I was roused from my thoughts by the voice of the interrogator as he called out to me, “Hey there … wake up!”
I looked up at him, trembling, and little by little I recovered my awareness of my surroundings.
The man said, “I’m asking you: Hadn’t your wife spoken to you about not wanting to be pregnant? Hadn’t she told you of her desire to have an abortion?”
I cast a quick glance at Dr. Amin, thinking to myself: He knows the entire secret from beginning to end. In fact, he may know far more than I know myself. It pained me to lie and expose myself to another insult.
“No,” I muttered.
“Did you think she was happy to be pregnant?”
In a listless, doleful tone I said, “It’s only now that I’m finding out that she was pregnant.”
The interrogator raised his eyebrows so high that they appeared above his spectacles, and I fixed my gaze on his eyes as he ruminated.
Then he asked me, “How do you explain the fact that she was hiding the matter from you?”
His question shook me to the depths of my being. All I had to say was one word, and my secret would become the butt of everyone’s jokes. Feelings of rage and the desire for revenge tempted me sorely to reveal what I’d striven so mightily to keep hidden so that I could likewise expose the secret that had been kept hidden by my depraved wife and avenge myself on the criminal. I wanted to say that there was nothing in the past year or more of our married life that could have led to pregnancy so that the interrogator could put his callous hand on the wanton trespasser. I was sorely, sorely tempted to do so, and the words were almost on the tip of my tongue. However, I didn’t say a thing. Instead, I was stricken with a total paralysis that I couldn’t explain. Could shyness influence me even in a situation like this? Was my desire to conceal my impotence so great that it overrode my longing for revenge? I wasn’t able to utter the decisive word, and with every second that passed I grew more helpless and resigned to defeat.
“I don’t know,” I muttered breathlessly.
And before I knew it, Dr. Amin had jumped to his feet and taken two steps back, folding his arms over his chest in pompous defiance.
Then in a confident, supercilious voice he said to the interrogator, “You’re asking him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only, and I’m responsible for everything from beginning to end!”
64
I left the house without seeing any of those who lived there. After all, it wasn’t my house any longer, nor were its residents my family. As I stood at the door to the building, my gaze shifted over to the tram stop, the tram stop of memories. I looked back and forth between it and the balcony, then closed my eyes to see the procession of memories marching past in the twinkling of an eye. It was a true picture of life, one that brought together its joys and its tragedies. Then I took off down the street without any destination in mind as though I were running away as fast as I could. My heart had turned into a firebrand from which sparks of rage, misery, and hatred were flying in all directions. I figured that this world, so preoccupied with its own concerns, would forget its sorrows the next day and drown itself in talk about my scandal. At the same time, I still hadn’t gotten over my shock, and I kept wondering what on earth had prompted that crook of a doctor to confess the terrible truth. I’d been so defeated by cowardice that I’d concealed the truth, and in so doing I’d given him a chance to flee if he had wanted to take it. But instead, he’d jumped to his feet in a rage and, in that self-important, arrogant way of his, he’d let the truth come out through his own two lips: “Don’t ask him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only …” My God! Why hadn’t I beaten him to a pulp? Why hadn’t I hurled myself at him and dug my fingernails into his heart? It was a memory that would sting me like a flaming whip till the day I died. But what had made him fling himself into perdition?
Had his despair of being acquitted of one of the two charges led him to confess to the other? Was he so dismayed at the fate to which love had doomed his lover that he was moved in a moment of despair to share with her in her dreadful fate? Was it an uprising of the conscience, of the heart, or both? How could I possibly become privy to the secrets of that disdainful heart? At the same time, I became increasingly bewildered and wondered to myself: How could he have permitted himself to send her to the grave shrouded in disgrace? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting for him to seize the opportunity at hand to save himself and protect the honor of the woman he had loved, and who had loved him? Do you suppose he now regretted what he had said, or was he still holding his head high in arrogance and conceit? It was a puzzle to me then, and it always will be. My heart was so bloated with bitterness and rage that the fate that had been meted out to them — her in the grave, and him in prison — was a source of relief and joy to me.
By this time my feet had carried me to Ismailiya Square. Finding no place better to flee to than the Qasr al-Nil gardens, I headed toward the bridge. I thought: If only I could disappear from Cairo for a whole year. It hadn’t even occurred to me to attend the funeral of this woman who’d been my wife. After all, I wouldn’t be able to face any of the people who knew of the tragedy. But had I really even married? It had been nothing but a long, drawn-out farce or, more properly speaking, a tragedy. My family were sure to be shocked when they learned that my wife had died and been buried without any of them being invited to the funeral. However, their shock would be quick to dissipate once they knew the truth, and it wouldn’t be long before they were too distracted telling jokes about it to think of anything else. Anybody who got hold of this story would be the life of the party. My heart shrank, and I felt a coldness flowing through my limbs. How badly I wanted to flee, just as I always had in such situations. Where could I find a distant land in which no one had ever set foot? And how could I cut off every tie that bound me to my odious past? If only I could be born again in a new world in which I wasn’t haunted by a single memory from this one! Indeed, I wouldn’t be able to carry on with my life as long as I was being followed about by my past like a heavy shadow.