The Beginning and the End by Naguib Mahfouz Page B

back?”
    “I forgot my handkerchief in the room,” Hassanein said aloud.
    Salem ran into the room, and the girl hastened inside the house. The boy brought him the handkerchief. He took it and went away. He forgot to thank him.

EIGHTEEN
    Hussein raised his head from the desk. Scrutinizing his brother’s face, he said, “What is the matter with you?”
    Hassanein answered with only a short laugh. In a meaningful tone, his brother asked, “Did you give your lesson?”
    Hassanein threw himself on the bed. “Do I look changed?” he inquired.
    “Certainly.”
    Hassanein sighed. “I have to thank God that our mother is sitting in semi-darkness,” he said.
    “What happened?”
    Would he tell him what happened? But what would he get from him but reproof? “Nothing happened,” he replied.
    “But you look confused! And when you are confused, your nostrils twitch like a donkey’s.”
    After saying this, Hussein paused to ask himself if the nostrils of a donkey actually twitched. How did such a smile come to his mind? His brother laughed.
    “Just a bit of excitement. That is all,” he said.
    “So what?”
    “Nothing.”
    Then Hussein said in earnest, “I want to understand your intentions.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Don’t feign ignorance. You understand everything. Why don’t you leave her alone? Aren’t you afraid that Farid Effendi will discover your forwardness, or that the girl herself will tell him about it? That will put us in a difficult situation.”
    “My brother,” Hassanein said, smiling, “if they place the sunon my right hand and the moon on my left and ask me to leave her, I won’t. I’d rather perish.”
    Hussein laughed in spite of himself. Reassuming his seriousness and solemnity, he inquired, “What do you want from her?”
    What a question. Too simple, yet unanswerable. Had he asked himself that question, he would have found no answer. He was motivated by his impulses and instincts, without need for thinking. He said in bewilderment, “In my case there is no distinction between cause and effect.”
    “I don’t understand what you mean.”
    “Neither do I.”
    “So leave her alone, as I told you.”
    “I shall keep chasing her until…”
    Hussein pressed on. “Until what?”
    “Until she falls in love with me as I have with her.”
    “Then?”
    The young man replied, perplexed, “That’s enough.”
    Hussein shook his head angrily. “You are mistaken,” he said. “She is a decent girl of a good family, and your conduct will displease her.”
    “She is that and even more; but I shall never give up hope.”
    He stood up and went to the desk. He put his books on the sill of the closed window immediately adjacent to his bed. He sat cross-legged before the sill, as though he were sitting at a desk.
    “Why don’t you sit at the desk?” his brother asked.
    “I want to sit cross-legged to warm my legs.”
    He was preoccupied with an important matter. He opened a copybook, cut out a page from it, and took up a pen. Intense with love and deep distress, he thought:
I shall write to her. There is no alternative. I shall not have another opportunity to speak to her again. But what should I write?
    The silence in the room, punctuated only by the sound of Hussein turning pages in his copybook, helped Hassanein toconcentrate. His ears began to distinguish the sound of a wireless stealthily murmuring through the closed window from one of the houses in the alley. He knit his brows, pretending to be annoyed, but he actually felt relieved to hear it since this helped him to escape his perplexity. He listened to the melody of “Happy Nights Are Here Again,” which completely swept him away. Tenderness gushed into his breast. His heart overflowed with affection, yearning, ecstasy, love, and life. Engulfed in his enthusiasm, he was filled with energy, he wanted to go free into the open air, concealed by the dark. He gradually became oblivious to the song, once it had opened