Naguib Mahfouz: Khan Al-Khalili

This decision of his to relish his own misery had an effect on his fluctuating political leanings. He always sided with the losing party, whatever its political principles may have been, and regularly placed himself in the role of the party leader who has to take all the inimical and malicious blows aimed in his direction and bear the brunt of all kinds of responsibilities and pressures. In all of it he discovered almost limitless pain and at the same time unparalleled pleasure.

Truth be told, this trait of his did not happen merely by chance or as a consequence of his failures; instead it traced its origins back to his early years when he was his parents’ firstborn child. He had become used to being cared for, loved, and even spoiled, but he was also the child whom fortune had kept in reserve so that he could take on all the responsibilities of his shattered family when he was not yet twenty years old. The world may have pandered to him just a bit, but not for a single hour had it treated him kindly!

He lay there stretched out on the bed, but didn’t close his eyes. He started looking round at the ceiling, walls, and floor of his room. Could he ever find contentment living in this strange quarter, he wondered. He felt a wave of nostalgia for Qamar Street, the Sakakini quarter, and the old house, but at the same time he still had that emerging sensation of hope alive with aspiration. Once again the apartment began to be filled with the sound of movement, and he listened to the noise as his mother and the servant started moving the furniture around and arranging the various rooms. From the street below came the sound of an annoying din. Listening more carefully with a disapproving ear, he made out that it was a group of children playing and singing. Shaken out of his slumber he went over to the window looking out on to the apartment buildings and opened it. Looking down on the street below, he could make out groups of boys and girls yelling and laughing. They had divided themselves up into teams, and each team was playing a particular sport. It was as if the entire street had been turned into a primitive sporting club; one group was playing with new stuff, and another amused itself with old rags. Some were skipping, others fighting. The young ones stayed on the sidewalk, dancing, singing, and clapping. Dust flew up in the air and noise was everywhere. He realized that from now on an afternoon snooze was out of the question. He heard some amazing tunes too: “Dear friend, what a beauty!” “Children of our alley, mulberries ahoy!” “That’s a high mountain, my friend!” and so on and so on. He did not know whether to feel amazed, angry, or happy. Just then he heard a nasty, gruff voice let out a yell like a clap of thunder: “God damn the world!” and then intoned the same phrase to a clapping rhythm. The voice was almost certainly coming from the store immediately below the window, but from inside. He could not see who this person was singing curses against the world in general, but he could not stop himself laughing, something that put a bloom on his pale face. He stretched as far as he could out of the window and was able to make out the sign over the store: “Nunu the Calligrapher,” it said in elegant script. So, he wondered, did this craftsman make signs that cursed the world and then sell them to grumblers and malcontents? He needed to buy some himself in order to slake his own thirst for such things!

He watched as the sun’s rays, reflected in the glass of the upper windows of the apartment blocks opposite his own window, started to disappear, a sign that the sun was setting behind the domes of al-Mu’izz’s Cairo. He looked up at the lofty minaret of the al-Husayn Mosque soaring in splendor over the fine mesh of sunset shadows. Leaning on the windowsill, he looked out on the roofs of the stores in between the apartment blocks and the windows and balconies that overhung the fronts of the buildings and the various alleyways that branched off. He could see fully locked windows and others that were half open. On the balconies housewives were busy collecting the washing or filling pots. By now the street was almost empty of children, as though the approach of nighttime had managed to scare them away. He secretly longed to venture outside, see the sights of the quarter up close, and explore the streets and alleyways, but he had spent so much energy organizing his room that he gave up on the idea. In fact, he usually stayed at home these days; once he arrived back from the ministry, he would only go out once in a while. He decided to postpone his little expedition for a later time. That decided, he left the window and sat cross-legged on his mattress, that being his favorite position for reading. Taking a book from his library shelves he proceeded to read until it was time to go to sleep.

His father, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged on his prayer mat with the Qur’an open in front of him. He was reciting portions of the text in an audible voice, not paying any attention to the numerous mistakes he kept making in the reading of the text. Akif Effendi Ahmad was in his sixties now; he had a long white beard, and his face had a haggard and august look to it. After he had been pensioned off in the very midst of his working life and with great aspirations for the future, he had imposed a severe isolation upon himself. He seemed to be spending his entire life on devotions and Qur’an recitation. He only left the house on rare occasions, and then it was for a solitary stroll or to visit a particular shrine. The fact that he was financially hard up (his pension amounted to no more than six pounds) was probably primarily responsible for the regulated life he led, but eventually he reconciled himself to his new way of life and fell into its routines; indeed, he even felt grateful and grew to like it. The time that had been most painful for him had been the period after he had been dismissed and pensioned off. He had lost his entire source of income, or almost so, and a life of poverty loomed over his wretched family. He had been forced to leave his work and the activities it involved and to abandon the prestige that came with his position. With that he sprang to his own defense like a madman and started looking for intermediaries who might intercede on his behalf.

However, all that went up in smoke, so he started submitting petition after petition and application after application, but all to no avail. Eventually he came to realize the sad truth, namely that the doors of government employment were now firmly and forever closed. In fact, he had not actually done anything wrong, but his general lassitude and his insolence toward the people who had investigated his conduct only made things that much worse. Once it was all over, all he could talk about was how he had been wronged and who had done it to him, calling down curses on all of them. Anger, hatred, and despair took hold of him, and he started scoffing at government work and civil servants in general. He claimed he had been pensioned off because he refused to do anything corrupt; government jobs were simply too constricting for someone like himself who insisted on keeping his self-respect. At first he had denied that he had been insolent when questioned by the government investigators, but then he turned that round and took pride in it to the point of exaggerating about the way he had behaved. It became his only topic of conversation, to the extent that he became the butt of jokes and started to drive his friends and relatives away.

Initially he maintained his relationships with people he knew; he used to frequent the Gita Café in Ghamra and play backgammon with his friends. But then his misfortunes had a bad effect on his demeanor, and he started becoming more and more intolerant and irascible. One day he lost his temper with someone who was playing backgammon with him. “You can’t talk!” roared the man. “You’ve been fired by the government!” From that day he never went back to the café and retreated from the world and its people. His refuge was the world of religious devotion; there was no longer any trace of the past. What speeded his recovery was the fact that his son Ahmad was able to take on responsibilities for the family, inheriting thereby his father’s obligations and ailments.