Naguib Mahfouz - The Seventh Heaven

He saw a man and woman coming toward him. “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi staying here?” the man queried.

The hotel manager answered in the affirmative, then telephoned to see if the lady would let the visitors go up to her room. Obviously, these people were from the upper crust, at least in terms of material wealth. The wind wailed powerfully, making the chandeliers dance in the hotel’s small lobby. Then quickly another eight persons arrived — four men and four women — and repeated the same question.

“Is Ms. Bahiga al-Dahabi staying here?”

Again the manager telephoned to obtain the guest’s permission. That being granted, the group mounted the stairs with a lofty air — they were from the same elevated crowd as the couple that preceded them — to room number twelve. There were now ten visitors in all — either relatives from one family, or friends, or friends and relatives combined. Whatever the case may be, there was no doubt that Madam Bahiga was no ordinary dame.

“Why did she choose our hotel?” he wondered.

Bustle spread through the establishment’s bar as the staff carried tumblers of tea above, and it occurred to the manager that he had seen some of the faces in the second group before. But then he said to himself that the best thing would be to purge his brain of any thoughts of Bahiga al-Dahabi. Tomorrow she would be just another one of hundreds of lost memories that cluttered the humble hotel.

Then he found before him a woman of about fifty, possessing the ultimate in poise and comportment. “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi in residence?”

When he said yes, she told him, “Tell her, if you please, that the lady doctor is here.”

He contacted the madam, who said the physician could come up. Then he yielded to an insistent urge by asking before she left him, “What is your specialization, doctor?”

“Obstetrics,” the woman replied.

He noticed that she had introduced herself with her professional title, but without her name. Is she visiting the woman in that capacity? Is Bahiga al-Dahabi suffering from a feminine condition? Is she pregnant? Yet he was not able to give full rein to his thoughts before a short, fat man with a scowling face marched in, introducing himself as Yusuf Qabil, contractor. He posed the much-repeated question, “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi here?”

After the hotel manager had sought and obtained permission for the contractor to go up to her room, he bid the man goodbye with a perplexed and sarcastic smile. Meanwhile, one of the bellhops returned from an errand outside, shivering from the cold within his thick, rustic gallabiya. Darkness, he said, was gathering in the four corners of the sky, and soon the day would be turned into night. The manager glanced again out the window, but he was really thinking about the woman in room number twelve — the mysterious femme fatale with her top-drawer coterie. He began to feel that a current of unrest and unease had spread throughout the hotel since her arrival. It permeated his own inner being, arousing within him adolescent dreams of the languorous splendor of rich, worldly occupations.

He was jolted from his reverie by a voice asking, “Is Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi here?”

He beheld a big man wrapped in a jubbah and caftan, a tarboosh tilted back on his head, his hand gripping a gray umbrella. “Tell her that Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer has come.”

His chest heaving with revulsion, the manager gritted his teeth, cursing the man and the woman both — but he did his duty by calling her. For the first time, he met a contrary response.

“Please wait in the lobby, sir,” he told the undertaker.

What did he come to do here? Why doesn’t he wait outside? The manager had worked in the hotel for fifty years, yet had never seen anything like what was happening that day. He was afraid that the rain would start coming down in torrents, keeping them all locked up inside the hotel for no one knew how long — and with this messenger of Death!

New visitors arrived. They came separately, but in succession: the owner of a furniture store, a grocer, a sugarcane juice vendor, the proprietor of a shop for cosmetics and perfumes, a high official in the Revenue Department, the editor of a well-known newspaper, a fish wholesaler, a procurer of furnished flats, an agent for an Arab millionaire. The manager thought the lady would move her meeting down to the lobby, but instead she kept granting permission for them to come up, one after the other. The bellhops brought them more and more tea and chairs, while the manager wondered how they could all find places to sit. Did they all know each other before? And what, exactly, had brought them together now? He summoned the head bellhop and asked him what he knew about these things.

“I don’t know what’s going in there,” he answered. “Hands reach out to take the chairs and the tea inside, then the door closes again immediately.”

The manager shrugged his shoulders. So long as no one complained, he told himself, then he was not to blame for anything.

Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer came up to him. “I’d like to remind the lady that I am here waiting,” he said.

“She promised to call you at the appropriate time,” the manager told him, with a feeling of futility.

The man wouldn’t move, so he called the lady again, handing the mortician the telephone at her request.

“Madam, it’s already past the afternoon prayer, and the days in winter are very short,” he chided.

He bent into the receiver listening for a moment, then put it back and returned to the lobby, clearly disturbed. The manager damned him from his deepest heart. The woman was responsible for inviting this ghoul to the hotel, he thought as he glanced at the lobby’s door with aversion and disgust. Meanwhile, some of the lady’s guests came down on their way outside, and the manager’s apprehensions about the goings-on in room number twelve seemed to lessen.

“Some of the visitors will go sooner and some later; they’ll all be gone by nightfall,” he assured himself.

He began to worry that his position of responsibility would force him into a confrontation with them — and they were from a powerful class. His dismay redoubled with the wind that whistled violently outdoors and the sense of distress that cloaked the roads. Yet despite these forbidding conditions, he saw a group of men and women wearing raincoats gathered at the door, and his heart sank in his chest. He surprised them by asking, “Madam Bahiga al-Dahabi?”

One of them, laughing, replied, “Tell her, if you please, that the delegates from the Association for Heritage Revival have arrived.”

So he telephoned the woman, and as she gave her consent for them to come up he pleaded with her, “There are ten of them, madam, and the lobby downstairs is at your disposal for any number of visitors.”

“There’s plenty of space in the room,” she retorted.

As the male and female delegates ascended, the manager shook his head in total confusion. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a clash. The fury of heaven was about to descend outside — provoked by the assorted oddballs in room number twelve. The manager chanced to turn around to the lobby, and caught sight of Blind Sayyid the Corpse Washer creeping toward him. So he rapped the table with his knuckles in agitation, then put the man directly in touch with the woman by telephone before he could open his mouth. The manager listened to him complain to her, then heard him accede. The undertaker hung up the receiver by himself, but then grumbled as the manager began to walk away, “Waiting around with nothing to do is very boring.”

The manager became enraged, and would have scolded him if the lady hadn’t telephoned at that moment, asking to be connected to the restaurant. Her conversation with them continued for some minutes. Would she and her guests remain in the room until dinner, the manager pondered, and where would they dine? How he wished he could examine her room now: it had to be a scene beyond all imagining — an insane spectacle indeed.