“This is the first letter I’ve received.”
“And what did it say?”
“Silly things,” she said wearily as she looked down again.
I thought back suddenly to the sight of her hands as they tore up the letter, and I felt a pang of suspicion that caused my body to tremble with fright.
“Why did you tear it up?” I shouted. “Why did you tear it up?”
She let out a sigh of near despair, then remained silent for some time.
Finally she said in calm resignation, “I received this miserable letter at school. I don’t think you can possibly doubt this, since it would have been madness for him to send it to the house. And now, ask yourself this question: Why would I have kept the letter and brought it home if it contained something suspicious? Why didn’t I tear it up at school after reading it there?”
Silenced by the cogency of her argument, I think I regretted my wild shouting.
As for Rabab, she continued, “If I were guilty, you wouldn’t find me in this bad position, and you wouldn’t know a thing about it. I’ll never forgive you for thinking ill of me.”
Stung by her words and painfully embarrassed, I lowered my glance lest she see the signs of defeat in my eyes. Yet, pained though I was, I hadn’t forgotten the mysteries I wanted to resolve.
“What you’re saying is plausible,” I said softly, “but maybe the person who wrote the letter didn’t sign it because he thought it would be easy for you to guess who he is — somebody who stops you on the street, for example.”
My gentle tone of voice did nothing to mitigate the effect of my words. In fact, it may even have exacerbated it.
“It’s my habit when I walk down the street to look straight ahead and not pay any attention to anybody!” she said resentfully.
I knew well enough the truth of her words, having experienced it first-hand. However, in my mind’s eye I could see the two men who had shared my admiration for her in the past.
So I asked, “Might it not be your former neighbor, the one who asked for your hand? I mean Muhammad Gawdat.”
She replied without hesitation, “He’s a dignified man who would never lower himself to such vulgar manners. Besides, I found out from my family around a month ago that he’s about to get married.”
After some thought, I said uncertainly, “During the same period when I used to hover around you, there was a heavy man that would regularly devour you with his eyes. Isn’t it possible that he wrote it?”
She knit her brow in an attempt to recall the person I was talking about. Then she shook her head, saying, “I don’t know anything about him.”
I tried to remind her of who he was, but she seemed not even to have been aware of his existence.
So, feeling angry and desperate, I said, “I want to know who he is so that I can put him in his place.”
In a tired-sounding voice she said, “Who cares who it was! If I hadn’t been so flustered that I tore it up, we’d be sitting here now reading it and laughing about it! So why don’t you just forget about it? It’s caused us enough grief as it is!”
I bit my lip and said nothing, still feeling angered and defeated.
Then she continued, “It’s a trivial matter. In fact, it’s too trivial for us to be getting so concerned about it.”
Heaving a sigh, I said mechanically, “If only you hadn’t torn it up!”
“Are you still suspicious of me?” she asked me sharply, her eyes flashing with anger.
“No,” I replied hurriedly, “but I won’t find any peace until I can teach him a lesson!”
Irritably she replied, “But we don’t know who he is, so what can we do?”
I was angered by what she’d said, but I avoided expressing how I felt lest I make her angry too. Apparently exhausted from standing, she moved over to the chair by the dressing table and sat down. At the same moment I felt a pain in my back, so I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. She was innocent and telling the truth, and the matter really was trivial. If only I could erase the memory of her tearing up that letter! Maybe the culprit was just some curious bystander who watched her coming and going. If only I didn’t fall prey so easily to jealousy. I knew myself well, and I knew that I could feel jealous of an illusion, that is, of nothing. So where could I find a far-away island on which no man had ever set foot?
Then suddenly my imagination took me to my mother’s room, and a chill went through me as I imagined her saying to me, “Didn’t I tell you so?”
I exhaled forcefully like someone trying to drive away a bad dream. I glanced over at Rabab and found her staring into my face in dismay.
Then a new thought occurred to me that I didn’t hesitate to express.
“Rabab,” I said, “why do you go on working for the government? Why do you endure such hardship unnecessarily? Why aren’t you content to stay at home like other wives?”
After looking at me long and hard, she said calmly, “Don’t you trust me?”
“God forbid that I shouldn’t trust you!” I said hurriedly, “But I.…”
Interrupting me, she said, “If you don’t trust me, it’s better for me to leave your house!”
“Rabab!”
Ignoring my anguish, she said, “But if you do still trust me, I’ll stay at my job.”
“As you wish,” I said with resignation.
Then in the same tone she said, “I don’t want to hear another word on this subject.”
And so it was. I left the house and went wandering about aimlessly till I was totally exhausted, then I went home again. We met as though nothing had happened between us. We had supper together, then went to our room and exchanged a meaningful look.
Then, in spite of ourselves, we burst out laughing. We went to bed and lay down, and I gave her a good-night kiss. For some strange reason, I was tempted to make another attempt at what we had agreed to avoid. Even stranger is the fact that I didn’t have an ounce of confidence, yet I still almost tried, and would have done so if fear hadn’t brought me back to my senses. It occurred to me to ask her what had made her sentence herself to deprivation. My lips parted and I voiced the question in my heart, yet it froze on the tip of my tongue. And fear, again, was what stopped me.
50
When I opened my eyes in the early morning, I recalled the events of the previous day and pondered them in amazement. It seemed to me now that the issue hadn’t called for so much suffering and pain. And I said to myself: If she’d torn up the letter at school, I never would have known about it, and the fact that she didn’t do that is testimony to her truthfulness. Then I recalled the image of her as she tore up the letter and threw it out the window, and it was as though she’d been tearing my heart to shreds and scattering them to the wind. Before I got out of bed, a violent shudder went through my body and I shook my head angrily, as though to shake off the illusions that had accumulated there. When we’d finished our breakfast and were sitting on the long seat sipping our tea, I looked over at her furtively and found her beloved face to be serene, smiling, and radiant with beauty and peace. Seeing her this way, I was stricken with remorse for the way I’d acted toward her, and I said to myself: Truly, Satan is an accursed tempter! The next morning a thought came to me like lightning: Isn’t it possible, I wondered, that she received the letter at home and that she hadn’t had the chance to tear it up elsewhere? But I soon rejected the idea. After all, it was ridiculous, as she had said herself, to think that anybody could be so foolish as to send a love letter to the husband’s home. Curses on illusions! My beloved was worthy of all trust, and trust is everything. If it weren’t for trust, there’s no telling what evil people might perpetrate.