NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

Children of the Alley had the distinction of being banned in every Arab country, and many of those same countries included other Mahfouz novels in this ban. Small wonder, as Professor Said had suggested, that the fundamentalists seemed justified in their murderous intentions.

  “He’s glad to see you,” Raymond said. “I told him you helped get him into the American Academy.”

  “He got himself in,” I said.

  The smiling man, supine in his bed, his neck bandaged, his hand in a splint, that greeted me in the intensive-care ward did not seem the dangerous man who had been vilified all over the Arab world. His expression was serene, his eyes clear. He was weary from what could have been a mortal wound, but he welcomed his visitors with animated conversation. He was modest, he teased, he even laughed and, soon after, this man who had been stabbed by a religious nut with a kitchen knife said, “It hurts when I laugh.”

  Raymond introduced me. He said, “This is the man I told you about. He was one of the people who supported your application to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

  Mahfouz began to laugh a little as Raymond repeated this in Arabic, as though a witticism had occurred to him that he was anxious to deliver.

  “Raymond’s exaggerating,” I said.

  Mahfouz said—his first words a joke—“I am the first person to be stabbed for being a member of the American Academy!”

  He then uttered a dry chattering laugh that convulsed him and caused him pain. He was in a ward with about ten other men, all of them bandaged, with drip-feeds, and monitoring devices, and with plastic curtains around their beds. But Mahfouz’s intelligence, and his sweetness, shone in his face.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I can’t write,” he said, and swung his splinted right hand on its sling. “That is bad.”

  Dr. Yahyah el-Salameh said, “The hand problem was caused by nerve damage. The knife hit the radial nerve. So his hand is paralyzed.”

  “My eyesight is bad, and I can’t hear,” he said. “That wasn’t the attack. That is because of my diabetes.”

  Some of this was in English, some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accent of one of his characters that he had described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.” Raymond stood behind me, translating. Mahfouz understood most of what I asked him, though from time to time he needed Raymond’s help.

  “Tell the people at the American Academy that I am very grateful,” he said, clutching my hand. “Please thank them.”

  “I know they’re worried about your health.”

  “It was a shock, but—” He smiled, he laughed a little; he did not want to dwell on the attack.

  “What do you think about those people?”

  “I feel no hatred,” he said, slowly, in English. “But—”

  He was gasping, having a hard time getting the words out. Dr. Yahyah looked anxious, but Mahfouz waved him away.

  “—it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven’t read.”

  He was sniggering again, and seeing me laugh, he kept on talking, gesturing with his wounded hand.

  “If you read the book and don’t like it,” he managed to say, stopping and starting, “then, okay, maybe you have a reason to stab the author. Eh? Eh?”

  It was as though he was turning the whole attack into a violent absurdity. Something of the same kind occurs in his strange story “At the Bus Stop,” where the passive onlookers to a series of disconnected intrusions and sudden incidents all die in a senseless hail of bullets. That story and some others in the collection The Time and the Place have the logic and distortion of a nightmare, a blend of comedy and horror and the lack of logic that life confronts us with. He was saying: As a shy and peaceful man—elderly, deaf, half-blind, diabetic—wasn’t it ludicrous that he had been knifed? He was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote: “There’s nothing left for death to devour—a wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and sharp bones.”

  “But I am sad,” he said.

  And he explained that the whole thing was pathetic. This was silly and futile. The fundamentalists were, most of all, ignorant.

  “I thought they had learned something. I thought they were better than before. But they are as bad as always.”

  “I think he is getting tired,” Dr. Yahyah said. “Maybe you—”

  As though defying the doctor, Mahfouz said, “Fight thought with thought—not thought with violence.”

  It was what he had said when defending Salman Rushdie against the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The effort of his speaking, much of this in English, had wearied him. He saluted us. He said he would be better soon—“Come back to Egypt then—we’ll talk”—and he gripped my hand in his left hand and tugged it with affection.

  Afterwards, I realized that I had been the one who had raised the religious issue and harped on the attack. But in retrospect I had the feeling that Mahfouz would have been much happier talking about something else—his work, perhaps, or Islamic aesthetics, or the weather, or Alexandria, or the French philosopher Bergson (who had worked on a theory of humor), or music, for which—before his deafness—Mahfouz had had a passion. He did not regard himself as a victim. His fatalism was part of his humor, and his modesty, and most of all it made him fearless.

  My train back to Alexandria was El-Isbani, “The Spaniard,” though no one could explain why it was called that. It was an express, it rushed across the Delta, stopping two or three times, and Alexandria on the return seemed serene, as Mahfouz had described it: “Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.”

  I had a drink at the Cecil and walked down the Corniche in the darkness, listening to the waves lap at the shore. “A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz, in his novel Miramar. “Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”

  Alexandria made sense to me now. It was not a derelict or threatening place. It was an ancient city, founded by Alexander the Great around 332 B.C., and rising and falling with the fortunes of this end of the Mediterranean, it had been many different cities since then. Mahfouz had been born in 1911 and had witnessed the violent 1919 revolution, the various occupations—Greek, Turkish, British; the Second World War, the rise of Nasser, the fall of Nasser, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the humiliation of the Israeli Six Day War of 1967. He had seen E. M. Forster come and go; he had been in Alexandria in the late 1940s, when the action of Durrell’s novels had unfolded. He had watched these writers and their characters depart. And it was right that after the romantics and the fabulists had finished with the city, and the fantasies had ceased to be credible, the city had been reclaimed by a realist like Mahfouz, who possessed sympathy, and alarming humor.

  I slept in my cabin on the Akdeniz, and woke exhausted and enervated by my dreams. Then I went into town again, bought the newspaper, and went to a cafe to read it. An Alexandrian joined me, Mr. Mohammed Ali.

  “Cairo people are not like Alexandria people,” he said.

  “Why is that?”

  “We are Mediterranean people,” he said. “We are used to so many other nations, so many other different people.”

  “But everyone in Alexandria is the same now. Isn’t that so?”

  “We are people of the shoreline and the water,” he protested. “We have maybe three million people. Cairo has fifteen million!”

  While I was in Alexandria, on the evening of my third day, the Arabic newspaper Al-Ahali (The People) published Naguib Mahfouz’s offending novel, Children of the Alley, in a special edition that sold out within a few hours of its hitting the street. “After 25 years of its absence from the Egyptian people!” the headline said. The whole book, in thirty broadsheet pages, had been printed without permission, infringing Mahfouz’s copyright. At
first glance, it seemed a challenge to the hard-liners, but Raymond Stock had lived in Egypt long enough to find a sinister motive possible: Remember when Mao started the Hundred Flowers Campaign in order to get intellectuals and rebels out of the woodwork? he said. Well, this might be something similar, the publication of the blaspheming novel encouraged by the fundamentalist sheiks, to see who would applaud it. In this way, identifying the infidels, and rousing potential stabbers of Mahfouz. Whatever, it was an event, and it seemed to electrify the city. All at once, in the space of a few hours, everyone in Alexandria was reading Mahfouz’s novel.

  “All gone,” the newsboys told me.

  Looking for someone to help me buy a copy, I met a man who had bought five. They were at his house, he said, or he would have given me one.

  “I spent forty pounds [about $14] on one copy last year!”

  This man, Mohammed Okiel, asked one of the newsboys who had turned me away earlier, claiming he did not have a copy. Browbeaten by Mohammed Okiel, he found a copy of the special edition under some movie magazines. He had the decency to say “Sorry” to me in English.

  “He is ashamed,” Mohammed said.

  Mohammed was a lawyer. We found a quiet backstreet cafe, where young men were puffing on hookahs, and we drank a cup of coffee and talked about Mahfouz. I did not say that I had seen him in the hospital in Cairo—it was too improbable, and it was boasting. Besides, I wanted to know what other people thought.

  “Naguib Mahfouz is a great man,” Mohammed said. “And he is a very great writer.”

  “Have you read the novel?”

  “Yes, Aulad Haratina is a great novel. I like it very much,” he said. “All the prophets are in it. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed. But it is also about us—we people.”

  “Are you a religious person?”

  “No. I have no religion,” he said. “Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish—all false.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because they cause trouble.”

  “Don’t they bring peace and understanding, too?”

  “People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,” he said. “You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.”

  The texture of Alexandria, all the metaphors, and the romance and the layers of history were irrelevant to that simple reflection. It seemed a salutary and humane thought, too, because in a matter of hours the ship’s lines were loosed from the quayside, and we sailed out of this sea-level city, passed the lovely palace of Ras el Tin, and the old yacht club, and the lighthouses, and the ships at anchor. As the sun set directly behind our stern, we plowed east along the crescent of the Delta, towards Israel.

  On deck after dinner, watching the Rosetta lighthouse winking from the Egyptian shore, at the narrow mouth of the Rashid Nile, Onan said—speaking as though I were not present—“Paul ran away from Alexandria. Where did he go?”

  “There is something about this man,” Samih Pasha said, and his mustache lifted as he smiled at me. He then tapped the side of his nose in a gesture of suspicion. “Something—I don’t know what.”

  “I had business to attend to,” I said.

  “We saw the pyramids,” Fikret said. “But for just a little while. Fifteen minutes at the museum. Then the shopping. Women shopping.”

  “I was very angry,” Onan said.

  I said, “You can’t leave Egypt unless you have a small stuffed camel toy and plaster model of the Sphinx.”

  “You see? He is making a joke,” Samih Pasha said. He tapped his nose again, once again drawing attention to its enormous size. “Something, eh?”

  Fikret said, “I think Mr. Paul is right. He does his business. He doesn’t waste time.”

  “You are going to Jerusalem?” Onan asked me sternly.

  “If I have time. Are you?”

  Onan sucked his teeth in contempt, to demonstrate the absurdity of my question, and then he said, “The only reason I am on this ship is to go to Jerusalem. Not the pyramids, not the Sphinx. I don’t care about the Nile. But Jerusalem. It is a holy place!”

  His tone was just a trifle shrill, combining something military with something obsessional, a touch of the ghazi—the warrior for God Almighty.

  “Relax, Onan, of course I’m going to Jerusalem,” I said. “I have the feeling you are making a pilgrimage.”

  “It is your feeling,” he said. “I must find a concordance in Israel—for the Bible. I read Hebrew. I am interested in the Bible.”

  “Yet I feel that you are a devout Muslim.”

  “Once again, it is your feeling,” Onan said. “I believe in the words of the holy Koran. I believe in Heaven and Hell.”

  This statement had an effect in the darkness of the Levantine night. We had passed beyond the sea-level lights of the shore and were traveling surrounded by dark water and dark sky, a cosmic journey on a rusty ship.

  Fikret was muttering to Samih Pasha. He said, “General Samih knows a joke about hell.”

  “Thank you very much,” Onan said tersely.

  “A man dies and doesn’t know whether to go to heaven or to Gehenna, as we call it,” Samih Pasha said, smiling broadly. “So an angel comes and shows him two breeches.”

  He paused and smacked his lips, to make sure we had taken this in. I thought: breeches? Then I thought: Yes, bridges.

  “First breech is Heaven. Very nice. Clean. Peaceful. Seenging,” Samih Pasha said. “Second breech. Man looks. Is Gehenna. Music! Fun! People dancing! Boys! Gorl!”

  “‘Weech breech?’ the angel asks him. Man says, ‘Second breech! Thank you very much!’ He find gorl right away. Nice! He begin to make love to her. Nice! But! Something is wrong. He cannot make love. He look—no holes!”

  Onan frowned, Fikret squinted. I said, “No holes,” and was interested that this Turkish man should use the plural.

  “The man says, ‘Now I see why this is Gehenna!’ ”

  I laughed, but no one else did, except the General, at his own joke. Onan continued to glare at him. Fikret said with his usual solemnity, “I understand.”

  That night, lying in my cabin, I thought of poor diminished Alexandria, and it seemed logical that it should look that way, after so much of it—streets and buildings and monuments—had been ransacked by writers.

  Offshore, twiddling my radio, I got classical music—Beethoven’s violin concerto from the Israeli shore—and remembered that the last time I had heard such music was in Mediterranean Europe. That was not so odd, for after all, Israel is an outpost of Europe. The moral high ground as a refuge and a garrison.

  And because of the ethical commitment and the financial burden required by Israel of all Americans it is impossible for Americans to go to Israel and not feel they have a personal stake in it—or more, that Israel owes them something—perhaps an hospitable attitude? Reflecting on the twelve-figure sum of approximately one hundred billion dollars that America has given Israel since 1967, that was my feeling. It was not a number I ever dangled in front of an Israeli, though on deck at the port of Haifa, I said to Samih Pasha, “As an American taxpayer, I think I own that building.” He laughed and later in Turkish Cyprus, a place that is a drain on Turkey’s budget, Samih Pasha said, “That building! I paid for it! It’s mine!”

  “Now Paul is going to disappear,” Fikret said.

  “Bye-bye,” the General said.

  Onan was busying himself with his maps and scriptures, in preparation for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He looked more intense than ever, and even somewhat feverish, his eyes bright with belief.

  The Akdeniz had hired a bus for those Turks who wanted to go to Jerusalem. A number of people had signed up for the trip, but many—as in Egypt—were interested in looking at Ottoman sights, whatever Turkish castles and fortresses they could locate. The passengers on the Seabourne Spirit were offered a four-hour tour of the whole of Israel, called “The Holy Land by Helicopter.” It is a very small place, and so this was not as odd as
it sounded, and the helicopter tour took in all the main cities, including Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and ended at the citadel of Masada—the scene of the famous massacre—with hampers of picnic food, and chilled champagne.

  I had no particular plans in Israel, just a general desire to travel down the Mediterranean coast, to Tel Aviv and Gaza; to see Jerusalem; to pay a visit to a writer in Nazareth, who was Arab and Christian and an Israeli citizen. But this was all premature, because when I went into the Akdeniz’s lounge to collect my passport I found myself surrounded by armed men.

  “Israeli security,” one man said. “Is this you?”

  It was my passport, the page with my goofy picture on it.

  “Yes.”

  “Come with us.”

  I was taken to a corner of the lounge, while the Turkish passengers looked at me with pity. They were the problem, not me. Every one of the other passengers, the whole crew, the officers—from the captain to the lowliest swabbie—every person on board the Akdeniz was a Turk.

  “You speak Turkish?” one of the Israeli security men asked.

  “No.”

  “But everyone on this ship is Turkish.”

  “Some of them speak English,” I said.

  “Are you traveling with someone?”

  “No.”

  A man flicking through my passport said, “You have been to Syria.”

  “No,” I said. “That visa’s been canceled. I had to pick up my passport early in order to catch this ship. Out of spite the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa.”

  “Why are you the only American on this ship?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What is your profession?”

  I hesitated. I said, “I’m in publishing.”

  These men wore pistols, two of them had machine guns. They did not wear uniforms, but they were soberly dressed and seemed very intent on discovering how an American could be traveling alone with so many Turks.

  “And now I’m a tourist,” I said.

  It hurt me to have to admit that, but I thought generally that tourists got away with murder and that being a tourist was an excuse for any sort of stupidity or clumsiness. You can’t do anything to me—I’m a tourist!