Naguib Mahfouz: Adrift on the Nile

The car set off, Ragab, Samara, and Ahmad sat in front, and the rest were squashed together in the back like one flattened body with six heads. They made for Pyramids Road, crossing the almost deserted city. Ragab suggested that the road to Saqqara would make a nice trip and everybody concurred, whether they knew the road or not. Anis sat hunched and silent in his white robe, pressed against the right-hand side of the car.

They covered Pyramids Road in minutes, and then turned left toward Saqqara. They began to travel at speed down the dark and deserted road, the headlights picking out the landmarks ahead. The road stretched infinitely out into the darkness, bordered on either side by great evergreens whose branches met overhead. On both sides lay the open spaces, the landscape and the air of the country. To their left the scenery was cut across by a canal running alongside the road. The water's surface stood out here and there under the faint starlight, iron gray against the black. The car went faster; the air rushed in, dry and refreshing and smelling of greenery. "Slow down," said Saniya to Ragab.

"Don't break the smokers' speed limit," said Khalid.

"Are you a speed freak?" Samara asked him.

We are on the way to the site of an ancient Pharaonic tomb. A good moment to recite the opening verse of the Qur'an…

Ragab soon slowed down again. Khalid suggested that they stop for a while and go for a stroll in the dark. Everybody agreed, so Ragab turned off onto a dusty patch of ground between two trees, and stopped the car. Doors were opened. Ahmad, Khalid, Saniya, Layla, Mustafa, and Ali got out. Anis shifted himself away from the car door and sat comfortably for the first time. He shook out his tunic and stretched his legs. He searched with one foot for the slipper he had lost in the crush. When they called him to go with them, he replied tersely: "No."

Ragab caught hold of Samara's hand as she was about to get out. "We can't leave the master of ceremonies alone," he said.

The expedition moved off. They were going toward the canal, laughing and talking. They turned into phantoms in the starlight, and then disappeared altogether, leaving only disembodied voices.

"What is the meaning of this journey?" asked Anis thickly.

"It's the journey that is important," Ragab teased, "not the meaning."

Samara said: "Hmm!" — in protest at his allusion to her; but Anis was complaining now. "The darkness makes me sleepy," he grumbled.

"Enjoy it, master of ceremonies," said Ragab eagerly. Then he turned to Samara. "We must talk about us," he said. "Honestly. Like the honesty of the nature surrounding us."

It is difficult to sleep when you are witnessing a romantic comedy. Very fitting, honesty, in the middle of the night on the road to Saqqara! Now his arm is creeping along the back of her seat. Anything can happen on the road to Saqqara.

"Yes," he continued. "Let us talk about our love."

"_Our_ love?"

"Yes, ours! That is exactly what I meant!"

"It is not possible for me to have anything to do with a god."

"It is not possible that our lips have not yet become acquainted."

She turned her head away toward the fields as if to listen to the crickets and frogs. How beautiful the stars were over the fields, she murmured. I wonder if any new ideas have been recorded in the notebook. Could we still perhaps see ourselves one night on the theater stage, and guffaw along with the audience?

"I know what you would like to say," Ragab went on.

"What?"

"That you are not like the other girls."

"Is that what you think?"

"But love…"

"But love?"

"You don't believe me!"

Where is honesty in this darkness? What do our voices mean to the insects? You are in your forties, Ragab. You'll have to start playing different roles soon. Do you not know how the great Casanova hid in the Duke's library?

"Please don't say 'bourgeois mentality' again," she said now.

"But how else can I interpret your fear?"

"I'm not afraid."

"Then it's a problem of trust?"

"I heard you say that in a film."

"Perhaps I don't believe in seriousness yet, but I believe in you."

"That's the Don Juan mentality!" she replied.

Ghosts, walking abroad in the fields — or in my head. Like the village in days gone by. Marriage, fatherhood, ambitions, death. The stars have lived for billions of years, but they have not yet heard of the stars of the earth. No ghosts out there; just lone trees, forgotten in the midst of the fields.

"I could perhaps remain chaste until we get married," Ragab was saying now.

"Get married?"

"But I have a devil in me that rebels against routine."

"Routine!"

"One hint, and you understand everything! But I do not understand you…"

Where is the balcony, and the lapping of the waves? The water pipe, and the smell of the river? Where is Amm Abduh? And those thoughts that gleam like lightning striking the shades of the evergreens and then vanish, but where?

"Why did you refuse to marry your important suitor?"

"I was not satisfied with him."

"You mean, you did not love him."

"If you like."

"He was in his forties, like me."

"It wasn't that."

"Satisfaction is only important in free choice. Not in love."

"I don't know."

"And sex?"

"That's a question that should properly be ignored!"

With a voice that broke the spell of the night, Anis shouted: "Rulings and classifications of age and love and sex? You damn grammarians!"

They turned around uncomfortably — and then both laughed. "We thought you were asleep," said Ragab.

"How long will we stay in this prison?"

"We've only been here an hour."

"Why haven't we committed suicide?"

"We were trying to talk about love!"

Across the abyss of the night came the voices of the expedition. Then their scattered shapes could be made out. They approached the car to stand together around the hood. Yes, my dear, we could easily have been killed out there… Where are they now, the days of knights and troubadours? Khalid said that he had been about to commit the primary sin, had the "fraudulent pioneer" not been so prudish.

"And then in the dark," Mustafa added, "we decided to find out how modern we really are, and see who could admit to the most misdeeds!"

Ragab thought it was a clever idea. "And so everyone confessed to their sins," continued Mustafa.

"Sins!"

"I mean, what are considered such in public opinion."

"And what was the outcome?"

"Wonderful!"

"How many could be called crimes?"

"Dozens."

"And how many were misdemeanors?"

"Hundreds!"

"Have none of you committed a virtue?"

"He who goes by the name of Ahmad Nasr!"

"Perhaps you mean his fidelity to his wife."

"And to financial directives and stocktaking and regulations for the acquisition of goods!"

"And what was your opinion of yourselves?"

"Our consensus was that we are in a state of nature, immaculate; and that the morals which we lack are the dead morals of a dead age; and that we are the pioneers of a new and honest ethic as yet unsanctioned by legislation!"

"Bravo!"

Anis gave himself over to the view of the trees that bordered the road. They had been planted with extraordinary regularity. If they moved out of their fixed order, the known world would come tumbling down. There was a snake coiled around a branch; it wanted to say something. Very well, say something worth listening to. But what a cursed row. "Let me hear it!" he cried aloud.

At his bellow, they all laughed.

"What do you want to hear?" asked Mustafa.

They piled back into the car, and Anis was once more pressed against the door. The snake had completely disappeared.