Fortunately she did not know anything. Walking slowly around the house, he thought about how expensive it was. He couldn’t possibly keep it now. Two years’ salary, even added to what was left in the bank of the umdas’ gifts, wouldn’t last longer than two years. All those objects decorating the entrance, the reception room, and the library were “gifts” too. Certainly the crooks outnumbered the people who had been dismissed for crookedness. He was guilty, though, and so were his friends: what had happened to the good old days? Gifts were forbidden, after all, a mark of corruption. But this sudden loss of everything, just when he was on the very threshold of a senior position, which would have led to the minister’s chair! How could you live in a world where people forgot or pretended to forget, where there were so many others who gloated over the whole thing with unfeeling malice, where hard-won honors were being stripped away and vices trundled out and exposed, unfurled like so many flags?
In the afternoon, he went to Ali Bey Sulaiman’s villa. The sky was lined with clouds and a chill breeze stirred up the dust blowing like the khamsin23 winds. As he climbed the broad marble steps, he thought to himself that if it were not for judicial immunity, Ali Bey Sulaiman would have been thrown into the street along with him. The Bey was outside, but Susan Hanem was in bed with a chill. Salwa appeared in a blue velvet dress. Her face gleamed out from the top of the dress like a beam of light—beautiful, but so expressionless that he could detect no reaction to recent events. His worried heart fluttered when he saw her and a spasm of love throbbed inside him like an escaped melody. He told himself she was the only thing of value he had left, and in the very next moment asked himself if she really belonged to him! “Salwa,” he blurted out abruptly, anxious to put an end to any doubts, “they pensioned me off today.”
Her beautiful, languid eyes blinked. “You?” she whispered in astonishment.
“Yes, me. The same thing is happening to many people these days,” he said, entrusting things to fate.
“But you’re not like the others!” she replied, staring at him.
Her words stabbed like a spear through the eye, and his mind reeled, his thoughts hanging suspended only by the gifts and the bank balance. “They’re taking advantage of us in the name of the purge,” he said.
Salwa glanced casually up at the bronze statue of a Maghrebi25 horseman mounting his steed, as if asking it for an opinion. “What an insolent thing to do,” she murmured.
“I’ll find a better job than the one I’ve got at the moment,” he went on, feeling encouraged.
She smiled at him as if to apologize for always seeming so listless. “Where?” she asked.
How much did she really love him? What new betrayals would the days ahead hold for him? A man’s image suddenly intruded into his consciousness and under his breath he cursed the chairman of the Purge Committee. “With a company or else in some private-sector enterprise,” he replied.
The tip of her tongue showed as she moistened her lips, an action so unstudied as to suggest that for a moment she had lost interest in the impression she was making. He was aware of how disappointed she must be. “Let me draw some strength from you,” he said hopefully.
Only her mouth smiled. “I wish you success,” she murmured.
He put his hand over hers on the arm of the chair. “Love,” he said in something close to a whisper, “can scoff at problems like these quite easily.”
“Yes, yes…”
She might have been a little phlegmatic by nature, but she undoubtedly loved him. Overwhelmed by an urge to clasp her, he leaned forward and put an arm around her. She gave him a velvety look, surrendered her body to his arm, and a spark of sudden lust shot out from deep down in his troubled soul. He lowered his eager lips against the softness of hers and released himself to a passionate craving for consolation. But she reached up a hand to stop him, turning her face away to escape from this frenzied onslaught; they drew apart, panting, then sat back in an awful silence, during which each read the thoughts in the other’s eyes, reprimand on her part and apology on his. His voice emerged broken from the confusion. “Salwa,” he said, “I love you. My entire life is embodied in one thing—you.”
She patted his hand sympathetically.
“You should say something,” he said.
She sighed deeply and seemed to regain composure. “We must face up to life,” she said, “and everything in it.”
He heard the sweet melody of her voice with a profound calm. He would have liked them to leave the world and go to some unknown place forever; a place where there were no politics, no jobs, no revolutions, and no past. “Will you give me your trust and encouragement?” he asked, the first signs of cheerfulness in his voice.
“You can have what you want and more,” she replied, dabbing her lips with a handkerchief.
He wanted to embrace her again, but Ali Bey Sulaiman’s voice was heard outside announcing that he was about to come in.
NINE
The Bey came toward them half smiling and stayed for a short while, then called Isa away for a talk in his study, a room set far back from the street and so dark that the Bey put on the lights. Isa looked at him anxiously and read a deep concern in his eyes. He asked himself whether it had anything to with him or was merely the result of recent events: looking up, he noticed that a picture of the Bey in his judicial uniform had taken the traditional place of the King.
“How are things?” the Bey asked.
“I’ll start afresh,” Isa replied, pretending to make light of things. He told the Bey about his unhappy situation, as he saw it.
The Bey thought for a while. “You won’t find things easy,” he said.
“I know that, but I’m not discouraged.”
The Bey looked extremely serious. “To tell you the truth,” he confessed, “your news didn’t come to me as a surprise.”
“Did the chairman of the committee tell you, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it have been possible…”
“Certainly not. It’s true he’s a friend, but the committee’s more powerful than the chairman. And everyone’s afraid.”
“In any case,” Isa said bitterly, “what’s happened has happened. Let’s think about the future.”
“That’s the best thing you can do.”
“I’ve spoken to Salwa about it,” said Isa, taking on the unknown.
“Salwa! Did you really tell her?”
“It was only natural.”
“Everything?” the Bey asked after a pause.
Isa looked at him warily. “Of course!” he replied, rather unnerved.
“What did she say?”
“Exactly what I would have suspected,” he replied, inwardly considering all the possible options. “She’s with me at all times, good and bad.”
The Bey drummed with his fingers on the glass-covered top of the desk. “I want to be perfectly frank with you,” he said. “Marriage is now quite out of the question!”
“That’s true at the moment, of course!”
The Bey shook his head, as though, in addition to what he had stated so frankly, there was something else, something that he was keeping hidden.
“I’m a political victim,” Isa said, trying to probe deeper.
The Bey raised his bushy eyebrows without saying a word.
“It’s often been my privilege to be in this situation,” Isa continued, stung to anger.
“It wasn’t just politics this time,” the Bey retorted.
Their eyes met and they stared at each other uneasily, while a new wave of fury came over Isa. “Explain further, please,” he asked in a quavering voice.
“You know what I mean, Isa,” the Bey replied, in a voice filled with exasperation and sorrow.
“Have you any doubts about me?” Isa barked, in a tone that seemed to make even the corners of this sedate room sit up and listen.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you driving at?”
“All the e
vidence looks grave,” the Bey replied, frowning at Isa’s tone of voice.
“It’s not just grave,” Isa shouted. “It’s despicable—so despicable that it takes a despicable mind to digest it!”
“Your nerves are obviously—”
“My nerves are like iron, and I mean every word I’m saying.”
“If you make me angry, you will truly regret it!”
His chances of having Salwa had been reduced to a hundred to one. “I don’t care how things are,” he yelled, “or how grave the evidence is you’ve mentioned. I’ve never been an opportunist for a single day. And the ex-King had no—”
The Bey leapt to his feet, his face black with anger, and he pointed to the door with a quivering arm, wordless. Isa left the room.
In spite of this scene, Isa decided not to give in to despair before making one final effort to defend the sole corner of consolation that had not yet been destroyed for him: the last word had to come from Salwa and no one else. Neither the strength of her character nor the depth of her love gave him great expectations, but he phoned her next day in the afternoon. “Salwa,” he pleaded, “I’ve got to see you immediately.”
Back came her answer like a slap in the face.
TEN
“There must be a solution to every problem!” Ibrahim declared as they sat in their corner at El Bodega. Ibrahim was so small that for his feet to touch the floor he had to sit close to the edge of his chair, with the brow of his oversized head furrowed to give him a stern and serious air and thus discourage any would-be jesters from poking fun at him. The four men had piled their coats on two adjacent chairs and sat there in the crowded, noisy café with their heads close together. Ibrahim Khairat could feel relaxed when talking about problems and how to solve them, Isa told himself; the recent earthquakes had not caused any losses in his world. He was a successful lawyer and a brilliant journalist. It was the same with Abbas Sadiq, who was secure in his job even though he’d been grabbing money from more people than Isa himself. There was no envy, resentment, or anger to disturb their firm friendship, however, or their long-standing political camaraderie.
Samir Abd al-Baqi took a handful of peanuts from a heaped saucer. “That’s all very well,” he said. “But the days keep rolling by without our finding a real solution.”
Isa looked through the window at the drizzle falling outside. “Do we start at the beginning of the road, on a typewriter?”
Abbas Sadiq began puffing at a nargila and blowing smoke, joining the orchestra of smokers already in the café. Smoke hung like fog around the lamps suspended from the ceiling. Isa surveyed the café, scrutinizing people’s faces and their different expressions, the daydreamers looking drowsy, the people playing games with looks of fierce concentration. Why was it his fate, he asked himself in dismay, to swim against the current of history, which has been flowing for eternity? He looked out through the windowpane onto the street, inundated by rain and light, and examined with lust a woman hurrying for shelter in the dark entrance of a building. “Winter’s beautiful,” he said, “but Cairo isn’t ready for it.”
“Don’t forget,” Ibrahim Khairat said to Abbas Sadiq, “that our men are scattered around on the boards of directors of several companies.”
Here he was talking about them and saying “our men” while at the same time writing articles attacking parties and partisanship and trying to rub out the old days altogether. Loathing reaches a very low ebb when it leads to utter disgust, but then disgust itself is an important element in loathing. The confusing exception was his own past life—and theirs—which had been marked by affection and magnanimity.
“Tell me what your feelings are,” Isa asked, “when you read your articles in the newspapers?”
“I ask myself why God willed Adam to appear on the earth!” Ibrahim Khairat answered quite calmly, ignoring everyone’s grins.
Abbas Sadiq raised his head from the mouthpiece of the nargila. He was pudgy, white-faced, his protruding eyes gleamed like a symptom of disease, and he was completely bald, with an overall appearance that would have led you to believe he was at least ten years older than he actually was. “We’ll all be unhappy,” he said, “till we see you both installed in two important posts with a decent company.”
Trying to penetrate into the minds of these people who were clustered for no apparent reason in this café, Isa let his own mind wander through past millennia, questioning their meaning, and was at first perplexed, then alarmed. He turned again toward the window. A beggar was standing outside, giving him an imploring look. The rain had stopped. “Just imagine,” Isa said to his friends, “these human beings are originally descended from fish!”
“But aren’t there still millions and millions of fish crowding the oceans?”
“That’s the real cause of our tragedy,” he replied firmly, dismissing the beggar with a wave of his hand. “Sometimes,” he continued, “it gives me great comfort to see myself as a Messiah carrying the sins of a community of sinners.”
“Are you sure of the historical facts?” Abbas Sadiq asked.
He’d been sure enough, he told himself, when that telephone was slammed down.
“This would be a good time for some brandy!” said Ibrahim Khairat.
With a little water, Samir Abd al-Baqi washed down a mouthful of peanuts. “Even supposing we did do wrong,” he said, “Couldn’t they find anything in our past records to compensate for our conduct?”
Isa closed his eyes to hear the past, its living heartbeats, the seemingly endless roar of glory, the rocket-like hiss and crack of soldiers’ truncheons. There had been self-destructive enthusiasm, then sedition sapping at aspirations, with apathy creeping forward like a disease, followed by earthquakes without even the uneasy howl of a dog’s warning. And the hollow-hearted search for consolation. And finally the buzz of the telephone line, the source of a void.
“We were the vanguard of a revolution,” Samir Abd al-Baqi said, “and now we’re the debris of one!”
“I say we should keep up with the procession,” said Ibrahim Khairat, as though in a general way he was trying to justify his own position.
A sorrowful look appeared in Samir Abd al-Baqi’s green eyes. “We’re fated to die twice,” he said.
“That’s true,” said Isa, endorsing his view, “and that’s why we’re fed on fish!”
They noticed the shoeshine man banging his box on the floor alongside them and resorted to silence till he had gone, when Samir Abd al-Baqi aroused their curiosity by laughing out loud. “I remember I once almost joined the military college!” he said.
They all laughed.
“How do you think I can feel so cheerful,” quipped Ibrahim Khairat, “when things are getting darker and darker?”
Offering condolences, Isa told himself, is not the same thing as being bereaved yourself. Leaving the café at about ten in the evening, wrapping his coat around him, he looked up at the sky and saw thousands of stars; he could smell winter in the clear air after the rain. The pavement looked washed and gleamed with grayish reflection. An invigorating wind, as cold as a gibe, brushed his face in staccato gusts. He felt very strange again and kept himself calm with the thought of the two years’ full salary and the remainder of the umdas’ gifts in the bank.
In Groppi’s,18 he sat down alongside Abd al-Halim Shukri and Shaikh Abd as-Sattar as-Salhubi, who was in the process of whispering the latest joke. They both asked him, perfunctorily, about the latest news. He expected the Pasha to disclose the results of the efforts he’d made to find him a job.
“Are you still happy the treaty was annulled?” the Shaikh asked ironically.
He realized that the Shaikh had an obsession with the question of the annulled treaty. All the calamities that had fallen on them stemmed from it alone.
“Events are striking our colleagues down like thunderbolts,” Abd al-Halim Shukri said, and then asked, “Is our turn coming?”
Isa sipped his tea and looked at the faces of people around him
enjoying food and drink. Suddenly Abd al-Halim Shukri leaned toward him. “Anticipation is better than doubt,” he said.
Furiously disappointed, Isa reminded himself that in the old days all these people had come to see him with some favor they wanted done. Why on earth were they snubbing him now? As he was leaving, foxy laughter burst from the mouth of a beautiful woman, as sexy as a suggestive song. In the street, the sorrows that had bent him double when the telephone was slammed down suddenly overwhelmed him again and, in spite of the cold, he almost melted away. He had loved her without once doubting that she was worthy of his love. It was true that each had accepted the other at the very beginning on the basis of other attractions which had nothing to do with love, but he had loved her quite genuinely afterwards. She had been very quick to slam the phone down in his face. Perhaps he was lucky to have suffered this blow to the heart at the same time as the blow to his political career; it could not monopolize his feelings.
His anger over all this had begun to get so out of hand that there was no room in his mind for anything of value. How can you imagine, he asked himself, that you really want to work, as you’ve made these other people think? Work is the very last thing you want. Who cares if these drunkards know it? Why not tell them? But before you do that, at least start looking for distractions. Let yourself enjoy a lengthy convalescence—longer than death itself. And let whatever happens happen.