Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The second novel of the trilogy opens in Hollywood if not Bollywood flamboyance with the festival of the flooding of the Nile. The story has as scaffold a politico-religious power conflict within which is an exotic exploration of that other power, the sexual drive.

  This is an erotic novel. A difficult feat for a writer; nothing to do with pornography, closer to the representation of exalted states of being captured in poetry. The yearly flooding of the Nile is the source of Egypt’s fertility, fecundity, source of life, as is sexual attraction between male and female.

  There are two distractions during the public celebration before the Pharaoh; omens. A voice in the throng yells ‘Long live His Excellency Khunumhotep’; the young Pharaoh is startled and intrigued by a woman’s golden sandal dropped into his lap by a falcon. The shout is no innocent drunken burst of enthusiasm for the Prime Minister. It is a cry of treason. The sandal isn’t just some bauble that has caught the bird of prey’s eye, it belongs to Rhadopis.

  The Pharaoh, ‘handsome … headstrong … enjoys extravagance and luxury and is rash and impetuous as a raging storm’, intends to take from the great establishment of the priesthood, representative of the gods who divinely appoint pharaohs, the lands and temples whose profits will enable him to ‘construct palaces’.

  His courtiers are troubled: ‘It’s truly regrettable that the king should begin his reign in confrontation.’

  ‘Let us pray the gods will grant men wisdom … and forethought.’

  His subjects in the crowd are excitedly speculating about him. ‘How handsome he is!’

  His ancestors of the sixth dynasty, ‘in their day how they filled the eyes and hearts of their people …’

  ‘I wonder what legacy he will bequeath?’

  A beautiful boat is coming down the Nile from the island of Biga. ‘It is like the sun rising over the Eastern horizon.’

  Aboard is ‘Rhadopis the enchantress and seductress … She lives over there in her white palace where her lovers and admirers compete for her affections.’

  No wonder Mahfouz later wrote successful film scripts; already he knew the art, the flourish, of the cut. If the technique was to serve him for films, the close-ups of the courtesan and her sumptuous ambience as she wields erotic power through the relations not only of men with her, but of men with men, their dealings in financial and political power, forecast the woman Zubayda (in the Cairo trilogy), whose influence on the life of Cairo during the thirties and forties of British occupation in forms it took during peace and war, even after Egyptain independence in 1922, is so vividly created.

  Rhadopis of Nubia is the original femme fatale. The ravishing template. Not even descriptions of Cleopatra can compare. The people gossip: enthralled, appalled, ‘Do you know that her lovers are the cream of the kingdom’; spiteful, ‘she’s nothing but a dancer … brought up in the pit of depravity … she’s given herself over to wantonness and seduction’; infatuated, ‘her wondrous beauty is not the only wealth the gods have endowed her with … Thoth [god of wisdom] has not been mean with wisdom and knowledge’; sardonic, ‘To love her is an obligation upon the notables of the upper class, as though it were a patriotic duty.’

  Mahfouz is the least didactic of writers. He’s always had nimble mastery of art’s firm injunction: don’t tell, show. Overhearing the talk one’s curiosity is exhilaratingly aroused as if one were there among the crowd, even while unnoticingly being informed of issues that are going to carry the narrative.

  Prime Minister Khunumhotep favours, against the Pharaoh’s intent, the case of the priests’ campaign to claim their lands and temples as inalienable right. The bold challenge of calling out his minister’s name on a grand public occasion has hurt and angered the Pharaoh; his Chamberlain Sofkhatep and courtier Tahu are concerned. There’s juxtaposed another kind of eavesdrop, on an exchange between these two which goes deeper than its immediate significance, dispute over the priests’ possessions.

  Tahu urges Pharaoh, ‘Force, my lord … Do not procrastinate … strike hard.’

  Sofkhatep, ‘My lord … the priesthood is dispersed through the kingdom as blood through the body … Their authority over the people is blessed by divine sanction … a forceful strike might bring undesirable consequences.’

  Here is a palace revolution in place of one of succession – Khufu’s seed – and it carries the ancient and ever-present (in our present) opposition of force versus wisdom, religious causes versus secular humanism. Pharaoh chillingly responds, ‘Do not trouble yourselves. I have already shot my arrow.’ He has had brought to him the man who cried out, told him his act was despicable, awed him with the magnanimity of not ordering him punished, declaring it ‘simple-minded to think that such a cry would detract me from the course I have set upon … I have decided irrevocably … that from today onward nothing would be left to the temples save the land and offerings they need.’

  Something that does distract the young Pharaoh from problems of his reign is the fall from the blue – the gold sandal. Sofkhatep remarks that the people believe the falcon courts beautiful women, whisks them away. Pharaoh is amazed: the token dropped in his lap is as if the bird ‘knows my love for beautiful women’. The gold sandal is Rhadopis’s, recognised by Tahu. He seems perturbed when Pharaoh asks who she is; a hint dropped of a certain circumstance that will give him an identity rather different from official one of courtier. He informs that she is the woman on whose door distinguished men knock. ‘In her reception hall, my lord, thinkers, artists and politicians gather … the philosopher Hof has remarked … the most dangerous thing a man can do in his life is set eyes upon the face of Rhadopis.’

  Pharaoh is intrigued and will set his upon that face. Of course he cannot join the men, however highborn, who knock on the Biga Island palace door. It seems odd and amusing that there is no rivalry for her bed and favours shown. Is Mahfouz slyly exposing another side of that noble quality, brotherhood – decadence? They share her. There is music and witty exchange, she may dance or sing for them if the mood takes her and there’s informed political debate in this salon-cum-brothel before she indicates which distinguished guest she will allow to her bed at the end of the entertainment.

  If kingly rank had not proscribed Pharaoh from joining the brotherhood he might have gained political insight to the issues facing his kingdom. Aside from the demands of the priests, there is a rebellion of the Maasaya tribe, and from the aristocratic company comes the familiar justification of colonialism which is to be exposed with such subtlety and conviction in Mahfouz’s future fiction.

  One of Rhadopis’s admirers questions ‘Why the tribe should revolt’ when ‘Those lands under Egyptian rule enjoy peace and prosperity. We do not oppose the creeds of others.’

  The more politically astute supporter of the imperial-colonial system: ‘The truth is that the Maasaya question has nothing to do with politics or religion … they are threatened with starvation … and at the same time they possess treasure [natural resources] of gold and silver … and when the Egyptians undertake to put it to good use, they attack them.’

  There’s argument, for and against, over the priests’ demands and Pharaoh’s intransigence.

  ‘The theocrats own a third of all the land in Egypt …’

  ‘Surely there are causes more deserving of money than temples?’

  The ironic dynamism of the story is that it is to be how the ‘cause’ of young Pharaoh’s desire to build palaces and acquire a woman whose extravagance matches his – political power and erotic power clasped together – contests the place of ‘most deserving’.

  Yes, it’s Milan Kundera’s maxim, the novelist asking questions, not supplying answers, that makes this novel as challengingly entertaining as the conversation in Rhadopis’s salon. House of fame, house of shame? As she becomes Pharaoh’s mistress and obsession, is she the cause of his downfall, his people turning against him, their worshipped representative of the gods, because of his squandering of the nation’s wealth on a courtesan? Or
is Pharaoh a figure of the fatality of inherent human weakness? Is it not in our stars – fall from the sky of a gold sandal – but in ourselves, the Pharaoh himself, to fulfil personal desires? And further: isn’t it the terrible danger in power itself that it may be used for ultimate distorted purpose? Dictators, tyrants. Mahfouz sets one’s mind off beyond the instance of his story.

  Rhadopis herself. Beginning with the introduction as prototype Barbie doll as well as femme fatale, the young Mahfouz achieves an evocation of the inner contradictions of the kind of life she lives that no other writer whose work I know has matched. Zola’s Nana must retire before her. On the evening at the end of the Nile festival, Rhadopis’s admirer-clients knock on her door as usual. The class-based denial of the existence of any critical intelligence in menial women, including prostitutes, is always an injustice refuted convincingly by Mahfouz’s women, whether serving in that category or another. After dancing suggestively at the men’s request, ‘sarcasm overcame’ her dalliance. To Hof, eminent philosopher among them: ‘You have seen nothing of the things I have seen.’ Pointing to the drunken throng, ‘… the cream of Egypt prostrating themselves at my feet … it is as if I am among wolves.’ All this regarded amid laughter, as her titillating audacity. No one among these distinguished men seems to feel shame at this degradation of a woman; no one sees it as a consequence of the poverty she was born into, and from which it was perhaps her only escape. This night she uses the only weapon they respect, capriciously withholds herself. ‘Tonight I shall belong to no man.’

  A theatrical ‘storm of defiance’ is brewing in her as she lies sleepless. It may read like the cliché passing repentance of one who lives by the sale of her body. But the salutary mood is followed next night by her order that her door should be kept closed to everyone.

  That is the night Pharaoh comes to her. No door may be closed to him. He is described as sensually as Mahfouz does his women characters. The encounter is one of erotic beauty and meaning without necessity of scenes of sexual gyration. It is also the beginning of Pharaoh’s neglect of the affairs of state for the power of a ‘love affair that was costing Egypt a fortune’. The price: Prime Minister Khunumhotep has had to carry out Pharaoh’s decree to sequester temple estates. Pharaoh’s choice is for tragedy, if we accept that the fall of the mighty is tragedy’s definition, as against the clumsy disasters of ordinary, fallible people. Rhadopis, in conflict between passion for a man who is also a king and the other, epiphany of concern for the Egyptian people of whom she is one, uses her acute mind – after all, let’s remind ourselves she was perforce wily in her former precarious life – to devise a means by which Pharaoh may falsely claim that there is a revolt of the Maasaya tribes in the region of the priests’ lands and summon his army there to overcome the real rebellion, that of the priests. The intricate subterfuge involves the ruthless exploitation of an innocent boy – also in love with her – by Rhadopis’s resorting to her old powers of seduction to use him as messenger.

  Tragedy is by definition inexorable as defeated Pharaoh speaks after the priesthood has exposed his actions to his people and the mob is about to storm the walls of his palace. ‘Madness will remain as long as there are people alive … I have made for myself a name that no Pharaoh before me ever was called: The Frivolous King.’

  An arrow from the mob pierces his breast. ‘Rhadopis,’ he orders his men, ‘Take me to her … I want to expire on Biga.’

  We hardly have been aware of the existence of Pharaoh’s unloved wife, the queen; how impressively she emerges now with a quiet command, ‘Carry out my lord’s decision.’

  Mahfouz’s nascent brilliance as, above all political, moral, philosophical purpose, a story-teller, is in the emotional pace of events by which this story meets its moving, questioning end, with the irony that Rhadopis’s last demand on a man is to have the adoring boy messenger find a phial of poison with which she will join Pharaoh in death, final consummation of sexual passion. For the last, unrequited lover, asked how he obtained the phial, Mahfouz plumbs the boy’s horror in the answer: ‘I brought it to her myself.’

  What was the young writer, Mahfouz, saying about love?

  The Nile is the flowing harbinger of Egypt’s destiny in the scope of Mahfouz’s re-imagined pharaonic history, starting with Khufu’s Wisdom, fourth dynasty, continuing with Rhadophis of Nubia, sixth dynasty, and concluding with Thebes At War, seventeenth to eighteenth dynasty.

  A ship from the south arrives up the Nile, at Thebes. On board not a courtesan or a princess but the Chamberlain of Apophis, Pharaoh by conquest of both the north and south kingdoms. Again, through the indirection of an individual’s thoughts, anticipation is roused as one reads the musing of this envoy: ‘I wonder, tomorrow will the trumpet sound … will the peace of these tranquil houses be shattered … Ah, how I wish these people knew what a warning this ship brings them and their master.’ He is the emissary of an ancient colonialism. Thebes is virtually a colony of Apophis’s reign. The Southerners are, within the traditional (unchanging) justification of colonisation, different. The classic example for that and all time: darker than self-appointed superior beings – in this era the Hyksos of the north, from Memphis. Compared with these, a member of the Chamberlain’s mission remarks, the Southerners are ‘Like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun’. And the Chamberlain adds ‘… despite their colour and their nakedness … they claim they are descended from the loin of the gods and that their county is the well-spring of the true pharoahs’. I wonder what Naguib Mahfouz, looking back to 1938 when his prescient young self wrote his novel, thinks of how we now know, not through any godly dispensation, but by palaeontological discovery, that black Africa – which the Southerners and the Nubians represent in the story – is the home of the origin of all humankind.

  After this foreboding opening, there comes to us as ludicrous the purpose of the mission. It is to demand that the hippopotami in the lake at Thebes be killed, since Pharoah Apophis has a malady his doctors have diagnosed as due to the roaring of the animals penned there! It’s a power pretext, demeaning that of the region: the lake and its hippos are sacred to the Theban people and their god Amun. There is a second demand from Pharoah Apophis. He has dreamt that the god Seth, sacred to his people, is not honoured in the south’s temples. A temple devoted to Seth must be built at Thebes. Third decree: the governor of Thebes, deposed Pharoah Seqenenra, appointed on the divide-and-rule principle of making a people’s leader an appointee of the usurping power, must cease the presumption of wearing the White Crown of Egypt (symbol of Southern sovereignty in Egypt’s double crown). ‘He has no right … there is only one kind who has the right’ – conqueror Apophis.

  Seqenenra calls his Crown Prince Kamose and councillors to discuss these demands. His Chamberlain Hur: ‘It is the spirit of a master dictating to his slave … it is simply the ancient conflict between Thebes and Memphis in a new shape. The latter strives to enslave the former, while the former struggles to hold on to its independence by all means.’

  Of the three novels, this one has the clearest intention to be related to the present in which it was written – British domination of Egypt which was to continue through the 1939–1945 war until the deposing of King Farouk by Nasser in the 1950s. It also does not shirk the resort to reverse racism which inevitably is used to strengthen anti-colonial resolves. One of Seqenenra’s military commanders: ‘Let us fight till we have liberated the North and driven the last of the white with their long dirty beards from the Land of the Nile.’ The ‘white’ are Asiatic foreigners, the Hyksos, also referred to as ‘Herdsmen’ presumably because of their wealth in cattle, who dominated from Northern Egypt for two hundred years.

  Crown Prince Kamose is for war, as are some among the councillors. But the final decision will go to Queen Tetisheri, Seqenenra’s wife, the literary ancestress of Mahfouz’s created line of revered wise matriarchs, alongside his recognition given to the embattled dignity and intelligence of courtesans. Physically, she’s described
with characteristics we would know as racist caricature, but that he proposes were a valid standard of African beauty, ‘the projection of the upper teeth that the people of the South found so attractive’. A questioning of the validity of any people’s claim to an immutable aesthetic standard of human form … Scholar of the Books of the Dead and books of Khufu’s teaching, Tetisheri’s was the opinion to which ‘recourse was had in times of difficulty’: ‘the sublime goal’ to which Thebans ‘must dedicate themselves was the liberation of the Nile Valley’. Thebes will go to war.

  Crown Prince Kamose is downcast when told by his father that he may not serve in battle, he is to remain in Seqenenra’s place of authority tasked with supplying the army with ‘men and provisions’. In one of the thrilling addresses at once oratorical and movingly personal, Seqenenra prophesies ‘If Seqenenra falls … Kamose will succeed his father, and if Kamose falls, little Ahmose [grandson] will follow him. And if this army of ours is wiped out Egypt is full of men … if the whole South falls into the hands of the Herdsmen, then there is Nubia … I warn you against no enemy but one – despair.’

  It is flat understatement to acknowledge that Seqenenra dies. He falls in a legendary hand-to-hand battle with javelins, the double crown of Egypt he is defiantly wearing topples, ‘blood spurted like a spring … another blow scattering his brains’, other blows ‘tipped the body to pieces’ – all as if this happens thousands of years later, before one’s eyes. It is not an indulgence in gore, it’s part of Mahfouz’s daring to go too far in what goes too far for censorship by literary good taste, the hideous human desecration of war. The war is lost; Kamose as heir to defeat must survive by exile with the family. They take refuge in Nubia, where there are supporters from among their own Theban people.