On my way to keep my appointment with Sirhan al-Hilaly, the month allotted to reading the play having now gone by, my heart had been beating wildly. A refusal this time would be beyond my endurance. It would finish me. The glee I saw hiding in his eyes made my heavy heart tremble, however, and I sat down where he indicated with increasing optimism, to hear his booming voice say, “At last you’ve created a real play,” and to feel him staring at me interrogatively, as if to ask, “How did you do it?” At that moment all my cares momentarily evaporated and I could feel my face going red. “It’s wonderful, terrifying, potentially a great success! Why did you call it Afrah al-Qubbah?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, bewildered.

“Artists’ wiles are beyond me,” he said with a resounding laugh. “I wonder if you’re alluding to the joys—shall we say?—of moral struggle in the midst of spreading vermin? Or are you being ironic, the way we are when we call a black servant girl Sabah or Nur?”*5 I smiled in agreement. “I’ll give you three hundred pounds,” he said. “Generosity is, probably, my sole virtue. It’s the largest sum ever paid for a first play.” If only you could have lived long enough to share my happiness. “But don’t you expect some embarrassing questions?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.

“It’s a play. There’s no need to look beyond it.”

“Well answered. I’m not interested in anything but the play. It’s bound to arouse a storm of suspicion, though, among people we know.”

“I don’t care if it does,” I said calmly.

“Bravo! What else have you got?”

“I hope to begin writing a new play soon.”

“Good for you! It’s the rainy season for you. I’m all anticipation. I’ll spring it on the company as a surprise this coming fall.”

—

My little flat made me subject to frequent fits of gloom and I wished I could find another place to live, but where? Changing the rooms around, selling the bed, buying a new one, I realized that Tahiya had penetrated much further into my life than I had ever imagined. My mourning was not the kind that began deep and became lighter. It had been comparatively bearable to begin with—probably because of the state of shock I’d been in—but then became so entrenched that I could only hope for forgetfulness through the passage of time. My apparent lack of reaction would look to many people like evidence that I had killed her. But she knows the whole truth now.

—