Listen, I’ll give you some advice: Your grandfather built this house. I don’t know anything about him. Your grandmother—a young widow no different from your mother—made it a lovers’ nest. Your father grew up in the bosom of reality. I’d really like to tell you everything. Should I be scared of you? If your grandmother hadn’t died suddenly she would have married the master sergeant and lost the house. After she died he wanted to lord it over me. I beat him up and he tried to get me drafted into the old regular army, but the house stayed mine. It was Umm Hany—my mother’s cousin and al-Hilaly’s pimp—who got me the job as prompter. I’d like to lay these facts before you someday so you’ll know what you came from, so you can trace your origins back to their roots without any sham reluctance. Be like your father, and love will unite us the way it used to when you were small. Don’t be misled by your mother’s hypocrisy. Someday you’ll find out everything. Should I be afraid of you, son?

—

Back at the shop I have to face Halima’s dreary questioning. What had Abbas told me? she wants to know.

“I didn’t see him. He left the flat with a suitcase, and no one knows where he went.”

She beats her thighs with her fists. “No one knows! Why didn’t he let us know?”

“He doesn’t think about us.”

“He’s the one who helped us start this shop.”

“He wants to forget us now. As far as he’s concerned, we belong to a past that’s best forgotten.”

“You don’t understand my son. You should’ve gone to see al-Hilaly!” Exasperation makes me speechless, and she goes on: “You’re not careful!”

“I’d like to bash your head in.”

“Have you gone back on opium?”

“Only government ministers can afford it these days!” I retort. “Al-Hilaly doesn’t know where he is either.”

“You visited him?”

“He has no idea where he is,” I repeated.

“My God! Did he move out of his flat?”

“No.”

“He’ll come back. Maybe there’s a woman involved.”

“That’s what a woman like you would think.”

“You don’t care about him at all!” she screams.

“You don’t care about anyone but yourself!”

“I have been condemned to leave one prison for another.”

“I’m the one who’s living in a prison cell!”

The woman begins to sob, and that makes me even more exasperated. How could I ever have loved her? I wonder.

—