Naguib Mahfouz: Adrift on the Nile

… She is tempting you, so that she can say to you, when it comes to it: _I am not a whore._ She reminds me of someone. I cannot remember who. Possibly Cleopatra, or the woman who sells tobacco down in the alley. She's a Scorpio too. Does she not realize that I am absorbed in abstractions of an erotic nature?

Mustafa excused him. "He who works does not speak," he said.

"Why does he do it all himself?"

"It is his favorite pastime," Mustafa replied, "and he allows no one to help him."

"He is the master of ceremonies here," added Ragab. "Sometimes we call him the master of pleasures. Any of us old hands are inexperienced amateurs compared to him, for he manages never to wake up."

"But he must be clearheaded first thing in the morning at least!" Samara protested.

"For a few minutes, during which he bellows for one of his "magic" cups of coffee, and then…!"

Samara addressed her next remarks to Anis. "Tell me yourself," she said. "What do you think about during those moments?"

He did not meet her eyes as he spoke. "I ask myself why I am alive."

"Splendid — and how do you answer that question?"

"Generally," he replied, "I'm high again before I get the chance."

They all laughed, rather too long, and he laughed along with them, his eyes passing over the other women through the billowing clouds of smoke. There was no love in their eyes for the visitor; there was a lion among them, one who devoured the flesh and threw the bones to the others. The new visitor's bones were filled with a disquieting kind of marrow.

But as long as the midge is a mammal, we need not fear. The fact is, were it not for the planets' revolution around the sun, we would soon know immortality at first hand.

Ragab looked at his watch. "Time for us to stop this babbling," he said earnestly. "Tonight has been a milestone in our lives. For the first time, a serious person has graced us with her presence. Someone who has something none of us possesses. Who knows? Perhaps with the passing of time we will find the answer to many questions that have up to now remained unanswered…"

She looked at him cautiously. "Are you making fun of me, Ragab?"

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it! But I do hope that you will become part of our circle here…"

"I hope so too — and I won't miss any opportunity that time allows."

There was an air of defeated resignation as people prepared to leave. The curse that puts an end to everything took hold. Was that the thought which had slipped my mind for so long? There was nothing left in the brazier of the pipe except ash. One by one they left; until he was on his own. Another night dies. From beyond the balcony, the night observed him… and here was Amm Abduh, setting the room to rights.

"Did you see the newcomer?" Anis asked him.

"As much as my old eyes could."

"They say she's a detective!"

"Ah!"

As the old man was on the point of leaving, Anis said to him, "You must go and find a girl for me. A girl to go with this pitch-dark night."

"It's so late at night — there will be no one out in the street now."

"Go on, you great lump!"

"But I've just washed for the dawn prayer!"

"You want to last even longer than you have already, do you? Go on!"

From the ashtray, he took the end of one of the cigarettes she had smoked during the evening. There was just the orange filter left, and part of the white end, squashed. He looked at it for a long time, and then he put it back, in the middle of a little heap of dead midges. The river breathed a watery scent, musky and female. He thought of entertaining himself by counting the stars, but he lacked the will. If there is no one watching our planet and studying our strange habits, then we are lost. How, I wonder, does the observer of our evenings full of laughter interpret what goes on between the meetings and the partings? Perhaps he would say: There are small gatherings that puff out a dust that thickens the atmospheric veil around the planet; and from these groups there come obscure sounds that we will not understand as long as we are without any idea of their composition. The gatherings increase in size from time to time, which means that they must become more numerous through some intrinsic or extrinsic motive. And it is thus not impossible that there is a primitive form of life on that cold planet — contrary to the opinion of some, who hold that it is impossible for life to exist in other than fiery atmospheres. It is extraordinary how these small gatherings disappear, to return repeatedly in this way without any clear goal, a fact that adds weight to the argument against life here — life in the proper sense at least…

He hitched his long tunic up over his shins and laughed loudly, so that the watcher would hear and see him. Yes, we do have life, he thought; we have penetrated so deeply in our understanding of it that we have realized that there is no meaning; and you too will penetrate deeper and deeper, and still, no one will be able to predict what will come to be. You will be no more astonished than Julius Caesar was when he was first struck by that immortal beauty tumbling from the rolled-up carpet…

"Who is the girl?" the bewildered Caesar asked.

And she replied, utterly confident in her beauty: "Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt."

Anis leaned against the rail of the balcony and gazed at the peaceful sunset. The breeze blew in through the neck of his robe to caress his body. It carried to him, along with the scent of the water and the greenery, the voice of Amm Abduh as he led the prayer in the little mosque near the houseboat. The black coffee was still bitter in his mouth, and his mind was still partly in thrall to the Caliph Ibn Tulun, in whose distant reign he had been wandering for a while before his siesta. He usually dreaded the short time between sipping the coffee and embarking on his evening's journey, in case something happened to bring the mysterious, causeless grief down upon him. But the boat began to rock slightly in time to a faint vibration on the gangway, and he wondered who could be coming so early. Leaving the balcony, he entered the main room just as Samara Bahgat appeared from behind the screen by the door.

She approached him, smiling. He regarded her, astonished. They shook hands. She apologized for coming so early, but he welcomed her in, genuinely pleased. She went out onto the balcony as eagerly as if she were about to see the Nile for the first time, and let her lively, cheerful gaze wander over the sleepy evening scene. She gazed for a long time at the acacia blossoms with their red and violet tints. Then she turned to him and they looked at each other, curiously on her part and with a certain confusion on his. He invited her to sit down, but she went first to the bookshelves to the left of the door, and looked over the titles with interest. Then she took a seat beside his usual place in the middle of the semicircle. He sat down in turn, and said again how pleased he was that she had come early after her weeklong absence. He compared her simple outfit of white blouse and gray skirt with his long white tunic. Perhaps it was because of her work that, unlike other women's, the neck of the blouse did not show her cleavage. Or perhaps because she was a serious girl.

Suddenly she asked: "You were once married, and had a child — is that not so?"

Before he could reply, she apologized, taking back the intrusion with her tone of voice, adding that she believed that Ali al-Sayyid had mentioned it once in the course of telling her about his friends. He replied with a bow of the head. But when he saw the curiosity unsated in her beautiful hazel eyes, he said: "Yes. When I was a student from the countryside, alone in Cairo. Mother and daughter died within the month, from the same illness." Then he added, with a detached simplicity: "That was twenty years ago."