Naguib Mahfouz - The Seventh Heaven

“And how do you see him?”

“I can testify to his piety,” said Abd al-Rahman. “We always meet in the mosque at Friday prayers.”

“Really?”

“I walked with him once after the prayers and found him very charming. He invited me to lunch at the Kursaal Restaurant downtown. He was so insistent that I could hardly get a word in edgewise. He told me of his enormous love for our religious heritage, and that he wanted my help to become more knowledgeable of it.”

“Perhaps he’s not well-educated.”

“No, he’s not exactly erudite in that field, but he did graduate from the College of Law, and studied law and history in the Sorbonne.”

“Maybe you’re the first to mix with him,” I suggested.

“Maybe I am, but we used to meet at the bar in the Mena House Hotel by the Great Pyramid. To me it was clear he had a lot of friends there — both Egyptians and foreigners. He was called to the phone so often, I thought he must be in business.”

“It never occurred to you to ask him about his occupation?”

” Once I asked him a bit craftily about how he spent his time. He answered that he loved innumerable things, yet he was not committed to any particular kind of work. In other words, he’s rich.”

“What’s the source of his wealth?”

“Land, stocks and bonds, and so on,” Abd al-Rahman replied. “Yet his greatest asset is that he is quite well read. At one point I proposed to him that he write history, and he smiled and asked me, ‘Do you think there’s really such a thing as history?’ I thought he was just kidding, but he saw this and said, ‘To get rich on history comes through praise, and on poetry through libel.’”

“Of course, you don’t know why he has avoided marriage?”

“Once I complained to him that one of my sons was acting up,” he said. “Makram told me with a sadness that seemed unusual for him, ‘A son’s rebellion means endless sorrow.’ The ring of anguish in his voice told me he was that son, or perhaps even the afflicted father himself. Rather slyly I said, ‘You’ve released yourself from all that.’ He looked at me and smiled — but without sating my curiosity.”

“Why didn’t you clarify this point?” I goaded him.

“I was close to him — I even revered him. I was afraid I’d lose him by putting too much pressure on him.”

“Naturally, he let you know that he intended to leave.”

“Never … his departure surprised me. But I’ll surely be seeing him on Thursday at the Mena House.”

“I don’t think so. In any case, we’ll see.”

“Why do you say, ‘I don’t think so’?”

“Don’t you know that he’s suspected of being behind the disturbing occurrences in our area?”

The man’s eyes widened in dismay as he said — not only incredulously, but in protest—”I seek refuge in God from the accursed Satan.”

6

The mystery grew murkier, merging into darkness, but my intuition — honed by years of experience — became conviction, or nearly so. I was just about fully satisfied with my conclusions, based on the information gathered by that time, and was ready to speed up the pursuit. But I saw no harm in meeting the third resident. This was Makram Abd al-Qayyum’s next-door neighbor, the tax collector, Bakr al-Hamadhani.

The tax man had hardly heard the suspect’s name when he blurted, “The madman!”

“Mad?”

“Of course! Every time I heard his voice it was reverberating like a drum in the quiet of the night. Was he talking on the telephone? To himself? Was he having an imaginary fight? You’d think it was a blast of wind or a rumble of thunder. And there was something else really astonishing.”

“Really?” I mused.

“He would sing and play the oud.”

“This is something new indeed.”

“His voice is actually strong and beautiful. Sometimes he sang songs of the utmost dignity, like, ‘Oh how I long to see you.’ But other times they were tunes of the most extreme banality, like, ‘Now I’m a teacher, I used to be a fool.’ Just imagine this somber man crooning, ‘The day you bit me so hard.’ He was such a raucous fellow.

“One time I was returning from an evening at the theater, and saw him outside the Vladimir Tavern, staggering drunk. ‘Bring it on!’ he shouted, slurring his words.”

“So he was rowdy?”

“How strange that was! But there were stranger things, too. One night as I came home from my evening out I saw him walking a few steps ahead of me. He went into his flat and I headed toward mine. For some reason, I noticed that the peephole on his door was open. I took a peek through it and, at the end of the foyer, I could see a well-lit room, perhaps a sitting room. But the bizarreness of what I saw nailed me where I stood.

“I saw it contained a whole variety of marvels. On the wall facing me strange masks were hung, both beautiful and ugly, along with the heads of stuffed animals. Also weapons from various historical periods, along with musical instruments. And in the center of the room there was what looked like a fully-stocked chemical laboratory.”

“A chemical laboratory?”

“Yes, a long table on which glass vials full of various-colored liquids were arrayed, long canisters mounted on metal bases, crucibles, power generators.”

“Amazing,” I muttered. “Simply amazing.”

“I went to my flat flabbergasted. I woke up my wife and told her what I saw. She accused me of being intoxicated. I dared her to come out with me to see for herself … an extraordinary sight.”

“Did you ever say hello to each other or have a conversation?”

“Not once. Honestly, I was afraid of him. I recited ‘There is no god but God’ when I heard he’d gone away.”

7

The same day I paid a visit to Azuz, the flat rental agent. I no longer needed new information on the suspect’s personality, but I hoped to find a thread that could lead us to him. I found the man remembered the precise interaction between them, despite the passage of nearly a year.

“I could never forget that day,” he declared.

“Why is that?”

“The bargaining was done in a minute. In fact, there was no bargaining at all. He was generous to an uncanny degree. But on the same day, I discovered that my billfold was missing. That’s why it was a day I can never forget.”

“How did that happen?”

“He handed me the cash and I put it on the desk, then he left. I was distracted for a moment by a telephone call. Then I picked up the money to put it in my wallet — but discovered that the wallet was gone without a trace.”

“What was running through your mind?”

“The billfold had been with me. The only ones who entered my shop had been Makram Abd al-Qayyum, and the shoeshine man. At the time, my suspicion fell on the bootblack. I called him inside and questioned him; I was so harsh with him that he screamed. But he swore by the most sacred oath that he was innocent, and started crying.”

“Of course, you didn’t suspect the other?”

“No, sometimes I would be assailed by suspicions, but these were hard to establish. It burned me up to lose more than two hundred gunayh —but how could I level an accusation against someone like him? He was a man of influence, without the slightest doubt. What good would it do me to accuse him, except to bring his power down on my head?”

“So you surrendered this matter to God?” “As happens in most cases of pickpocketing. But I would see him sometimes when he went out in the morning and mutter to myself, ‘Our Lord is a mighty avenger.’”

8

That evening I met with my boss. I showed him the reports I had written up in meticulous detail. He began to read them with his head propped on the palm of his hand until he’d finished them. Then he stared at me, frowning.