City of Love and Ashes by Yusuf Idris

Author:Yusuf Idris [Yusuf Idris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617972041
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 0195-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

To Hamza now the kitchen gave succor, though he did not know where that succor came from. The kitchen, the bathroom, the prison cell, and all other such small boxes of bricks that are barely big enough to accommodate a person— in these places people feel as close as it is possible to be to their own soul, and as soon as they close the door on themselves they sense a strange security, as if there were now a barrier between them and the world and its tragedies. As Hamza prepared the coffee he felt that the kitchen, white and clean, was like his kindhearted unmarried sister, to whom he had become accustomed to confessing his closest secrets without shame, regret, or desire, and he so allowed his mind to scatter, each part of it going off in a different direction, that he put the coffee and the sugar in the kanaka and placed it on the stove without adding water. When the smell of burning sugar alerted him he repeated the procedure more carefully. He felt an unusual lightness, as though he were a balloon filled with gas lighter than air. He felt happy, but wanted to ignore the feeling so that when it went away he would not feel miserable and desperate.

There was an extraordinary joy inside him, and an extraordinary awe too. Her coming could mean only one thing—that she had acceded, and that the darkness that had gathered in his soul and obscured his path to the future had suddenly lifted. Now the path was flooded with a brilliant, bountiful light. Yesterday when he had cast his very self before her, her stinging, burning words had been suddenly heaped upon him, and a great pain had as suddenly swept him away. He had offered her his heart and she had seared it with fire. Yesterday he had felt that everything was over, that it had all been a transient delusion, from which a painful sting of reality had roused him. Yesterday after what had happened he had looked for any last remnant of affection toward her and not found it.

But what had happened? Was he crazy? Was his soul a children’s seesaw, soaring one moment up to the sky, the moment barely over before it plummets back toward the earth and another moment barely begun before it once again heads for the sky? When she stood at the door and said “Here I am” through trembling, smiling lips, he had felt that he truly did love her, with a love that was backed up by all that filled the universe, a love that even if it were portioned out among a million souls would light a fire in each of their hearts. This was serious, and he knew his feelings for her were nothing shameful, nor were they a deviation.or a crime.They were in fact something material, precipitated layer upon layer in the depths of his soul. More than this, he suddenly comprehended that he had

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