“Certainly.”
“Will you come with me?”
The question took her by surprise and she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, “God willing.” But he said sadly, “You’ve changed toward me, Busayna. I know it.”
Busayna could see another quarrel coming, so she said with a sigh, “You’re tired out now. Go get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
She left but he didn’t sleep. He stayed awake for a long while thinking, recalling a hundred times the face of the presiding general as he asked him slowly, as though reveling in his humiliation, “Your father’s a property guard, son?” “Property guard?” — an unfamiliar expression, one that he’d given no thought to and that he’d never expected. An expression that was his whole life. He had lived it for long years, suffered its oppression, resisted it with all his might, and tried to rid himself of it. He had struggled so that he might escape through the opening provided by the Police Academy into a respectable, decent life, but that expression — “property guard” — was waiting for him at the end of the exhausting race, to ruin everything at the final moment. Why hadn’t they told him at the beginning? Why had the general left it to the end and shown how pleased he was with his answers to the questions, then directed his final thrust at him, as much as to say to him, “Get out of my sight, you son of a doorkeeper! You want to get into the police, you son of a doorkeeper? The son of the doorkeeper wants to be an officer? That’s a good one, I swear!”
Taha started to pace the room for he had made up his mind that he had to do something. He told himself that he could not remain silent while they humiliated him in this way. Slowly, he started to imagine fantastic scenes of revenge: he saw himself, for example, delivering the generals on the committee a speech about equal opportunity, rights, and the justice that God and his Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — had bidden us to. He went on rebuking them until they melted in shame for what they had done and apologized to him and announced his acceptance into the academy. In the final scene, he saw himself grasping the presiding general’s collar and shouting in his face, “What business is it of yours what my father’s job is, you cheating bribe-taker!” Then he directed at it a number of violent blows, in response to which the general fell to the ground, drowning in his own blood. It was his habit to imagine scenes like these whenever he found himself in difficult situations that he could not control. This time, however, the scenes of revenge, for all their power, could not assuage his thirst. Feelings of humiliation continued to bear down on him, until an idea occurred to him that he could not get out of his head. Sitting down at the small desk and taking out a piece of paper and a pen, he wrote in large letters at the top of the page, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Complaint presented to His Excellency the President of the Republic.” He stopped for a moment and tipped his head back, feeling some comfort at the grandiloquence of the words and their solemnity. Then he applied himself diligently to writing.
I have left this space empty because I couldn’t think what to write in it. Words are all right to describe ordinary sorrows or joys, but the pen is incapable of describing great moments of happiness, such as those lived by Zaki el Dessouki with his sweetheart Rabab and, despite the unfortunate incident, Zaki Bey will always remember the lovely Rabab with her magical, golden-brown face, her wide, black eyes, and her full, crimson lips when she had undone her hair so that it hung down her back and sat in front of him drinking whisky and caressing him with her provocative voice, and how she excused herself to go to the bathroom and came back wearing a short nightdress, opened to reveal her charms; and he will remember that playful smile of hers as she asked him, “Where shall we sleep?” and the irresistible pleasure that her soft, warm body bestowed on him. Zaki Bey remembers every detail of that superb lovemaking and then suddenly the picture in his head becomes distorted and is violently disturbed, and finally cuts out altogether, leaving behind it a dark emptiness and a painful feeling of headache and nausea. The last thing he remembers is a low sound like the hissing of a snake, followed by a penetrating smell that stung the membranes of his nose, at which moment Rabab started examining him with a strange look as though watching for something. After that, Zaki Bey remembers nothing…
He awoke with difficulty, the hammers of an appalling headache banging on his head, and found Abaskharon standing next to him, showing signs of apprehension and whispering insistently, “Your Excellency is unwell. Shall I call a doctor?”
Zaki shook his heavy head with difficulty, making an extraordinary effort at the same time to gather his scattered thoughts. He thought he must have been asleep for a long while and wanted to know the time, so he looked at his gold wristwatch, but it wasn’t there. Nor was his wallet on the table next to him where he’d left it. At this, he knew for sure he’d been robbed and little by little started to make an inventory of what was missing: in addition to the gold watch and the five hundred pounds that were in his wallet, Zaki Bey lost a set of gold Cross pens (unused, in their case) and a pair of Persol sunglasses. The worst blow, however, was the theft of the diamond signet ring belonging to his elder sister Dawlat el Dessouki.
“I’ve been robbed, Abaskharon! Rabab robbed me!”
Zaki Bey kept repeating this as he sat almost naked on the edge of the couch that shortly before had been a cradle of love. At that moment, in his underwear and with his frail body and empty, collapsed mouth (he had removed his false teeth so as to be able to kiss the Beloved), he looked very much like some wretched comic actor, resting between scenes. Overwhelmed by misery he put his head in his hands while Abaskharon, agitated by this momentous event and excited as a locked-up dog, started to strike the ground with his crutch and pace the room in every direction. Then he bent over his master and gasped out, “Excellency, should we report the bitch to the police?”
Zaki thought a little, then shook his head and remained silent. Abaskharon came closer and whispered, “Excellency, did she give you something to drink or spray something in Your Excellency’s face?”
Zaki el Dessouki had needed that question in order to be able to articulate his anger and he flared up, raining insults on the unfortunate Abaskharon. In the end, however, he accepted his help in getting up and dressing, for he had decided to leave.
It was past midnight and the stores on Suleiman Basha had closed their doors. Zaki Bey walked with dragging steps, staggering from the effects of the headache and fatigue, an enormous fury slowly building up inside him. He thought of the efforts and the money that he had spent on Rabab and the valuable things she had stolen from him. How could all this have happened to him? Zaki Bey the distinguished, the woman charmer and lover of noblewomen, tricked and robbed by a low prostitute! Perhaps she was with her lover at this minute, giving him the Persol glasses and the gold Cross pens (unused) and laughing with him at the gullible old man who had “fallen for it.”
His ire was increased by the fact that he could not inform the police for fear of the scandal, echoes of which would inevitably reach his sister Dawlat. Likewise he could not go after Rabab or make a complaint against her at the Cairo Bar where she worked since he knew for sure that the owner of the bar and everyone who worked there were hardened criminals with previous convictions and that the robbery might even have been carried out for them. In any case there was no possibility they would support him against Rabab, and it was even on the cards that they would beat him up, as he had actually seen them do with disorderly customers.