“The hero is totally disgusting, an odious person,” he said. “The audience won’t have any sympathy for him.” The remark was mainly his sly way of letting me know the director’s opinion and I ignored this criticism completely: the hero wasn’t like that, either in real life or in the play. I saw that Tariq was simply attacking me, nothing more or less, and I looked at him so contemptuously that he asked, “Didn’t it occur to you that the events of the play would make people think the worst about you?”

“That doesn’t matter to me.”

“What a cold-blooded killer you are!” he blurted out, suddenly showing agitation.

“Now you’re going back to the past,” I said disdainfully. “As far as I’m concerned, the main thing was an attempt at love, whereas with you it was all nothing but an ordeal marked by your own spite.”

“Are you going to be able to defend yourself?”

“I haven’t been accused.”

“You’re going to find yourself in the office of the prosecuting attorney.”

“You’re a stupid ass.”

He got up. “She deserved to be killed in any case,” he said contemptuously. “But what you deserve,” he added, “is hanging.” Then he left.

This hateful visitation made me feel as if I were being caught up in a whirlpool; it convinced me that I had to hide myself somewhere, out of reach of these ignoramuses. Did I really deserve to be hanged? Not in the least, not even if I were charged with my own hidden desires. My imaginings—symbols of escape from actual burdens, not of flight from love or my loved one—had arisen out of temporary agitation, not out of deep-seated feelings. Anyway, I could no longer go on living where this devil could get at me.

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?