Return of the Spirit

by Tawfiq al-Hakim

  The shaykh turned toward him. Running his beads through his fingers, he replied, “Those Bedouin, respected bey, are a bunch of rapacious jerboas. They have no religion and no creed. They are ignorant of divine compassion and of Islam.”

  “How so?”

  “One of us fellahin will be very good to them. He will be generous to them, help them, and keep them company, while they hold him in contempt as though they are the only ones with real blood while we have water. They think the peasant’s spirit isn’t worth more than a piastre’s load of shot. Consider this year: Abu Mutawalli al-Jarf was good enough to plow land for a man named Basis the Bedouin. He prepared it for cultivation and did the sowing, because a Bedouin doesn’t know how to plant or weed. They are a people, if you’ll excuse the expression, who are not good at anything except beating and snatching. The upshot of this aid and generosity was that people caught Basis the Bedouin beating Abu Mutawalli in the cornfields.”

  “Did he kill him?”

  “Do those Bedouins know clemency? They’re animals, respected bey. If you just watch them eating their flour gruel mixed with clarified butter when it’s burning hot, you’ll say they’re not human beings.”

  He was silent for a time as Muhsin continued to look at him, waiting for him to speak. Shaykh Hasan started talking again after a moment. He told Muhsin, with regard to the eating habits of the Bedouin, that he had once been invited to an outdoor Bedouin wedding. After they had fired their rifles into the air and jousted around on horseback, they put out a big bowl filled with white rice. They then invited the guests to help themselves. That was during the khamsin windstorms when the winds were yellow with sand and dust and blew from every direction. Before the guests knew what had happened, the white rice in the bowl had turned as yellow as turmeric from the dust. He politely declined to eat. Naturally—was he going to eat dirt? Then the Bedouins came forward, bared their forearms, and attacked the bowl, without being about to tell rice from dust. They started devouring fistfuls of that rice and dirt as though dying of hunger.

  Muhsin smiled and said enthusiastically, “The fellah’s better than the Bedouin, more generous than the Bedouin, kinder than the Bedouin; isn’t that so, Uncle Shaykh Hasan?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days passed without the expected letter from Saniya arriving. Anxiety began to pervade Muhsin’s soul. He started spending the better part of his day on the mastaba bench waiting for the mail. He recalled Saniya and what had occurred between them the last time he saw her—that kiss she had granted him and his tears flowing out. As soon as he recalled this, his heart was oppressed. He imagined it had been a dream. He was amazed at how easily he had attained such happiness, without saying or doing anything. Had he been obtuse and heedless? Or had he been sleeping? Once again he was filled with the happiness he had not fathomed then but had become aware of only later. She had kissed him, and he could still feel the touch of that kiss on his cheek. His heart was agitated, and without being conscious of it, he raised his hand to his cheek and felt it, as though examining it and trying to assure himself that it had left a permanent imprint. He wasn’t able to believe that a kiss made no more impression than air and vanished at once. No, this kiss meant something far more significant to him—that she loved him. At that time he had also not grasped the meaning of love. Yes, she loved him; otherwise what would have induced her, a bashful Egyptian girl, to take the initiative and kiss him when he hadn’t kissed her? Moreover, wasn’t it she who had suggested writing to him via his aunt Zanuba? So what did he have to fear? Why should he be anxious? Perhaps it was Zanuba’s fault. She might have been slow to tell her about the letter concerning his arrival. So let him wait a little. There was no room for anxiety and for wanting things to happen too quickly. Instead of being anxious, he ought to rush out into the fields with his heart at rest, inhaling love from this pure, clean air and seeing love in all the pure, innocent creatures surrounding him.

  Thus he got over it, and obeying his soul’s counsel, set off running here and there, over vast stretches. He smiled at the lark in flight. He listened to the water flowing beneath the shade of the huge sycamore. It occurred to him to race to the threshing sledge that lay in a corner of the threshing area or to the waterwheel while it was turning. He would gaze at the two oxen operating it. Their eyes were covered so they would not see they were going nowhere.

  But none of this had as much impact on him as the sight of the houses of the farm laborers. He went snooping cautiously down their narrow alleys, afraid of upsetting them. He saw an open door, poked his head inside, but found no one home. He realized that its occupants were out to pasture, so to speak.

  He went inside hesitantly and started to look around. He saw a small courtyard, half of which was roofed with dry cotton and corn stalks, and then a small chamber. Its door was open as well. Muhsin looked in. He observed something he would never forget. He saw that this chamber was where the occupants slept. There was an oven with mats and covers spread on top of it. But he also saw a cow in one corner. Clover was piled before it, and between its back legs a beautiful suckling calf was reaching for a teat.

  What astonished Muhsin the most, however, was to see beside that suckling calf a suckling child, presumably the son of the occupants. He was crowding against the calf and pushing him away from the cow’s udder. The cow remained calm and still, not interfering with either of them, as though she did not favor one over the other. The calf and the child both seemed to be her children. What a beautiful picture! What a striking concept!

  Muhsin looked at the nursing calf in its purity and innocence. It was lowing contentedly to show it was satisfied. Then he looked at the nursing child, who let out a cry of pleasure and contentment in its purity and innocence. It seemed to him that the two of them understood each other, as though they were linked and didn’t see any difference between them.

  Muhsin was delighted by this scene. It meant something to him at a deep, mysterious level. But his mind could not add anything to that deep feeling. Intuition is the knowledge of the angels, but rational logic is human knowledge. If one attempts to translate Muhsin’s feelings into the language of logic and intellect, one can say he responded in his soul to that union between the two different creatures, who were joined by purity and innocence. But sadly, tomorrow that child will grow up and, as he does, his human qualities will increase while his angelic ones diminish. His feeling of union between himself and the rest of creation will be replaced by desires and wishes that prompt him to scorn everything that differs from him. These will blind him to all their resemblances. For this reason the angelic light that manifests itself as purity, innocence, and a feeling of unity and of group solidarity leaves him. Its place is taken by man’s blindness, which shows itself in desires, passions, and selfish, egotistical feelings.

  The feeling of the unity of existence is the feeling for God. For this reason, angels and children are closer to God than adults. Although Muhsin knew none of that with his developing intellect—the mind of a competency-level student—he perceived it through his heart and inner eye unconsciously.

  Didn’t Dostoyevsky say man knows many things without knowing it?

  But there was one thing Muhsin was able to grasp with his intellect and this was thanks to his study of the history of ancient Egypt. This scene reminded him suddenly, without there being any particularly strong link, of what he had read about the ancient Egyptians worshipping animals or at least portraying the one God with images of different animals.

  Why?

  Muhsin wasn’t able to discern the exact reason. Here as well he perceived vaguely through his emotions what might be translated discursively as follows. Didn’t the ancient Egyptians know of the existential unity and the overall union between the different groups of creatures? If their symbol for God was half man and half animal, wasn’t that a symbol of their perception that existence is a unity? They did not scorn animals any more than this child would s
corn the calf. So if they made God in a man’s form, they also represented him in the form of animals, birds, and insects. Aren’t all these creatures God’s handiwork? Doesn’t everything created offer a portrait of its creator? So why shouldn’t animals also be a portrait of the Creator or one of the images of the Creator just as man is?

  The feeling of being merged with existence, of being merged in God, was the feeling of that child and calf suckling together. It was an angelic feeling. It was the feeling of that ancient, deeply rooted Egyptian people.

  Even now, the farmers of Egypt had a heartfelt respect for animals. They did not scorn living with them in the same house or to sleep together in a single room.

  Did not the angelic Egypt with a pure heart survive in Egypt? She had inherited, over the passing generations, a feeling of union, even without knowing it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Muhsin left the farmer’s house with this luminous intuition. He set off, his soul filled with a happiness he didn’t understand. Perhaps God wanted prompt payment for this happiness with grief or to complete for Muhsin the picture he had sketched in his soul, for the youth heard shouts and wails from the threshing area. Women were slapping their faces. He rushed to ask what had happened. He saw a group of fellahin coming from the center of the clover field, carrying a dying water buffalo. The women following behind were weeping. Muhsin thought at first this bellowing and wailing was without doubt for a person who had died or suffered a calamity. When he saw them carrying the buffalo, he still did not understand what he saw. When the group neared him, he asked what had happened. They told him that a water buffalo from Arjawi’s house seemed to have been poisoned. They would slaughter it and were consoling the owner for its death. Everyone appeared to be grieving and mournful, as though the deceased were a man.

  Muhsin was amazed once he had calmed down a little. He repeated to himself, “A buffalo? A buffalo!”

  He felt like cracking jokes while he walked by these peasants who were carrying on like this over a buffalo. What would they have done if its owner had died? A woman passed him weeping. He asked her, “All this for a buffalo?”

  She stared at him in a hurt way and replied, “I wish it had been one of the babies instead.” Then she went on, paying no heed to anything.

  Muhsin was a little embarrassed, for it appeared to him that no matter who he was, he was still far from understanding the feelings of these people. Possibly life in the town and in the capital had corrupted his heart. His sarcasm vanished at once, along with his intellect and his logic. His emotions returned, and he mourned with the fellahin and admired them.

  He heard someone pounding on a peg. He saw that nearby some individuals were putting up a wooden post in the middle of the threshing area. Then the buffalo was brought. They suspended it there and began to skin it. The people of the estate gathered after a bit, except for the buffalo’s owner. He had no doubt gone straight home to weep over the loss of one he would never see under his roof again. It would never share the space or floor of his room again. When it had been skinned and butchered, one of the friends of the bereaved began to distribute the meat, selling it to the farm laborers. Everyone came forward to buy without any haggling or hesitation. They seemed to think they had a duty to provide more than spoken consolation. They had to lighten the burden on its owner by getting its price together and giving that to him in compensation for its loss. One of the farm workers told Muhsin that this was the normal practice, the custom followed whenever one of them suffered a loss from his livestock.

  They were not, like the people of the district capital, a people who stopped at talk. They shared grief in a way that was more than phrases to be repeated. It was an actual sharing to lessen the burden. Each of them sacrificed part of his wealth for the sake of the other.

  Muhsin was silent in astonishment. That luminous happiness, the essence of which was beyond his ken, returned to him; it returned to him this time from sorrow, like life returning from death.

  What an amazing nation they were, these Egyptian farmers! Did there still exist in this world solidarity as beautiful as this and a feeling of unity like this?

  The next day, when Muhsin opened his eyes he heard the chirping of little birds. He saw the first signs of morning and of the rising sun. Everything around him was quietly coming back to life. His soul was radiant and he felt at peace. He went to the window and opened it wide. There the green field, the blue sky, the birds, the light, everything was smiling in the stillness. Deep within him, for the first time, he felt the beauty of life. He perceived for the first time the spirit pervading nature’s creatures and tranquil inhabitants. A vague, hidden feeling welled up inside him that eternity was just an extension of a moment like this.

  This intuition of Muhsin’s was sound. If he had known more about the history of the Nile Valley he would have realized that its long-gone inhabitants had believed in no paradise other than that paradise of theirs and in no other form of eternity. For them, the meaning of eternal life after death was a return to this earth itself and then death and a rebirth there again . . . and so on in perpetuity, because God had not created any paradise besides Egypt.

  The youth dressed quickly and went out to the fields. He went far into them, breathing in the wonderful earthy air, air saturated with the fragrance of life and creation. In just the same way, the water and silt of the stream and the irrigation canals carried life and creation.

  Muhsin felt power and energy in his body. He took delight in life. He accepted it joyfully. He felt the love in his heart swelling to life like this healthy, vigorous vegetation blessed by the warmth of the sun . . . and why not, when everything around him was strong, vigorous, and growing? How beautiful life was!

  Lovely singing reached his ears then. He turned to look. The fellahin were grouped nearby with scythes in their hands, reaping the harvest, which was piled in rows. They were all singing. One of them would start and the others would join in. The breeze carried their voices to Muhsin’s ears. The sun had just come over the horizon, and the dawn light was still bleeding red from its birth. What was this song or hymn? Were they chanting a hymn for the morning to celebrate the birth of the sun the way their ancestors did in the temples? Or were they chanting in delight at the harvest that nowadays was their Beloved to which they sacrificed their work, toil, hunger, and freezing in the cold all year long? Yes, they had sacrificed all they had for the sake of this Beloved so it might be gracious unto them, bring them prosperity, and fill their homes with comfort.

  Muhsin went toward them and walked among them. They were caught up in their work and singing. He began to look at them and at their faces in wonder. Their features and expressions all conveyed the same sense. Despite their differences, they seemed a single person with regard to this sense of work and hope.

  He watched them while each carried what he reaped to add to the pile. They were looking at the collected harvest with loving interest, as though saying, “Toil and suffering are of no concern when dedicated to the one we worship.”

  * * *

  • • •

  At the end of that day, Muhsin returned to the house. What he had seen had left a spiritual impression he could sense but not comprehend. Caught by the contagion, he started thinking of his own beloved. But he straightened suddenly when a thought passed through his mind that made him tremble. Would he too be able to sacrifice for Saniya’s sake, plunging himself in pain and suffering for her? Or was he not of the same blood as these Egyptian farmers?

  * * *

  • • •

  When night fell, the croaking of frogs reverberated through the air, while the birds and animals became still. The moon rose. The air was heavy, and Muhsin found himself unable to sleep. The beauty of the night disturbed his peace of mind. He would gaze at the moon for a moment and ask himself, “I wonder if she too is looking at you now?”

  He went outside to the thres
hing floor with his heart in flames. Perhaps he would discover something to divert him. He found that the farm workers were gathered in a circle by the light of the beautiful sphere. In the center they had placed the tea things.

  Tea had become another idol for the fellah. The wandering Bedouin had introduced it and taught the farmer about it. The latter held fast to it while the Bedouins, as was so typical, forgot it. They knew no permanence in work or love and would not limit themselves to one residence.

  The fellahin, however, developed a taste for it and found they could not do without it. They drank it communally as if conducting a prayer service after they finished the heavy toil of the day. They had made a small wooden stand for the teapot and placed it there like a statue on a plinth. One of them assumed responsibility for passing around the cups. This drink, however, sometimes cost them more than they could afford. Many a prosperous farmer became impoverished by the excessive cost of preparing it, consuming it, and inviting his brethren to sit together to drink tea.

  Muhsin approached them. When the headman of the estate saw him, he rose in Muhsin’s honor. He invited him to drink and presented him a cup. Muhsin had no objections. He sat down politely and modestly among them, near Shaykh Hasan, who cleared a space for him and spread it with dry clover stems.

  The boy was pleased by that. The fellahin were a little shy in front of him at first, but he graciously encouraged them to speak. They proceeded with their down-to-earth discussions. Whenever one of them finished a cup, he went to the teapot. Shaykh Hasan felt that Muhsin wasn’t consuming enough tea and wanted to get him another cup. The youth smiled and showed him the contents of his cup. He had only drunk one sip. One of them asked in a straightforward way, “The bey doesn’t like the fellahin’s tea?”