi by the door.

He sat in the lounge for about an hour, smoking and scanning the papers.

He got up, went to the telephone, and dialed. “Elham, will you meet me tomorrow in the café?”

“With pleasure. Is anything wrong?”

“No, no, not at all. I want to see you whenever I can.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The nights he spends in passion with Karima. The sound of breathing echoes the rhythm and savagery of the jungle. He forgets himself then. Transcends this earth and universe, far above all fears and worries. Karima offers the pleasures and pains of a heavy meal, in contrast to the loneliness left by Elham every time they part.

Karima’s nocturnal visits were uninterrupted since that first night when her gentle knock awakened him from his drunken sleep. Her influence dominating him, leaving no way for escape from these moments of passion. He pretending to be the dominant partner but fooling neither himself nor her. Never had a woman dominated him like this before. And yet he always doubted everything she said.

“I can’t live without you,” she whispered one night as she lay in his arms. How familiar were those words! He’d heard them in all the nightclubs and whorehouses that had been his life in Alexandria. He fought against the tide of her passion and influence. In vain. She was everything to him. Love, the hope that sent him searching for his lost father. On other evenings, she would just lie silent and still, submitting quietly and without much passion or concern. Then he would cry out in his mind for Elham, the fresh breeze to cool him in his hell with Karima. Yet it was a hell he could not live without.