Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Monra is expected to eliminate his issue. ‘Sire, I have no weapon with which to kill.’ Khafra, Pharaoh’s seed, shoves his dagger into Monra’s hand. In revulsion against himself the High Priest thrusts it into his own heart. Khafra with a cold will (to remind oneself of, much later) has no hesitation in ensuring the succession. He beheads the infant and the woman.

There is another encounter, on the journey back to Pharaoh’s palace, another terrified woman, apparently pursued by a Bedouin band. Once more compassionate, he orders that the poor creature with her baby be taken to safety — she says she was on her way to join her husband, a worker on the pyramid construction. Mahfouz, like a master detective-fiction writer, lets us in on something vitally portentous his central character, Khufu, does not know; and that would change the entire narrative if he did. The woman is Zaya. She has saved the baby from Bedouin attack on the wheat wagon.

Mahfouz’s marvellous evocation, with the mid-twentieth-century setting of his Cairo trilogy 139, of the depth of the relationship between rich and aristocratic family men and courtesans, pimps, concurrent with lineal negotiations with marriage brokers, exemplifies an ignored class interdependency. His socialist convictions that were to oppose, in all his work, the posit that class values, which regard the lives of the ‘common people’ as less representative of the grand complex mystery the writer deciphers in human existence, begins in this other, early trilogy. The encounter with Zaya moves his story from those who believe themselves to be the representatives of the gods, to the crowd-scene protagonists in life. The servant Zaya’s desolation when she learns her husband has died under the brutal conditions of pyramid labour, and the pragmatic courage of her subsequent life devotedly caring for baby Djedef, whom she must present as her own son, opens a whole society both coexistent with and completely remote from the awareness of the Pharaoh, whose desire for immortality has brought it about. The families of his pyramid workers have made in the wretched quarter granted them outside the mammoth worksite Pharaoh gazed on, ‘a burgeoning low-priced bazaar’. There Djedef grows to manhood. Zaya, one of Mahfouz’s many varieties of female beauty, has caught the eye of the inspector of the pyramid, Bisharu, and does not fail to see survival for herself and the child in getting him to marry her. Mahfouz’s conception of beauty includes intelligence; he may be claimed to be a feminist, particularly when, in later novels, he is depicting a Muslim society where women’s place is male-decreed: a bold position in twentieth-century Egypt, though nothing as dangerous as his criticism, through the lives of his characters, of aspects of Islamic religious orthodoxy that brought him accusations of blasphemy and a near-fatal attack by a fanatic.

Djedef chooses a military career; his ‘mother’ proudly sees him as a future officer of the Pharaoh’s charioteers. While his putative father asks himself whether he should continue to claim this progeniture or proclaim the truth? But that once again would be a different novel and the one whose heights Mahfouz is mounting will not have the pyramid inspector determine a route.

Pharaoh Khufu has been out of the action and the reader’s sight; it almost seems the author has abandoned the subject of Khufu’s wisdom. But attention about-turns momentously. As Djedef rises from rank to rank in his military training, Pharaoh has the news from his architect: the pyramid is completed, ‘for eternity it will be the temple within whose expanse beat the hearts of millions of your worshippers’.

Fulfilment of Khufu’s hubris? Always the unforeseen, from Mahfouz. Khufu has gone through a change. He does not rejoice, and when Mirabu asks, ‘What so clearly occupies your mind, my lord?’, comes the reply, ‘Has history ever known a king whose mind was carefree … is it right for a person to exult over the construction of his grave?’

As for the hubris of immortality: ‘Do not forget the fact that immortality is itself a death for our dear, ephemeral lives … What have I done for the sake of Egypt … what the people have done for me is double what I have done for them.’

He has decided to write ‘a great book’, ‘guiding their souls and protecting their bodies’ with knowledge. The place where he will write it is the burial chamber in his pyramid. If the wisdom claimed for the Pharaoh in the book’s title has appeared to be intended to be ironic, it now proves to have been the counter-line of tension only a writer of subtle strength may hold between himself and the reader.

There are more changes of identity, outward ones.

The first notes in Mahfouz’s recurrent theme of that other power, sexual love, life-enhancing or destructive, is heard in army commander Djedef’s passion for a peasant girl who really is a princess.

Crown Prince Khafra’s professed love for his father is really an impatience to inherit the throne.

Mahfouz puts Khufu’s wisdom to what surely is the final test of any such concept: attempted parricide. The horror is foiled only by another: Djedef killing Khufu’s own seed, Crown Prince Khafra. What irony in tragedy conveyed by vivid scenes of paradox: it is the sorcerer’s pronouncement that is fulfilled, not the hubris of an eternal abode. Djedef of divine prophecy is declared future Pharaoh with the seemingly unattainable princess as consort, after a moving declaration by a father who has seen his own life saved — only by the death of his son. He calls for papyrus: ‘that I may conclude my book of wisdom with the gravest lesson that I have learned in my life …’ Then he throws the pen away. With it goes the vanity of human attempt at immortality; Khufu’s wisdom attained.

The second novel of the trilogy opens in Hollywood if not Bollywood flamboyance with the festival of the flooding of the Nile. The story has as scaffold a politico-religious power conflict within which is an exotic exploration of that other power, the sexual drive.

This is an erotic novel. A difficult feat for a writer; nothing to do with pornography, closer to the representation of exalted states of being captured in poetry. The yearly flooding of the Nile is the source of Egypt’s fertility, fecundity, source of life, as is sexual attraction between male and female.

There are two distractions during the public celebration before the Pharaoh; omens. A voice in the throng yells ‘Long live His Excellency Khunumhotep’; the young Pharaoh is startled and intrigued by a woman’s golden sandal dropped into his lap by a falcon. The shout is no innocent drunken burst of enthusiasm for the Prime Minister. It is a cry of treason. The sandal isn’t just some bauble that has caught the bird of prey’s eye, it belongs to Rhadopis.

The Pharaoh, ‘handsome … headstrong … enjoys extravagance and luxury and is rash and impetuous as a raging storm’, intends to take from the great establishment of the priesthood, representative of the gods who divinely appoint pharaohs, the lands and temples whose profits will enable him to ‘construct palaces’.

His courtiers are troubled: ‘It’s truly regrettable that the king should begin his reign in confrontation.’

‘Let us pray the gods will grant men wisdom … and forethought.’

His subjects in the crowd are excitedly speculating about him. ‘How handsome he is!’

His ancestors of the sixth dynasty, ‘in their day how they filled the eyes and hearts of their people …’

‘I wonder what legacy he will bequeath?’

A beautiful boat is coming down the Nile from the island of Biga. ‘It is like the sun rising over the Eastern horizon.’

Aboard is ‘Rhadopis the enchantress and seductress … She lives over there in her white palace where her lovers and admirers compete for her affections.’