Naguib Mahfouz: Khan Al-Khalili

“The taamiya’s ready, esteemed sir!” his mother called.

He shut the two windows, changed out of his business clothes, and put on a gallabiya and skullcap. “God bless this house!” he intoned to himself. At that very same moment and before he had had a chance to leave his room, he heard a gruff voice coming up from the street below.

“God destroy your house and damn your eyes, you son of a …!”

Another voice retorted with an even viler curse, all of which proved that the two men were merely following the custom of the quarter in swearing at each other in such a disgusting fashion.

Ahmad felt furious and cursed them under his breath. “I seek refuge with God from bad luck and pessimism!” he said, and then left the room.

The taamiya was the best he had ever tasted; he praised it to the heavens. His father liked it too, and turned his praises into an encomium on the new quarter where they were now living.

“You know absolutely nothing about the al-Husayn quarter,” he said, warming to his subject. “It’s not only the tastiest taamiya and ful mudammis, but kebab, goat meat, trotters, and sheep’s head as well. You won’t find tea or coffee like it anywhere else. Here it’s always daytime, and life goes on day and night. Al-Husayn, the son of the Prophet’s own daughter, is here; he makes for a good neighbor and protector!”

After dinner, Ahmad went back to his room and threw himself down on the bed, hoping to get a bit of rest. By this time he had decided that the move to the new quarter had as many plusses to it as minuses. He looked round the room again, and his eyes fell on the piles of books beside the desk that still needed to be organized. He stared at them, his thoughts a mixture of pleasure and contempt. There they were, his beloved books, all of them in Arabic. He had had so much trouble learning English — and not very well — that he had been forced to neglect his Arabic books; by now he had almost forgotten about them. More than a third of them were school textbooks on geography, history, math, and science. Quite a few were reference books on law, and an equal number consisted of works by al-Manfaluti, al-Muwaylihi, Shawqi, Hafiz, and Mutran. There were also some yellowing tomes from al-Azhar on religion and logic, all of which still confounded him; he had come to regard them as symbols of that most difficult of subjects whose truths very few people manage to penetrate. There were also a few works by contemporary writers, the acquisition of which he regarded as an act of courtesy. So all these were his beloved books; truth to tell, they were his entire life. He was a voracious reader. For the past twenty years, from 1921, when he graduated from high school, until now in 1941, he had devoted himself to reading books. It consumed his life inside and out and served as the focus for all his feelings, whims, and aspirations. However, from the outset, his reading activities had had their own particular characteristics, and they had stayed with him for all twenty years. All his readings were general; there was no specialization or depth involved. While there may have been a certain inclination toward classical learning, it was both cursory and disorganized. The reason for this lack of focus may well have been that he had been compelled to abandon his studies after his high-school graduation, so he had never had any kind of planned opportunity to specialize.

This decision had had profound ramifications for Ahmad’s life, both socially and psychologically, and they had clung to him ever since. The major reason for the decision was that his father had been pensioned off before he had even reached the age of forty. As a result of sheer negligence he had failed to perform his administrative obligations adequately; what made it worse was that he had then adopted a supercilious attitude toward the civil service investigators who were examining his case. Because of his father’s behavior, Ahmad had been forced to terminate his studies and take a minor administrative post in order to provide for his shattered family and support his two younger brothers. One brother had died, and the other had taken a job as a minor employee in Bank Misr. Ahmad himself had been an excellent and ambitious student with broad aspirations. At first he had wanted to study law, by following his great idol, Saad Zaghlul, by completing a legal degree, but his father’s dismissal had swept all that away. The decision to abandon his studies had been a severe blow to his hopes. At first it sent him reeling, and he was overwhelmed by a violent, almost insane fury that completely destroyed his personality and filled him with a sense of bitter remorse. To him it was obvious that he was a martyr to injustice, a genius consigned early to the grave, a victim of malicious fate. Thereafter, he was forever ruing his martyred genius and invoking its memories, whether or not the occasion demanded it. He kept on complaining about what fate had wrought and enumerating its crimes against him to such an extent that the routine turned into a sickly obsession. His colleagues inured themselves to listening to him repeating the same things over and over again.

“If only I’d been able to complete my studies,” he’d say in his shaky voice, “needless to say, I would have done well. And then just think where I’d be now. I’d be a real somebody!”

“I’m in my forties now,” he’d complain in a resentful tone. “If things had gone the way they were supposed to and cruel fate had not stood in my way, just imagine what I’d be doing. I’d be a middle-aged lawyer, someone whose services to the legal profession would have been widely acknowledged for almost twenty years. What else could have been expected over a period of twenty years for someone as serious and dedicated as me?”

“We’ve been robbed of the most fruitful era in Egypt’s history,” he would go on regretfully, “one where considerations of age and inherited wealth have been thrust aside and the younger generation has leapt forward to occupy ministerial positions.”

He kept a relentlessly close watch on the careers of some of his more distinguished school contemporaries who had managed to continue their studies. Quite frequently he would look up from reading the newspaper and say something like, “Do you know this person they keep writing about?” he would ask incredulously. “He was at school with me, grade after grade. He was a very poor student; he never managed to beat me at anything.”

“Good heavens!” he would scoff. “The man’s an undersecretary of state! That scruffy boy who could never remember anything he was told? What’s happening to the world?”

He would then go on and talk about what an exceptional student he himself had been at school and what a promising career his teachers had predicted for him. All these sentiments only managed to have negative effects on his temperament; he became obstreperous, bad tempered, and arrogant, always ready to wax hyperbolic about his talents. His life was thus turned into a continuing succession of lies and sheer misery. This alleged genius thereafter found himself stuck in the eighth administrative level in the archives department at the Ministry of Works, but he adamantly refused to settle down and accept things. Never giving up, he kept searching for ways to rid himself of his chains and beat a path to freedom, glory, and authority. Many avenues were tried, and one attempt followed another. His first idea was to undertake home study for a law degree, that being the field he had aspired to from the start. He had to get a degree because practicing law was no longer the kind of endeavor it had been in the old days of Saad Zaghlul and al-Balbawi, so he started collecting books on law and borrowing reports, then spent an entire year studying before presenting himself for the examinations. He failed in two subjects. This was a savage blow to his pride, and he felt acutely embarrassed when dealing with all those people who had been assiduously following the tales of his exceptional talents. He started using his job in the ministry as an excuse for his failure and pretended he had an illness that made it impossible for him to continue his studies. In fact, he kept up this pretense of an illness even afterward as a precautionary measure against further embarrassment. He was scared to try the exam again and decided to avoid subjecting his talent to more obvious public experiments, where people could easily gauge the results.