Pointing to her child, who was sleeping in her arms, she said, “Help me, Abduh! The boy’s burning hot and he keeps throwing up. He’s been crying all night long. Hatim Bey, I beg you, get us a doctor or take us to the hospital!”
When Busayna opened the door of the bathroom, she found Zaki el Dessouki stretched out on the floor, his clothes covered with vomit, and unable to move. Bending down, she took his hand and found it was as cold as ice.
“Zaki Bey! Are you ill?”
He muttered some incomprehensible words and continued to stare into space. She brought a chair, took him in her arms, sat him down on it (discovering at the same time how very light his body was), removed his soiled clothes, and washed his face, hands, and chest with hot water. Soon he started to come round a little. He was able to stand and walk, leaning on her, and she put him to bed and went up to her room on the roof and quickly returned with a large glass of hot mint, which Zaki drank before surrendering to a deep sleep. She spent the night next to him on the couch and examined him several times. She checked the heat of his brow with her hand and put a finger under his nose to make sure that his breathing was regular. She stayed awake and determined to call a doctor if his condition got worse. As she contemplated his aged sleeping face, he appeared to her, for the first time, in simple reality, as just a good-hearted, drunk old man, frail, mild-tempered, and deserving of compassion, like a child.
In the morning, she made him a light breakfast with a glass of warm milk. Abaskharon had arrived and discovered what had happened and he stood before his sick master with his head bent in sorrow, saying over and over in an agonized voice, “A thousand wishes for your recovery, Excellency!”
Zaki opened his eyes and made a sign for him to leave. Then he got up with difficulty, leaned against the wall, and taking his head in his hands grumbled in a low voice, “I’ve got a terrible headache and my stomach hurts a lot.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor?”
“No. It’s nothing. I drank too much. This has happened to me so many times. I drink a cup of Turkish coffee without sugar and I’m fine.”
He was putting on a show of holding up and being tough and she laughed and said, “So listen. That’s enough machismo. You’re an old man now and your health is weak. No more drinking and staying up late. You’re supposed to go to bed early like old people your age.”
Zaki smiled and looking at her gratefully said, “Thank you, Busayna. You’re a good and loyal person. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She put her hands on his face and kissed his brow.
She had kissed him often before, but this time she felt the touch of his face differently. She felt as she pressed her lips to his brow that she knew him well, that she loved his old, coarse smell, and that he was no longer that Bey, who, far removed from her, told her about the old days. He wasn’t any longer even that rebarbative male lover who was different from her. Now he was close to her, as though she had known him for ages, as though he was her father or her uncle, as though he carried the same smell and blood as she. She wanted to hug him hard so that she could take his weak, fragile body in her arms and fill her nostrils with that old, coarse smell of his that she loved.
She thought that what was happening between them was strange and unexpected. She remembered that only yesterday she’d tried to trick him and get hold of his signature, and she felt ashamed. It occurred to her that the trick she’d played on him yesterday had been her last try at resisting her real feelings toward him. Inside she’d wanted to flee from her love for him. She’d have been more comfortable in a way if she had limited her relationship to him to sex and money—he wanted sex and she wanted money, that was how she had pictured the relationship—but she had overstepped the bounds.
Now she is facing her true feelings and she understands them clearly. She wants to stay with him, to take care of him, and to respect him, gratefully confident that he will understand anything she may say to him. She will tell him about her life, her father and her mother, and her old love for Taha; she’ll even tell him the sordid details of her relationship with Talal and she won’t be ashamed with him. She will feel at peace once she’s told him, as though she has relieved herself of a heavy burden. How she warms to the sight of his aged face listening attentively to her as he asks her to explain some detail of her stories, then comments on them!
She cannot describe her feelings with any other word than love. It wasn’t the hot, burning love she’d felt for Taha but another different kind of love, calm and deep-seated, something closer to peace of mind, and confidence, and respect. She loved him, and having worked that out she was freed forever from her misgivings. She began to live carefree and happy and started spending most of the day and a good part of the night with Zaki Bey.
One small, sharp, pointed thing, however, pricks her conscience whenever she remembers that she had been going to betray him. She had put pressure on him to sign the contract so that Malak could get hold of his apartment. She had exploited his confidence in her to do him harm. Wasn’t that what had happened? Hadn’t that been her goal? To make a fool of him and get his signature while he was drunk and get five thousand pounds from Malak in payment for her betrayal? Whenever that word resounded in her mind, she would remember his kindly smile and his interest in her and his concern for her feelings. She would remember that he had always treated her gently and that he had given her his entire trust. At those moments, she would feel she was vile and treacherous and would despise herself and enter a whirlpool of self-reproach.
These feelings continued to torture her until one morning she suddenly went to Malak. It was early and he had just opened his shop. There was a glass of tea with milk in front of him from which he was sipping in a leisurely fashion. She stood in front of him, greeted him, and said to him straight off before her courage could seep away, “Mr. Malak, I’m sorry. I won’t be able to do what we agreed on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That business of the signature I’m supposed to get from Zaki Bey. I’m not going to do it.”
“Why?”
“That’s just how it is.”
“Is that your last word?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Fine. Thanks.”
Malak spoke calmly and sucked up a sip of tea. He turned his face away from her, and she thought as she left him that she had liberated herself from a heavy worry, though she was surprised all the same that he had accepted her apology without fuss. She’d expected him to get angry and blow up, but he’d stayed calm, as though he’d been expecting that or had something or other in mind. This thought disquieted her for a few days, but she soon rid herself of her misgivings and felt for the first time a deep contentment because she had stopped betraying Zaki and had nothing left to hide from him.
At 8 A.M., Sheikh Shakir and Taha el Shazli took the Metro in the direction of Helwan. They had been engaged over several days in long discussions during which Sheikh Shakir had tried to persuade Taha to forget what had happened and pick up his life again. However, Taha remained so vengeful and angry that he seemed more than once to be on the verge of collapse. Finally, at the end of a long debate, the sheikh shouted in his face, “What do you want then? You don’t want to study and you don’t want to work and you don’t want to see any of your colleagues or even your family. What do you want, Taha?”
“I want to take revenge on the people who assaulted me and humiliated me.”
“And how will you know them, since you didn’t see their faces?”
“From their voices. I could distinguish their voices from a thousand. I beg you, Master, to tell me the name of the head officer, who supervised my torture. You told me before that you know his name.”
Sheikh Shakir was silent, thinking.
“I beg you, Master. I won’t be at peace till I know his name.”
“I can’t be certain as to his identity. But torture at National Security generally takes place under the supervision of two men—Colonel
Salih Rashwan and Colonel Fathi el Wakil. They’re both unbelieving criminals destined for Hell—How evil a homecoming! But how does it help you to know the officer’s name?”
“I shall take revenge on him.”
“Nonsense! Are you going to spend your life looking for someone you never set eyes on? An insane enterprise, destined to fail.”
“I’ll go after him to the end.”
“You’re going to fight on your own a whole regime, with an army and a police force and huge quantities of terrible weapons?”
“You say that, when you’re the one who taught us that the true Muslim is a nation unto himself? Has not the Truth, Blessed and Almighty, said, How often a little company has overcome a numerous company, by God’s leave! (God has spoken truly)?”
“God indeed speaks truly but your fight with the regime will cost you your life. You’ll die, my son. They’ll kill you the first time you confront them.”
Taha was silent and looked into the sheikh’s face, for the mention of death had had its effect on him. Then he said, “I’m dead now. They killed me in detention. When they trespass on your honor laughing, when they give you a woman’s name and make you answer with your new name and you have to because of the savagery of the torture…. They called me Fawziya. Every day they used to beat me and make me say, ‘I’m a woman and my name is Fawziya.’ You want me to forget all that and go on living?”
He spoke bitterly and bit his lower lip with his teeth. The sheikh said, “Listen, Taha. This is my last word, to clear my conscience before Our Lord, Mighty and Glorious: getting involved in fighting this regime means certain death.”
“I’m not afraid of death any longer. I’ve made up my mind to be a martyr. I hope with all my heart to die a martyr and enter Paradise.”
There was silence between them and suddenly the sheikh got up from his place and went over to Taha and looked at him for a short while. Then he hugged him hard and smiled and said, “God bless you, my son. This is what real faith does to those who have it. Go home now and pack your bag for a journey. Tomorrow morning I’ll come and go with you.”
“Where to?”
The sheikh’s smile broadened and he whispered, “Don’t ask. Do as I say and you’ll find everything out in due course.”
Taha deduced that the sheikh’s opposition to him at the beginning had been a stratagem to test the strength of his determination. Now, the following day, they were sitting next to each other in silence in the crowded metro car, the sheikh looking out of the window while Taha stared without seeing at the passengers, a disturbing question repeating itself in his mind: Where was the sheikh taking him? Of course, he trusted him, but fear and misgivings afflicted him all the same. He felt as though he was proceeding to some perilous point of no return that would be fundamental in his life. He felt a shudder when the sheikh said to him,
“Be ready to get out at the next station, Turah el Asmant.”
The station bears the name of the cement company that the Swiss built in the twenties and which was then nationalized after the Revolution and increased its production to become one of the biggest cement factories in the Arab World. Thereafter, like the other major companies, it had been subjected to the Open Door Policy and privatization, with foreign companies buying numerous shares. The metro line goes right through its middle: on the right are the administrative buildings and the giant furnaces and on the left stretches the vast desert, bounded by mountains throughout which are scattered the quarries where the huge rocks are blasted with dynamite, then moved onto large transporters to be incinerated in the cement kilns.
Sheikh Shakir got down, Taha with him, and they crossed the metro station in the direction of the mountains and walked out into the desert. The sun was hot, the air laden with the dust that covers the whole area, and Taha felt a dryness in his throat and a low, continuous pain in the top of his stomach, followed by nausea and coughing. The sheikh said jokingly, “Sweet patience, champion! The air here is polluted with cement dust. You’ll get used to it soon. Anyway, we’re almost there.”
They stopped in front of a small rocky hillock and waited a few minutes. Then the sound of an engine reached their ears. A large rock-moving truck approached and stopped in front of them. The driver was a young man dressed in workers’ blue overalls that were worn and faded with use. He exchanged greetings quickly with the sheikh, who looked at him appraisingly and said, “God and Paradise,” to which the driver replied with a smile, “Patience and Victory.”
These were the passwords, and the sheikh took Taha’s hand and climbed up with him into the driver’s cabin. The three said nothing and the truck proceeded along a mountain track. Other transporters belonging to the company passed them until the driver turned off onto a narrow unmetaled sidetrack on which they drove for more than half an hour. Taha almost confessed his anxiety to the sheikh, but he saw that the latter was absorbed in reciting the Qu’ran from a small copy in his hand. Eventually, there appeared in the distance indistinct shapes that gradually became clearer and turned out to be a group of houses built of red brick. The truck stopped, Taha and the sheikh got down, and the driver bade them farewell, then turned and went back.
The streets had the look of any urban slum—conspicuous poverty, puddles of water in the dirt lanes, chickens and ducks running around outside the houses, small children playing barefoot, and veiled women sitting at the doors. The sheikh strode out with the confidence of one who knows a place well and entered one of the houses, Taha behind him. They went through the door into a spacious room empty but for a small desk and a blackboard that hung on the wall. On the floor were spread large yellow rush mats on which were sitting a group of bearded young men in white gallabiyas who all jumped up to greet Sheikh Shakir, embracing him and kissing him one after the other. The oldest among them, a huge, tall man aged around forty with a large black beard and wearing a dark green sash over his white gallabiya hung back a little. He had a scar extending from his right eyebrow to the top of his forehead like the remains of a large old wound and this prevented him from fully closing his eye. On seeing Sheikh Shakir, the man whooped with joy and said in his husky voice, “Peace be upon you! Where have you been, Master? We’ve been waiting for you two whole weeks.”
“Only urgent necessity has kept me from you, Bilal. How are you and your brothers?”
“Praise God, we’re fine, God willing.”
“And how is your work?”
“As you will have read in the newspapers—from success to success, thanks be to God.”
Sheikh Shakir put his arm around Taha and told the man, smiling, “This is the Taha el Shazli whom I spoke to you about, Bilal. A fine example of the courageous, pious, observant young man—and we give precedence over God to none.”
He brought Taha forward to shake the man’s hand and Taha felt the man’s strong grip and looked at his disfigured face as Sheikh Shakir’s words resounded in his ears, “Taha, God willing, I introduce you to your brother in God, Sheikh Bilal, the commander of the camp. Here with Sheikh Bilal you will learn, God willing, how to take what is yours and how to wreak vengeance on all the tyrants.”
Souad woke up and opened her eyes with difficulty. She had stomach pains, nausea, and a headache, and her throat was dry and hurting her. Little by little she realized that she was in a hospital. The room was large, the ceiling high, and there were old chairs and a small table in the corner. The double doors with two round glass portholes looked like those in an operating theater in an Egyptian movie from the forties. Next to the bed stood a stout nurse with a snub nose. She bent over Souad and put her hand on her face, then smiled and said, “Praise God you’re fine. God’s been good to you. You hemorrhaged badly.”
“Liar!” shouted Souad in a strangled voice. The nurse leaped back. “You aborted me by force. I’ll see you get hell!”
The nurse left the room. An insane anger swept over Souad and she started kicking her feet and shouting in a loud voice, “Criminals! You aborted me! Get me the Eme
rgency Response Police! I’ll put you all in jail!” The door soon opened and a young doctor appeared. He came up to her, the nurse following. Souad shouted, “I was pregnant and you aborted me by force!”
The doctor smiled, obviously lying and scared. He said in an embarrassed voice, “You had a hemorrhage, Madame. Calm yourself. Excitement’s not good for you.”
Souad exploded again. She shouted and abused them and wept. The doctor and the nurse left. Then the door opened again and her brother Hamidu appeared, with Fawzi, Hagg Azzam’s son. Hamidu hurried in and kissed her. Clinging to him, she burst into passionate tears.
Hamidu’s face crumpled and he shut his mouth tight and said nothing. Fawzi calmly pulled up the chair from the end of the room and sat down beside the bed. Then he leaned back and said in measured tones, enunciating the words clearly as though he were giving a lesson to children, “Listen, Souad. Everything is fated and allotted. Hagg Azzam agreed with you about something and you broke the agreement and ‘the one who begins is the more unjust.’”
“God take revenge on you and on your father, you criminals, you sons of bitches!”
“Shut your mouth!”
Fawzi shouted these words angrily, his face frowning and looking stern and cruel. Then he said nothing for a little, sighed, and resumed his lecture.
“Despite your rudeness, the Hagg has dealt with you as God’s Law requires. You had a hemorrhage and you would have died, so we took you to the hospital and the doctor was forced to carry out an abortion. The hospital paperwork is on file and the doctor’s report is on file. Tell her, Hamidu.”
Hamidu lowered his head in silence and Fawzi’s voice rose again.
“My father, Hagg Azzam, is a God-fearing man. He has divorced you and given you more than your rights, God recompense him. The deferred payment and the support money we have calculated as God’s Law requires, and there’s something extra as a gift from us. Your brother Hamidu has a check for twenty thousand pounds. The hospital bill is paid and we’ve taken all your things from the house and we’ll send them to you in Alexandria.”