Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

On land, the merchant takes lodgings at an inn among fishermen. In the bar (as later, in the Cairo trilogy) inhibitions dissolving in drink mean people reveal in banter the state of the country. It's serious social criticism and delightful entertainment, at once. ‘You're certainly a rich man, noble sir!.. But you're Egyptians, from the look of you!’ Isfinis/Ahmose: ‘Is there any contradiction between being Egyptians and being rich?’ ‘Certainly, unless you're in the rulers’ good graces'; this bar ‘is the refuge of those who have no hope… The rule in Egypt is that the rich steal from the poor, but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich.'

Mahfouz has the rare gift of rousing a subconscious alertness in the reader: a kind of writerly transmission so that one moves on for oneself, as if before he does, to how things will develop and why. Nothing is an aside. A man bursts into the inn's rowdiness to tell how someone the locals know, Ebana, has been arrested on the pretext that she attacked a Herdsman officer who was soliciting her. When Isfinis hears the woman will be flogged because she's unable to pay a fine, he insists on going to the court to do so. The apparently irrelevant good deed that a man principled against injustice may casually settle with cash. But perhaps one has been prompted. Who is this woman? And indeed her presence is invoked in context of Isfinis's mission when, at another of the progressively hierarchal meetings that must precede granting of audience with Pharoah Apophis, the judge from the woman's trial happens to be present, and he remarks superciliously of the merchant, ‘It seems that he is ever ready with himself and his wealth, for he donated fifty pieces of gold to save a peasant woman charged with insulting Commander Rukh.’ And Princess Amenridis — she's there too, sarcasm her form of baiting flirtation, ‘Isn't it natural that a peasant should roll up his sleeves to defend a peasant woman?’ Echoing tones of Rhadopis; but the courtesan was arming herself against her vulnerability as a despised woman, while Amenridis is amusing herself by taunting a man beneath her class, albeit attractive. Mahfouz hasn't cloned from a previous creation, he's making a statement that the caprice of the privileged is not the need of the dispossessed.

Merchant Isfinis, ready to produce a bribe of the governor's choice, reveals the splendour of objects he wants to offer before Pharoah Apophis. The princess enjoys making a sensation by saying, of the merchant, to the judge, “I am in his debt.’ She relates how she was drawn to the merchant's convoy by the weird sight of the pygmy and picked out from his other wares the necklace with its emerald heart she is now wearing. The governor joins the mood of repartee and innuendo: And why did you choose a green heart… pure white hearts… wicked black hearts, but what might be the meaning of a green heart?’ The princess: ‘Direct your question to the one who sold the heart!’ Isfinis: ‘The green heart… is the symbol of fertility and tenderness.’ The Beatrice and Benedict volley will develop into the taming of the shrew, this arrogant beauty who privately wishes ‘she might come across such stature in the body of one of her own kind… Instead she had found it in the body of a brown-skinned Egyptian who traded in pygmies.'

The — blessed or cursed — complication of sexual attraction along with the imperative will to political power causes Isfinis, out of beguilement and tactics to keep in with those who can take him to Pharoah, to decide he can't ask payment for the green heart.

A sharp-minded reader is required to follow the shifts in identity of protagonists in this marvellous chronicle; and he/ she will be rewarded by the stunning agility of the author's mind. Ebana is, indeed, no simple incident illustrating Isfinis/ Ahmose's compassion. She is the widow of Pepi, Seqenenra's commander killed during the final defence of Thebes ten years ago, since when she has concealed herself among a poor fisher community to the south of Thebes. Pepi had named their son Ahmose, after the grandson of Seqenenra, born the same day. It is more than coincidence; this other Ahmose is also twinned in bravery and dedication with Ahmose-disguised-as-Isfinis, to win back for Thebes the double crown of Egypt.

The dynastic Ahmose hears through Ebana that the fishermen's quarter is full of former owners of estates and farms, dispossessed by Apophis. He tells them — and lets on to the reader for the first time — the true purpose of his ‘trade mission’ is to link Egypt to Nubia by getting permission to transport these men ostensibly as workers to produce the treasures of Nubian resources for Memphis's acquisitive taste. ‘We shall carry gold to Egypt and return with grain and men and maybe we shall come back one day, with men only…’ Eros too, is relentless; while Ahmose is engaged in planning this great campaign an ‘invading image’ causes him to shudder. ‘God, I think of her… And I shouldn't think of her at all.’ Amenridis, daughter of the enemy, the Pharoah Apophis.

The day of his reception by the Pharoah brings another emotional experience Ahmose cannot let disempower him: the garden of the palace usurped by Apophis was his grandfather Pharoah Seqenenra's where in childhood he would play with Nefertari — now his wife, whom Mahfouz knows, in his skill at conveying the unstated merely by an image, he does not have to remark that Ahmose is betraying.

In the palace Apophis discards his crown and puts on his head the vanity of a fake, bejewelled double crown the merchant presents him with along with the gift of three pygmies. They are to amuse him; or to remind him of something apposite to His Majesty, in guise of quaint information. ‘They are people, my lord, whose tribes… believe that the world contains no other people than themselves.’ The scene of greedy pleasure and enacted sycophancy is blown apart by the charging in of Apophis's military commander Rukh, the man who brought Ebana to court accused of insulting him. He is drunk, raging, and demands a duel with the Nubian trader who paid gold to save her from flogging.

Ahmose is strung between choices: flee like a coward, or be killed and his mission for his people lost. He's aware of Princess Amenridis regarding him with interest. Is it this, we're left to decide, which makes him accept Rukh's challenge? As proof of manhood? For the public the duel is between class, race: the royal warrior and the peasant foreigner. Commander Rukh loses humiliatingly, incapacitated by a wounded hand. Whatever Ahmose's reckless reason in taking on the duel, his present mission is fulfilled; the deal — treasures to Pharoah Apophis in exchange for the grain and workers — is agreed. He may cross the border for trade whenever he wishes. Aboard his homeward ship in what should be triumph, Ahmose is asking himself in that other mortal conflict, between sexual love and political commitment: Is it possible for love and hate to have the same object?’ Amenridis is part of the illicit power of oppression. ‘However it be with me, I shall not set eyes upon her again…'

He does, almost at once. Rukh pursues him with warships, to duel again and ‘this time I shall kill you with my own hands'. Amenridis has followed on her ship, and endowed with every authority of rank, stops Rukh's men from murdering Ahmose when he has once again wounded Rukh. Ahmose asks what made her take upon herself ‘the inconvenience’ of saving his life. She answers in character: ‘To make you my debtor for it.’ But this is more than sharply aphoristic. If he is somehow to pay he must return to his creditor; her way of asking when she will see again the man she knows as Isfinis. And his declaration of love is made, he will return, ‘my lady, by this life of mine which belongs to you'.

His father Kamose refuses to allow him to return in the person of merchant Isfinis. He will go in his own person, Ahmose, only when ‘the day of struggle dawns'. Out of the silence of parting comes a letter. In the envelope is the chain of the green heart necklace. Amenridis writes she is saddened to inform him that a pygmy she has taken into her quarters as a pet has disappeared. ‘Is it possible for you to send me a new pygmy, one who knows how to be true?’ Mahfouz discards apparent sentimentality for startling evidence of deep feeling, just as he is able to dismantle melodrama with the harshness of genuine human confrontation. Desolate Ahmose: ‘She would, indeed, always see him as the inconstant pygmy.'