He started wondering once again: had Faust, Goethe’s hero, appeared to Taha Hussein when he wrote his novel? The story was an old one, but it kept renewing itself. The devil was always present and ready to strike deals. The devil had been there with Dostoyevsky in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, and with Nietzsche, who constantly flirted with evil spirits despite his reclusiveness, and who lost his mind after contracting syphilis following his single visit to a brothel. And it was also there with Thomas Mann when he wrote ‘Dr. Faustus’, since the hero of the story, a great musician, was also a recluse, but he struck a deal with the devil and ended up infected with a similar disease and losing his mind. Had the devil been present when he and Salwa sat by the Ismailia Canal, and she begged him not
