He answers me with a look full of scorn and disgust, and I, to provoke him, tell him he doesn’t know how to act.

“I’d like to bash your head in!”

“Have you gone back on opium?”

“Only government ministers can afford it these days.” He lowers his voice. “Al-Hilaly doesn’t know where he is either.”

“You visited him?” I ask anxiously.

“He has no idea where he is.”

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

“No.”

“Maybe there’s a woman involved.”

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

“What can I say to someone like you? You don’t care about him at all.”

My misery is too much for me. I weep bitter tears.

Wearing my new dress, an old shawl around my shoulders, and without any hope, I go to Abbas’s building, where my despair is confirmed when I question the doorman.

“You must know something about what happened?”

“Nothing at all.”

I don’t have the courage to go to the theater. My reluctant footsteps direct me homeward. I stop on the way and visit Sidi al-Sharany to seek his miraculous help, then come back to my prison cell to find the man joking and laughing with a customer, quite unconcerned. I sit down defeated, my spirits at lowest ebb, my endurance gone. “Do something,” I manage to say to him. “Don’t you have any plan in mind?”

“I’d like to kill you; someday I will kill you!”

“Go and see al-Hilaly again.”

“Go yourself,” he interrupts. “He gives special attention to his slave girls.”

“The truth is, I’m your mother’s victim! My torture comes from her grave. She’s the one who made you such a brute!”

“Compared with you, she was a decent woman.”

—

This theater—where I’d been raped and no one held out a helping hand—was the backdrop of my torment and my love. While its lofty dome echoed with admirable sentiments, phrased in the sweetest way, my blood spilled on its comfortable seats, the blood of my secret, strangling me. I was lost, lost. He wasn’t even aware of my adoration. Nothing mattered to him. He probably even forgot my name.

“You’re avoiding me! I can’t take any more. I have to see you.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“What? Have you forgotten? I’ve lost everything!”

“Don’t exaggerate. I don’t like it. What happened isn’t worth troubling your head over.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “No,” he said, “no. Nothing that goes on in this theater should ever be taken to heart.”

“But what about me? Don’t you see what it means to me? Don’t leave me!”

“The whole thing is much simpler than you imagine. No harm done. Cheer up—for the sake of your work and your future. Forget what happened. It’s no use asking me to keep remembering it.”