“About what?”
The sheikh let out a loud laugh and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Sheikh Taha? I’m talking about Radwa, man.”
Taha said nothing and smiled in embarrassment. The sheikh patted him on his shoulder and said, “Congratulations, my boy.”
As soon as the evening prayer was over on Thursday, the brothers hovered around Taha congratulating him, while joyful ululations rang out from the room set aside for the women. For two days the women had exhausted themselves getting the bride ready and putting together her trousseau. After a quarter of an hour of ululations and congratulations, Sheikh Bilal sat down to perform the marriage ceremony. Radwa deputized Brother Hamza (like her, from Asyut) to conclude the marriage contract and other brothers volunteered themselves as witnesses. Sheikh Bilal made the normal short speech about marriage in God’s Law, then placed Taha’s hand in Hamza’s and pronounced the words of the contract, which they repeated after him. When they had finished, Sheikh Bilal murmured “O God, make their union blessed, guide them in obedience to You, and provide them with righteous offspring!” Then he placed his hand on Taha’s head, saying, “God bless you and your marriage and join you and your wife in good fortune!”
The brothers then all rushed to embrace the groom and congratulate him and the ululations rang out loud and the sisters started singing, while beating on tambourines,
Taha was seeing the Islamic style of wedding celebration for the first time and was much affected by the joy of the sisters and their songs and by the enthusiasm of the brothers in their congratulations. Next the sisters accompanied the bride to her new home — a single spacious room leading to a small separate bathroom in the large building set aside for married couples (and which originally, in the days of the Swiss, had been a dwelling for the cement company’s quarry workers; it had been left abandoned and completely forgotten about until some of the Islamist workers in the company took it and made it into a secret camp for the Gamaa). The women left and the mosque was quiet. The brothers sat with the groom and there was merry conversation interspersed with loud laughter. Then Sheikh Bilal stood up, saying, “Off with us then, brothers.”
Taha tried to detain him, but the sheikh laughed and said, “On your wedding night you mustn’t dissipate your energy in conversation!” Laughing comments showered down from the brothers as they left the mosque. Taha bade them farewell and they departed. Left on his own, he began to feel terrified. He had imagined what he would do on the wedding night in numerous ways, then in the end he’d gone ahead and decided to let things proceed as God ordained, though the idea that he had no experience of women while his wife did have previous experience, perhaps making her hard to please, continued to make him anxious. As though reading his thoughts, Sheikh Bilal had taken him aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriage and his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothing for a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not a virgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be a weak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He said sarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity, even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that if one of them marries a woman who was previously married, the thought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat her badly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam has no such complexes.”
These were all indirect messages, as Taha understood, about how he should treat Radwa. The sheikh reviewed with him what takes places between a man and a woman and explained to him the verse from The Cow chapter,
Now the wedding ceremonies were over and the brothers had left him on his own to face the critical moment. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and then entered the bride’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of the bed. She had taken her headscarf off. Her hair was black and smooth and reached her shoulders, and its blackness, next to the rosy whiteness of her skin, was fascinating. For the first time, Taha noticed her beautiful neck, her small hands, and her delicate fingertips. With his heart beating hard, he cleared his throat and said in an embarrassed voice, “Peace be upon you.”
Radwa smiled, bowed her head, and whispered gently, blushing, “And upon you be peace and the mercy of God and His blessings.”
Hatim Rasheed heard the news the next day. He had stayed late at the paper until the first edition was out and returned exhausted to the house about 4 A.M., telling himself, “I’ll sleep, then check on Abduh in the morning.” He woke late, showered, put on his clothes, and left to go to the hospital. In the lobby of the building he met El Shazli the doorkeeper, who said to him tersely, “Abduh’s left you the keys of the room and the kiosk.”
“What?” exclaimed Hatim, taken aback. The doorkeeper informed him of the death of the child and what had happened afterward. Hatim lit a cigarette and asked, making an effort to appear calm, “Did he tell you where he was going?”
“He said he was going to live in Imbaba and he refused to leave a new address.”
Hatim went back, climbed up to the roof, and started asking the residents for Abduh’s new address. He put up with their insolent looks and hostile responses (whose hidden message was “Leave Abduh alone. You’ve done enough to him.”) but in the end got nowhere. In the evening he sat in his car in front of the locked kiosk on the off chance that Abduh might have forgotten something and come back to get it with the spare key that he kept. He went to the kiosk three days running but Abduh never showed up.
Hatim did not give up. He went on searching for him everywhere and with everyone who knew him but in vain. After a long week of searching, it became clear to him that Abduh had gone forever and a raging wave of sorrow and despair swept over him. Painful and conflicting feelings engulfed him: he missed Abduh — his ardor, his strong hard body, his good nature and purity, his husky voice and Sa’idi accent. He brimmed with compassion for him too because he knew how much he had loved his son and how much his death would grieve him. He felt regret that he had left him that day at the hospital and gone to the paper, telling himself, “I could have postponed the work to be with him at that difficult time. He needed me beside him but was ashamed to ask.”
Day by day Hatim’s agony increased. A sense of being truly unlucky possessed him. He had spent many years in misery and suffering before finding a biddable and sensitive companion who didn’t cause problems, and as soon as his life had begun to settle down, the child had died and Abd Rabbuh had disappeared, leaving Hatim to start his wretched journey over again. He would have to cruise the streets of Downtown every night to pick up a Central Security recruit who might turn out to be a thief or a criminal who would beat him up or rob him, as had happened many times before. He would have to return to the Chez Nous in search of a barghal and to the Gebelawi baths in El Hussein to pick up some adolescent with whom to satisfy his lust, only to have to put up in return with his vulgarity and greediness. Why had he lost Abduh after he had loved him, and grown to feel at ease with him and planned their life together? Was it really so difficult for him to enjoy happiness with a lover over time? If he were religious,
