Paul Theroux: Dark Star Safari

Its doors are locked upon its secrets; there is no revealing of its mysteries without seeing them from within. There one sees a quarter for the poor folk and beggars gathered in the spot for their housework and to take care of their daily needs; and one sees a paradise singing with gardens, with a hall to receive visitors, and hareem for the ladies. And from the little high window just before the ‘qabw’ sometimes appears a face luminous like the moon; I see it from the window of my little house which looks out over the harah and I wander, despite my infancy, in the magic of its beauty. I hear its melodious voice while it banters greetings with my mother when she passes out of the alley, and perhaps this is what impressed on my soul the love of song. Fatimah, al Umri, the unknown dream of childhood.

He also wrote about the afreets , the demons, that lurked in the tunnel that linked Judge’s House Square to Palace Walk. Clapping our hands to disperse the afreets , we crawled through the tunnel and alley, which were so littered we were knee-deep in household rubbish and trash and garbage, more demonic to me than any afreet .

‘I’d like to see Mahfouz again.’

‘He might be somewhere tonight.’

Cairo had a very old-fashioned literary culture, with cliques and salons. The city’s most endearing characteristic was that all this socializing was accomplished through word-of-mouth. Raymond made a call and found out that at a certain time Mahfouz would be in a certain hotel in a certain district near the Nile.

We arrived at the place at the same time as Mahfouz, who was being guided, a burly man on each side of him, steering him to an upstairs lounge, for he is somewhat enfeebled, and almost blind, and nearly deaf; he is sallow and diabetic, yet looked much healthier than the last time I had seen him, supine in the intensive care unit of the Military Hospital. Looking like a head of state, he wore a heavy overcoat because of the February chill of nighttime Cairo.

‘I feel better now,’ he said, when I complimented him on his recovery from the stab wound.

He kissed Raymond in the Egyptian way, and groped for my hand and shook it. Then he seated himself on a red plush sofa, and held court — silent court, for he said almost nothing. Men took turns sitting beside him, shouting into his left ear, his reasonably good ear, and because he is so deaf they seemed to rant. They monologued to Mahfouz and to the room at large, they engaged in debate, they read articles they had recently published. And Mahfouz simply listened and smoked cigarettes and looked Sphinx-like.

Mahfouz held these audiences as majlis ceremonies, like a pasha on a divan, to lift his spirits, Raymond said. He had been very low after his stabbing and made a deliberate effort to get out of the house, as a way of sending a message to the fanatics that they had not put him out of business.

One man took a seat next to Mahfouz and shouted the contents of a whole long article he had written, rattling the pages of the morning paper, while Mahfouz puffed his cigarette and sat staring through his thick lenses with a stern concentrated gaze. His expression hardly changed as he listened but when he responded he did so with a crooked-toothed smile of jeering triumph.

The United States and Britain had just bombed Iraq, claiming that Iraqi planes had fired on their planes in a ‘no-fly zone.’ The view of Mahfouz’s audience was that although Iraq was an unfriendly country still it seemed like Anglo-American provocation to declare portions of it forbidden zones and then arbitrarily to strafe it, inviting the sort of attack as a pretext to justify a severe bombing. In other words, Iraq was being bombed for defending itself against the humiliation of hostile fighter planes in its skies. I refrained from saying that to call the bluff of the United States Iraq had, early on, actually agreed in writing to the no-fly zones.

Reflecting on the bombing, Mahfouz murmured a sentence in Arabic and then laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘He says, “The attack on Iraq is like the random attack in Camus’s The Stranger .” ’

The sun-dazed Meursault in the novel shoots the shadowy Arab on the beach for no logical reason.

‘As usual, America is simply trying to appease Israel,’ one man said.

‘Israel is part of America,’ another man said.

‘Yes. We say Israel is America’s fifty-first state,’ a woman said. ‘What do you think, Mr Theroux?’

I said, and Raymond translated, ‘What I think is that Israel is the window through which America looks at the Middle East.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ said the man sitting next to Mahfouz.

And it is rather a small window,’ I said.

‘Say some more.’

‘The window is too small to see every country clearly — for example, Egypt is much larger and poorer and more harmless than it appears. But Israel insists that we see every country through its own window. And by the way, it is not an American window.’

While all this was translated for Mahfouz and the others, I felt that I was being drawn into a fruitless political debate. I was encouraged to elaborate, but what was the point?

‘It’s tribal warfare,’ I said. ‘I want to stay out of it. Anyway, what does Mahfouz think?’

‘No one cares what I think,’ Mahfouz said, and everyone laughed, including him.

More people arrived, some writers from Alexandria, a French journalist, a German woman, and the writer Ali Salem, a big man with a melon-like paunch and a bald head that seemed like part of his elongated and satirical face.

One man leaned over and said to me, ‘Israel is America’s baby.’

I said, ‘Many countries are America’s babies. Some good babies, some bad babies.’

‘We don’t like to fight,’ he said. ‘Egyptians want peace.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Ali Salem said, unfolding a large newspaper page. He smacked it with the flat of his hand and sat next to Mahfouz. ‘You must listen to these jewels.’

Declaiming rather than reading the article, he bugged out his eyes and went on smacking the sheet of newsprint. This was an article he had written about a trial of some Islamic fundamentalists who had attacked Mahfouz’s novels for their secularity. Mahfouz, who had made a career out of twitting and needling Muslims, just listened, staring into space, holding his burning cigarette sideways like a snack.

When Ali Salem finished another man took his place by Mahfouz’s good ear and began to shout into it in a very loud voice. Mahfouz, unmoved by the man’s screeching, went on puffing his cigarette.

This man was ranting about the state of writing in the Arab world, with the sort of loudness that seemed like self-parody, and yet it was possible, even likely, that he was not being ironical.

‘The Nobel Prize was given to Naguib Mahfouz, and in so doing it recognized traditional writing. When the prize was given to García Márquez many other Latin American writers were inspired to write books and publish them. But what has happened in the Arab world? Where is Arab literature? Nothing has happened!’

Hearing his name shouted over and over Mahfouz did not appear to be impressed. He remained impassive.

‘Naguib Mahfouz won the first and last Nobel Prize for Arab literature. He won it for all Arabs. But no other Arabs will get the prize.’

The shrillness of the man’s voice underlining this as a criticism also made the speech seem like a piece of buffoonery.

‘Why hasn’t the rest of Arab literature achieved any recognition?’ Now the man was glaring at me. ‘It is a conspiracy by the West!’

I had become the West. Well, I didn’t mind, as long as it kept these people talking, for nothing is more revealing of a person’s mind than a person’s anger. Mahfouz just shrugged. He seemed a worthy laureate — dignified, prolific, rebellious in his point of view, for in this Islamic country he refused to indulge in sanctimony or religion at all, and yet he was gentle, going against the political and religious grain with grace and humor.