The Beginning and the End

TWENTY-ONE

Hassanein left Farid Effendi Muhammed’s flat and closed the door behind him. He was extremely depressed. He walked toward the stairs, suffering with despair and frustration. But he stopped, putting his hand on the banister. He raised his head to follow the rustle of a dress. He saw the hem as the wearer climbed the last flight of stairs leading to the roof of the house. Who was it? He knew all the occupants of the house very well. Which of them was it, dressed in that red color? His heart beat violently, and he felt some power urging him to climb upward. He cast a wary look at the closed door and listened with attention and anxiety. On tiptoe, he crossed the corridor in front of the flat and walked toward the last flight of stairs leading to the roof. Perhaps it was she. He had seen her no more, either in the room or in the hall, since he threw his folded letter at her feet. She had disappeared in anger, and was, undoubtedly, indifferent to his letter and emotions. Thus the teaching hours became tedious and a torture to him. Noiselessly he climbed up the stairs until he reached the last flight. He saw the slanting rays of the setting sun level with his eyes. Waves of gentle breezes blew on his forehead. He looked all over the roof, from its front ledge overlooking the alley to its back ledge; but he found no trace of a human being. There was nothing on the roof but two wooden chicken houses. One of them faced the door to the roof, and the other, which belonged to Farid Effendi’s family, stood in a corner beside the back ledge. He silently approached the second chicken house and stood near the door, pricking his ears. At first, he heard only the cackle of chickens. Then he heard a voice clucking to the chickens. He could not tell whose voice it was. Afraid that the girl’s mother might be inside, he retreated a step. He was about to flee. But the door opened, and on its threshold appeared Bahia in a red overcoat. Her blue eyes widened in amazement, and they were fixed dumbfounded on him. She blushed so intensely that her face resembled the red velvet of her overcoat, but her blush lasted only for a few moments. Then, controlling her feelings, she crossed the threshold and closed the door. She went away from him, walking toward the door of the roof. But he did not allow her to escape, leaping to block her way. She gave him an angry look and indignantly straightened her head.

“This is too much!” she exclaimed.

In a mixture of daring and tenderness, he replied, “Always angry! I wonder at my bad luck, always finding you angry.”

She looked annoyed. “Let me pass, please,” she said.

He stretched out his arms as if to block her way altogether. “This is an opportunity I couldn’t dream of,” he said. “So I can’t allow it to slip from my hands. After your deliberate disappearance which caused me the most painful torture, I have the right to keep you for a while. Why do you disappear? Let me ask you: How did you like my letter?”

She frowned. “You mention that paper!” she said sharply. “How brazen of you! I don’t approve of it.”

His look at her wavered between hope and fear, and he thought: Should I believe this anger? My heart tells me that it is exaggerated. Perhaps it is a symptom of shyness. Surely it is. If she had really wanted to force her way, I couldn’t have stopped her. I don’t want to believe it. But why did she insist on disappearing?

“My brazenness is the result of exhausted patience!” he said to her beseechingly.

She shook her head with annoyance. “Patience,” she muttered. “Do not play with such words, and let me go, please!”

“I have told you nothing but the truth,” he said with warmth and sincerity, “and it was my true feeling alone which urged me to write that short letter. Every word in it is true. So I am terribly offended to find that you recoil so angrily at my feelings.”

Panting, he swallowed hard, then corrected himself. “Yes,” he said with a sob. “I love you.”

She turned her head away, still frowning, her brows closely knit and her lips tight. But when she kept silent for a while, a fresh gleam of hope revived in him. Then she said in a voice that was softer than before, “Let me go. Aren’t you afraid someone may come up to the roof and find us?”

Oh God! Is she annoyed only that someone may come up to the roof?! He was filled with ecstasy; his shining brown eyes radiated with delight.

“Let me express my feelings to you,” he exclaimed. “I love you. I love you more than life itself. Not only that. The only good in life is that I love you. This is what I wrote, what I am saying, and what I will repeat. Believe me, and don’t keep silent, because I can’t bear it.”

He could read seriousness and solemnity on her pure face as she turned it to him. But he thought he could perceive in her some sort of tender feeling which, perhaps, she found it hard to suppress.

Then he heard her say in a whispering voice, “That is enough! Now, allow me to go!”

She was adamant in wearing that mask. How easily she yields to shyness. He heaved an audible sigh. “I do not want to go back to my tortures without a gleam of hope,” he said quietly. “I have opened up the secrets of my heart to you. And I do not hope to get from you more than one word to infuse life into my dead soul.”

But she seemed unable to utter that word. In her extreme confusion she said only, “Oh, God! How can I leave this place?”

He was touched. But hope rendered him more stubborn and persistent. “Don’t be so scared,” he said warmly. “I love you. Does this confession only arouse annoyance in you? I won’t go back to desperate torture. Never. Never.”

“So what?”

Observing her flushed face in the quiet and the waning light of the dusk, he was swept by an uncontrollable upsurge of loving emotion, and he felt that to perish was less painful than to retreat. He implored her from the depths of his soul.

“Say just one word! If you can’t, only give a nod. Again, if you can’t even do that, then your silence — if I can perceive contentment in it — is enough for me.”

Her lips moved without uttering a word; then they closed. Her face flushed more deeply, and she turned away from him. His desire mounting, his heart leapt ecstatically inside his breast. “Is that the silence I want? I love you. I give you my word that I shall be yours unto death.”

She inclined her face more without breaking her beloved silence. A sweeping ecstasy overcame his body until his eyes were intoxicated. Unconsciously, desire made him move toward her, but she shrank away as if she were awakened from a profound dream by a sudden shake; she almost leapt away from him. Then she fled. He remained transfixed, looking with mad love at her back until she disappeared behind the door. He sighed heartily. Looking far away into the dusk at the embroidered phantoms of the horizon, he felt that his soul was dissolving into the universe and singing in its splendor. Then he moved slowly, drunk and glowing, until he almost reached the door. As he passed the other chicken house, a magnetic power seemed to attract him to it. Looking to his left, he saw his brother Hussein standing behind the wall of the chicken house.