However, she smiled at me and said, “If I’m not doing well, it’s because of some insomnia that came over me last night. If I can manage to sleep even a couple of hours, I’ll get my energy back.”
“Try to sleep no matter what it takes,” I said imploringly.
I gazed into her eyes for a long time. She looked at me for a minute, then quietly looked down again. I had to go, so I got up, promising to visit again after coming back from the ministry. Then I left.
I arrived at the ministry at ten past eight and set to work. However, the work wasn’t sufficient to make me forget myself. I went back to thinking about Rabab. I pictured the grave look in her eyes and felt a forlornness I couldn’t explain. I tried valiantly to lose myself in the task at hand, but it did no good. I was defeated by my own thoughts, which have always had a tendency to create fear out of nothing. Feeling more worried than ever, I thought to myself: Here’s Rabab unable to come home and looking gaunt and frail, so how can I be at peace? And how can I leave her? Faintheartedness in the face of the most minor misfortune was nothing new to me. After all, there were countless times when I’d been unable to sleep on account of some minor indisposition afflicting my mother. So, I thought, maybe this fear I’m feeling is an effect of that chronic faintheartedness of mine. But oh, what a terrible, heavy gloom had come over me! My heart shrank in fear and pain as though it were holding back a cry for help that was trying to make itself heard. Why torture myself by forcing myself to endure such a wait for no reason? And with that, I folded up my papers and requested permission to leave, explaining that my wife was ill. I left the ministry at nine-thirty and got to the house a few minutes before ten. The closer I got to the house the more forlorn I felt, and I entered the building in near dread. I rang the doorbell, and before long it opened. But to my astonishment, the person who opened the door for me was Dr. Amin Rida. The doors to the small parlor onto which the front door opened were closed, and he was the only person there. I hadn’t seen him since the day of the luncheon that had been hosted in this same house. What on earth would have brought him here at such an early hour? And why would he be staying alone in this closed room?
I extended my hand, saying, “Peace be upon you!”
“And upon you be peace,” he replied as he extended his hand in turn.
I seemed to notice him looking at me strangely through his spectacles as he said, “Won’t you come in?”
Then he turned away from me, saying, “I’ll wait for you in the reception room.”
Then he headed for the reception room, opened the door, and went in. As for me, I went to the large parlor, opened the door and went in, then proceeded to Madame Nazli’s room. However, I’d hardly taken two steps when my ears were bombarded by an eerie sound that I don’t know how to describe. Was it a prolonged sigh? A muffled scream? Whatever it was, it was clearly coming from beyond the closed door to Rabab’s room. I went rushing toward the door, turned the knob, and went in, my heart aflutter with dismay. I looked over at the bed and saw Rabab lying there. She was covered up to the neck and her handkerchief was wrapped around her face from the top of her head to below her chin. Her eyes were closed and her face looked haggard and sallow, with a frightening whiteness to it. The handkerchief-bound face brought back vague memories that I didn’t have time to clarify. However, it awakened an unspoken terror deep within me. The next moment I became aware of the fact that Madame Nazli was sitting on the edge of the sofa sobbing piteously with her head buried in the bed pillow. As for Sabah, who hadn’t seen me come in, she stood at the foot of the bed weeping and wailing.
Lord! Had Rabab really died?
60
I cried like a madman, “Tell me what’s happened!!”
Turning toward me, Sabah shouted hysterically, “Sir! Sir!”
The woman looked up in obvious terror and gaped into my face with eyes red from weeping. For a moment she froze and neither spoke nor wept as though my arrival was, to her, a fate worse than death. Then she gasped and burst into tears. I looked back and forth between the two women in a daze, then my eyes came to rest on the handkerchief-bound face. How was I to submit to the verdict of this terrifying reality? My shattered heart made me want to throw myself on my wife and to blubber and scream till I died. But I didn’t move a muscle. A strange force caused me to stay frozen in place and filled me with a ruthless madness. I was overtaken by a wild rage that was willing to defy the power of death itself and the tyranny of Fate. I refused to believe my eyes, and it was impossible to convince me. What did this mean?
Gesticulating wildly in the mother’s face, I asked her in a voice that I was hearing for the first time, “How? How?”
She spread her arms in despair, too choked up to speak. However, Sabah came toward me, terrified and delirious, and in a muffled scream, said, “The miserable operation! God damn the operation!”
Turning toward the servant in bewilderment, I shouted, “Operation? What operation?”
It was then that I knew something suspicious was afoot. I looked around the room until my eyes fell on a table in one corner. On the table I saw some medical instruments arranged together with some containers and cotton. I came up to the table and examined it with eyes that could hardly focus. When had they brought all this? When had the decision to do it been agreed on? How had this happened? Then I looked at my mother-in-law and found her eyeing the servant with a strange, cruel look. Now I was more alarmed and confused than ever, and my heart turned hard, unforgiving, and frantic.
“What operation is Sabah talking about?” I asked in a terrible voice.
The woman looked at me in bewilderment and alarm. Then, in a low voice choked with tears she said, “My daughter’s condition suddenly got worse, so I called the doctor, and he advised that an operation be performed right away.”
Having been transformed into a new, formidable person quite unlike the one the world had known thirty years earlier, I asked her, “In which part of the body?”
She said, “The doctor said it was the peritoneum.”
I was hearing the word for the first time. However, I passed over the matter and asked in the same fearsome voice, “And was the operation performed?”
“Yes,” she said, weeping, “and it ended with what you see before you!”
Stamping the floor with my foot in a rage, I screamed, “But I was here two hours ago and there was nothing wrong with her! Didn’t you assure me that her condition was nothing to worry about?”
In a voice choked with tears, she said, “Her pain got suddenly worse! What could I do? What could I do?”
“And who might be the doctor who murdered her?”
Looking at me brokenly through her tears, she mumbled, “He did everything he could. But God’s decree intervened!”
“Who might he be?”
She fell silent for a moment as though she were taking a breath, then she said, “Dr. Amin Rida.”
A violent tremor went through my body as I repeated over and over, “Amin Rida!”
Then I cried in fury and contempt, “Dr. Amin Rida? He’s just a beginner! Besides, his specialty is reproductive disorders!”
Flustered, she said he’d been the nearest doctor, that she thought doctors understood all sorts of disorders whatever their specialties happened to be, that there hadn’t been time to hesitate, and so on. Trembling with rage, I waited until she was finished.
Then I let forth a frigid laugh and cried, “An obstetrician who performs an operation on the peritoneum! It’s no wonder you killed her!”