Hatim went back, climbed up to the roof, and started asking the residents for Abduh’s new address. He put up with their insolent looks and hostile responses (whose hidden message was “Leave Abduh alone. You’ve done enough to him.”) but in the end got nowhere. In the evening he sat in his car in front of the locked kiosk on the off chance that Abduh might have forgotten something and come back to get it with the spare key that he kept. He went to the kiosk three days running but Abduh never showed up.
Hatim did not give up. He went on searching for him everywhere and with everyone who knew him but in vain. After a long week of searching, it became clear to him that Abduh had gone forever and a raging wave of sorrow and despair swept over him. Painful and conflicting feelings engulfed him: he missed Abduh — his ardor, his strong hard body, his good nature and purity, his husky voice and Sa’idi accent. He brimmed with compassion for him too because he knew how much he had loved his son and how much his death would grieve him. He felt regret that he had left him that day at the hospital and gone to the paper, telling himself, “I could have postponed the work to be with him at that difficult time. He needed me beside him but was ashamed to ask.”
Day by day Hatim’s agony increased. A sense of being truly unlucky possessed him. He had spent many years in misery and suffering before finding a biddable and sensitive companion who didn’t cause problems, and as soon as his life had begun to settle down, the child had died and Abd Rabbuh had disappeared, leaving Hatim to start his wretched journey over again. He would have to cruise the streets of Downtown every night to pick up a Central Security recruit who might turn out to be a thief or a criminal who would beat him up or rob him, as had happened many times before. He would have to return to the Chez Nous in search of a barghal and to the Gebelawi baths in El Hussein to pick up some adolescent with whom to satisfy his lust, only to have to put up in return with his vulgarity and greediness. Why had he lost Abduh after he had loved him, and grown to feel at ease with him and planned their life together? Was it really so difficult for him to enjoy happiness with a lover over time? If he were religious, he might have believed that his tribulations were a punishment for his homosexuality, but he knew at least ten homosexuals who lived quiet, carefree lives with their lovers. Why should he, specifically, lose Abduh?
Bit by bit his mood deteriorated. He lost his appetite for food, started drinking a lot, and kept to the house. He stopped going to the paper except for the most pressing of emergencies, which he would resolve and then hurry back home, where everything was silence, sorrow, and memories: Abduh used to sit here, and eat here, and put out his cigarette here, and… here he used to lie next to him, while Hatim stroked his black body, kissing every part of it and whispering in a voice trembling with the heat of desire, “You’re mine, only mine, Abduh. You’re my beautiful black stallion.”
Hatim spent entire nights wallowing in his memories and going over his relationship with Abduh minute by minute till one night from amid the clouds of drunkenness and despair, an idea emerged that flashed in his mind like lightning. He recalled that Abduh had said once jokingly, “A Sa’idi can’t live without other Sa’idis. You know, if I go any place I have to ask where’s the cafe that the Sa’idis hang out.”
Hatim pulled himself together and looked impatiently at his watch. It was past 1 A.M. He dressed hurriedly and in half an hour he was asking people on the street in Imbaba where the Sa’idi cafe was. In another half hour, he’d found it. In the short distance he traversed between the car and the entrance to the cafe, he felt the sweat pouring off his brow, and his heart was beating so hard it almost stopped.
The cafe was cramped and filthy. Hatim hurried in and looked around him impatiently. Later he would ponder the relation between our extreme desire for something and our ability to realize it — was what we wanted inevitably brought about if we wanted it enough? He longed so much to find Abduh that he did in fact find him. He was sitting in the farthest part of the cafe smoking a waterpipe, wearing a capacious, dark-colored gallabiya and had a large Sa’idi turban on his head. At that moment he looked enormous and imposing, like a magic dark-skinned jinni that had materialized from the world of the imagination. He looked too as though he had returned to his true self, to his origin and his roots; as though he had taken off along with his Western clothes his whole contingent and exceptional history with Hatim Rasheed. The latter stood before him for a moment in silence, looking at him closely as though confirming, verifying, laying hold of, his presence, lest he disappear again. An instant later he rushed toward him and exclaimed in a gasping voice that made the customers turn their heads in his direction, “Abduh. At last.”
Their intercourse on the first night was simple and spontaneous, as though she had been his wife for years. The rose opened to the touch of his fingers and he watered it more than once till it was quenched. This amazed him and he took to asking himself as he recalled the details of their wedding night how was it that he had succeeded easily with Radwa when he had never touched a woman before? Where had his apprehension, hesitation, and fear of failure gone? Perhaps it was because he felt at ease emotionally with Radwa, or because he had applied all Sheikh Bilal’s advice, or because his wife had encouraged him with her experience and shown him the secret sources of pleasure. This she had done skillfully and adeptly, though without abandoning her natural modesty as a Muslim woman.
Taha thought about all this and came to the conclusion that his marriage to this woman was a great benison from Our Lord, Glorious and Mighty, because she was a woman who was refined, honest, and sincere in her Islam. He loved her and felt at ease with their daily routine. He would leave her in the morning and spend the whole day at the camp. Then he would return after the last prayer of the day to find the room tidy and clean and delicious hot food waiting for him. How he loved to sit with her at the low round table to eat their dinner! He would tell her what had happened during the day and she would recount to him her conversations with her sister Muslims and give him a summary of what she had read in the newspapers (which he didn’t have time to read). They would laugh together at the antics of little Abd el Rahman and his mischief, which would only be put to a stop when he fell all of a sudden into the clutches of sleepiness, at which point Radwa would carry him to the bed she had prepared for him on the floor, returning to remove the remains of the food and carefully wash the dishes.
Then she would excuse herself to go into the bathroom and Taha would get straight into their old iron bed to wait for her, stretched out on his back, gazing at the ceiling, his heart brimming with that delicious, nervy passion that he had come to know and love and to which he looked forward every night — his implacable longing for her; her enchanting body, refreshed by the hot water, naked but for a large towel that enveloped her as she emerged from the bathroom; the tense, thrilling, silent moments, gravid with desire, while she turned her back to him and prettied herself before the mirror; and the confused words, empty of meaning, that she spoke in a hushed, gasping voice as she made a pretense of conversing on any subject, as though to conceal her desire for him. He would understand the signal and grant her no delay, crushing to himself her supple, tall, slender body and tickling her with his kisses and his burning breath till his sweetness overflowed and he emptied himself in her embrace of all his feelings — his sorrows, his memories, his frustrated hopes, his unstilled desire for revenge and his savage hatred for his torturers; even those blazing, obscure sexual yearnings that had so often swept over him and made him ache in his room on the roof — all this he would empty into Radwa’s body, to emerge liberated, at rest, the fire damped and replaced by a calm, steady affection that grew more firmly rooted every night.