“I was passing by her locked-up room on my way to the laundry, when I heard a voice speaking very excitedly inside,” said the bellhop.
“But isn’t she by herself?”
“Still, she was talking angrily and her voice kept getting louder, too.”
“A lot of people do that,” the manager said. “Just because you talk to yourself doesn’t mean that you’re crazy.”
The bellhop shook his head without saying anything, so the manager asked him, “Were you able to make out anything she was saying?”
“No, except one expression: ‘It’s not important.’”
The manager signaled firmly that he wanted to end their discussion. Then, as he was writing in the register, he added to the bellhop, “Be ever more vigilant — that’s our obligation, in any case.”
Thunder sounded, and the manager looked at the sky through the window and found it thickly overcast with clouds. The weather was very cold, with occasional showers of rain. At exactly 1:00 p.m., the woman telephoned from room number twelve.
“May I order lunch?” she inquired.
“We have no food in the hotel, but there’s a restaurant close by,” the manager told her. “What would you like, ma’am?”
“Mixed vegetables with chicken,” she answered, “plus rice with minced meat and onions, a kilogram of assorted kabab, a set of oriental salads, a loaf of bread grilled with lamb, soft pastries, and two oranges.”
The manager ordered all that she requested. Yet he was astounded by how much food she’d wanted — especially the meat. That alone would have been enough for six persons!
“She’s crazed not just with fear — but with gluttony, too,” he said to himself. “Most likely she’ll leave the hotel during the afternoon, and I’ll be able to get a look inside her room.”
The food arrived, and an hour later the man from the restaurant returned to collect the tray and china. The manager couldn’t resist looking at the plates — and found them all licked clean, except for the remains of some bones and congealed sauce. He decided to put the whole business out of his mind, but nonetheless found that the woman — the strange way she looked and acted — kept pursuing him, pressing in upon his thoughts. He couldn’t say that she was beautiful, yet she had a kind of force and attraction. There was something frightening about her, along with things that aroused curiosity and even submission. And though he’d seen her for the very first time that day, she’d left an impression of familiarity that comes only with faces that have embedded themselves in one’s memory from days of old.
He saw a man and woman coming toward him. “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi staying here?” the man queried.
The hotel manager answered in the affirmative, then telephoned to see if the lady would let the visitors go up to her room. Obviously, these people were from the upper crust, at least in terms of material wealth. The wind wailed powerfully, making the chandeliers dance in the hotel’s small lobby. Then quickly another eight persons arrived — four men and four women — and repeated the same question.
“Is Ms. Bahiga al-Dahabi staying here?”
Again the manager telephoned to obtain the guest’s permission. That being granted, the group mounted the stairs with a lofty air — they were from the same elevated crowd as the couple that preceded them — to room number twelve. There were now ten visitors in all — either relatives from one family, or friends, or friends and relatives combined. Whatever the case may be, there was no doubt that Madam Bahiga was no ordinary dame.
“Why did she choose our hotel?” he wondered.
Bustle spread through the establishment’s bar as the staff carried tumblers of tea above, and it occurred to the manager that he had seen some of the faces in the second group before. But then he said to himself that the best thing would be to purge his brain of any thoughts of Bahiga al-Dahabi. Tomorrow she would be just another one of hundreds of lost memories that cluttered the humble hotel.
Then he found before him a woman of about fifty, possessing the ultimate in poise and comportment. “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi in residence?”
When he said yes, she told him, “Tell her, if you please, that the lady doctor is here.”
He contacted the madam, who said the physician could come up. Then he yielded to an insistent urge by asking before she left him, “What is your specialization, doctor?”
“Obstetrics,” the woman replied.
He noticed that she had introduced herself with her professional title, but without her name. Is she visiting the woman in that capacity? Is Bahiga al-Dahabi suffering from a feminine condition? Is she pregnant? Yet he was not able to give full rein to his thoughts before a short, fat man with a scowling face marched in, introducing himself as Yusuf Qabil, contractor. He posed the much-repeated question, “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi here?”
After the hotel manager had sought and obtained permission for the contractor to go up to her room, he bid the man goodbye with a perplexed and sarcastic smile. Meanwhile, one of the bellhops returned from an errand outside, shivering from the cold within his thick, rustic gallabiya. Darkness, he said, was gathering in the four corners of the sky, and soon the day would be turned into night. The manager glanced again out the window, but he was really thinking about the woman in room number twelve — the mysterious femme fatale with her top-drawer coterie. He began to feel that a current of unrest and unease had spread throughout the hotel since her arrival. It permeated his own inner being, arousing within him adolescent dreams of the languorous splendor of rich, worldly occupations.
He was jolted from his reverie by a voice asking, “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi here?”
He beheld a big man wrapped in a jubbah and caftan, a tarboosh tilted back on his head, his hand gripping a gray umbrella. “Tell her that Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer has come.”
His chest heaving with revulsion, the manager gritted his teeth, cursing the man and the woman both — but he did his duty by calling her. For the first time, he met a contrary response.
“Please wait in the lobby, sir,” he told the undertaker.
What did he come to do here? Why doesn’t he wait outside? The manager had worked in the hotel for fifty years, yet had never seen anything like what was happening that day. He was afraid that the rain would start coming down in torrents, keeping them all locked up inside the hotel for no one knew how long — and with this messenger of Death!
New visitors arrived. They came separately, but in succession: the owner of a furniture store, a grocer, a sugarcane juice vendor, the proprietor of a shop for cosmetics and perfumes, a high official in the Revenue Department, the editor of a well-known newspaper, a fish wholesaler, a procurer of furnished flats, an agent for an Arab millionaire. The manager thought the lady would move her meeting down to the lobby, but instead she kept granting permission for them to come up, one after the other. The bellhops brought them more and more tea and chairs, while the manager wondered how they could all find places to sit. Did they all know each other before? And what, exactly, had brought them together now? He summoned the head bellhop and asked him what he knew about these things.
“I don’t know what’s going in there,” he answered. “Hands reach out to take the chairs and the tea inside, then the door closes again immediately.”
The manager shrugged his shoulders. So long as no one complained, he told himself, then he was not to blame for anything.
Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer came up to him. “I’d like to remind the lady that I am here waiting,” he said.
“She promised to call you at the appropriate time,” the manager told him, with a feeling of futility.
The man wouldn’t move, so he called the lady again, handing the mortician the telephone at her request.