An agent suggested a room in the pension La Côte d’Azur in Helwan.*6 This again was loneliness, but of a different kind: myself, my craft, and my imagination. Keeping mostly to my room, I set aside time during the night to get some exercise by walking. As I’d resigned from my job and had nothing to do but write, I told myself that I had to sit down and choose one of the dozens of ideas floating around in my head, then concentrate. When it came to it, however, it became quite clear to me that after all I didn’t possess a single idea. What was wrong?

I wasn’t living merely alone, but in a vacuum. My grief for Tahiya returned, penetrating, deep, and subjugating. Even the image of Taher took shape before my eyes, innocent, emaciated, struggling against some unknown entity. In my attempt to escape from my depression by writing, I would encounter only a void. I was burned out. And what had extinguished the flame had not only smothered my creativity but left nothing in its place except endless listlessness and aversion to life itself.

Meanwhile, much to my bafflement, I read a great deal about the success of the play, dozens of critiques lavishing praise on the author and predicting how much the theater would profit from his talent. This critical reception, coming on the heels of my tortured attempts at writing in this hell of barrenness, this hell of sorrow and want, with my resources dwindling every day, was sheer mockery. To the gloom enveloping me I said aloud: “You never expected this.”

Far from enjoying the rainy season that Sirhan al-Hilaly had predicted, I could not even think. Any idea I conceived came to nothing, shriveling as the wells of contemplation dried up. It was death, a living death: I saw death, touched it, smelled it, and lived with it.

When the money was all gone, I went to see Sirhan al-Hilaly at home. He didn’t begrudge me an extra hundred pounds over and above the contracted price.

I’d entered a race with death, but I was so dried up within me that mine had become a living body without a soul. The voice of annihilation stole into my ears, jeering, letting me know that I was finished—it had played with me as it wished, baring its fangs to pronounce a sentence of death.

When the money ran out again, I rushed off a second time to Sirhan al-Hilaly, who politely but firmly made it clear that he was ready to grant me another sum whenever I showed him a portion of a new play—and only then.

Returning to solitude, with destitution now added to grief and sterility, I contemplated seeking a haven—Bab al-Shariya—but something stopped me. At that point, willfully parentless, soon to be homeless, and no longer belonging to any quarter, I said to myself that nothing was left except the end I’d assigned to my own protagonist. And eventually I hit upon the appropriate exit line. I despised my burdens and afflictions. No mention of them. I would die keeping them to myself.