“And what did your family do?”
“I sent someone to tell them I was all right and I’ll go and visit them as soon as possible, God willing. I pray God to forgive me if I’ve done them harm.”
Listening to her, he felt she was truthful and he liked a certain serious, sincere expression that appeared on her beautiful face while she was talking, as though she were a guilty child confessing frankly. He noted too that her body was full and well proportioned and her breasts swelling and firm (after which he reproached himself for the thought and asked God’s forgiveness).
A few days later, Sheikh Bilal summoned him to his office and shook his hand in welcome. Then he looked at him for a moment with a mysterious smile on his face and said in a deep voice, as though resuming a conversation in which they had been engaged, “So… what do you think?”
“About what?”
The sheikh let out a loud laugh and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Sheikh Taha? I’m talking about Radwa, man.”
Taha said nothing and smiled in embarrassment. The sheikh patted him on his shoulder and said, “Congratulations, my boy.”
As soon as the evening prayer was over on Thursday, the brothers hovered around Taha congratulating him, while joyful ululations rang out from the room set aside for the women. For two days the women had exhausted themselves getting the bride ready and putting together her trousseau. After a quarter of an hour of ululations and congratulations, Sheikh Bilal sat down to perform the marriage ceremony. Radwa deputized Brother Hamza (like her, from Asyut) to conclude the marriage contract and other brothers volunteered themselves as witnesses. Sheikh Bilal made the normal short speech about marriage in God’s Law, then placed Taha’s hand in Hamza’s and pronounced the words of the contract, which they repeated after him. When they had finished, Sheikh Bilal murmured “O God, make their union blessed, guide them in obedience to You, and provide them with righteous offspring!” Then he placed his hand on Taha’s head, saying, “God bless you and your marriage and join you and your wife in good fortune!”
The brothers then all rushed to embrace the groom and congratulate him and the ululations rang out loud and the sisters started singing, while beating on tambourines,
Taha was seeing the Islamic style of wedding celebration for the first time and was much affected by the joy of the sisters and their songs and by the enthusiasm of the brothers in their congratulations. Next the sisters accompanied the bride to her new home — a single spacious room leading to a small separate bathroom in the large building set aside for married couples (and which originally, in the days of the Swiss, had been a dwelling for the cement company’s quarry workers; it had been left abandoned and completely forgotten about until some of the Islamist workers in the company took it and made it into a secret camp for the Gamaa). The women left and the mosque was quiet. The brothers sat with the groom and there was merry conversation interspersed with loud laughter. Then Sheikh Bilal stood up, saying, “Off with us then, brothers.”
Taha tried to detain him, but the sheikh laughed and said, “On your wedding night you mustn’t dissipate your energy in conversation!” Laughing comments showered down from the brothers as they left the mosque. Taha bade them farewell and they departed. Left on his own, he began to feel terrified. He had imagined what he would do on the wedding night in numerous ways, then in the end he’d gone ahead and decided to let things proceed as God ordained, though the idea that he had no experience of women while his wife did have previous experience, perhaps making her hard to please, continued to make him anxious. As though reading his thoughts, Sheikh Bilal had taken him aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriage and his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothing for a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not a virgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be a weak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He said sarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity, even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that if one of them marries a woman who was previously married, the thought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat her badly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam has no such complexes.”
These were all indirect messages, as Taha understood, about how he should treat Radwa. The sheikh reviewed with him what takes places between a man and a woman and explained to him the verse from The Cow chapter, Your women are a tillage for you; so come unto your tillage as you wish, and forward for your souls, expounding at length on the Qur’anic expression “and forward for your souls” through which the Lord, Sublime and Glorious, teaches us how to have intercourse with women in a gentle and humane fashion. The sheikh had an ability to talk about even the most precise details of sex in a serious and respectable way that did not offend one’s modesty. Taha benefited from what he said and learned many things that he had not known before, which made him love the man even more, so that he thought to himself, “Even if my father himself were with me, he would not have done more for me than Sheikh Bilal has.”
Now the wedding ceremonies were over and the brothers had left him on his own to face the critical moment. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and then entered the bride’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of the bed. She had taken her headscarf off. Her hair was black and smooth and reached her shoulders, and its blackness, next to the rosy whiteness of her skin, was fascinating. For the first time, Taha noticed her beautiful neck, her small hands, and her delicate fingertips. With his heart beating hard, he cleared his throat and said in an embarrassed voice, “Peace be upon you.”
Radwa smiled, bowed her head, and whispered gently, blushing, “And upon you be peace and the mercy of God and His blessings.”
Hatim Rasheed heard the news the next day. He had stayed late at the paper until the first edition was out and returned exhausted to the house about 4 A.M., telling himself, “I’ll sleep, then check on Abduh in the morning.” He woke late, showered, put on his clothes, and left to go to the hospital. In the lobby of the building he met El Shazli the doorkeeper, who said to him tersely, “Abduh’s left you the keys of the room and the kiosk.”
“What?” exclaimed Hatim, taken aback. The doorkeeper informed him of the death of the child and what had happened afterward. Hatim lit a cigarette and asked, making an effort to appear calm, “Did he tell you where he was going?”
“He said he was going to live in Imbaba and he refused to leave a new address.”