Naguib Mahfouz: The Seventh Heaven

Continuing on his way to the café, he performed memorable services. Spotting a gaping pothole, he filled it. Finding an electrical box hanging dangerously open, he locked it. Tripping on a pile of rubbish, he removed it. Splashed by sewer water flooding an alley, he drained it. All these things together convinced many in the neighborhood that a genuine awakening had struck the nerves of the state — or even had gone beyond mere awakening to an outright renaissance.

He took his seat in the café, to refresh his mind with a cup of coffee. He listened to the radio as an announcer was expounding on promising developments expected in the future. Tayyib al-Mahdi was annoyed: similar prognostications had excited him in the past, though in the end they had produced only frustration. His chest tightening in fury at what the man was saying, he commanded him from afar … Tell us what has already been accomplished— not what has yet to be achieved! Then he remarked to himself that only sneezing would stop this broadcaster from speaking. Without warning the man sneezed massively, then remained silent. Perhaps he was drying his nose and mouth with a kerchief. Resuming his chat, he abruptly sneezed again, more emphatically than before. After that, he couldn’t complete a whole sentence. The sneezes kept waylaying him until he was forced to conclude that an unforeseen illness had seized him. Rather than trying to talk anymore, he instead played a recorded song, “Walk Around and See.”

Tayyib was intoxicated with a rapture of happiness and victory. He would purify both aural and visual broadcasting of what was unworthy of their noble goals. He would terminate any talk that displeased him by making the speaker sneeze spontaneously, or emit trilling cries like those made by women at weddings, or flee at the onset of uncontrollable diarrhea. Without any doubt, he would be the trusty popular censor of the dangerous media of mass communication.

At this time he noticed a man called Sulayman Bey al-Hamalawi surrounded by slavish devotees and followers, not far from his own seat in the café. Sulayman’s stooges crowded around their benefactor in hypocritical sycophancy, inflating him grossly with arrogance and conceit. The tax authorities counted Sulayman, one of the fat cats of the reforms, among the city’s poor. “Wonderful,” Tayyib mumbled. “Just wonderful.”

Sulayman Bey, go straight to the tax prosecutor’s office to repent and say you’re sorry, and pay up the millions of pounds you owe. Immediately the man got up and went to his car parked outside. Tayyib rubbed his hands with glee — tomorrow his victim will be the talk of the newspapers, which will make an example of him to awaken people’s consciences. And when Sulayman returns to his villa, he will wonder what had befallen him, beating his head against the wall in despair.

He kept applying his stupendous ability the rest of that day and in the days that followed, in all sorts of different places, wherever it seemed suitable. He passed by a maternity hospital, a consumers cooperative, an electrical appliances factory, and so on. A curse and an affliction for some, a mercy for many others. Wherever he went, astonishment and confusion trailed in his wake. Both those he had chastised and those he had blessed would wonder, “How could people change without warning from one extreme to another? What’s happening to the world? How can so many problems be set right, without any steps taken to sort them out?”Meanwhile, Tayyib came to see that he could not make

the best use of his power without proper planning and awareness of need. He obtained guides to the departments of government, factories, and private companies, and took them to the tea garden at the zoo to draw up a comprehensive program for his intervention: the lairs of official bureaucracy, the centers of production and services, the People’s Assembly, the prisons and what was said about them, the commercial markets, the press, the political parties, the schools and universities. Each phase must be mapped out slowly and deliberately. Every clamor must be quieted, every deviation must be deterred. And once he is done correcting his country, he will turn with zeal to deal with the world. The mission that shall emerge from it will be manifold and heavy. Yet the power that he possessed was the wonder of the age!

Something caught his eye at the tea garden’s entrance. He saw a beautiful woman approaching, to take a seat at the table right next to him. Gorgeous and enticing, she was a perfect replication of his lost youthful dreams. Swept by a surge of delight, Sulayman found his passions aroused in a way that he not known since he first married Haniya, destroying the indifference he had dreaded since he entered old age. The surprise attraction amazed him — truly it was far from ordinary, and hardly appropriate for one preoccupied with such a mountainous burden as his.

She barely noticed him as her large, round eyes wandered over the zoo’s green lake, and the ducks floating lazily on it. Does she have any idea that, in a split-second, he could set her head-over-heels at will? He hesitated a moment before sending her a hidden message. Instantly she threw him an answering look, and seemed as though she were about to speak. His desire now ecstasy, he gave way to it in spite of himself.

Would it do any harm to one who wished to repair the world if he also sought to heal himself? And, in one shared smile, he utterly forgot both his faith and his life. He closed his notebook as they stood up together, surrendering to their fate.

Returning to his house one evening, Tayyib came back to his senses: he realized that he had erred. When Haniya remarked he was not in his normal mood, he claimed to her it was only a cold. And though he never thought to repeat his mistake, the pain it caused him would not go away. Worst of all, he was no longer favored with the depthless inner confidence on which he’d been drunk for so long.

He longed to practice his secret power once again. Waiting until Haniya had gone out on an errand, he turned toward the television as he had done so often before.

The channel would not change.

He thought he was going mad. No matter how much he tried, all he met was failure. The miracle was gone— like a dream.

Pleading is pointless. Distress is useless. Regret has no effect. An awesome sadness will haunt Tayyib al-Mahdi until the day of his death.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Satan. That alone should do. You’ve known my story since antiquity. Indeed, my mission’s fame burns as brilliantly as the sun that shall surely scorch me on the Day of Judgment.

Yet I am dazed and confused since it has come to me that, despite all claims to the contrary, there yet exists an honorable man in your country. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me say frankly that I can take no credit whatsoever for the flood of evil that now engulfs the earth. Yet I gladly embrace these new, deviant ideas that never even occurred to me in times of old. I have always accepted my fate, which is to struggle to make man stumble, then bide my time to see the result. But the innovations of this generation far surpass those of all who came before it. Since time immemorial, the art of tempting a single man or a woman would totally absorb me as I resorted to my vast repertoire of tricks and sleight of hand in the effort to snare them. Yet now I simply watch as all humanity throws itself madly into the abyss. Whole groups and peoples fall into the pit without a word passing from my lips, without my moving at all. They all sink together into the mire, while I stand back and wait, puzzled and perplexed, drumming palm against palm. How I have wished that I was its cause, the man who put it in motion, the one who could boast it was his own!