“What is going on outside, Amm Abduh?” Anis asked him.
“The same as usual, sir.”
“Nothing new?”
“Why don’t you go out, sir?”
“I go to the Ministry every day.”
“I mean, for relaxation.”
Anis laughed. “My eyes look inward, not outward like the rest of God’s servants!” And he dismissed Amm Abduh, telling him to wake him if he was still asleep at sunset.
Everything was ready. The mattresses were arranged in a large semicircle just inside the door to the balcony. On a brass tray in the middle of the semicircle stood the water pipe and the brazier for the charcoal. Dusk came down over the trees and the water, and a clement calm reigned. Homecoming flocks of white doves flew swiftly over the Nile.
Anis sat cross-legged behind the tray, staring out at the sunset with his customary sleepy gaze—sleepy, that is, until the lump of kif, dissolved in the bitter black coffee, worked its magic. Then things would change. Abstract, cubist, surrealist, fauvist forms would take the place of the evergreen and guava and acacia trees and the girls on the other houseboats; and humankind would return to the primeval age of mosses…What could it have been that had turned a whole band of Egyptians into monks?
And what was that last joke he had heard, the one about the monk and the cobbler?
The houseboat shook faintly; there were footsteps on the gangway. He prepared to greet the newcomer. It was a girl of medium build, with golden hair. She came out onto the balcony, greeting him gaily.
“I bid a welcome to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs!” he murmured in reply.
Layla Zaydan had been a friend for the past ten years. She was thirty-five and unmarried, which was appropriate for one of the first explorers of the space of female liberty; one, moreover, who had set out from a bastion of conservatism. You have not touched her, Anis, but age has. Look at those wrinkles as light as down at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and that tinge of dryness, harsh and bleak, like a water jar long since drained. There was still a desirable beauty in her clear skin, in spite of a thickness to the tip of her nose, and in spite of something obscure, something encroaching on her which threatened her ruin. In the age of Cheops she was a shepherdess in the Sinai, but died, bitten by a blind snake, leaving no trace…
She did not turn to him as she spoke. She seemed to be addressing the Nile. “I had a hard day at the Ministry. I translated twenty pages of foolscap.”
“And how is our foreign policy today?”
“What do you expect?”
“Oh, all I want is a quiet life. Quiet and respectable…”
She left the balcony for the farthest mattress on the right-hand side, where she sat down. “It’s the same scene as ever,” she said. “Amm Abduh is sitting in the garden like a statue, and here you are, filling the pipe.”
“That is because Man has to work.”
He yielded to a reeling sensation. The evening seemed personified, a wanton creature, one who had lived for millions of years. He began to talk, in a roundabout way, about a woman who he said was the slave of love; whenever one lover deserted her, he said, she threw herself into the arms of another. He added that such behavior could be explained by the waxing and waning of the moon.
Layla smiled coldly. Copying his previous ironic tone, she said: “And that’s because Woman has to love!”
And then she grumbled: “Wretched man!” and he detected in her face the faint warnings of anger, but no trace of real antipathy. He was sure that when it came to jokes she was no Queen Victoria, ruler of an age bound by convention.
“Why don’t you take me as your lover?” he suggested, not particularly seriously.
When he continued to look at her, she answered: “If one day you ever used the word ‘love’ as the subject of a sentence,” she said, “you would never remember what the predicate was. Ever.”
He recalled how good he was at Arabic, as good as the Head of Department; witness the man’s decision to cut two days’ pay from his salary, for no reason except that he had written a blank page. And he remembered also how Layla had said to him once: “You have no heart.” One night it was, when all the friends had gone and only Khalid Azzuz and Layla remained on the houseboat. And without any preliminary Anis had grasped her arm and said: “You are mine tonight.” Why did it always have to be Khalid? Khalid who inherited you after Ragab left you! And so, for me, only the night is mine. His voice had been raised in anger that night, raised against the dawn prayer. Amm Abduh outside, calling to prayer, you yourself yelling like a madman inside; and Khalid, spreading his hands wide in supplication, and saying: “You’ve made a scandal of us!”
Layla had laughed at first, and then cried. She had raised a highly philosophical question. For she loved Khalid, and on account of that could not give in to Anis, in spite of their friendship—if she did, she would be a whore. And he had shouted that night that the call to prayer was easier to understand than these riddles!
“Friendship is more important,” Layla pleaded now, to clear the air. “Friendship is for life.”
“May God grant you a long one, then.”
He filled the pipe so that they could smoke together while waiting for the others. She took a greedy puff and coughed for a long time. And he said again what he usually said, that the first pull on the pipe made you cough; it was after that that the pleasure came. And he thought to himself that it was not so strange that the Egyptians had worshipped the Pharaoh; what was extraordinary was that the Pharaoh had believed himself to be a god…
The houseboat shook, more violently this time, and a hubbub of voices came from outside. He glanced toward the doorway concealed by the screen and saw a lively group of companions follow one another in: Ahmad Nasr, Mustafa Rashid, Ali al-Sayyid, and Khalid Azzuz…“Good evening…Good evening to you!” Khalid sat down next to Layla; as for Ali al-Sayyid, he threw himself down to the right of Anis, crying: “Come to our aid!” So Anis set about filling the pipe and stacking glowing pieces of charcoal on top, and the water pipe was soon being passed around the circle. “Any news of Ragab?” Mustafa Rashid inquired.
Anis told him that Ragab had telephoned to say that he was in the studio, and that he would come as soon as he had finished work.
A breeze blowing in from the balcony made the coals glow on the brazier. Anis was now as animated as he would become. His broad face suffused with a profound rapture, he announced that whoever it was who had made a magnificent tomb out of human history, a tomb that graced the shelves of every library, had not begrudged them a few moments of pleasure.
Khalid Azzuz looked toward Ali al-Sayyid. “So does the press have any news?” he asked.
Ali indicated Layla with a lift of his chin. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is here before you.”
“But I heard the most astonishing facts…”
“Don’t bother our brains with it,” Anis said cynically. “Whatever else we get to hear, this world of ours will still be here, the same as ever it was, absolutely nothing happening at all.”
Mustafa Rashid cleared his throat. “And what’s more,” he said, “the world does not concern us any more than we concern it. In any way at all.”
Anis agreed. “As long as the pipe is still being passed around, what does it matter to you?”
Khalid regarded him, delighted. “Wisdom,” he said, “from the mouth of the intoxicated!”
“Let me tell you what happened to me today with the Director General,” Anis continued, and the story of the pen provoked a storm of laughter. “Pens like that are used to sign peace treaties,” Ali said finally.
The water pipe continued on its glowing, melodious way. A halo of midges clustered around the neon light. Outside, beyond the balcony, darkness had set in. The Nile had vanished save for a few geometric shapes, some regular, some irregular: the reflections of the streetlights on the opposite bank, and the illuminated windows of the other houseboats. The Director’s bald pate loomed, like the hull
of an upturned boat, in the embrace of darkness. He must surely be a scion of the Hyksos kings, and one day would return to the desert…The worst thing Anis had to fear was that the evening would come to an end like the youth of Layla Zaydan, like the gray ash encroaching on the heart of the embers…
Who was it who had said that revolutions are plotted by the clever, fought by the brave, and profited from by cowards?
—
Amm Abduh came and took the pipe away to change the water. Then he brought it back and left again without uttering a word. Khalid Azzuz wiped his gold-rimmed spectacles, declaring his admiration for the old man. Ahmad Nasr broke his customary silence. “A man from the stock of dinosaurs,” he said.
“We should thank God that he’s past his prime,” added Mustafa Rashid. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be a single woman left for us!”
Anis related the conversation he had had with the old man.
“The world needs a giant like him to solve its political problems,” said Ali.
The pipe gurgled louder in the momentary silence that followed. From outside came the croaking of frogs and the chirp of crickets. Through the spreading veil of smoke, Layla’s hand crept into Khalid’s; friends of a lifetime, a solace to one another. Ahmad’s long, hooked nose was rivaled only by Ali’s—though the latter was set in a wider, paler face. Beyond the balcony the darkness spoke, and said: Concern yourself with nothing. Borne down on the rays of a dull red star, it had come, across a hundred million light-years, to reach the smoking party. Do not make your life a burden, it said. Even the Director General will one day be gone, as was the ink from your pen. And there was no care left now in his heart, not since they committed his precious ones to the ground…If you really want to perpetrate some piece of idiocy, to make people stare, then strip off your clothes and prance around in Opera Square—where you will find the statue of Ibrahim Pasha on his charger, pointing at the Continental Hotel. Which must be the most bizarre advertisement for tourism in the entire country…
“Is it true that we will die someday?”
“Wait until it’s broadcast on the news.”
“Anis Zaki is philosophizing!”
“And he’s brought up something new this time!”
“What was that last joke?” Layla wondered.
“There are no jokes anymore,” Mustafa replied. “Not now that our lives have become a sick joke.”
Anis gazed out into the darkness beyond the balcony. He saw a huge whale quietly approaching the houseboat. It was not the strangest thing he had seen under cover of night, true; but now it gaped as if intending to swallow the houseboat whole. The conversation went back and forth among the smokers regardless, and so he decided to wait, likewise regardless, and see what happened. The whale came no closer; and then it winked, saying: I am the whale that saved Jonah. And then it retreated—and vanished. Anis laughed, and Layla asked him what he was laughing at.
“Strange apparitions,” he replied.
“So why don’t we see them?”
He replied, still busy with the water pipe: “As the great sheikh says: ‘He who turns this way and that will arrive at nothing.’ ”
An unrestrained volley of expostulations followed. “No sheikhs here, you old fraud!”
“Who can tell for sure where the next earthquake will strike!”
“And even so, there’s singing and dancing everywhere.”
“If you wanted to have a really good laugh, then why not look at the earth from above.”
“Lucky they who look down from above.”
“Although when the new finance bill comes into force, all our minds will be at rest.”
“Does the bill apply to animals as well?”
“I fear it applies primarily to animals…”
“We could always emigrate to the moon.”
“You know what I’m afraid of? That God is sick of us.”
“Like everything is sick of everything else.”
“Like Ragab is sick of his sweethearts.”
“Like being sick of it is sick of being sick of it.”
“And the solution, is there no solution?”
“Yes indeed—that we all pull together and change the world!”
“Or we stay as we are, which is better—more long-lasting, you see.”
The houseboat shook at the approach of footsteps. They waited for Ragab to appear, but instead there came in a gay, lively woman whose plump figure had one fault only, which was that her bust was a little fuller than her hips. Saniya Kamil! She kissed everyone in greeting, meeting their gaze with gray eyes. Ali al-Sayyid offered her the seat next to him. “We haven’t seen you since last Ramadan!” he said. He kissed her hand twice. “A passing visit?”
“A visit for always!” she replied.
“That means that your husband has left you!”
“Or that I have left him,” she said, taking the water pipe.
She puffed voraciously and said, to satisfy the curiosity around her: “I caught him flirting with the new neighbor!”
“Salacious news!”
“And I should think they heard me on the seventh floor!”
“Bravo!”
“So I left the house and the children and went to my mother in Maadi.”
“That is a shame—but necessary, for the renewal of married life.”
“And the first idea that came into my head was to come and visit my houseboat here!”
“Absolutely right! An eye for an eye!”
Mustafa indicated Ali. “Now’s the time for the emergency husband!” he said to Saniya.
“Why can’t it be my turn this time?” Anis demanded heatedly.
Ali humored him. “I’ve always been Saniya’s standby, for a long time now—”
“And I—”
“You are our lord, and the jewel in our crown, and the master of our pleasures; and if you were ever to bother with love, you could have all you wanted and more…”
“Liar.”
Ali pointed to the water pipe. “Anyway, you’ve no time for love!”
“Bastards! Let me tell you the story of what happened with the Director General.”
“But you have recounted every detail. Have you forgotten, master of pleasure?”
“Damn you all! Your lives will be over before you get the message!”
The water pipe circulated, favoring Saniya, who had not smoked since Ramadan. She’s dark, nervous, likes to laugh, thought Anis. And she never forgets her children even in the intoxication of love and kif. She will go back to her husband in the end. But she will live with him one year and leave him the next, swearing always that it is his fault. Ragab brought her the first time, just as he had brought Layla, for he is the god of sex, the provider of women for our boat. I knew an ancient forebear of his who walked the forests before one house was built on the face of the earth, who in the arms of women would bury his fears of animals and darkness and the unknown and death. Who had a radar in his eyes and a radio in his ears and a grenade for a fist. Who achieved extraordinary victories before expiring exhausted. And as for his great-grandson, Ragab…
The houseboat shook. Ragab al-Qadi’s voice could be heard. He was talking to someone with him. “Watch your step, my dear,” he was saying.
Their faces were filled with anticipation. “Perhaps an actress from the studio,” murmured Khalid.
Ragab appeared from behind the screen by the door. He was slender, dark, and fine-featured—and preceded by a teenage girl. She was also dark, with small regular features in a round, shallow-looking face. Ragab had clearly noticed his friends’ surprise at her extreme youth. Smiling, he announced in a melodious voice: “This is Miss Sana al-Rashidi, a student at the Faculty of Arts.”
All eyes were fixed on the newcomer, who remained unperturbed and met their gazes with a bold smile.
Ragab put his arm around her waist and led her to sit beside him. “Rescue me, master of pleasures!” he said.
“In front of Mademoiselle?” A
hmad queried.
Ragab reproached him. “There’s no need for pretense,” he said. “Not with such a sincere admirer!”
He took a long, deep drag on the pipe, so that the charcoal on the tobacco glowed and sent up a dancing tongue of flame. He closed his eyes in gratification, and then opened them to say: “Let me introduce you to the friends who from this night on will be your family.”
Then he realized for the first time that Saniya Kamil was there. He shook her hand warmly and guessed the reason for her coming, and she agreed, laughing, that he was right. He introduced her to Sana.
“Saniya Kamil, graduate of the Mère de Dieu College, wife and mother. A truly excellent woman, who in times of domestic distress returns to her old friends. A lady with great experience of womanhood, as single girl, wife, and mother—a fund of wisdom for the young girls on our houseboat.”
Involuntary sounds of mirth. Sana smiled. Saniya gave Ragab a cold, but not angry glance. Ragab turned to Layla.
“Miss Layla Zaydan, graduate of the American University, a translator at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There is no one more beautiful or cultured than she, not in the whole history of female advancement in this country. Oh, by the way, her hair really is that golden color; it’s not a wig, or dyed.”
Then he turned his attention to Anis, absorbed in his work. “Anis Zaki, civil servant in the Ministry of Health, and the company’s master of ceremonies and Minister for Pipe-Smoking Affairs. A man as cultured as your good self—this is his library—who has made the rounds of the Medicine, Science, and Law faculties, each time departing—like any good man unconcerned with appearances—with knowledge and not qualifications. He is from a respectable country family, but has lived alone in Cairo for a long time; he is quite a cosmopolitan now. Don’t take his silence amiss—he seldom speaks, roaming as he does in another realm entirely.”
Ahmad was the next to be introduced. “Ahmad Nasr, Director of Accounts at the Ministry of Social Affairs. A civil servant of note, expert in a great number of matters—selling, buying, and many other things of a practical and useful nature. He has a daughter your age, Sana, but he is an exceptional husband, worthy of attention. Imagine—he has been married for twenty years and has never once deceived his wife. Her company does not bore him; in fact, his attachment to married life grows stronger. He should be a case study at the next medical conference.”