A vivacious pretty girl was quick to reply, "Of course we remember her. She suddenly disappeared and we haven't seen her since!"
"Do you have any clues to her disappearance?" A different girl, with a look of spiteful cunning in her eyes, answered him, "We only know what we told her mother when she questioned us. We saw her several times with a well-dressed man in a suit, walking in the Mousky."
An icy shudder shook his whole body, as he asked, "You say you saw her with a man in a suit?"
The cruel look now left the girl's eyes as they registered the young man's anguish. One girl spoke softly: "Yes, that's right."
"And you told her mother that?"
"Yes."
He thanked them and walked away. He was certain they would talk about him all the way home. They would have a good laugh about the young fool who went to Tell el-Kebir to earn more money for his fiancee, who left him for a stranger who appealed to her more. What a fool he had been! Probably the whole quarter was gossiping about his stupidity. Now he knew that Uncle Kamil concealed the raw truth, just as Hamida's foster mother had. In a state of complete confusion he told himself, "I was afraid this might happen!" Now all he could remember were those very faint doubts.
Now he was moaning and muttering, "Oh God! How can I believe it? Has she really run off with another man? Who would ever believe it?" She was alive, then. They were wrong to look for her in the police station and the hospital. They had not realized she was sleeping contentedly in the arms of the man she had run off with. But she had promised herself to him! Had she meant to deceive him all along? Or was she mistaken in thinking she was attracted to him… How did she meet the man in the suit? When did she fall in love with him? Why did she run off with him?
Abbas' face had now turned ghastly white and he felt cold all over. His eyes glowered darkly. Suddenly he raised his head, gazing at the houses in the street. He looked at their windows and asked himself, "In which one is she now lying at her lover's side?" The seeds of doubt were now gone and a burning anger mixed with hatred took its place. His heart was twisted by jealousy. Or was it disappointment? Conceit and pride are the fuel of jealousy and he had little of either. But he did have hopes and dreams and now they were shattered. Now he wanted revenge, even if it only meant spitting at her. In fact, revenge took such possession of him that he longed to knife her treacherous heart.
Now he knew the true meaning of her afternoon walks: she had been parading before the street wolves. Anyway, she must be in love with this man in the suit; otherwise how could she prostitute herself rather than marry Abbas?
He bit his lip at the thought and turned back, tired from walking alone. His hand touched the box with the necklace in his pocket, and he gave a hollow laugh that was more an angry scream. If only he could strangle her with the gold necklace. He recalled his joy in the goldsmith's shop when he selected the gift. The memory flowed through him like a gentle spring breeze, but, meeting the glare of his troubled heart, it was transformed into a raging sirocco…
29
Salim Alwan had scarcely finished signing the contract on his desk when the man sitting opposite him grasped his hand and said, "Well done, indeed, Salim Bey. This is a great deal of money."
Salim sat watching the man as he passed through the office door. A profitable deal, indeed. He had sold his entire tea stock to this man. He made a good profit and lost a burdensome worry, especially since his health could no longer bear the strains of the black market. Despite all this, he still told himself angrily, "A great deal of money, yes, but with a curse on it. There seems to be a curse on everything in my life." It was true what people said, that only a faint shadow of the old Salim Alwan remained.
His nerves were slowly devouring him and he was forever thinking about death. In the old days he neither lacked faith nor was a coward, but now his frayed nerves made him forget the comforts of faith. He still remembered how in his illness he had lain there in pain, his chest rising and falling with that lung pain, his eyes failing fast. At such times life seemed to flow out from every part of him and his spirit seemed to have left his body. Could this really have happened? Isn't it true a man goes mad if his fingernails are pulled out? What happens, then, when his life and spirit are extracted?
He often wished God would give him the good fortune of those who die of a heart attack. They simply expire in the midst of talking, eating, standing, or sitting. It was as if they outwitted death completely by slipping off stealthily. Salim Alwan abandoned hope of this good fortune, for indeed his father and grandfather had both demonstrated to him the sort of death he might expect. He would probably linger in great agony on the point of death for half a day, and this no doubt would turn his sons gray.
Who would ever believe that Salim Alwan — healthy and life-loving — would harbor such fears? But not only dying terrified him, for now his feverish attention was also drawn to death itself. He spent a good deal of time analyzing all aspects of it.
His imagination and the culture from ages past told him that some of his senses remained after death. Didn't people say that the eyes of a dead person could still see his family staring down at him? After all, he had seen death as clear as daylight before him and he had almost felt eternity enclose him. Indeed, he felt he was already in the darkness of the tomb, with all its eerie loneliness, with bones, shrouds, and its suffocating narrowness and the painful love and longing he would probably feel for the living world. He thought about all this, his heart contracting in painful melancholy, his hands and feet icy and his brow feverish. Neither did he forget the afterlife. The assessment of his life, the retribution… O God, what a vast chasm there was between death and paradise…
So it was he clung to the fringe of life, even though it gave him no pleasure. All that was left for him was to audit the accounts and make business deals.
After his convalescence he had made a point of having a serious consultation with his doctor. He assured Alwan that he was cured of his heart condition but advised him to take care and to live cautiously. Salim Alwan complained about his insomnia and tensions, and the doctor advised a nerve specialist. Now he consulted a procession of specialists in nerves, heart, chest, and head. Thus his illness opened a door to a world populated by germs, symptoms, and diagnoses. It was amazing, for he had never believed in medicine or doctors. Now in his troubled state his faith in them was entire.
His working and leisure hours were now almost completely submerged in his private hell of anxieties. Indeed, he was always in a state of war with himself or with people. His employees saw the transformation before their astonished eyes. His manager left after twenty-five years of service, and those few employees who remained were disgruntled. The alley people thought he was half crazy, and Husniya once commented, "It was the bowl of green wheat that did it."