Unfortunately, Medhat had committed an even more serious blunder and harmed another person by introducing Samaraï to Salma. The hardship she suffered from the intrusion of this individual in her life — with his retrograde ideas of love as tragedy — was of personal concern to Medhat, given that he was solely responsible for it. He should have known better; a man infatuated with diplomas was someone to be avoided like the plague. Medhat could not forgive himself for this mistake, for it affected an understanding and generous woman who alone was worth all the students in all the universities in the world.
This led him to think about Teymour and how he had judged him when he first returned from abroad. Contrary to Medhat’s hasty judgment, however, Teymour had revealed himself to be wonderfully clever; he had done nothing but amuse himself over there and his diploma was not a degrading document, but a forgery obtained in exchange for money in order to reassure his family. His admiration for Teymour increased at this thought and he recalled that, having found a place to live in the old city, Teymour was planning on holding a party soon. Medhat suddenly forgot the quarrels between Salma and her tortuous lover and began to consider whom among his female acquaintances he would choose to liven up the festivities.
Salma was waiting for him in the kitchen, seated with a cup of coffee in front of her.
“It took you a long time to get here, son of a dog!” she shouted as soon as she saw him. “I cannot count on anyone in this city. Especially not on you, the cause of all my woes!”
Medhat sat facing her, imperturbably calm; he was now certain that at the root of this summons lay some misdeed on the part of the veterinary student. He stretched out his legs, leaned back in his chair, relaxed, and waited patiently to hear the young woman’s grievances. The little servant girl, washing dishes at the sink, was pretending to ignore him. Medhat, too, had turned his gaze from her and seemed entirely uninterested in her presence in the kitchen. It was the slowest and most arousing game, this game of pretending to ignore each other.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, as if he knew nothing.
The hypocrisy of this question enraged Salma, who withdrew into hostile silence. She wanted to punish the young man for his impertinence by plunging him in the throes of uncertainty. But Medhat always encouraged this very feminine fondness for ambiguous situations because it gave him time to daydream about frivolous things while simulating the signs of restless expectation. In fact he could only consider Salma’s inconsolable distress with detachment, as an infinitesimal part of the general chaos with which he refused to compromise. With her disheveled hair, her make-up watered by tears, and the distraught fixedness of her reddened eyes, she looked like a witch in a trance. After a minute she seemed to recall that there was no point in laying claim to martyrdom with Medhat; tragedy amused him the same way a puppet show did.
Emerging from her silence, she cried:
“Where is he, that pimp?”
“Samaraï? What did he do now?”
“He disappeared four days ago, that’s what he did. What does he think, that louse? My house is not a hotel!”
“So he’s gone!” Medhat cried. “What good news!”
“He’s not gone; his suitcase is still here. He’s probably hanging around the city somewhere. He must have found another fool like me to put him up. You! You must know where he is.”
“On my honor, I know nothing,” Medhat said. “I haven’t seen him since the evening he quarreled with Chawki.”
“Is that true? Swear it!”
“I swear. And I can also tell you that I’m happy to be rid of him. He’s the type of person who needs to live in the capital. An ambitious man can only move in a world of other ambitious men. The capital is swarming with civil servants awaiting promotion. Believe me. He’s gone back to his quagmire.”
“I’m telling you, he hasn’t gone; he would never have left his suitcase behind. He’s not like you; his things matter a great deal to him. He takes pride in ownership. I’ve seen him sick with grief because he lost one of his handkerchiefs. Apparently it was a gift from his mother.”
Tears were now streaming down her cheeks. She seemed sorely afflicted by her lover’s running away.
“Hankering for a handkerchief,” said Medhat with commiseration. “That doesn’t surprise me. What you just told me merely confirms my opinion.”
Salma said no more, but this time her silence was not heavy with the rancor and bitterness that had put Medhat on the defensive. She looked at him doubtfully, as if she were attempting to understand things with which she had had no contact for many long years. A loving, tragic anxiety could be read in her eyes. She’d wound up growing fond of Samaraï and his ardent, fanatical love that had remained a mystery to her, and to which she was hardly accustomed. Over the past few days she had felt alone, abandoned by everyone. She became aware of an emptiness caused by Samaraï’s absence, a void that even her hatred of Chawki could not fill; she now regretted not having listened to her unhappy lover’s proposals and having been cantankerous and vindictive with the only person who had thought about saving her from her self-destructive folly. Perhaps she should have left this city, forgotten her lost youth and the man who had taken advantage of her, to begin a new life elsewhere. She was already twenty-two, and the veterinary student had been her last chance to renounce her status as a dishonored girl and abandon her extravagant quest for an illusory revenge. But now it was too late. She was overcome with dread at the thought of the person who had vanished; she could not dissociate his disappearance from the recent kidnappings in the city. Already she could picture her lover dead, his corpse dismembered and rendered unrecognizable, lying among the rubble of some wasteland. Once again this vision made her shiver; she readjusted the collar of her dressing gown around her breasts, then asked in a low and trembling voice, as if she feared divulging her secret foreboding:
“Do you think he may have had an accident? Could he have been kidnapped like all those other notables of whom we’ve never found a trace?”
Medhat began to laugh. It seemed to him that Salma was going much too far, exaggerating the tragedy out of sheer feminine vanity.
“But that poor fellow is no notable. No one would think of kidnapping him. He would very quickly become a burden to his kidnappers. I would not want to be in their shoes.”
“You’re forgetting that he always carried on his person all that money he’d inherited.”
The sudden surfacing of this detail made Medhat oddly attentive. Samaraï’s disappearance was taking on new meaning. It was true; Samaraï carried his entire fortune everywhere he went. Medhat had noticed it several times, but had forgotten. In this light, the kidnapping seemed entirely plausible. He could not help but see something epically comic in the idea that the veterinary student had ended his career in this way. He snickered, finding the situation quite humorous.