Morning and Evening Talk

by Naguib Mahfouz

  Because of his connection to his close friend he was revered, even by ministers, and flattered by friends and enemies alike. Within a short time, he moved to a new apartment in East Abbasiya, purchased a car, and became a true man of the times. He was loyal to family and friends and extended a helping hand to his uncle Hamid and cousin Nadir. It was thanks to him that his younger brother, Salim, was dealt with humanely when he was interrogated prior to his incarceration. Likewise, he was the intermediary in the appointment of many of his friends as guards after members of the family were placed under supervision. He remained close to his friend even after the man ranked with the new leaders. Not a week went by without a domestic visit to his mansion, where they would discuss romance and memories in confidence. On one such occasion he asked his friend casually, “Isn’t it about time you nominated me as a minister?”

  “What’s the value in being a minister? Your income would be cut in half,” the man said.

  “But.…”

  The other laughed. “I’m telling you I already tried…,” he said and gazed at Hakim with a meaningful smile.

  “I promise I’ll give up gambling,” he said.

  “It’s your brother Salim too,” said the friend dejectedly.

  Hakim gave up the idea of becoming a minister, but his star continued to soar and he was elected a member of the national assembly. His light went on shining until June 5, when his friend was among those swallowed by darkness. Hakim’s influence thus disappeared in one blow, though he managed to keep his job. The fall was a personal as well as public defeat; he tasted the bitterness of ignominy after the sweetness of glory and found the many snubs he suffered—including from those he had loyally rescued from insignificance—unbearable. His only comforts in the world were his two sons, Hussein and Amr, who had become officers in the cavalry. Around this time, he began to show symptoms of high blood pressure and to suffer the effects. Then came the calamity he had often had nightmares about: Amr was martyred in the War of Attrition. Unlike Saniya, Hakim tried to maintain his self-control and appear brave and accepting of fate, leaving his sorrow to congeal deep inside him like sediment in a vessel. He carried on as one leader died and the next took over. He lived through October 6 and was shaken by a delirium he had not felt since the happy days before June 5. But the blaze was soon extinguished when he received news that his remaining son, Hussein, had been martyred on the battlefield. The tension mounted and exploded without self-control, a show of bravery, or acceptance of fate, and killed him. These events took place as Radia hovered at the summit of her old age. The angels chuckled in the old house.

  Halim Abd al-Azim Dawud

  He was born and grew up in an elegant villa in East Abbasiya, the third son of Abd al-Azim Pasha Dawud. He had a pleasant face and sporty build and from an early age was devoted to fun and amusement, jokes, and riotous behavior. He was never known to utter a single serious word. His two older brothers were excessively serious and industrious, hence he would say, “I was created to restore balance to the family.”

  Abd al-Azim Pasha watched bitterly as he stumbled through school and told him, “You’ll bring shame on yourself and the family.” But Halim took no notice of censure. Of the family’s characteristics he retained only pride, conceit, and arrogance—he even held his own family, along with Amr and Surur, in contempt and resented the successful among them. Only Amer, who was married to his sister Iffat, was spared his tongue. The Murakibi family he placed, despite their wealth, on the same level assigned them by the Dawud family because of their lack of education and their descent from a man who sold pantofles. Had it not been for the weight of tradition and the vigilance of his aunts, he would not have hesitated to seduce the pretty female cousins of his age, like Surur Effendi’s daughters, Gamila and Bahiga, or Rashwana’s daughter, Dananir. Hamid was probably the only person he was cautious around, on account of his strength and predisposition to violence. He resented him nevertheless, and they remained adversaries until the final stages of their lives, when all they had in common was misfortune. In childhood and adolescence, amid his mother’s pampering, he gained mastery in swimming, football, gambling, wine, romance, and amusement. He was also distinguished by a sweet voice and would say with characteristic conceit, “Were it not for family tradition, I’d be a popular singer.” After a long struggle with school, he decided to enroll in the police academy. The family, men and women alike, was not impressed. “We’re a family of lawyers and doctors,” his father said.

  “I have no patience with studying,” he confessed.

  When he enrolled at the academy he found Hasan Mahmud Ata al-Murakibi in his final year and Hamid halfway through. In keeping with academy conventions, he had to execute duties for them humbly and obediently. It would have been easier for him to do this for a soldier. Once, the three were having a meal with Radia, removed from duties and obligations. They got into a discussion of origins, boasting jokingly to one another. He reminded them of their roots and they reviled him for his. “You may be pashas but you come from the soil,” Hamid said to him. Radia was following the conversation, smiling. “At the end of the day we’re all Adam and Eve’s children, and there’s no champion in the family to match my father, Shaykh Mu‘awiya.”

  Halim regarded Radia as one of life’s curiosities with her dervish ways, magic, daily prayers, and ifrit. “In a different life she would take her natural place among the madmen at Bab al-Akhdar,” he said to his mother.

  “Be careful not to insult the dearest person to me,” Farida Hanem exclaimed.

  Farida Hanem believed in Radia and whenever they met would ask her to read her coffee cup. When in her old age she guessed her end was near, she stipulated that Radia, and no one else from either her or her husband’s family, should wash her.

  Halim graduated an officer a year after Hamid and, thanks to his father, was appointed to special posts at the interior ministry and spent most of his service guarding amirs and ministers. The 1919 Revolution played out before him like an emotive film in the cinema; never in his life had he associated with anything but amusement, riotous behavior, jokes, and entertainment. His father and brothers were dervishes of constitutional liberalism, but he was a dervish of bars, nightclubs, and casinos. He never contemplated forming a family or sustaining any ties. He chose an apartment for himself in a building on Nile Street—the one he showed Hamid after his divorce—and decorated it with gifts from amirs and ministers. It bore witness to all manner of prostitutes and artistes. He did not hesitate, even when he rose in rank, to spend the evening on the houseboat Monologist, drinking, behaving riotously, and singing, then staggering home at dawn. Relations became strained between him and his father and two brothers, and some futile attempts were made to arrange a marriage. But as the days passed he conquered them with his jovial spirit; he assailed their hearts until they surrendered to him like an unavoidable evil, probably the most gratifying evil in the family.

  When the July Revolution came he was transferred to the district inspectorate. True, he was luckier than Hamid and Hasan, but in old age he had to work hard for the first time in his life. Moreover, he let his contempt for the revolution be known from the first day. He wondered how people distinguished by nothing but their possession of weapons could usurp government. Did it mean then that brigands could become kings? What had happened to noble families? How could the rank of pasha be eliminated with a stroke of the pen? How should he address his father and older brother from now on? How could he give the military salute to officers of similar or lower rank? Worst of all, he found in the Murakibi family two officers in the second tier of rulers, and Samira’s son Hakim was part of the ruling body! The world had truly turned upside down—the bottom now at the top, the top now at the bottom. Fires of jealousy and rancor raged in his heart. He glowered angrily at the new world glowering at him.

  How great was his delight at the Tripartite Aggression! He believed the curtain would come down on the comedy and the situation would be put right. But the
events that followed frustrated his hopes, and the leader turned to meet a new world of chivalry and valor. His father died in the 1960s, followed two years later by his older brother, compounding his exile and sorrow. His amusements and riotous behavior escalated unchecked. One night he was at a luxury apartment for illicit gambling and there was a police raid. He made his identity known to the head of the force, but was ignored and herded with the others to the police station in Qasr al-Nil. The matter did not end well: the interior minister summoned him and demanded he submit his resignation to avert something worse. So he resigned in spite of himself and found himself on a pension. In dark despair, he decided to curb his routine. Hamid suggested that Hakim could intercede to find him a job, as he had done for him, but Halim thanked him and declined. He would rather make do on his pension than debase himself before Hakim. He found a way of living on his pension and replaced whisky with hashish, as it was cheaper and had an adequate effect. With instinctive contemptuousness, he gave himself wholly to detesting and deriding the era and its men. After June 5 he decided to make the pilgrimage to God’s Holy Shrine. Like most of his family, he was not religious, except in name, but he performed the pilgrimage nevertheless, then resumed his life completely unchanged. He calmed down a little but developed diabetes and did not possess the will to confront the demands it made on his diet. It got out of control and he suffered successive complications. One evening he telephoned his neighbor and cousin and said, “Come over and bring Esmat Hanem. I’m dying.…”

  He passed away that night with Hamid and his wife at his side.

  Khalil Sabri al-Muqallad

  THE FIRST CHILD of Surur Effendi’s youngest daughter, Zayna, Khalil was born and grew up in the family home in Bayn al-Ganayin. The standard of living was good, thanks to his father’s relative rise in salary, and considered an improvement on his grandfather’s, who died before Khalil’s mother, Zayna, married. Of the grandsons, he was the one who bore the closest resemblance to his uncle Labib. He inherited his good looks from his grandmother Sitt Zaynab, as well as his mother, Zayna, who was pretty—albeit less so than her sisters, Gamila and Bahiga. Zayna would sadly compare his face with his younger sister Amira’s, for the girl had inherited from her mother a nose that spoiled her sweet face; the skies of her female future were clouded with fear, but it would not be long before death snatched her away after an acute stomach infection. Khalil displayed aptitude in school and was infused with the zeal of Nasser’s generation. He had an unusual romantic experience in the final stage of secondary school when a relationship developed between him and a neighbor, a widow in her thirties called Khayriya al-Mahdi, who was fifteen years his senior. One evening, Zayna said to her husband, Sabri al-Muqallad, “Khayriya al-Mahdi has seduced your esteemed son!”

  Sabri was at first startled. He was a broad-minded man and a devoted and understanding father. He had himself run wild in youth before marriage miraculously tamed him. The news alarmed him but it also aroused his pride. He watched the boy to make sure he was visiting the widow’s house.

  “You’re not doing anything,” Zayna said to him.

  “Do you think advice would do any good?” he asked her.

  “She’s my age,” she said anxiously.

  “He’ll soon be satiated and move on.”

  “I can’t stay silent,” she confessed. “Do you think they’re thinking of getting married?”

  The man couldn’t help laughing. “The imbecile!” he exclaimed.

  He began making inquiries to ascertain some facts. “The woman is rich,” he told Zayna.

  She sensed he was beginning to welcome the idea so appealed for help to her brother Labib. His public and private life did not leave him room to take on new problems, but at the same time he could not ignore his helpless younger sister. He graciously visited Bayn al-Ganayin, gathered the son and his parents together, and set the matter out plainly. The discussion did not yield a result that pleased Zayna.

  “It won’t affect me continuing my studies,” said Khalil.

  “Praise God. The bride may be old but she has plenty of money,” said Labib, addressing Zayna and bringing the subject to a close.

  Zayna wanted the marriage postponed until Khalil finished law school, but the bride was too keen to wait and it was only delayed for as long as it took for the woman to renovate and furnish her house. She married Khalil, and by the time he attained his law degree in 1965 he had a son, Uthman. He was appointed to the legal department. Many predicted the marriage would end in failure in due course, but Khayriya died undergoing surgery in al-Kulwa when she was fifty. She bore no other children after Uthman. Khalil never thought of marrying again.

  Dawud Yazid al-Misri

  HE WAS THE YOUNGER SON OF YAZID AL-MISRI and Farga al-Sayyad, born a year after his brother, Aziz, in the house in al-Ghuriya near Bab al-Mutawalli. Farga al-Sayyad was waiting for the right time to send the two boys to her mother at the market so they could learn to be fishmongers, but Yazid said, “I want them to attend Qur’an school first.”

  “Why waste time fruitlessly?” she protested.

  “If I hadn’t learned to read and write and mastered basic arithmetic I wouldn’t have got my job at the paper supplier,” said the man confidently.

  The woman saw in selling fish advantages her husband could not get at the paper supplier, but she could not change his mind. Yazid found encouragement in his friend Shaykh al-Qalyubi, a teacher at al-Azhar. Indeed, he said, “Qur’an school then al-Azhar, Almighty God willing.”

  But Yazid’s religion—like that of his other friend, Ata al-Murakibi, who lived in the same building—was satisfied by carrying out religious obligations, like prayer and fasting, and did not extend to deeper religious aspirations. Hence he conceived of Qur’an school for his two sons as a preface to working life.

  One day, as the two brothers were wandering about between al-Ghuriya and the railway line they saw a band of policemen. Aziz instinctively ran and hid, but the men seized Dawud and drove him away into the unknown. People discussed what they saw and knew the leader, Muhammad Ali, was taking people’s sons off to secret locations to teach them new subjects and keeping them under guard so they could not escape education.

  “If I hadn’t been careful they would have got me too,” Aziz said to his father.

  Yazid complained of his “misfortune” to Shaykh al-Qalyubi.

  “Don’t be sad,” the shaykh counseled. “Your son is safe and sound. Maybe it will protect him from harm.”

  The family was terribly upset. Farga cursed the leader. They began to watch more closely over Aziz, who continued to attend Qur’an school. Years passed. Aziz found work as the watchman of Bayn al-Qasrayn’s public fountain and married Ata al-Murakibi’s daughter, Ni‘ma. Then, one day, Dawud returned to al-Ghuriya, his schooling complete. The family was overjoyed with his homecoming, but it was short-lived for he said, “They’re sending us on a delegation to France.”

  “A land of infidels!” cried Yazid.

  “To study medicine.”

  “If God hadn’t been looking out for me I’d be going too!” exclaimed Aziz.

  Dawud left to begin an experience he would never have dreamed of. During his absence, Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad died, Aziz fathered Rashwana, Amr, and Surur, and Ata al-Murakibi leaped from the depths of poverty to the summits of wealth and moved from al-Ghuriya to the mansion on Khayrat Square. Dawud returned a doctor and headed to his old house in al-Ghuriya, where Aziz and his family lived alone. Affection united the two brothers once more. Aziz began observing his brother with interest and apprehension. He was happy to find him observing his prayers and still as fond as before of visiting al-Hussein, though his clothes had changed and, to a degree, so had the way he spoke. He seemed to be hiding another side of himself that he had obtained in the infidel land. “Didn’t they try to turn you away from your religion?” Aziz asked him.

  “Not at all,” he answered laughing.

  Aziz would have liked to talk t
o him more about “them” but didn’t want to upset the peace. He also asked, “Is it true you cut bodies open?”

  “When necessary. For the good of the patient,” Dawud replied.

  Aziz praised God in secret for conferring flight on him that day long ago.

  “If things had been different you could be a father by now,” he said to his brother.

  “That’s uppermost in my mind,” Dawud said.

  There was a Turkish family in Darb Qirmiz, the Rafat family. He pointed them out and said, “Maybe they’d approve a doctor returned from France for their daughter.”

  They decided that Ata al-Murakibi, in his new circumstances, was the right person to raise the matter. But Dawud was refused as a vulgar peasant. Neither his knowledge nor his suit or job could intercede on his behalf. The young man was hurt and looked to his brother, Aziz, for guidance. “There’s the Warraq family that owns the paper supplier where our father works,” said Aziz. They were a family with Syrio-Egyptian roots. The brothers found what they were looking for in the great al-Warraq’s granddaughter, Saniya. The family welcomed the groom. The wedding was held and Dawud took his bride to a new house in al-Sayyida. She gave him a son, Abd al-Azim, and three daughters whom death snatched away as infants. Dawud advanced in his profession until he earned the rank of pasha and his official and intellectual standing was firmly established. It was destined that he should successfully reconcile his two incongruous identities. In his medical profession he was a fine emissary for the new civilization, with a vision of the nation’s future driven by a painful awareness of what the country lacked in his field and with close friends among both his Egyptian and foreign colleagues. Yet he was also in tune with his wife who, despite her beauty, social rank, and basic education, was not really any different from his mother, Farga al-Sayyad, and older brother’s wife, Ni‘ma al-Murakibi. He never renounced the customs of his family and environment, and visited the house in al-Ghuriya out of love and duty. There he would completely forget his assumed identity, sit at the low round table, tuck into the fish, bean cakes, lentil broth, salted fish, and green onions, and observe the love and affection developing between Abd al-Azim and Rashwana, Amr, and Surur. He visited al-Hussein and wandered around Bab al-Akhdar and got to know his brother’s brother-in-law, Ata al-Murakibi, and two sons, Mahmud and Ahmad, and friend Shaykh al-Qalyubi, the father-in-law of Dawud’s nephew Amr. During these times, he would revert to being the old Dawud, son of Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad, son of al-Ghuriya and its fragrant, penetrating smells, towering minarets, and mashrabiyas clothed in the past.