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

No wonder Mahfouz later wrote successful film scripts; already he knew the art, the flourish, of the cut. If the technique was to serve him for films, the close-ups of the courtesan and her sumptuous ambience as she wields erotic power through the relations not only of men with her, but of men with men, their dealings in financial and political power, forecast the woman Zubayda (in the Cairo trilogy), whose influence on the life of Cairo during the thirties and forties of British occupation in forms it took during peace and war, even after Egyptain independence in 1922, is so vividly created.

Rhadopis of Nubia is the original femme fatale. The ravishing template. Not even descriptions of Cleopatra can compare. The people gossip: enthralled, appalled, ‘Do you know that her lovers are the cream of the kingdom’; spiteful, ‘she’s nothing but a dancer … brought up in the pit of depravity … she’s given herself over to wantonness and seduction’; infatuated, ‘her wondrous beauty is not the only wealth the gods have endowed her with … Thoth [god of wisdom] has not been mean with wisdom and knowledge’; sardonic, ‘To love her is an obligation upon the notables of the upper class, as though it were a patriotic duty.’

Mahfouz is the least didactic of writers. He’s always had nimble mastery of art’s firm injunction: don’t tell, show. Overhearing the talk one’s curiosity is exhilaratingly aroused as if one were there among the crowd, even while unnoticingly being informed of issues that are going to carry the narrative.

Prime Minister Khunumhotep favours, against the Pharaoh’s intent, the case of the priests’ campaign to claim their lands and temples as inalienable right. The bold challenge of calling out his minister’s name on a grand public occasion has hurt and angered the Pharaoh; his Chamberlain Sofkhatep and courtier Tahu are concerned. There’s juxtaposed another kind of eavesdrop, on an exchange between these two which goes deeper than its immediate significance, dispute over the priests’ possessions.

Tahu urges Pharaoh, ‘Force, my lord … Do not procrastinate … strike hard.’

Sofkhatep, ‘My lord … the priesthood is dispersed through the kingdom as blood through the body … Their authority over the people is blessed by divine sanction … a forceful strike might bring undesirable consequences.’

Here is a palace revolution in place of one of succession — Khufu’s seed — and it carries the ancient and ever-present (in our present) opposition of force versus wisdom, religious causes versus secular humanism. Pharaoh chillingly responds, ‘Do not trouble yourselves. I have already shot my arrow.’ He has had brought to him the man who cried out, told him his act was despicable, awed him with the magnanimity of not ordering him punished, declaring it ‘simple-minded to think that such a cry would detract me from the course I have set upon … I have decided irrevocably … that from today onward nothing would be left to the temples save the land and offerings they need.’

Something that does distract the young Pharaoh from problems of his reign is the fall from the blue — the gold sandal. Sofkhatep remarks that the people believe the falcon courts beautiful women, whisks them away. Pharaoh is amazed: the token dropped in his lap is as if the bird ‘knows my love for beautiful women’. The gold sandal is Rhadopis’s, recognised by Tahu. He seems perturbed when Pharaoh asks who she is; a hint dropped of a certain circumstance that will give him an identity rather different from official one of courtier. He informs that she is the woman on whose door distinguished men knock. ‘In her reception hall, my lord, thinkers, artists and politicians gather … the philosopher Hof has remarked … the most dangerous thing a man can do in his life is set eyes upon the face of Rhadopis.’

Pharaoh is intrigued and will set his upon that face. Of course he cannot join the men, however highborn, who knock on the Biga Island palace door. It seems odd and amusing that there is no rivalry for her bed and favours shown. Is Mahfouz slyly exposing another side of that noble quality, brotherhood — decadence? They share her. There is music and witty exchange, she may dance or sing for them if the mood takes her and there’s informed political debate in this salon-cum-brothel before she indicates which distinguished guest she will allow to her bed at the end of the entertainment.

If kingly rank had not proscribed Pharaoh from joining the brotherhood he might have gained political insight to the issues facing his kingdom. Aside from the demands of the priests, there is a rebellion of the Maasaya tribe, and from the aristocratic company comes the familiar justification of colonialism which is to be exposed with such subtlety and conviction in Mahfouz’s future fiction.

One of Rhadopis’s admirers questions ‘Why the tribe should revolt’ when ‘Those lands under Egyptian rule enjoy peace and prosperity. We do not oppose the creeds of others.’

The more politically astute supporter of the imperial-colonial system: ‘The truth is that the Maasaya question has nothing to do with politics or religion … they are threatened with starvation … and at the same time they possess treasure [natural resources] of gold and silver … and when the Egyptians undertake to put it to good use, they attack them.’

There’s argument, for and against, over the priests’ demands and Pharaoh’s intransigence.

‘The theocrats own a third of all the land in Egypt …’

‘Surely there are causes more deserving of money than temples?’

The ironic dynamism of the story is that it is to be how the ‘cause’ of young Pharaoh’s desire to build palaces and acquire a woman whose extravagance matches his — political power and erotic power clasped together — contests the place of ‘most deserving’.

Yes, it’s Milan Kundera’s maxim, the novelist asking questions, not supplying answers, that makes this novel as challengingly entertaining as the conversation in Rhadopis’s salon. House of fame, house of shame? As she becomes Pharaoh’s mistress and obsession, is she the cause of his downfall, his people turning against him, their worshipped representative of the gods, because of his squandering of the nation’s wealth on a courtesan? Or is Pharaoh a figure of the fatality of inherent human weakness? Is it not in our stars — fall from the sky of a gold sandal — but in ourselves, the Pharaoh himself, to fulfil personal desires? And further: isn’t it the terrible danger in power itself that it may be used for ultimate distorted purpose? Dictators, tyrants. Mahfouz sets one’s mind off beyond the instance of his story.

Rhadopis herself. Beginning with the introduction as prototype Barbie doll as well as femme fatale, the young Mahfouz achieves an evocation of the inner contradictions of the kind of life she lives that no other writer whose work I know has matched. Zola’s Nana must retire before her. On the evening at the end of the Nile festival, Rhadopis’s admirer-clients knock on her door as usual. The class-based denial of the existence of any critical intelligence in menial women, including prostitutes, is always an injustice refuted convincingly by Mahfouz’s women, whether serving in that category or another. After dancing suggestively at the men’s request, ‘sarcasm overcame’ her dalliance. To Hof, eminent philosopher among them: ‘You have seen nothing of the things I have seen.’ Pointing to the drunken throng, ‘… the cream of Egypt prostrating themselves at my feet … it is as if I am among wolves.’ All this regarded amid laughter, as her titillating audacity. No one among these distinguished men seems to feel shame at this degradation of a woman; no one sees it as a consequence of the poverty she was born into, and from which it was perhaps her only escape. This night she uses the only weapon they respect, capriciously withholds herself. ‘Tonight I shall belong to no man.’