'_Our_ love?'
'Yes, ours! That is exactly what I meant!'
'It is not possible for me to have anything to do with a god.'
'It is not possible that our lips have not yet become acquainted.'
She turned her head away toward the fields as if to listen to the crickets and frogs. How beautiful the stars were over the fields, she murmured. I wonder if any new ideas have been recorded in the notebook. Could we still perhaps see ourselves one night on the theater stage, and guffaw along with the audience?
'I know what you would like to say,' Ragab went on.
'What?'
'That you are not like the other girls.'
'Is that what you think?'
'But love…'
'But love?'
'You don't believe me!'
Where is honesty in this darkness? What do our voices mean to the insects? You are in your forties, Ragab. You'll have to start playing different roles soon. Do you not know how the great Casanova hid in the Duke's library?
'Please don't say 'bourgeois mentality' again,' she said now.
'But how else can I interpret your fear?'
'I'm not afraid.'
'Then it's a problem of trust?'
'I heard you say that in a film.'
'Perhaps I don't believe in seriousness yet, but I believe in you.'
'That's the Don Juan mentality!' she replied.
Ghosts, walking abroad in the fields — or in my head. Like the village in days gone by. Marriage, fatherhood, ambitions, death. The stars have lived for billions of years, but they have not yet heard of the stars of the earth. No ghosts out there; just lone trees, forgotten in the midst of the fields.
'I could perhaps remain chaste until we get married,' Ragab was saying now.
'Get married?'
'But I have a devil in me that rebels against routine.'
'Routine!'
'One hint, and you understand everything! But I do not understand you…'
Where is the balcony, and the lapping of the waves? The water pipe, and the smell of the river? Where is Amm Abduh? And those thoughts that gleam like lightning striking the shades of the evergreens and then vanish, but where?
'Why did you refuse to marry your important suitor?'
'I was not satisfied with him.'
'You mean, you did not love him.'
'If you like.'
'He was in his forties, like me.'
'It wasn't that.'
'Satisfaction is only important in free choice. Not in love.'
'I don't know.'
'And sex?'
'That's a question that should properly be ignored!'
With a voice that broke the spell of the night, Anis shouted: 'Rulings and classifications of age and love and sex? You damn grammarians!'
They turned around uncomfortably — and then both laughed. 'We thought you were asleep,' said Ragab.
'How long will we stay in this prison?'
'We've only been here an hour.'
'Why haven't we committed suicide?'
'We were trying to talk about love!'
Across the abyss of the night came the voices of the expedition. Then their scattered shapes could be made out. They approached the car to stand together around the hood. Yes, my dear, we could easily have been killed out there… Where are they now, the days of knights and troubadours? Khalid said that he had been about to commit the primary sin, had the 'fraudulent pioneer' not been so prudish.
'And then in the dark,' Mustafa added, 'we decided to find out how modern we really are, and see who could admit to the most misdeeds!'
Ragab thought it was a clever idea. 'And so everyone confessed to their sins,' continued Mustafa.
'Sins!'
'I mean, what are considered such in public opinion.'
'And what was the outcome?'
'Wonderful!'
'How many could be called crimes?'
'Dozens.'
'And how many were misdemeanors?'
'Hundreds!'
'Have none of you committed a virtue?'
'He who goes by the name of Ahmad Nasr!'
'Perhaps you mean his fidelity to his wife.'
'And to financial directives and stocktaking and regulations for the acquisition of goods!'
'And what was your opinion of yourselves?'
'Our consensus was that we are in a state of nature, immaculate; and that the morals which we lack are the dead morals of a dead age; and that we are the pioneers of a new and honest ethic as yet unsanctioned by legislation!'
'Bravo!'
Anis gave himself over to the view of the trees that bordered the road. They had been planted with extraordinary regularity. If they moved out of their fixed order, the known world would come tumbling down. There was a snake coiled around a branch; it wanted to say something. Very well, say something worth listening to. But what a cursed row. 'Let me hear it!' he cried aloud.
At his bellow, they all laughed.
'What do you want to hear?' asked Mustafa.
They piled back into the car, and Anis was once more pressed against the door. The snake had completely disappeared.
'You will be driven by a thoroughly modern driver!' Ragab said. The car moved onto the road, engine roaring, and then they set off, faster and faster, until they were traveling at an insane speed.
People laughed hysterically; then their voices shook; and then they began to protest and shout for help. The trees flew by. They felt as if they were plummeting into a deep gulf, and waited in dread to hit the bottom.
'Madness — this is madness!'
'He'll kill us in cold blood!'
'Stop! We have to get our breath back!'
'No! No! Even madness has to stop somewhere!'
But Ragab put his head back in a terrifying frenzy, and drove as fast as the car would go, whooping like a Red Indian. Samara was forced to put a hand on his arm, and whisper: 'Please!'
'Layla's crying,' Khalid snapped. 'Will you return to your senses!'
My mind is dead. All that is left in my head is the pulse of my blood. My heart is sinking as in the worst depressions of kif — close your eyes — that way you will not see death —
Suddenly a horrifying scream rang out. He opened his eyes, shaking, to see a black shape flying through the
