“These are confessions, Sirhan. How can we let the criminal get away with it?”

“It’s an exciting play. It’s bound to attract audiences and that’s all that matters to me, Tariq.”

Anger and bitterness well up inside me; past sorrows, with all their attendant regrets and failures, spread over my consciousness like a cloud. Then a thought comes to me: now I’ll have a chance to get back at my old enemy. “How do you know all this?” “Pardon me, but we’re going to be married.”

“What are you going to do?” says Sirhan al-Hilaly.

“My primary concern is to see that the criminal gets what he deserves.”

“Better make it your primary concern to learn your part.”

I give in. “I won’t let this chance slip by me.”

At the sight of the coffin, a sense of defeat overwhelms me, and to everyone’s astonishment, as if it were the first coffin I’ve ever seen, I burst into tears. It is neither grief nor contrition I suffer, but temporary insanity. The contemptuous expressions of the other mourners waver like water snakes in my tear-filled eyes, and I avoid looking at them, afraid my sobbing will turn to hysterical laughter.

What melancholy engulfs me as I plunge into the crowd—the men, women, and children, the dust and the din—at Bab al-Shariya!*1 I haven’t gone near it for years, this district of piety and depravity, where everything under the clear autumn sky seems draped in contempt and depression. My memories of this place—bringing Tahiya here for the first time, her arm gaily tucked in mine—disgust and pain me, as much as the way I live now, mixing with scum, crouching under Umm Hany’s wings. Damn the past and the present. Damn the theater. Damn its bit parts. Damn my hopes of success in a lead role—at my age, over fifty, in a play by my enemy, who is a criminal! I walk down the narrow serpentine length of the gravel merchants’ market, past its ancient brooding gates and its two apartment buildings, stark and new, to the place where the old house, a dark and bloody past locked up inside it, still lurks.

Some changes have been made, though: the ground-floor reception room has been converted into a shop where watermelon seeds are roasted and sold, and Karam Younis sits in it ready for business, with his wife, Halima, beside him. Prison has transformed them completely. Their faces incarnate resentment and at the very time their son’s star is on the rise they seem to have sunk into total despair.