Naguib Mahfouz - Adrift on the Nile

Anis fingered his jaw. "Leave it in front of me," he said.

"Drink it right away, from someone who wishes you well. It will soothe the pain." And Amm Abduh lifted the cup to Anis' mouth for him to sip. "Let it be for your good health this time," said Amm Abduh. Then he retreated, but at the door he paused. "I had made up my mind to break the moorings if he hit you again!" he said.

"But I would have drowned along with all the others!" Anis replied, astonished.

"At least there is protection in the Lord," said Amm Abduh as he left.

Anis laughed faintly. "Did you hear what the old man said?" he asked Samara.

"Do you not think we should call a doctor?" she asked in turn.

"No, no. No need for that."

Talking about it stirred up the pain again, but it was trifling now that the coffee had settled in his stomach.

"Will he really go to the police?" Samara asked.

"I have no idea what is happening outside," he replied.

She hesitated a little before saying: "What made you…?" And then she stopped short. He had grasped her meaning, but he did not reply.

"Was it anger?" she asked.

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps?"

He smiled. "I also wanted to put it to the test — saying what should be said, that is."

She thought for a moment. "Why?" she asked.

"I don't know exactly. Perhaps to examine the effect."

"And how did you find it?"

"As you saw."

"Are you really going to inform the police if Ragab does not do it?"

"You don't want that!"

She sighed. "It all got beyond me. I was defeated."

"But the experience proved that it is possible?"

"But it appears that you will not follow it through to the end."

"I haven't the reasons that you have for that!"

"Now you're killing me all over again!"

He was silent for a while. Then he said: "You love him. Is that not so?"

She took refuge in silence and pretended to be unaware that he was waiting for her to speak.

"Have you found him different from the excellent man you refused before?" he said next.

"I see you still have your fighting spirit!" she said plaintively.

"There is nothing to be ashamed of, if you have found him different. He's still an excellent man…"

"But he has no morals!"

"They no longer exist. Not even for Ahmad Nasr."

"I'd like to call you a pessimist, but I have no right."

"At any rate, their amorality will protect them from committing any moral stupidity. And you will come to love again!"

"Torment me all you like; I deserve it, and more."

He laughed, and laughter made him feel the pain in his jaw. "I have a confession to make," he said, "which is that jealousy was one of the motives for my strange behavior!"

She stared at him in astonishment. He smiled, and continued: "It would not be right to deceive you. You might have imagined that one of the characters of your play had developed to its opposite extreme through the influence of your words — or by hard experience. And that would land you with a false ending."

She was still staring in amazement. "There is another ending," he continued, "no less trite than that — which is that you love me back."

She lowered her eyes. "And how do you see the ending?" she asked.

"That is our problem," he replied, "not simply a problem of the play."

"But you spoke earlier of 'saying what had to be said'!"

"That is true. It was not just anger; nor was it just jealousy. But I decided then to say what had to be said. To take a serious position in order to examine the effect. And there came an earthquake whose consequences none of us could have known. Even you were defeated!"

"You've killed me already — you're mangling my dead body now!"

"But I love you!"

A look of profound grief came into her eyes. "I confess," she began, "that I try to be more serious than I really am."

"Speak now — quickly. The coffee is about to take effect."

"In my moments of leisure, absurdity gnaws at me like a toothache."

"That's one of its symptoms."

"But I fight it with my intellect and my will."

"Perhaps you will find the development you need for your play in the moral collapse of the heroine!" he said ironically.

"On the contrary! No! I am determined to go on!" she protested.

He was silent in sympathy. "And even so," she continued, "I am convinced that the question is not simply one of intellect and will."

"What, then?"

"Do you know what it's like, the big wheel at a fairground?"

"No."

"It takes the passengers up from the bottom to the top, and down again from the top to the bottom…"

"And so?"

"When you are rising, you feel an automatic rising sensation, and when you are sinking, you feel an automatic sensation of sinking, in both cases without the intervention of intellect or will!"

"So give me an explanation for all this, and remember the coffee!"

"We are the people descending."

"And what can we do?"

"We have only will and intellect."

"And defeat as well?"

And she said, vehemently: "No!"

"Do you consider yourself a model of victory?" he asked her.

"Among those who are going down, there are some who surpass themselves — even who destroy themselves in the attempt."

She began to speak about hope. He looked out at the Nile. The night fluttered its wings, and its secrets were scattered like the stars. Her words died to a whisper echoing in the slumber of his dream. Before long, he knew, the dark waters would part to reveal the head of the whale.

She said to him: "You are no longer with me."

He said, and he was talking to himself: "The cleverness of the ape is the root of all misfortune. He learned how to walk on two legs, and his hands were free."

"That means that I should leave."

"And he came down from the apes' paradise in the trees to the forest floor…"

"One last question before I go: Do you have a plan for the future, if things get difficult?"

"… And they said to him: Come back to the trees, or the beasts will get you."

"Do you have the right to a pension if — God forbid — you are actually dismissed?"

"… But he took a branch in one hand and a stone in the other and set off cautiously, looking away down a road that had no end…"

The End

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels. In 1988, Mr. Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters.

Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.

For the thousands of devoted readers of Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, Adrift on the Nile — first published in Arabic in 1966 — will be an exciting and dramatic change of pace. In elegant and economic prose, Mahfouz creates — out of the simplest of plots — a telling commentary on human nature.

It is the late sixties, and for the group of friends who meet night after night on a houseboat moored along the banks of the Nile, life is not what it used to be. Nasser has ushered in an age of enormous social change; responsibility is the watchword, and there is no time for the frivolous or the absurd. In this serious world, the theory of "art for art's sake" has been usurped by the concepts of committed theater, social realism, and art with a message for the people. These middle-aged and middle-class sons and daughters of the old bourgeoisie are left high and dry, to gather beneath the moonlight, smoking and chatting, hoping to re-create the cozy and enchanted world they so dearly miss. Their witty sallies are as inconsequential as the midges that weave around the lamp. They wistfully hark back to the High Middle Ages of the Mamluk sultans. Their constant companion is the pipe, filled with kif or hashish, whose heady smoke provides oblivion from their existential terror and despair. But one night, art and reality collide — with unforeseen consequences.