On our wedding night, with a cock crowing on a neighboring rooftop, she made the revelation that dragged us both to the edge of a bottomless pit, down which everything seemed to plunge but history itself. My first bewilderment turned to a numbness so deep that except for hearing the sound of her choking sobs, I almost thought I’d died. The sobs said everything. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she whimpered. Really? “I should have….” What for? There’s no need to say any more. “But I loved you,” she murmured a second time.

I’d found out her secret. But she hadn’t yet found out mine. How could she know that her man had likewise come to her with something of a past? Or even understand how wild I’d been? I’d had a nasty surprise, but her deception didn’t bother me, and even my surprise, once the numbness wore off, seemed silly. “The past doesn’t matter to me,” I declared heroically.

She bent her head, in what looked like grateful humility.

“I hate the past,” she said. “I’m becoming a new person.”

“That’s good,” I said magisterially. Any desire to learn more I put aside. I was neither angry nor glad. I loved her. I entered into my new life with all my heart.

Hours go by, and we don’t exchange a word. We’re like two peanuts in a shell. Every customer complains about the rise in prices, the overflowing sewers, the exhausting queues at the government food stores, and we exchange condolences. Sometimes they look at the woman and ask, “What makes you so silent, Umm Abbas?”

What have I got left to look forward to? She, at least, expects Abbas to return.

I began my married life with genuine ardor. Halima announced the news of her approaching motherhood, and I was annoyed at first, but it was only a passing feeling. When Abbas was a child I loved him passionately.

Then things began to change. It was Tariq Ramadan who came up to me one day and said, “Hamlet’s a tough role. Why don’t you dissolve this in a cup of tea?” That was the beginning of a mad course. The man who cared about nothing was taken in. As time passed, the springs of life dried up and finally all joy was throttled in the grip of a crisis.

“Is this what you want? To blow your earnings on poison and leave me to face life on my own?” Halima’s voice was now as disgusting to me as the stench of backed-up sewers. We’d become like two bare trees. Hunger was knocking at the old house’s door.

I was relieved to be able to say to her one day, “The end is in sight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll fix up the east room upstairs as a place for entertainment.”

“What?”