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.