“What exactly do you want?” he asked me coldly.

“I wanted to let you know, so you can set him straight and make him understand ours is a respectable home. You must tell him to leave.”

“Pay attention to your studies, and leave matters belonging to the house to its owner,” he replied sharply.

“She’s engaged to him,” Mother explained, in a voice that was muffled and abject.

“But they aren’t married yet!”

“He wants to die of starvation,” Father said to Mother sarcastically, pointing in my direction.

“We have made ourselves poor,” I remonstrated in a burst of anger.

He seized his glass of tea to throw it at me, but Mother jumped between us and took me to my room. Her eyes were threatening tears. “There’s no use hoping for anything from him,” I said, trying to comfort her. “Just don’t have anything more to do with him. I wish we could go away together, but where could we go? Where would we find a place to live? And where would our money come from!”

I couldn’t find an answer. The truth stood before me in all its naked ugliness: Mother’s moral reserves had collapsed in the face of the circumstances created by my father’s addiction, for which he was obviously responsible, but from which he was helpless to escape. But even apart from his addiction, it struck me at times that he was totally without principles. I despised him and I rejected him. He’d made a brothel out of our old home. But I was weak, too. All I could do was cry.

I passed my examinations, but my success didn’t make me as happy as it should have. I couldn’t rid myself of my sense of shame; sorrow had settled deep within me. During the long vacation I took refuge in the library, and there I wrote a play. I begged Father to show it to Sirhan al-Hilaly, but he only replied, “We’re not a children’s theater.”

Mother volunteered to submit it to him. Two weeks later she brought it back, saying, “Don’t expect your first play to be accepted. What you must do is try again.”

I was upset, but I didn’t despair. How could I despair when my only hope was the theater? One day I happened to meet Fuad Shalaby in the reading room. We shook hands, I reminded him who I was, and his cordiality gave me the courage to ask, “How can I write an acceptable play?”

“How old are you?” he inquired. “What grade are you in now?”

“I’ll be in secondary school next year.”

“Can’t you wait until you finish your education?”

“I feel as if I can write now.”

“No, you don’t understand life yet.”

“I have a pretty good idea what it’s all about.”

He smiled at me, “What is life, in your view?” he asked.