How much I miss him now, in spite of everything! If he were alive, I'd ask him to help me in my search. He was the one who taught me Greek and Latin and said I was gifted at languages and should put my talent to use. I think he wasn't wrong. I have taught myself to read hieroglyphs and their derivatives and after I married Mahmoud I learnt Arabic. My father would be proud of me, in that respect anyway. He used to read his papers and translations from the Greek to me and he encouraged me too to translate and enthused over everything I wrote. All the same, I am sure I couldn't have convinced him to accept my marriage to Mahmoud. Impossible.
I haven't seen my mother either since I came to Egypt and I don't know what her feelings are now. She writes to me sometimes, briefly, just for form's sake. She wasn't pleased by my first marriage and I suppose her to be even more set against the second. My sister Fiona was the only one to understand my marriage to Mahmoud straight away. Just as she forgave my marriage to Michael, she blessed my marriage to Mahmoud. She forgave me for the business with Michael, even if I haven't forgiven myself. No wonder my father used to call her 'the Saint'. She writes me her long, loving letters all the time. Will she come to Egypt one day as she has promised? And how would she be able to get in touch with us if she did, with our leaving now for a place so far from civilization? I have written to her telling her to postpone her travel plans.
But let me think this through to the end. Do I truly want her to come or do I want her, despite my missing her, to remain distant? I don't want things that remind me of that painful experience. I recovered from it only with difficulty. I'm certain, of course, that she'd never do anything to bring back the memory; perhaps she'd not even mention Michael's name if we met. It's not she that's the problem, it's me: it's my feeling that I stole him from my sister. If only Fiona knew how lucky she was to have been saved from him!
Our close neighbour, a friend and youthful companion of my father's, like him a teacher, with the face of an angel and soft spoken, he was joined to my father by their interest in the study of the language and the civilization of the Greeks, though while my father was content all his life to be an amateur, Michael published articles in a small local journal, and sometimes they'd accept essays from him in a well-known history journal. I believed, like everyone else, that when he visited the house it was because of his interest in Fiona. He would spend hours in conversation with her in the garden, and there was nothing strange in that. Fiona was the more beautiful, the younger, and the more congenial. Just to look at her shining face was a pleasure. I know my body is acceptable but my face is ordinariness itself. Despite all that, one year after my father's death, from the shock of which I had yet to recover, he surprised me with a proposal of marriage.
I entered my father's study one sunny morning and found him toppled over a book he was reading. He had never been sick before and complained of no ailments; indeed, on that particular morning he had been more than usually cheerful. Mahmoud told me he'd experienced a similar shock. I didn't understand the meaning of that death. I don't understand what meaning death has, but since it is inevitable, we should do something to justify our lives. We should leave a mark on this earth before we leave it.
When Michael came to me in the garden, I asked him, 'Why me?' and he replied, 'Because I love you.' 'And Fiona?' And he repeated, 'You are the one I love.' My mother, in great anger, said, 'He led us all to believe that he wanted Fiona and now he wants to get engaged to her sister? Anyone would think there had been a scandal! Has anything been going on between you that we don't know about?' I swore with perfect honesty that I hadn't thought about him at all, and that his offer had taken me by surprise, not to mention that I myself didn't want him. But it was Fiona herself who settled things. She said she had never thought of Michael as anything but a friend of her father's and the family's, and even if he had proposed to her she would have refused.
If that was true, then she was not only the more beautiful but also the more intelligent.
No doubt she understood him better than I. She said she wouldn't accept Michael under any circumstances and left it up to me to accept or refuse him. I thought a little and then agreed. I told myself that beautiful Fiona would surely find better opportunities.
Why did I ignore my mother's insistence that, whatever my sister might say, this marriage would be a betrayal of her? I should have understood, as she did, that he was not a person to be trusted, but at the time I had no way of knowing his other characteristics. It was only after the marriage that I experienced his insane jealousy of other men. He imposed on us a complete isolation during which we neither visited nor were visited and hardly even left the house. His jealousy extended even to books.
He'd been used to seeing me studying with my father and had demonstrated in his presence a concern for the encouragement of my studies. Then, after we married, he came to hate the sight of me holding a book. He would mock my readings and my translations. What was I going to do with them when I had no employment? Wouldn't it be better if I concerned myself with the housework? And all the time he would accuse me of ignorance and expose mistakes in my readings of the Latin or Greek.
At the beginning, I tried praising his work. I would display an exaggerated admiration for his articles and studies, which I knew he copied from others with minor alterations. It was no use. At least he knew that I was playing the hypocrite with him and that my admiration was false. He refused, however, to acknowledge that there might be any truth to the criticism he perceived in my comments; rather, he would insist that I, like other readers, had failed to grasp the central idea of his article. That also was my fault. I was responsible because his ideas were beyond us.
And from the start of the marriage, too, I discovered his miserliness. He wasn't just a miser with money. That's no great sin in a poor country that doesn't permit its people to live in luxury. But he was grudging in everything, even his feelings.
On the few occasions when he made love to me, he behaved as though he were bestowing on me a great favour, and one that he was in a hurry to be done with. I only really discovered my body with Mahmoud, after the failed attempts with Michael. With Mahmoud, I came to know that the practice of love is a sublime moment in which two bodies fly together, leaving the world's orbit for a pleasure that is new every time. A unique grace would descend, as though each occasion were the first, and as though that final gasp were a new birth, or a new resurrection — something I never knew with Michael, something utterly different from the stickiness of the sweat, the revulsion and the tension of a body desperate to be watered and, with that, relieved of the torture of an entangling that led only to disgust at oneself and one's bedmate.
Once I asked him, 'Why did you marry me?' to which he replied sarcastically, 'To torture myself.' Maybe he was telling the truth. A man can't marry a woman he doesn't love unless he wants to torture himself. But why? To the end of his life I could see in his eyes a sad and abject look when he gazed at Fiona. So why didn't he marry her and why did he choose me? I have known men in my life who avoid beautiful women for fear of the looks of others who ask, 'Does that man deserve that woman?' Perhaps he too was that cowardly, or maybe he was indeed sure he didn't deserve her, so he chose the ordinary sister for whom nobody would envy him to torture himself, as he said, and to torture me along with him for four long years.