Thank God! Now I have an adequate income! Two Lebanese liras per day. It was not long either, before Asaad, a frail old man who had spent half a century serving as a janitor, handed me a paper and inquired: “Are you Anis Fraiha?”

“Yes,” I replied. I took the paper which read, “Call on the Dean.”

So I headed to the Dean’s office, and there he was, as usual, wearing his glasses at the end of his nose and lifting his gaze from under the lenses to scrutinize his guests. “What is your defense for skipping the morning prayer from 8:30 until 9 am for over two months now? Don’t you know that attendance is compulsory?” he asked. Each of us had a numbered seat, and a supervisor used to check the vacant seats and report the names of the absentees to the Dean.

“I am giving lessons to members of the missionary at Zqaq El-Blat’s School of Theology at that particular time,” I explained. He stared right at me and asked: “Do you really need to work during the morning prayer? It is forbidden.” “Then, I will have to skip lunch on my days off,” I retorted. He studied my face again, and his gaze frightened me. But he smiled at me, a privilege he rarely accorded to anyone, and said: “You are exempt from attending the prayer. Thank you.”

The first two semesters ticked away in a flash. I spent a good part of my days making a living and only obtained high grades in Arabic and history. I recall that following geometry, we started a new lesson, which was way beyond my head: trigonometry.

Mr. Dow, who was a mathematician before spending a year at the American University as a visiting teacher, was in love with tennis, and I stroke up a tight bond with him thanks to the tennis rounds we often had together. However, he mistook my mathematical skills as equal to those of Charles Malek, who never scored less than hundred in Math tests.