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

It is flat understatement to acknowledge that Seqenenra dies. He falls in a legendary hand-to-hand battle with javelins, the double crown of Egypt he is defiantly wearing topples, ‘blood spurted like a spring … another blow scattering his brains’, other blows ‘tipped the body to pieces’ — all as if this happens thousands of years later, before one’s eyes. It is not an indulgence in gore, it’s part of Mahfouz’s daring to go too far in what goes too far for censorship by literary good taste, the hideous human desecration of war. The war is lost; Kamose as heir to defeat must survive by exile with the family. They take refuge in Nubia, where there are supporters from among their own Theban people.

From the horrifyingly magnificent set-piece of battle, Mahfouz turns — as Tolstoy did in War and Peace — to the personal, far from the clamour, which signifies it in individual lives. Kamose leads the family not conventionally to the broken body but ‘to bid farewell to my father’s room’. To ‘face its emptiness’. With such nuance, delicacy within juggernaut destruction, does the skill of Mahfouz peretrate the depth of responses in human existence.

And the emptiness of that room will become of even greater significance. Kamose has Seqenenra’s throne taken from the palace to the Temple of Amun, where the body of Seqenenra lies. Prostrate before the throne, he speaks: ‘Apophis shall never sit upon you.’

Ten years have passed. The story is taken up again along the Nile. A convoy of ships is pointing north, now, from Nubia to the border with Egypt, closed since the end of the war. The sailors are Nubian, the two commanders Egyptian. Beauty and rightfulness go together in early Mahfouz’s iconography. The leading commander has ‘one of those faces to which nature leads its own majesty and beauty in equal proportion’. Here is Isfinis, a merchant bringing for sale the precious jewels, ivory, gold and exotic creatures that are the natural resources of Nubia. The convoy lands first at Biga, that island from which Rhadopis’s siren call once sounded, where now the merchant bribes the local governor with an ivory sceptre in exchange for intercession to be received by the Pharaoh Apophis.

Isfinis is not a merchant and Isfinis is not his name. His purpose is not business but justice; we overhear him saying to his ‘agent’, courtier Latu, ‘If we succeed in restoring the ties with Nubia … we shall have won half the battle … the Herdsman is very arrogant … but he is lazy … his only path to gold is through someone like Isfinis who volunteers to bring it to him.’ So this merchant must be disguised Kamose, Seqenenra’s heir, come for retribution?

Mahfouz is the writer-magician, pulling surprise out of the expected. No, Isfinis is Ahmose, Seqenenra’s grandson, last heard of going as a child into exile with the defeated family.

A royal vessel sails near the merchant convoy and a princess with her slave girls is amazed at the sight on the merchant’s deck of an item of cargo never seen before. It is a pygmy. Her Pharaonic Highness sends a sailor to say she will board the merchant ship to look at the ‘creature’ — if it is not dangerous.

Isfinis presents the pygmy with a show of obsequiousness: ‘Greet your mistress, Zola!’ A wryly mischievous scene of the cruel sense of absolute superiority in race, hierarchy of physique, follows.

The princess asks, ‘Is he animal or human?’

Isfinis: ‘Human, Your Highness.’

‘Why should he not be considered an animal?’

‘He has his own language and his own religion.’

To her the pygmy is like anything else the merchant might offer, something to own or reject; ‘… but he is ugly; it would give me no pleasure to acquire him’. From some other examples of the merchant’s wares she picks a necklace; it’s simply assumed he will have to come to the palace to be paid.

The satirical social scene explodes as Latu cries angrily, ‘She is a devil, daughter of a devil!’

In this tale of doubling-up identities Isfinis/Ahmose realises that this woman he’s attracted to is the daughter of the ‘humiliator of his people, and his grandfather’s killer’.

On land, the merchant takes lodgings at an inn among fishermen. In the bar (as later, the Cairo trilogy) inhibitions dissolving in drink mean people reveal in banter the state of the country. It’s serious social criticism and delightful entertainment, at once.

‘You’re certainly a rich man, noble sir … but you’re Egyptian, from the look of you.’

Isfinis/Ahmose: ‘Is there any contradiction between being Egyptian and being rich?’

‘Certainly, unless you’re in the rulers’ good graces’; this bar ‘is the refuge of those who have no hope … The rule in Egypt is that the rich steal from the poor but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich.’

Mahfouz has the rare gift of rousing a subconscious alertness in the reader: a kind of writerly transmission so that one moves on for oneself, as if before he does, to how things will develop and why. Nothing is an aside. A man bursts into the inn’s rowdiness to tell how someone the locals know, Ebana, has been arrested on the pretext that she attacked a Herdsman officer who was soliciting her. When Isfinis hears the woman will be flogged because she’s unable to pay a fine, he insists on going to the court to do so. The apparently irrelevant good deed that a man principled against injustice may casually settle with cash. But perhaps one has been prompted. Who is this woman?

And indeed her presence is invoked in context of Isfinis’s mission when, at another of the progressively hierarchal meetings that must precede granting of audience with Pharoah Apophis, the judge from the woman’s trial happens to be present, and he remarks superciliously of the merchant, ‘It seems he is ever ready with himself and his wealth, for he donated 50 pieces of gold to save a peasant woman charged with insulting Commander Rukh.’

And Princess Amenridis — she’s there too, sarcasm her form of baiting flirtation, ‘Isn’t it natural that a peasant should roll up his sleeves to defend a peasant woman?’ Echoing tones of Rhadopis; but the courtesan was arming herself against her vulnerability as a despised woman, while Amenridis is amusing herself by taunting a man beneath her class, albeit attractive. Mahfouz hasn’t cloned from a previous creation, he’s making a statement that the caprice of the privileged is not the need of the dispossessed.

Merchant Isfinis, ready to produce a bribe of the Governor’s choice, reveals the splendour of objects he wants to offer before Pharoah Apophis. The Princess enjoys making a sensation by saying, of the merchant, to the judge, ‘I am in his debt.’ She relates how she was drawn to the merchant’s convoy by the weird sight of the pygmy and picked out from his other wares the necklace with its emerald heart she is now wearing.

The Governor joins the mood of repartee and innuendo: ‘Why choose a green heart … pure white hearts, wicked black hearts but what might be the meaning of a green heart?’

The Princess: ‘Direct your question to the one who sold the heart.’

Isfinis: ‘The green heart is the symbol of fertility and tenderness.’ The Beatrice and Benedict volley will develop into the taming of the shrew, this arrogant beauty who privately wishes ‘she might come across such a man as this merchant in the body of her own kind … instead she had found it in the body of a brown-skinned Egyptian who traded in Pygmies’.

The — blessed or cursed — complication of sexual attraction along with the imperative will to political power causes Isfinis ‘out of beguilement and tactics to keep in with those who can take him to Pharoah’, to decide he can’t ask payment for the green heart.