Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  From the horrifyingly magnificent set-piece of battle, Mahfouz turns – as Tolstoy did in War and Peace – to the personal, far from the clamour, which signifies it in individual lives. Kamose leads the family not conventionally to the broken body but ‘to bid farewell to my father’s room’. To ‘face its emptiness’. With such nuance, delicacy within juggernaut destruction, does the skill of Mahfouz peretrate the depth of responses in human existence.

  And the emptiness of that room will become of even greater significance. Kamose has Seqenenra’s throne taken from the palace to the Temple of Amun, where the body of Seqenenra lies. Prostrate before the throne, he speaks: ‘Apophis shall never sit upon you.’

  Ten years have passed. The story is taken up again along the Nile. A convoy of ships is pointing north, now, from Nubia to the border with Egypt, closed since the end of the war. The sailors are Nubian, the two commanders Egyptian. Beauty and rightfulness go together in early Mahfouz’s iconography. The leading commander has ‘one of those faces to which nature leads its own majesty and beauty in equal proportion’. Here is Isfinis, a merchant bringing for sale the precious jewels, ivory, gold and exotic creatures that are the natural resources of Nubia. The convoy lands first at Biga, that island from which Rhadopis’s siren call once sounded, where now the merchant bribes the local governor with an ivory sceptre in exchange for intercession to be received by the Pharaoh Apophis.

  Isfinis is not a merchant and Isfinis is not his name. His purpose is not business but justice; we overhear him saying to his ‘agent’, courtier Latu, ‘If we succeed in restoring the ties with Nubia … we shall have won half the battle … the Herdsman is very arrogant … but he is lazy … his only path to gold is through someone like Isfinis who volunteers to bring it to him.’ So this merchant must be disguised Kamose, Seqenenra’s heir, come for retribution?

  Mahfouz is the writer-magician, pulling surprise out of the expected. No, Isfinis is Ahmose, Seqenenra’s grandson, last heard of going as a child into exile with the defeated family.

  A royal vessel sails near the merchant convoy and a princess with her slave girls is amazed at the sight on the merchant’s deck of an item of cargo never seen before. It is a pygmy. Her Pharaonic Highness sends a sailor to say she will board the merchant ship to look at the ‘creature’ – if it is not dangerous.

  Isfinis presents the pygmy with a show of obsequiousness: ‘Greet your mistress, Zola!’ A wryly mischievous scene of the cruel sense of absolute superiority in race, hierarchy of physique, follows.

  The princess asks, ‘Is he animal or human?’

  Isfinis: ‘Human, Your Highness.’

  ‘Why should he not be considered an animal?’

  ‘He has his own language and his own religion.’

  To her the pygmy is like anything else the merchant might offer, something to own or reject; ‘… but he is ugly; it would give me no pleasure to acquire him’. From some other examples of the merchant’s wares she picks a necklace; it’s simply assumed he will have to come to the palace to be paid.

  The satirical social scene explodes as Latu cries angrily, ‘She is a devil, daughter of a devil!’

  In this tale of doubling-up identities Isfinis/Ahmose realises that this woman he’s attracted to is the daughter of the ‘humiliator of his people, and his grandfather’s killer’.

  On land, the merchant takes lodgings at an inn among fishermen. In the bar (as later, the Cairo trilogy) inhibitions dissolving in drink mean people reveal in banter the state of the country. It’s serious social criticism and delightful entertainment, at once.

  ‘You’re certainly a rich man, noble sir … but you’re Egyptian, from the look of you.’

  Isfinis/Ahmose: ‘Is there any contradiction between being Egyptian and being rich?’

  ‘Certainly, unless you’re in the rulers’ good graces’; this bar ‘is the refuge of those who have no hope … The rule in Egypt is that the rich steal from the poor but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich.’

  Mahfouz has the rare gift of rousing a subconscious alertness in the reader: a kind of writerly transmission so that one moves on for oneself, as if before he does, to how things will develop and why. Nothing is an aside. A man bursts into the inn’s rowdiness to tell how someone the locals know, Ebana, has been arrested on the pretext that she attacked a Herdsman officer who was soliciting her. When Isfinis hears the woman will be flogged because she’s unable to pay a fine, he insists on going to the court to do so. The apparently irrelevant good deed that a man principled against injustice may casually settle with cash. But perhaps one has been prompted. Who is this woman?

  And indeed her presence is invoked in context of Isfinis’s mission when, at another of the progressively hierarchal meetings that must precede granting of audience with Pharoah Apophis, the judge from the woman’s trial happens to be present, and he remarks superciliously of the merchant, ‘It seems he is ever ready with himself and his wealth, for he donated 50 pieces of gold to save a peasant woman charged with insulting Commander Rukh.’

  And Princess Amenridis – she’s there too, sarcasm her form of baiting flirtation, ‘Isn’t it natural that a peasant should roll up his sleeves to defend a peasant woman?’ Echoing tones of Rhadopis; but the courtesan was arming herself against her vulnerability as a despised woman, while Amenridis is amusing herself by taunting a man beneath her class, albeit attractive. Mahfouz hasn’t cloned from a previous creation, he’s making a statement that the caprice of the privileged is not the need of the dispossessed.

  Merchant Isfinis, ready to produce a bribe of the Governor’s choice, reveals the splendour of objects he wants to offer before Pharoah Apophis. The Princess enjoys making a sensation by saying, of the merchant, to the judge, ‘I am in his debt.’ She relates how she was drawn to the merchant’s convoy by the weird sight of the pygmy and picked out from his other wares the necklace with its emerald heart she is now wearing.

  The Governor joins the mood of repartee and innuendo: ‘Why choose a green heart … pure white hearts, wicked black hearts but what might be the meaning of a green heart?’

  The Princess: ‘Direct your question to the one who sold the heart.’

  Isfinis: ‘The green heart is the symbol of fertility and tenderness.’ The Beatrice and Benedict volley will develop into the taming of the shrew, this arrogant beauty who privately wishes ‘she might come across such a man as this merchant in the body of her own kind … instead she had found it in the body of a brown-skinned Egyptian who traded in Pygmies’.

  The – blessed or cursed – complication of sexual attraction along with the imperative will to political power causes Isfinis ‘out of beguilement and tactics to keep in with those who can take him to Pharoah’, to decide he can’t ask payment for the green heart.

  A sharp-minded reader is required to follow the shifts in identity of protagonists in this marvellous chronicle; and he/she will be rewarded by zest of entering the stunning agility of the author’s mind. Ebana was, indeed, no simple incident illustrating Isfinis/Ahmose’s compassion. She is the widow of Pepi, the courtier killed with Seqenenra ten years ago, since when she has concealed herself among the poor fisher community of enemy territory, Memphis. Pepi had named their son Ahmose, after the grandson of Seqenenra, born the same day. It is more than coincidence; this other Ahmose is also twinned in bravery and dedication with Ahmose-disguised-as-Isfinis, to win back for Thebes the double crown of Egypt.

  The dynastic Ahmose hears through Ebana that the fishermen’s quarter is full of former owners of estates and farms, dispossessed by Apophis. He tells them – and lets on to the reader for the first time – the true purpose of his ‘trade mission’ is to link Egypt to Nubia by getting permission to transport these men ostensibly as workers to produce the treasures of Nubian resources for Memphis’s acquisitive taste. ‘We shall carry gold to Egypt and return with grain and men … and one day we shall come back with men only …’

  Eros, too, is relentless; while A
hmose is engaged in planning this great campaign an ‘invading image’ causes him to shudder. ‘God, I think of her … And I shouldn’t think of her at all.’ Amenridis, daughter of the enemy, the Pharoah Apophis.

  The day of his reception by the Pharoah brings another emotional experience Ahmose cannot let disempower him: the garden of the palace usurped by Apophis was his grandfather Pharoah Seqenenra’s where in childhood he would play with Nefertari – now his wife, whom Mahfouz knows, in his skill at conveying the unstated merely by an image, he does not have to remark that Ahmose is betraying.

  In the palace Apophis falls to the trap of demeaning himself by discarding his crown and putting on his head the vanity of a fake, bejewelled double crown the merchant presents him with along with the gift of three pygmies. They are to amuse him; or to remind of something apposite to His Majesty, in guise of quaint information. ‘They are people, my lord, whose tribes believe that the world contains no other people but themselves.’

  The scene of greedy pleasure and enacted sycophancy is blown apart by the charging in of Apophis’s military commander Rukh, the man who brought Ebana to court accused of insulting him. He is drunk, raging, and demands a duel with the Nubian trader who paid gold to save her from flogging.

  Ahmose is strung between choices: flee like a coward, or be killed and his mission for his people lost. He’s aware of Princess Amenridis regarding him with interest. Is it this, we’re left to decide, which makes him accept Rukh’s challenge? As proof of manhood? For the public the duel is between class, race: the royal warrior and the peasant foreigner. Commander Rukh loses humiliatingly, incapacitated by a wounded hand. Whatever Ahmose’s reckless reason in taking on the duel, his present mission is fulfilled; the deal, treasures to Pharoah Apophis in exchange for the grain and workers, is granted. He may cross the border for trade whenever he wishes.

  Aboard his homeward ship in what should be triumph, Ahmose is asking himself in that other mortal conflict, between sexual love and political commitment, ‘Is it possible for love and hate to have the same object?’ Amenridis is part of the illicit power of oppression. ‘However it be with me, I shall not set eyes upon her again …’

  He does, almost at once. Rukh pursues him with warships, to duel again, and, ‘This time I shall kill you with my own hands.’

  Amenridis has followed on her ship and endowed with every authority of rank stops Rukh’s men from murdering Ahmose when he has once again wounded Rukh. Ahmose asks what made her take upon herself ‘the inconvenience’ of saving his life.

  She answers in character: ‘To make you my debtor.’

  But this is more than sharply aphoristic. If he is somehow to pay he must return to his creditor; her way of asking when she will see again the man she knows as Isfinis. And his declaration of love is made, he will return, ‘My lady, by this life of mine which belongs to you’.

  His father Kamose refuses to allow him to return in the person of Merchant Isfinis. He will go in his own person, Ahmose, only when ‘the day of struggle dawns’.

  Out of the silence of parting comes a letter. In the envelope is the chain of the green heart necklace. Amenridis writes she is saddened to inform him that a pygmy she has taken into her quarters as a pet has disappeared. ‘Is it possible for you to send me a new pygmy, one who knows how to be true?’

  Mahfouz discards apparent sentimentality for startling evidence of deep feeling, just as he is able to dismantle melodrama with the harshness of genuine human confrontation. Desolate Ahmose: ‘She would, indeed, always see him as the inconstant pygmy.’

  The moral ambiguity of a love is overwhelmed by the moral ambiguities darkening the shed blood of even a just war. The day of struggle comes bearing all this and Kamose with Ahmose eventually leads the Theban army to victory, the kingdom is restored to Thebes.

  Mahfouz, like Thomas Mann, is master of irony, with its tugging undertow of loss. Apophis and his people, his daughter, have left Memphis in defeat. It is a beautiful evening of peace. Ahmose and his wife Nefertari are on the palace balcony, overlooking the Nile. His fingers are playing with a golden chain.

  She notices: ‘How lovely. But it’s broken.’

  ‘Yes, it has lost its heart.’

  ‘What a pity!’ In her innocent naivety, she assumes the chain is for her.

  But he says, ‘I have put aside for you something more precious and beautiful than that … Nefertari, I want you to call me Isfinis, for it’s a name I love and I love those who love it.’

  ‘Are you still writing?’

  People whose retirement from working life has a date, set as the date of birth and the date of death yet to come, ask this question of a writer. But there’s no trade union decision bound upon writers; they leave practising the art of the word only when their ability to transform with it something of the mystery of human life, leaves them.

  Yes, in old age Naguib Mahfouz is still writing. Still finding new literary modes to express the changing consciousness of succeeding eras with which his genius created this trilogy and his entire oeuvre, novels and stories. In the rising babble of our millennium, radio, television, mobile phone, his mode for the written word is distillation. In a current work, The Dreams,140 short prose evocations drawing on the fragmentary power of the subconscious, he is the narrator walking aimlessly where suddenly ‘every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus’. At first he ‘could soar with joy’, but when the spectacle is repeated over and over from street to street, ‘I long in my soul to go back to my home … and ‘trust that soon my relief will arrive’. He opens his door and finds – ‘the clown there to greet me, giggling’. No escape from the world and the writer’s innate compulsion to dredge from its confusion, meaning.

  2007

  Experiencing Two Absolutes

  ‘The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I shall cease to write.’

  The little strip of planet Earth where two peoples of common ancient origin, Israelis and Palestinians, contest to live – but not together.

  I went there not at the invitation of the Israeli government. I was invited by Israeli writers to an international festival of writers. I accepted because the quotation above, by Albert Camus, is my credo. I believe that the writer within integrity to his/her creativity has a responsibility as a human being for recognition of oppression perpetrated against people, whoever they are, in the society in which the writer has his/her being. Just as the opera singer has particular qualities of the vocal cords, the writer has an insight bringing the responsibility to bear particular witness to the writer’s time and place. I want to testify that writers, rejecting political correctness and using the gifts of insight witness, may dredge up some of the truth, beyond the surface of information, about their society and country.

  ‘Witness: The Inward Testimony’ was the subject of the address I gave. It had, of course, particular reference and relevance to the place, Israel, and the Israeli writers among those present. In the depths of profound confusion, while peace talks as the foundation of justice for both peoples flounder and revive, I found there are two absolutes: for Israelis, the right of Israel to exist, denied by Hamas and jihad Palestinians; and the return of the occupied territories to Palestine.

  Among Israeli writers, including the vociferous Amos Oz, renowned internationally for his brilliant novels and bold, critical publication of possible solutions for two-state justice, every Israeli writer I met was against the occupied territories and the harsh measures used against the Palestinian inhabitants. I was informed by people at conference sessions that the majority of Israelis are against their government’s policies of occupation. A minority spoke to me in defence of the occupied territories as acquisitions of the 1967 changes to partition lines in divine accord with biblical prophecy.

  I had made arrangements before leaving South Africa to visit East Jerusalem, the Palestinian sector. A car from the Palestinian Authority picked me up at a curiously named no-man’s-land, the American Colony Hotel. I was rec
eived by Professor Sari Nusseibe, a fellow writer whose work I know. I talked with a gathering of students, many of them aspirant writers, answering their questions about the pressures of political conflict on the freedom of expression. But literature did not turn out to be the portent of this occasion for me. I was taken to the faculty which houses a unique documentation, for which ‘museum’ is not the right word. The smiling director was himself a prisoner of Israel for seventeen years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Not only had he assembled the minute scraps of testimony scribbled on shreds of paper or cloth that were smuggled out of prison, and photographs of men under merciless interrogation; he has a library of written accounts by ex-prisoners whom he seeks out to set down living memories of pain and humiliation under interrogation. No doubt there are the same kind of memories of suffering among Israeli prisoners interrogated by Palestinians.

  The inhumanity of humans towards humans knows no boundaries.

  Al Quds University is close to what is referred to as the Jerusalem suburb, Abu Dib, through which the wall that divides Palestine from Israel has part of its monumental path. The wall defies any conventional image. I stood beside one of its gigantic convolutions across streets and houses. It is as high as a wall from floor to ceiling in a one-storey house. I was with a doctor at the entrance to his home. The wall slices toweringly across his and a neighbour’s garden and their street. His clinic is a few blocks away, on the other side of the wall. He has to drive (I was with him) several kilometres to the nearest gate and checkpoint to cross and reach his clinic back near the very point he set out from. He told of critically ill patients on the east side of the wall whose life-saving treatment was available only at a specialised hospital on the west side, on occasion someone dying while guards delayed perusal of medical documents that authorised the crossing. In Israel, I was told by friends that nevertheless there are times when the ‘unconscious’ patient and the attending ‘doctor’ are let through. They are suicide bombers coming to explode murder among the Israeli men, women and children in public places.