The Atonement of Love
By Mohammed Hussein Heikal
Translated by Amr El-Zawawy
She was about thirty-five. She had a fresh face, a sweet smile, and a keen gaze. She was a bit shorter than average, neither stout nor slender. Her finely shaped lips lent her glances an added quickness and a wealth of unspoken meaning. Her friends didn’t know much about of her life beyond what our friend and her relative, Hamza, chose to tell them. Yet they followed her news with avid interest, since, in recent months, tongues had been busy and ears attentive to her story.
Cairo was permissive when it came to the caprices of romance, and it was lenient with those who yielded to its vagaries. Yet the city was astonished by true love. Let someone speak, in any quarter of the city, of a sincere devotion or a bond that found sweetness in companionship and scorned death, and ears would grow keen. Thus, the tale of Zuhayrah stirred the curiosity of Cairenes and sharpened their ancient skepticism—skepticism as to the sincerity of this love, or even of a woman’s capacity to regard love as a sin worthy of expiation.
Our friend and her cousin Hamza was approaching forty. He had a tranquil heart and a spirit that smiled at life—even mocking it. Yet he was severe and meticulous when it came to matters many of us deemed trivial, so long as they concerned not himself alone but others, too. He was so exact in his appointments that we set our watches by the moment the bell rang and he stepped inside. Indeed, we suspected that if he arrived a minute or two early, he would linger outside the door, watch in hand, until the precise second struck before pressing the bell.
One day, we were waiting for him at five o’clock sharp. A little before the hour, the bell rang. We checked our watches and exchanged glances, accusing them of running a few seconds fast—but it was not Hamza who entered. Five minutes passed, then a quarter hour, then half an hour, and still he did not come. Anxiety bled through us. One of us said he must have suddenly taken ill; another said that some importunate friend had detained him; a third blamed the traffic. Each rehearsed the cause he fancied.
At last, the bell rang again, and Hamza entered. He greeted us and sat down, head bowed. Removing his fez, he placed it beside him, asked for a cup of coffee, and asked what we had been discussing. When we told him of our fears over his delay, a hesitant look crossed his face. He tried to divert the conversation, but one of us pressed him for the reason. We saw, in his expression, that there was a secret he would not refuse to share—and we were eager for it.
Then someone ventured, “Perhaps you were detained because of something concerning Zuhayrah?”
“Yes,” he said at once. “Yes—because of Zuhayrah. I have been with her since morning, and today I found her so different from how I have known her. She was always as still as the Sphinx, despite what people said. She would even smile with pity at those who accused her of vile things—scorning their folly and their rash judgments in matters of the heart. But today she was not just as still as the Sphinx—she was as still as the grave.”
When he had seated himself comfortably with her, she told him she had long pondered what people said of her, and she feared that some echo of it might linger in his mind to incline him against her. Therefore, she wished to tell him her story. In telling it, she passed the entire day. “I do not know,” Hamza said, “whether it was confession, testament, or defense. But she ended with these words: ‘Do you not see, now that I have told you everything, that I am the atonement of love?’”
She then complained of a headache, dissolved a little white powder from a folded paper into a glass of water, and asked to be left to rest. “If you have noticed in me some disturbance,” Hamza said, “it is the effect of her tale. It made me feel she was expiating sins and that the heaviest burden was not hers alone.”
“Give us the testament,” one of us said.
“Or the defense,” another added.
“Nay,” a third said in a saddened voice. “Tell us this tale of the atonement of love.”
Hamza straightened in his chair, though his gaze remained lowered. Pressing a hand to his brow, as if recollecting the actual words he had heard, he began.
“Forgive me if memory betrays me and I fail to faithfully render her feelings and the strange courses of fate. I would not wrong Zuhayrah by misreporting her story. So I shall try.
“She was three-and-twenty when her mother died. She had refused more than one suitor, tiring her father out with her refusals. Then a year passed without a proposal, and her father began to fear that her pride had cost her all prospects and that she would remain a spinster. He urged her aunt to reason with her, to ‘restore her senses,’ as she put it. Pressed from all sides, Zuhayrah felt herself a burden in her father’s house and even contemplated teaching to ease his mind. But when she confided this to her aunt, her father stormed at what he deemed a rebellion against God’s design for woman, which was marriage, the governance of the home, and the bearing of sons.
At last, a suitor came. He was older by twenty years, wealthy but meager in learning, neither handsome nor lively. Worn down by her father’s pressure and fearful of wounding him, she yielded, declaring that the responsibility for her happiness or misery henceforth lay with them. She wept in resignation and was wed.
Her husband lavished her with jewels and fine clothing. Grateful at first, she soon found such tokens hollow. She longed not for adornments but for a soul to meet her own: for a shared vision, for artistic beauty, for a living communion of mind and spirit. She strove to awaken him to such things—but whenever emotion stirred, he lapsed into animal appetites. Whenever she spoke of beauty in art or nature, he gaped at her, uncomprehending. His affections were possessive and self-involved.
Motherhood rescued her from despair. She bore a son, Husam, and poured her heart into him, hoping he might grow into the sort of man she had desired. But her husband’s love for the boy was instinctive, possessive—like that for his horse or his automobile. Disillusion deepened.
Then a judge who had been transferred from the countryside moved into the house next door. After meeting her husband, he became a frequent guest. His speech glowed with warmth; his mind was alive with culture, music, literature. In him, she saw the man she had dreamed of. Her dormant spirit awakened. She resolved that, if she could not find fulfillment in marriage, she would at least shape her son in this man’s likeness.
When she confided this hope to her husband, jealousy flared. The man’s visits grew infrequent. One day, encountering the judge by chance in a shop, she accepted his offer of a carriage ride—she knew not whither. From that day, her existence bloomed under what she called the grace of true love. Though her body remained her husband’s, her heart was given elsewhere.
Years passed. Children were born—four in all. Her husband, suspecting betrayal, once confessed to a friend who was a schoolmaster that he was certain only the eldest was his son. Yet he bore his humiliation in silence, preferring private misery to public scandal.
After his death, she read these words in his diary, and for the first time shed hot tears for him.
Now free, she proposed marriage to the judge. He asked for time to think. Later, he summoned her to the secluded apartment that had been their refuge. The room was covered in flowers, as of old. He knelt, reciting the love poetry that had once intoxicated her. But when she mentioned marriage, he recoiled.
“Marry whom you will,” he said. “Let us remain as we were.”
“As we were? And who should we deceive, now that my husband is dead?”
Yet he would not wed a mother of four children. He feared, perhaps, that what he had done might be done to him. In that moment, she saw through him: beneath culture and music lay baseness. She saw him transformed in her vision into something less than human.
Shattered in spirit, she left him. Illness followed—fever, delirium, sleepless nights haunted by visions of serpents and scorpions filling that once-beloved room. She felt pursued by guilt. Her children’s innocent faces pierced her heart: whose sons were they? She prayed for forgiveness, yet an inward voice told her that only pain could expiate her sin.
At last, Hamza said, she ended her tale with the words: “Do you not see me now—as the atonement of love?”
He paused. We listened, stricken. Then the telephone rang. Hamza answered. As he listened, his features tightened with grief.
“It is over,” he said at last. “The atonement of love is dead.”
The white powder she had dissolved into her glass was poison. Refusing a doctor, she declared that departure from mankind was her greatest victory over them and over life.
“She has indeed triumphed over people and over life,” Hamza concluded, rising and taking up his fez. “But she has not triumphed over her children.”
He left us to perform the last rites for that unhappy victim, while we sat silent, stunned by her story and by the swiftness with which it had passed into death.
Also read: Mohammed Hussein Heikal’s ‘The Second Family’
Mohammed Hussein Heikal (August 20, 1888- December 8, 1956) was a prominent Egyptian writer, journalist, and politician who held several ministerial positions, most notably serving as Minister of Education. Heikal was born in Kafr Ghannam, near Mansoura, in the Ad Daqahliyah Governorate in 1888. He earned a bachelor’s degree in law in 1909, followed by a PhD from the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1912. During his studies in Paris, he wrote Zaynab, widely regarded as the first genuinely Egyptian novel. Upon his return to Egypt, he practiced law for a decade before turning to journalism. He contributed articles to Al-Jarida and later co-founded Al-Siyasa, the official newspaper of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, where he served as an adviser and was elected editor-in-chief. In 1937, he was appointed Minister of State at the Ministry of the Interior in Muhammad Mahmoud Pasha’s second cabinet. In November 1940, he assumed the post of Minister of Education in the government led by Hussein Sirri Pasha.
Amr El-Zawawy is Professor of Linguistics and Translation, Faculty of Education, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. He has also practiced written and simultaneous translation for more than 20 years now. He contributed important articles to different international scholarly journals, including but not limited to Babel (John Benjamins), Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, California Linguistic Notes and Advances in Language and Literary Studies. He published a number of books and translations, including Studies in Contrastive Linguistics and Stylistics (Novika, USA), Exploring the Cognitive Processes of Simultaneous Interpreting (Lexington Books, USA), Seminal Studies in Linguistics and Translation (Cambridge Scholars, UK), Selections from Arabic Poetry (Kindle, Amazon), and English-Arabic Dictionary of Rare and Difficult Words (Lincom).
Other stories in the Classic Short Fiction series, curated by Amr El-Zawawy:
Mohammed Hussein Heikal’s ‘The Second Family’
Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni’s ‘On New Year’s Eve’
Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani‘s ‘The Last Bullet’
Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani’s ‘My Secret Picture’
Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s ‘Eve and the Viper’
Muhammed Taymour’s ‘The Eid Whistle’
Muhammad Taymour’s ‘A Boy Who Became a Man’
Marouan Abboud’s ‘Among the Problems of the Village’
Mahmud Taymour’s ‘The Grand Funeral’
Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni’s ‘Mimi’