Adrift on the Nile

  She approached him, smiling. He regarded her, astonished. They shook hands. She apologized for coming so early, but he welcomed her in, genuinely pleased. She went out onto the balcony as eagerly as if she were about to see the Nile for the first time, and let her lively, cheerful gaze wander over the sleepy evening scene. She gazed for a long time at the acacia blossoms with their red and violet tints. Then she turned to him and they looked at each other, curiously on her part and with a certain confusion on his. He invited her to sit down, but she went first to the bookshelves to the left of the door, and looked over the titles with interest. Then she took a seat beside his usual place in the middle of the semicircle. He sat down in turn, and said again how pleased he was that she had come early after her weeklong absence. He compared her simple outfit of white blouse and gray skirt with his long white tunic. Perhaps it was because of her work that, unlike other women’s, the neck of the blouse did not show her cleavage. Or perhaps because she was a serious girl.

  Suddenly she asked: “You were once married, and had a child—is that not so?”

  Before he could reply, she apologized, taking back the intrusion with her tone of voice, adding that she believed that Ali al-Sayyid had mentioned it once in the course of telling her about his friends. He replied with a bow of the head. But when he saw the curiosity unsated in her beautiful hazel eyes, he said: “Yes. When I was a student from the countryside, alone in Cairo. Mother and daughter died within the month, from the same illness.” Then he added, with a detached simplicity: “That was twenty years ago.”

  He was reminded of the story of the spider and the fly. He realized, annoyed, that he had hardly started on his journey yet. He was afraid that he would meet with words of pity from her, but she expressed her feelings by a prolonged silence. Then she turned to the bookshelves. “They tell me that you are very keen on history and culture. But, as far as I know, you do not write on those subjects.”

  He raised the wide eyebrows that suited his broad, pale face in apparent rejection or scorn. She smiled. “So why did you stop studying?” she asked.

  “I had no success at it,” he replied. “Then I ran out of money, and managed to get a job at the Ministry of Health on the recommendation of one of the doctors who taught me at medical school.”

  “Perhaps the work doesn’t agree with you.”

  “I can’t complain.”

  He looked at his watch, and then poured a little fluid from a bottle onto the charcoal in the brazier. He put a match to it and placed the brazier in the doorway of the balcony. But now she questioned him again.

  “Don’t you feel lonely, or…?”

  He interrupted her with a laugh. “I don’t have time for that.”

  She laughed in turn. “In any case,” she said, “I am happy to have found you in your right mind this time.”

  “Not entirely,” he said. He had seen her looking at the newly lit charcoal, so he pointed, smiling, at the dregs in the bottom of the coffee cup. She accepted the evidence, and began to praise riverside life. He confessed that he himself was relatively new to it. “We gathered in any number of apartments, but the nosy neighbors never once left us in peace!”

  And then he laughed, but this time in a different, exultant way. She looked at him inquiringly. He laughed again, and then pointed to his head. “The journey has begun,” he said, “and your eyes are beautiful.”

  “And where is the connection?”

  “There is no connection between any one thing and another,” he announced, as if it were an axiom.

  “Not even between the firing of a bullet and the death of a person?”

  “Not even then—for the bullet is a rational invention, but death…”

  She laughed. “Did you know?” she said, “I came early on purpose so that I could be alone with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are the only one who hardly speaks at all.”

  The lift of his eyebrows showed that he did not accept this, but she did not retract this time. “Even if you are talking to yourself all the time!”

  A silence separated them. He sat looking at the gathering mists, and realized that her early arrival had caused him to miss his usual contemplation of the evening’s leisurely entrance. But he was not sorry. They heard the familiar cough from outside. “Amm Abduh,” he murmured. She spoke about him with interest, and put a whole string of questions about him to Anis. He answered simply that no, the man was never ill, and that no, the weather did not affect him, and that no, he did not know how old he was, just as he could not imagine him ever dying.

  “Would you accept,” she asked now, “if I invited you all to the Semiramis Hotel?”

  “I think not,” he replied uncomfortably. “As for myself, it’s impossible.” And he assured her that he never left the houseboat except to go to the Archives Department of the Ministry.

  “It seems that you don’t like me!” she said.

  “On the contrary!” he protested. “You’re a sweet girl!”

  Now the night had drawn in. The boat swayed under many footsteps, and a clamor of voices rose on the gangway. The rocking motion made Samara uneasy. “We live on the water,” he told her. “The houseboat always moves like this when people arrive.”

  The friends appeared one by one from behind the screened door. They were astonished to find Samara there, but welcomed her warmly. Saniya put a special complexion on this early visit, and jestingly congratulated Anis. And shortly after that, his hands were busy as usual, and the water pipe circulated.

  Ragab poured Samara a whiskey. Anis saw Sana snatching a furtive look at Samara from beneath her curls, and he smiled. As the coals glowed, he became merry. He offered the water pipe to Samara, but she declined, and all his encouragement was in vain. Everything was silent, save for the bubbling of the pipe. Then they were swept away on a stream of diverse remarks. American planes had made strikes on North Vietnam. Like the Cuban crisis, remember? And as for the rumors, there was no end to them. The world was teetering on the brink of an abyss. The price of meat, the problems of the government food cooperatives—and what about the workers and the peasants? And corruption, and hard currency, and socialism, and the way the streets were jammed with private cars? And Anis said to himself: All these things lie in the bowl of the pipe, to go up in smoke, like the vegetable dish, mulukhiya, which Amm Abduh cooked for lunch that day. Like our old motto, “If I were not, I would wish to be.” And when a light like the light of these embers blazes in the heavens, the astronomer says that a star has exploded, and in turn the planets around it, and everything has been blown to dust. And one day the dust fell onto the surface of the earth and life sprang from it…And after all that, they tell me: “I will cut two days from your salary!” Or they tell me: “I am not a whore!” The poet al-Ma‘arri summed it up in one line—a line which I cannot remember, which I do not care if I remember or not. Al-Ma‘arri was blind, and could not have seen Samara when she lived in his time.

  “My husband is trying to get a reconciliation.”

  “God forbid!”

  Blind, and could not see. The thread was cut, and some splendid thing was scattered away. The important thing is that we preserve…preserve what? Tomorrow we have a wearisome task; tomorrow is the day of the annual accounts. In the prison house of the Archives Department. A museum for insects. Midges, of course, being mammals…

  “But you are a beautiful blonde,” Samara was saying to Layla. “Really you are.”

  Khalid Azzuz spoke, and it was clear that he meant Layla. “Her real problem,” he began, “is the problem of the country as a whole; that is, she’s a modern girl—but the husband is bourgeois!”

  Anis looked out at the night. He saw the lamps of the opposite shore, slipping into the river’s depths like pillars of light. And from a houseboat out of sight, carried on the breeze, came the sound of singing and music. Perhaps a wedding party. As Muhammad al-Arabi had sung on the night of your wedding: “Look! What a wonder. I fell for a peas
ant girl!” And my uncle had said: “God preserve you, and let your house be full of fine children, but be careful, there are only two acres left…” How beautiful the village was, with the garden smelling of orange blossom; a perfume as heady as musk behind the ears of fine women…

  “What a suggestion!” someone was exclaiming.

  “But it’s a wonderful idea!” Samara replied eagerly. “And this way we will really get to know each other; there’s no room for pretenses!”

  “But what do you mean by it?”

  “I mean the primary concern of your lives!”

  “Sounds like a probe to me!”

  “If you have any doubts about me at all, then I should leave this minute!” Samara protested.

  “Let’s start with you, then,” Ahmad said cautiously. “Tell us about your primary concern.”

  She appeared not to be surprised by the question, and said simply, in a way that seemed very candid: “Mine, at the moment, is that I try my hand at writing a play.”

  “Plays are not written without a reason!” Mustafa said maliciously.

  She took a leisurely puff at her cigarette, narrowing her eyes in thought, hesitating. Ali’s smile betrayed his sympathy for her, and he said, to encourage her: “The atmosphere here is clearly not conducive to anything except cynicism and triviality. I think you have a strong character, though—and you should stand firm!”

  She lowered her eyes, as if she were contemplating the coals in the brazier. “So be it,” she said. “The truth is that I believe in being serious.”

  There was a barrage of questions. Serious? Serious about everything? Could we not seriously believe in absurdity? And seriousness, moreover, implies that life has a meaning—but what is this meaning? Finally Ragab cried, “You have a sorceress here before you! With one stroke of her pen she will turn farce into political theater!” He turned to Samara. “But do you really believe in that?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Speak frankly. Tell me how you can. We would welcome this miracle of belief with all our hearts!”

  They discussed the higher basis on which life’s meaning had formerly rested. They agreed that this basis had now gone forever. What new foundation could there possibly be? Samara summed it up: “The will to live!”

  They exchanged their thoughts. The will to live was something sure and solid, but it could lead to absurdity. Indeed, what was to stop it? Was the will to live alone sufficient to create heroes? For the hero was someone who sacrificed his will to live in the service of some other thing, loftier in his eyes than life; how, according to her theory, could that higher glory ever be reached?

  Samara spoke again. “I mean that in our search we should turn toward the will to live itself, not any one foundation in which it is impossible to believe. The will to live is what makes us cleave to real life at times when, if it were left to our intellects alone, we would commit suicide. This will itself is the sure foundation granted to us, so that by it we might rise above ourselves…”

  Mustafa spoke. “You’ve turned Marx upside down,” he said. “Not ‘from above to below,’ but ‘from below to above’!”

  “There is no philosophy there,” she protested. “But this is my primary concern. Now it’s your turn.”

  Curses on you all. There is no worse an enemy to the water pipe’s pleasures than thinking. Twenty pipes, and all for nothing, or nearly nothing. A date palm seems to be the firmest believer of all. The perseverance of the midges is also worthy of admiration. But if the plaints of Omar Khayyam lose their ardor, then say goodbye to ease. All these mockers and scoffers are merely complex atomic formations. And each of these individuals is breaking down into a certain number of atoms. Losing their form and color…changing entirely…until there is nothing left of them that can be seen with the naked eye…until there is nothing there except voices.

  The voice, then, of Ragab al-Qadi: “My primary concern is art.”

  And the voice of Mustafa Rashid: “Actually, his primary concern is love—or, to be more exact, women.”

  Samara’s voice, doubtful: “Is that really what concerns you?”

  “No more and no less.”

  Her voice had prompted Ali’s voice to reply. He said: “My primary concern is artistic criticism!”

  The mocking voice of Mustafa: “Nonsense; his real concern is to dream—dreaming itself, that is, regardless of the contents of the dream. Criticism? He criticizes simply to flatter friends or destroy enemies—and to squeeze a certain amount of money out of it as well!”

  “But then how can he want the dream to come true?”

  “That does not matter to him at all. But when the pipe is generous in its bliss, he scratches his formidable nose and says: ‘Contemplate, my children, the distance man has traveled, from the caves to outer space! Bastards all, you will soon sport among the stars like gods.’ ”

  The inquiry turned to Ahmad. His voice spoke hesitantly. “My first concern is…to keep up my reputation.”

  Mustafa’s voice, interrupting again: “This man is in a different situation altogether. He’s a Muslim, to begin with; he prays and fasts, and he is a model husband whose attitude toward the women here is one of complete indifference. Perhaps his primary concern is that his daughter gets married!”

  Khalid’s voice: “He is the only one of us who will live after death.”

  Anis became tired of his clamorous solitude and called Amm Abduh to change the water in the pipe. The man seemed, while he was present, to be the only thing existing in this vocal wilderness. One voice said that his concern was to remember; and another that it was to forget. And Anis himself wondered why the Tartar hordes had stopped on the border…

  “I have no concerns!” cried Layla’s voice.

  To which the voice of Khalid replied: “Or rather, I am her first concern!”

  Saniya’s voice said: “Mine is that my husband divorces me—and that Ali divorces both his wives…”

  Samara’s voice tried to draw out Sana’s voice, but it did not utter a word. Ragab’s voice said: “Tell me your primary concern!”

  And Sana’s voice said: “No”; but the voice of a kiss whispered, indistinct and blurred. As for the voice of Khalid, it said: “My first concern is…anarchy!”

  Laughter rang out. Then a silence reigned, like an interval for rest, and the void had complete dominion.

  Amm Abduh approached. “A woman has just fallen from the eighth floor of the Suya Company building,” he said.

  Anis regarded him anxiously. “How did you find out?”

  “I hurried over when I heard the scream. It was a shocking sight.”

  Ali’s voice: “Luckily we’re far from the street—we can’t hear anything.”

  “Did the woman commit suicide or was she murdered?”

  “God only knows,” replied the old man. Then he hurried out to the street.

  Ali suggested going out to see what was going on, but this was rejected by the company. The shock of the news had returned the atoms to their original formation, and people were themselves again. Anis was glad that he had escaped from his wearisome solitude. The company of madmen was better than being alone. It was Mustafa’s turn to speak now, but Ali wanted to avenge himself first.

  “He’s a lawyer,” Ali began, “who lost some of his best clients when the constituencies were reorganized, and who lives now off the misdeeds of ordinary people. His first concern, after getting an advance on his fees, is the Absolute; and this even though he is ruthless when it comes to getting the balance of the fees!”

  “So you’re devout!” said Samara.

  “God forbid!”

  “But what is the Absolute?”

  It was Ali who replied. “Sometimes he looks at the sky, and sometimes he retreats into his shell—and sometimes he is sure that he is close to it, but there are no words to describe it. Khalid has advised him to go to a gland specialist.”

  “But he is one of the serious people at any rate?”

  “Not a
t all. His Absolute is absurd.”

  “Could you describe him as a philosopher?”

  “In the modern sense of philosophy, if you wished; that is, the philosophy that combines theft and imprisonment and sexual perversion à la Jean Genet.”

  Anis recalled his last meeting with Nero. No, he was not the monster people said he was. He had said that when he found that he was emperor he killed his mother; and then when he became a god, he burned Rome to the ground. Before all that, he was just an ordinary human being—one who loved art. And this was why he now enjoyed the bliss of paradise. Anis laughed aloud—to find all eyes turned upon him, and Samara addressing him. “Your turn now, master of ceremonies; what is the most important thing for you?”

  Anis answered without a second thought. “To be your lover,” he said.

  Everybody roared with laughter—and Ragab burst out: “But…” before remembering himself. Everyone laughed all the more, and in spite of the embarrassment, Samara persisted in getting a reply. Ahmad answered for him. “To kill the Director General.”

  Samara laughed. “At last I have found somebody serious,” she said.

  “But he only thinks about that when he is clearheaded.”

  “Even so!”

  Amm Abduh returned. He stood by the screen in front of the door. “The woman committed suicide,” he said. “After a quarrel with her lover.”

  There was a short silence, broken by Khalid. “She did the right thing,” he said. “Change the water in the pipe, Amm Abduh.”

  “So there is still love after all,” murmured Samara.

  Khalid spoke again. “The woman most likely killed herself when she was serious. We, on the other hand, will not.”