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

A sharp-minded reader is required to follow the shifts in identity of protagonists in this marvellous chronicle; and he/she will be rewarded by zest of entering the stunning agility of the author’s mind. Ebana was, indeed, no simple incident illustrating Isfinis/Ahmose’s compassion. She is the widow of Pepi, the courtier killed with Seqenenra ten years ago, since when she has concealed herself among the poor fisher community of enemy territory, Memphis. Pepi had named their son Ahmose, after the grandson of Seqenenra, born the same day. It is more than coincidence; this other Ahmose is also twinned in bravery and dedication with Ahmose-disguised-as-Isfinis, to win back for Thebes the double crown of Egypt.

The dynastic Ahmose hears through Ebana that the fishermen’s quarter is full of former owners of estates and farms, dispossessed by Apophis. He tells them — and lets on to the reader for the first time — the true purpose of his ‘trade mission’ is to link Egypt to Nubia by getting permission to transport these men ostensibly as workers to produce the treasures of Nubian resources for Memphis’s acquisitive taste. ‘We shall carry gold to Egypt and return with grain and men … and one day we shall come back with men only …’

Eros, too, is relentless; while Ahmose is engaged in planning this great campaign an ‘invading image’ causes him to shudder. ‘God, I think of her … And I shouldn’t think of her at all.’ Amenridis, daughter of the enemy, the Pharoah Apophis.

The day of his reception by the Pharoah brings another emotional experience Ahmose cannot let disempower him: the garden of the palace usurped by Apophis was his grandfather Pharoah Seqenenra’s where in childhood he would play with Nefertari — now his wife, whom Mahfouz knows, in his skill at conveying the unstated merely by an image, he does not have to remark that Ahmose is betraying.

In the palace Apophis falls to the trap of demeaning himself by discarding his crown and putting on his head the vanity of a fake, bejewelled double crown the merchant presents him with along with the gift of three pygmies. They are to amuse him; or to remind of something apposite to His Majesty, in guise of quaint information. ‘They are people, my lord, whose tribes believe that the world contains no other people but themselves.’

The scene of greedy pleasure and enacted sycophancy is blown apart by the charging in of Apophis’s military commander Rukh, the man who brought Ebana to court accused of insulting him. He is drunk, raging, and demands a duel with the Nubian trader who paid gold to save her from flogging.

Ahmose is strung between choices: flee like a coward, or be killed and his mission for his people lost. He’s aware of Princess Amenridis regarding him with interest. Is it this, we’re left to decide, which makes him accept Rukh’s challenge? As proof of manhood? For the public the duel is between class, race: the royal warrior and the peasant foreigner. Commander Rukh loses humiliatingly, incapacitated by a wounded hand. Whatever Ahmose’s reckless reason in taking on the duel, his present mission is fulfilled; the deal, treasures to Pharoah Apophis in exchange for the grain and workers, is granted. He may cross the border for trade whenever he wishes.

Aboard his homeward ship in what should be triumph, Ahmose is asking himself in that other mortal conflict, between sexual love and political commitment, ‘Is it possible for love and hate to have the same object?’ Amenridis is part of the illicit power of oppression. ‘However it be with me, I shall not set eyes upon her again …’

He does, almost at once. Rukh pursues him with warships, to duel again, and, ‘This time I shall kill you with my own hands.’

Amenridis has followed on her ship and endowed with every authority of rank stops Rukh’s men from murdering Ahmose when he has once again wounded Rukh. Ahmose asks what made her take upon herself ‘the inconvenience’ of saving his life.

She answers in character: ‘To make you my debtor.’

But this is more than sharply aphoristic. If he is somehow to pay he must return to his creditor; her way of asking when she will see again the man she knows as Isfinis. And his declaration of love is made, he will return, ‘My lady, by this life of mine which belongs to you’.

His father Kamose refuses to allow him to return in the person of Merchant Isfinis. He will go in his own person, Ahmose, only when ‘the day of struggle dawns’.

Out of the silence of parting comes a letter. In the envelope is the chain of the green heart necklace. Amenridis writes she is saddened to inform him that a pygmy she has taken into her quarters as a pet has disappeared. ‘Is it possible for you to send me a new pygmy, one who knows how to be true?’

Mahfouz discards apparent sentimentality for startling evidence of deep feeling, just as he is able to dismantle melodrama with the harshness of genuine human confrontation. Desolate Ahmose: ‘She would, indeed, always see him as the inconstant pygmy.’

The moral ambiguity of a love is overwhelmed by the moral ambiguities darkening the shed blood of even a just war. The day of struggle comes bearing all this and Kamose with Ahmose eventually leads the Theban army to victory, the kingdom is restored to Thebes.

Mahfouz, like Thomas Mann, is master of irony, with its tugging undertow of loss. Apophis and his people, his daughter, have left Memphis in defeat. It is a beautiful evening of peace. Ahmose and his wife Nefertari are on the palace balcony, overlooking the Nile. His fingers are playing with a golden chain.

She notices: ‘How lovely. But it’s broken.’

‘Yes, it has lost its heart.’

‘What a pity!’ In her innocent naivety, she assumes the chain is for her.

But he says, ‘I have put aside for you something more precious and beautiful than that … Nefertari, I want you to call me Isfinis, for it’s a name I love and I love those who love it.’

‘Are you still writing?’

People whose retirement from working life has a date, set as the date of birth and the date of death yet to come, ask this question of a writer. But there’s no trade union decision bound upon writers; they leave practising the art of the word only when their ability to transform with it something of the mystery of human life, leaves them.

Yes, in old age Naguib Mahfouz is still writing. Still finding new literary modes to express the changing consciousness of succeeding eras with which his genius created this trilogy and his entire oeuvre, novels and stories. In the rising babble of our millennium, radio, television, mobile phone, his mode for the written word is distillation. In a current work, The Dreams , 140short prose evocations drawing on the fragmentary power of the subconscious, he is the narrator walking aimlessly where suddenly ‘every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus’. At first he ‘could soar with joy’, but when the spectacle is repeated over and over from street to street, ‘I long in my soul to go back to my home … and ‘trust that soon my relief will arrive’. He opens his door and finds — ‘the clown there to greet me, giggling’. No escape from the world and the writer’s innate compulsion to dredge from its confusion, meaning.

2007

‘The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I shall cease to write.’

The little strip of planet Earth where two peoples of common ancient origin, Israelis and Palestinians, contest to live — but not together.

I went there not at the invitation of the Israeli government. I was invited by Israeli writers to an international festival of writers. I accepted because the quotation above, by Albert Camus, is my credo. I believe that the writer within integrity to his/her creativity has a responsibility as a human being for recognition of oppression perpetrated against people, whoever they are, in the society in which the writer has his/her being. Just as the opera singer has particular qualities of the vocal cords, the writer has an insight bringing the responsibility to bear particular witness to the writer’s time and place. I want to testify that writers, rejecting political correctness and using the gifts of insight witness, may dredge up some of the truth, beyond the surface of information, about their society and country.