The Beginning and the End

FORTY-ONE

At about sunset Nefisa left the house of one of her customers on Al Walid Street. She looked annoyed. She always felt miserable when she was alone. The fact that her meager earnings from her work were swallowed up by the family’s urgent needs increased her misery, for she was unable to keep any of her earnings. Besides, a serious change had come over her. Now she paid close attention to her appearance. Her orange dress, decorated with violets, revealed her tall, slim body. She applied makeup flamboyantly. She continued walking along Al Walid Street until she reached Shubra Street. At the corner she turned, casting a distant look toward the garage, which infused her heart with vitality and watchfulness. The sight of the garage and its proprietor, Mohammed al-Ful, brought back to her memory a violent conflict that had torn her heart throughout the past weeks. She neither stepped forward nor backward, but came to a complete stop. Fear paralyzed her legs. Although her tortured wavering had been resolved, yet, as she took the last step, she was stricken by fear.

Isn’t it better for me to think the matter over? she thought. No, no. Thinking will only cause me headaches. He’ll block my way as he does every evening. I can’t deny that I smiled at his pleasantries. What will happen next? Now it is too late to retreat. He doesn’t conceal his motives or intentions. Nor am I ignorant of them. I understand everything. I understand why he invites me to ride in his car. He doesn’t try to deceive me as someone else did. What he wants is perfectly clear. Shall I do it? Why is he interested in me? I’m not pretty, and it’s impossible that this makeup will make me so. But in the market of lechery even ugliness itself is a salable commodity, and pleasure seekers, at least some of them, are not fastidious in their demands. This is the truth. Marriage is a different matter. But where seeking pleasure is concerned, people are all the same. Should I allow myself to fall? Why not? I wouldn’t be losing anything I haven’t already lost. But isn’t it better to think this over carefully?

Bitter memories of her old despair galled her and besieged her mind, and she remembered how bitterly hopeless her condition had become. However, in addition to the feeling of despair, an intense desire boiled in her veins, clamoring for gratification; she felt helpless before it. Whenever she surrendered to despair, this fierce desire stung her to the depths of her being. This desire alone would get in her way, were she ever to think of hiding herself away from people. It was so strong that she came to detest it as much as she detested her life itself, but consciously she denied its existence. Shutting it out of her mind, she would persuade herself that she could accept humiliation for the sake of the money which her family so badly needed. Her family’s condition being what it was, she was not lying when she thought in this fashion. But it was only half the truth, the half she admitted while she ignored the other. She found pleasure, if we might call it that, in looking upon herself as a martyr and a victim of despondency and poverty.

At that moment, the young man appeared from the garage. He was speaking to some workers. Her heart fluttered, and her eyes remained fixed on him. Instinctively, she realized she would not retreat. Turning her back and standing at a distance from him, she mentally surrendered to him, and her surrender was complete. It was at this moment that the violent, distressing conflict which had torn her heart for weeks was finally resolved. In despair and heated emotion, she sighed, and with slow steps approached him, pretending to ignore him until she felt him, with his usual daring, somehow blocking her way.

“My lady, why are you so hard-hearted? My entreaties would soften even a rock. My car is waiting at the turn of the road. For ages it has been waiting for you,” he said.

Encouraged by her smile, he walked by her side. “Stop being so coy. Even if I had the patience of Job, it would run out…” he pleaded.

How delicious flirtation was, even if it was false! Though it was a pity to feel this way, his flirtation restored her long-humiliated sense of female dignity. She wished he knew who she was and who her father had been. She heard him speak to her in a menacing tone: “Here is the car. If you don’t get in, I’ll pick you up in my arms in front of everyone.”

They reached the car, parked in the next blind alley. With one hand he seized hers, and opened the door of the car with the other. Swallowing, she nervously entered the car and sat down. He closed the door behind her. Walking around the car, he got in through the other door. She was almost unaware of his presence. She leaned far back to avoid the window looking out on the road. At that moment she experienced a feeling of alienation. Everything seemed to her eerie and phantasmagorical: the road on which the curtain of night was falling, the figures of the people passing by, the old dilapidated car, herself, people’s voices, and the rumbling sound of the wheels of tram-cars. Determined, she forced herself to regain her composure. She gave him a furtive look. He was sitting erect before the steering wheel, veins bulging from his solid face with its big, rocky nose, protruding cheeks, and broad, bulldoglike mouth.

The sight of him brought her back to the real world, the world of consciousness, nerves, blood, and fear. Cautiously looking about, the man took a bottle from under the seat and uncorked it. Raising it to his mouth, he took huge gulps. He turned to her, his face contracting convulsively. “Would you like a little wine?” he asked.

“No. I don’t drink,” she said hurriedly.

Smacking his lips, he raised his eyelids in surprise. He returned the bottle to its place and the car started to move.

“It’s better to drink now so that I’ll be in the right frame of mind when we reach our destination,” he said.

He drove the car recklessly at high speed. Nefisa wondered at his bravado. He seemed to her strong and daring, but at the same time dishonorable and untrustworthy. What need did she have for an honorable man! She was not worthy of such a man, who had ceased to be the object of her dreams. A scandal was the only thing in life she feared. She heard him laugh and say proudly, “You’ve been coy for so long! But I always thought that one day you would fall into the trap, and here you are!”

She welcomed his conversation; it helped her escape from her thoughts and confusion. A smile appeared on her lips.

“Who told you that I’d fallen?”

“We’ll see what happens in the Almaza Desert,” he said with a laugh.

“The Almaza Desert? Will we be there long?” she inquired, worried.

“Until midnight.”

Terrified, she visualized the faces of her mother and two brothers.

“What a disaster! I must return home before supper. For God’s mercy, stop the car!” she entreated.

“Really? Don’t be frightened. We’ll return before supper. But what are you afraid of?” he asked halfheartedly, in astonishment.

“My family.”

He watched her with pretended suspicion.

“Your family! Don’t they know?” he asked her in a meaningful tone.

His painful words stabbed her in the heart. Her family know! What did he take her for?!

“How could my family know? My brothers are university students and my father was an official,” she said quickly.

Pretending belief, he shook his head.

My mother is only a washerwoman, and my brothers are just vagabonds, he mentally mimicked her, full of sarcasm. But I have to be resigned to God’s will. He doubled the car’s speed to reach his destination as soon as possible. The wine was taking effect, and he felt pleased.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Nefisa.”

Unimpressed, he asked her, “Why didn’t you choose a sweeter name?”

Not catching his meaning, she misunderstood him. “I like it,” she said resentfully.

“Excuse me, Lady Nefisa. Long live your name!”

At length, turning to the desert road, the car dived into total darkness. At a distance the city lights seemed like a powerful giant with innumerable fiery eyes. He started to slow down, then finally stopped and turned off the headlights. Stretching out his arm, he suddenly encircled her waist, pulling her toward him with unexpected violence. Sighing, she fell upon him. Opening his broad mouth, he thrust it upon hers, reaching the middle of her chin. He pulled her brutally to his breast, breathing hard through his nose with a rattling kind of snort. At first she felt pained and worried. But her uneasiness vanished in a strange, mysterious inner darkness. Their two shapes dissolved in the total darkness which engulfed them. She felt grateful for it; it not only made her bold, it concealed her defects. Impelled by an instinctive urge, she did her best to gratify him. In addition to fear and worry, she felt shy at first. But soon she was overcome by an insane passion that thawed these feelings that held her back.

“Let’s wait for a second go,” he said seductively.

Wiping the perspiration that streamed from her forehead, she beseechingly replied, “I can’t. Please, let’s return at once.”

Taking the bottle, he quenched his thirst in successive gulps. His face long and rigid, he drove the car in silence until they reached Ramses Square.

“I feel like doing it again. Shall we go back?” he said.

“No, no, I can’t,” she begged him fearfully.

Suddenly he frowned indignantly. Then he spoke with unexpected roughness. “Damn you! This trip wasn’t worth the gasoline it took to get there!”

His words fell like lashes upon her soul. She was speechless. Her heart overflowed with disappointment. Stunned, she stared at him, but, indifferent, he drove on. Perhaps his ungratified desire for more was an excuse. All the same, would it not have been better to treat her kindly, or at least to say a tender word to erase the ill effects of his roughness? He continued to drive in silence. Turning into a back street to let the girl get out unseen, he stopped the car near the pavement. Considering the insult as she left the car, she wondered whether to accept or reject another appointment to meet him. She was too perplexed to know how to face this inevitable question. But she saw him stretching out his hand, offering her a ten-piaster piece.

“This is enough for one time,” he said.

As she stood motionless before him, he threw the silver coin at her feet and drove off in a trail of choking smoke, the car roaring and gurgling. Blind with fury, she remained transfixed, her body shaking all over. Biting her teeth, she continued to quake. She kept sucking in her breath rapidly as if from a bursting chest. He did not care to ask her for another appointment. Just a transient relationship as though she were…Oh, God! Just a transient relationship! Then she remembered how he threw the ten-piaster piece at her! An idea occurred to her, extinguishing her anger and replacing it with embarrassment and a sense of failure. No. Wasn’t it possible that she failed to appeal to him and satisfy him? This was quite possible, even probable. It was certain! She was overwhelmed with a profound feeling of sorrow and degradation. She suddenly realized that she was still standing on the pavement. On the point of leaving, she remembered the coin lying at her feet. Not knowing what to do, she gave it a furious glance. Memories rushed to her mind. She immediately recalled the five-piaster piece which Soliman had borrowed one day at the tram stop, the day he had taken her to his home, the total darkness of the place, her quarrel with him in the street, and her dead father’s words about her sweet temper. Then once more she focused her attention on the silver coin at her feet. She gazed at it for a long time. Seeing no reason to leave it there, she picked it up.