“It seems you haven’t heard yet.”

“I just arrived. What’s happened?”

“The police,” he began. “Last night—I mean at dawn—they made a raid on the house.”

“My father’s?” He nodded. “And what happened?”

“The same as always happens in such cases: they let the gamblers go free and arrested your parents.”

I was absolutely devastated. Filled with a suffocating anxiety, I forgot my former sentiments, forgot my enduring anger. My father’s and mother’s dreadful fate stabbed me so deeply that I broke into sobs. Sirhan al-Hilaly summoned me at once. “I’ll engage an expert lawyer as legal counsel for them,” he told me. “The money has been confiscated. They came across quite a lot of drugs. There’s some hope, though.”

“I want to see them right away.”

“No doubt you’ll be able to, but I’m afraid I can’t let you off work tonight. That’s a matter of course in the theater. The show must go on, even when there’s been a death. I mean, even the death of a loved one doesn’t prevent a professional actor from playing his role. Even if it’s a comic one.”

I left his room feeling defeated, and the guilty memory of my frightful dreams intensified my suffering.

Taher was born just before the trial, into an atmosphere so heavy with dejection, so teeming with sorrows and humiliations that Tahiya hid even her joy in front of me. Before the baby was a month old his grandparents went to prison. He was sickly, which worried us both, but I fled, to drown my anxieties and sense of guilt in endless work. I was destined, however, to face another blow, so cruel that it would make me almost forget the sorrow I felt then.

When Taher was just over five months old, Tahiya’s health broke down. We diagnosed the malady ourselves as influenza, but after a week had gone by with no signs of improvement, I fetched the local doctor. “She must have tests done,” he said when we were alone. “I suspect typhoid.” As a precautionary measure he prescribed some medicine and suggested moving her to a fever hospital.

Having made up my mind to look after her myself, I rejected the idea, though I had to quit my job at Faisal’s typing bureau. To make up for the loss of income and to cope with added expenses, I sold the refrigerator. I became Tahiya’s nurse and Taher’s nursemaid, moving him into the other room and giving him his bottle while I tended her, applying myself to both tasks with devotion. Unlike the baby’s, Tahiya’s health improved.