Chapters (12)
Surely, the man is later than usual? The last beams of sunlight are just leaving the walls along this narrow street. What’s keeping him? Has he at last discovered the hiding place and gone there straightway? Will they come home together? I can see his fine-featured face smiling as he apologizes. I will not believe that this torture can go on forever. The play may well have pointed out the sources of my weakness, but I’ve always kept my heart clean. Haven’t I atoned, then, sufficiently for that weakness? Who could have imagined that this kind of life would become the lot of the beautiful, chaste Halima? My heart holds nothing now but tolerance and love. O God, I accept your judgment. I have such compassion in my heart that it even pities Karam in his misery. I’ll even forgive his brutality to me. When he returns with my beloved absent one’s arm tucked under his, I’ll forgive him everything.
Elation floods my being, but the feeling diminishes with the passing of time. A customer remarks as he leaves with his package, “You’re in another world. Umm Abbas.”
From the mosque the call to evening prayer reaches my ears as darkness creeps over the short winter day. There must be a reason for his delay. He isn’t worth all this anxious waiting. What’s keeping him? The candle splutters in the winter wind; I stand up, not intending to sit down again. My mood has altered; he has deceived me unmercifully. My patience is worn out, and I’ll have to go and look for him.
The first person I meet at the theater door is Fuad Shalaby, who approaches me with unaccustomed tenderness, holding out his hands to me.
“I hope it’s false news,” he says.
“What news?” I say as my last glimmer of hope disappears. The man doesn’t seem to know what to say, so he remains silent. “Is it about Abbas?”
He nods his head, saying nothing more, and I lose consciousness.
When I come to, I find myself on the couch in the cafeteria and Amm Ahmad is taking care of me. Fuad Shalaby and Tariq Ramadan are also there. Amm Ahmad breaks the news to me in a funereal voice and ends by saying, “No one believes it.”
Fuad Shalaby takes me home in his car. On the way he wonders aloud, “If he’s committed suicide, where is his body?”
“Then why did he write the note?”
“That’s his secret,” he answers. “We’ll find out in good time.”
—
But I know his secret as I know my own heart and I know my luck; he has killed himself. Evil is playing flute music for Abbas.
*1A holy man to whom a small local mosque was dedicated.
*2 Al-Kabsh—the ram.
*3This was a sentence used during the wars with Israel, and it has a special connotation.