The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail (24 page)

           

T
o Isa the atmosphere seemed to be weighed down with a variety of conflicting probabilities, which somehow combined to rob him of his peace of mind. He suffered through his life with his nerves on edge. The postponement of his marriage had become inevitable until such time as the earth had settled under his feet again and his father-in-law had become aware of reality again. Question marks kept springing up in front of his eyes and those of his friends like black flags on the beach when the sea is rough. They all chewed over rumors like colocynth.
⁹
Then he learned not only that his cousin Hasan had been selected for an important post but that the way was clear for him to be appointed to even more important and influential positions. As proof that Hasan belonged to the new world, this particular news stunned Isa even more than the events that had given that world birth. For a while, he did not know how to tell his mother about it, but the old lady did not understand how things really were. “Your turn will come,” she said naïvely. “Don't be sad. You deserve all the best.”

How nice it would be, he told himself, for a man to live far from the realm of his own consciousness. Then the purging statute was announced. He read it with a frenzied attentiveness and bitter despair: the destruction threatening the parties and leaders would destroy him as well; the roots that kept him fixed to the ground would be torn up one by one. What strange things were happening! Here was his friend Ibrahim Khairat, a lawyer and ex-member of Parliament, writing enthusiastically about the revolution in more than one newspaper, as though he were one of the officers himself! Attacking the parties—his own among them, of course—and the past era as though he himself had never been a part of it. Abbas Sadiq, calm and peaceful, a man who had not taken any notice of the events, had found a shield to protect him and had even continued his ambitious quest for promotion with greater hopes than he'd had before. Only Samir Abd al-Baqi, a thin, slender young man with a yellowish complexion and a dreamy look in his green eyes, had suffered the same fate as Isa and shared his own anxious fears. In him Isa found some consolation. “What will happen to us, do you think?” he asked.

“Dismissal is the least we can expect,” Samir replied with a pallid smile.

“What should we do?” he asked with a dry throat.

“A worthless salary. But we might find a job with a company.”

“I wonder if that could be arranged for us. Could we find the courage to start at the very beginning all over again?”

His friend shook his head. There were even a few gray hairs among the black.

“Maybe events will prove us wrong,” Isa muttered spiritlessly.

Complaints piled up in the office of the Purge Committee like so much refuse. Isa gathered that most of them were aimed at him. This did not surprise him, however, in view of the nature of the situation. Of the people who now held senior positions in the ministry, more were his enemies than were his friends. To those he could add the spiteful and the jealous as well as others who would volunteer for any opportunity to inflict some damage. Some of these people defied him openly in the ministry for no particular reason and made sarcastic remarks about him to his face. Even a few of his subordinates considered themselves permitted to look on him with contempt. All this turned the ministry into a corner of hell itself.

Then he was summoned to appear before the Purge Committee. It was seated behind a green table that stretched across the room in the office of the legal adviser to the ministry. The secretariat occupied one end of the table; he was asked to sit down facing the members of the committee, who sat on the opposite side. On the wall behind them, he noticed that God's name in a frame had taken the place of the King's picture. When he looked at the faces of the people sitting in front of him, he recognized the representative of the State Council as an old colleague of his on the Students' Committee; they had both almost been killed one day during a demonstration in front of the parliament building—and his mouth felt a little less dry. The committee only looked at him gravely, however, or glanced into their dossiers. None of them gave the slightest indication of having worked with him, even though the personnel director and the director of the general administration
numbered among them. There'd been a time when he'd made several members of this committee tremble even when his party was not in power. But now a cold neutrality had taken the place of sympathy or cordiality: an icy terror pervaded the atmosphere of this big room with its high ceiling and dark walls, filled with the smell of stale cigarettes. Through the glass of the locked door, he saw a kite land on the outside balcony and then take off again at great speed, making a noise like a dirge.

The chairman stared at him for a long time through his dark blue gold-rimmed spectacles. “I hope you're completely convinced of our impartiality,” he said. “We seek only justice.”

“I've no doubts of that,” Isa replied, a calm smile concealing his desperation.

“I want you to know that the purpose of the task with which we have been entrusted is to serve the public interest. There's no idea of revenge or any other motive…”

“I've no doubts about that either,” Isa replied, sinking several levels further into the clutches of despair.

A gesture was made toward the secretariat and then the petitions were read out one after the other. Some of them came from civil servants, others from
umdas
.
⁴⁴
The voice of the person who was reading them out became as monotonous as the
faqih
¹⁴
who intones advice to the dead at funerals. In an attempt to concentrate, Isa closed his eyes. All the accusations applied to the appointment of
umdas
on the basis of party bias and gifts, and, in the midst of so much repetition, his concentration lapsed, melting into the darkness he'd chosen by closing his eyes, which felt as if arrows were piercing them through a red fog. His efforts to regain his concentration were thwarted then by something he remembered from early childhood. It sprang up in
his mind as fresh and vivid as some tender plant like youth itself: he was coming home from a game of football in the open country around Al-Wayiliyya, the rain was pouring down in torrents, and the only protection he could find was under a refuse cart. Asking himself what it meant, he opened his eyes and saw faces wavering up and down; it looked to him for an instant as though the left side of the legal adviser's mustache was connected to the right side of the State Council representative's. He was asked for his opinion. What opinion? “Rubbish! All of it!” he shouted in fury. “I would like to see one piece of proof.” With this vigorous outburst, however, his energy was exhausted and he collapsed like a wilted leaf.

“The minister relied on your nominations,” the chairman commented, “so you were primarily responsible.”

“That was one of my duties and I carried it out in a way that satisfied my own conscience.”

“Is there any other criterion—apart from party bias—to account for the appointment and dismissal of
umdas
?”

“Suppose party politics were the criterion,” he replied, trying desperately to control his erratic breathing, his trembling. “Wasn't that one of the mainstays of our past life?”

“Are you satisfied with the propriety of your conduct?”

“I consider that it was quite normal.”

“What about the gifts?” the chairman asked, playing with a Parker pen in his hand.

“I told you that was rubbish,” Isa retorted angrily. “I'd like to see one piece of evidence.”

The names of
umdas
themselves who were witnesses were read out.

“What's the point of this vulgar intrigue?” Isa yelled.

Afterward, civil servants who had worked with him for some time were called in to give testimony, then his own
signatures were shown to him, on authorizations for promotion of civil servants in exceptional circumstances, orders for irrigation and farming services, and recommendations on behalf of provincial criminals connected to party hacks by patronage or kinship. As time dragged on, things began to lose their color.

“Show me a single government civil servant who deserves to stay on,” he blurted out nervously, his voice too loud.

A member of the committee whom he did not know turned to him and gave him a stern lecture about a civil servant's duties toward the people. “The revolution is determined to purge the governmental machine of all kinds of corruption,” he said. “I assure you that in the future no Egyptian will be deprived of his rights or gain any kind of benefit or concession for himself through belonging to any group, family, or organization.”

Something deep inside Isa warned him not to argue with this member of the committee, and so he remained silent. The investigation went on until four o'clock in the afternoon and then he left the committee room, feeling like a dried-up twig snapped off and devoured by worms. Crossing town toward Dokki, he felt as if he were floating in some sort of Atlantis. The lifeless streets, their lengths and widths, the neighborhoods they intersected, seemed remote, submerged beneath the seething clash of his own self. All he could see, hear, or think about was this unrelenting anxiety that tormented him.

“Why don't you talk to your cousin about the situation?” his old mother asked. “He's one of them!”

Her advice stung him, and he was aware that an insane look of rage flashed in his eyes.

           

T
he personnel director called him in to tell him that the decision had been taken to pension him off, crediting him with a two-year addition to his period of service. This was the same director who had written the memoranda connected with Isa's advancement, through promotion by exceptional promotion, all the way up to the second grade; he might still have the draft memorandum about his promotion to the first grade which had been prepared for submission to the cabinet, Isa knew, one week before the treaty had been annulled—the promotion that, in the course of events that had followed the annulment of the treaty, there had been no chance to confirm. The director himself had no party affiliation. Isa did not doubt for a moment, however, that the man loathed him: they held the same rank, after all, despite the enormous difference in their ages. He seemed moved by the situation and took advantage of the fact that there was no one else in the room to say so. “God only knows, Isa,” he said, “how really sorry I am!”

Isa thanked him. He knew perfectly well the man was lying. Eight years of dealing with civil servants was quite enough to make him expert at translating their stock phrases of courtesy into what they really meant. There was his file thrown down on the desk with his name written on the cover in Persian script: ISA IBRAHIM AD-DABBAGH. In his imagination, he pictured it being thrown into the Records Office, where it would be buried forever, along with old signatures that testified to his distinction and gave promise of a happier future. He asked the director how much his pension would be.

“Twelve pounds,” he was told, “but you'll also receive your full salary for a period of two years.”

He left the ministry building, his eyes fixed on something inside his head, resigned to the fact that he had been destined to live through one of those lurches in history when it makes some important leap forward but forgets about the people it bears on its back, not caring whether they manage to hang on or lose their balance and fall off.

He wandered aimlessly for a while in the sunlight, oblivious of the identity of the streets he walked along, then thought of his favorite café, El Bodega, and headed in that direction. As it was noon, there was no hope of finding any of his friends there, and so he sat down and ordered a tea by himself, with his own melancholy image in the polished mirrors to keep him amused. A group of backgammon players, hovering with bated breath over the next throw of the dice, provided an appropriate example of the total indifference with which the world regarded his troubles.

He turned away from them and from the other people there who were drowning themselves in
nargila
²⁶
smoke. He stared at his own dismal reflection. If this image could
speak, he thought, then I would really find a person who understood me. Tell me, what have you done? Why didn't you read the future when it was only a few hours away from you, you who can confirm things that happened on this earth millions of years ago? The face, with its big head and triangular shape, praised by a poet and likened to the Nile Delta; this face which had been a contestant for front-page coverage in the newspapers, how could it possibly fall into oblivion like some dinosaur? Or like the tea you are drinking which has been pulled out of the good earth in Ceylon to get stuck eventually in the Cairo sewers? If you go up several thousand feet into space, you cannot see anything living on the earth's surface or hear a single sound; everything fuses into a cosmic insignificance. All indications point to the fact that the mighty past which is still breathing around your face will dissolve in the near future and decay. All that will remain will be a foul smell.

“My heart told me I'd find you here,” a raised voice said nervously. Samir Abd al-Baqi came up and sat down beside him. He looked haggard and dispirited, almost as though he were looking at him through bars. Isa was so delighted to see him that he shook his hand fiercely in a manner that seemed to be a plea for help as well.

“My heart told me I'd find you here!” Samir repeated with more assurance.

Isa laughed loudly, so loudly that the café owner behind the table blinked. “After today,” he said, “this is the only place you'll find me.”

Samir gave him a mortified look with his green eyes. “It's the same with me,” he said. “I left the ministry for the last time today.”

They looked at each other for a long while, each of them plunged in despair. Then Isa had a feeling of mirth;
it seemed strange and not really genuine, as though he had been drinking or taking drugs.

“What's to be done?” he asked.

“We've two years' grace on full salary.”

“What about afterwards?”

“We may be able to find a job with a company.”

“Which company will risk taking us on?” Isa asked doubtfully.

“There's a solution to every problem,” Samir replied with a sigh.

Isa started on his way home. He looked at people with curiosity as though he were seeing them for the first time. They were strangers and had nothing to do with him; nor had he anything to do with them. He was an outcast in his own big city, banished without really being banished. He was amazed at the way the ground had suddenly collapsed under his feet like a puff of dust and how the pillars which had withstood fate for a quarter of a century had crumbled. When he got home, he looked at his mother's withered face and then sprang the news on her. She put her hand on the top of her head as though she were trying to stop the mounting pain. “Why are they doing that to you, my son?” she asked with a sigh.

Fortunately she did not know anything. Walking slowly around the house, he thought about how expensive it was. He couldn't possibly keep it now. Two years' salary, even added to what was left in the bank of the
umdas'
gifts, wouldn't last longer than two years. All those objects decorating the entrance, the reception room, and the library were “gifts” too. Certainly the crooks outnumbered the people who had been dismissed for crookedness. He was guilty, though, and so were his friends: what had happened to the good old days? Gifts were forbidden, after all, a
mark of corruption. But this sudden loss of everything, just when he was on the very threshold of a senior position, which would have led to the minister's chair! How could you live in a world where people forgot or pretended to forget, where there were so many others who gloated over the whole thing with unfeeling malice, where hard-won honors were being stripped away and vices trundled out and exposed, unfurled like so many flags?

In the afternoon, he went to Ali Bey Sulaiman's villa. The sky was lined with clouds and a chill breeze stirred up the dust blowing like the khamsin
²³
winds. As he climbed the broad marble steps, he thought to himself that if it were not for judicial immunity, Ali Bey Sulaiman would have been thrown into the street along with him. The Bey was outside, but Susan Hanem was in bed with a chill. Salwa appeared in a blue velvet dress. Her face gleamed out from the top of the dress like a beam of light—beautiful, but so expressionless that he could detect no reaction to recent events. His worried heart fluttered when he saw her and a spasm of love throbbed inside him like an escaped melody. He told himself she was the only thing of value he had left, and in the very next moment asked himself if she really belonged to him! “Salwa,” he blurted out abruptly, anxious to put an end to any doubts, “they pensioned me off today.”

Her beautiful, languid eyes blinked. “You?” she whispered in astonishment.

“Yes, me. The same thing is happening to many people these days,” he said, entrusting things to fate.

“But you're not like the others!” she replied, staring at him.

Her words stabbed like a spear through the eye, and his mind reeled, his thoughts hanging suspended only by the
gifts and the bank balance. “They're taking advantage of us in the name of the purge,” he said.

Salwa glanced casually up at the bronze statue of a Maghrebi
²⁵
horseman mounting his steed, as if asking it for an opinion. “What an insolent thing to do,” she murmured.

“I'll find a better job than the one I've got at the moment,” he went on, feeling encouraged.

She smiled at him as if to apologize for always seeming so listless. “Where?” she asked.

How much did she really love him? What new betrayals would the days ahead hold for him? A man's image suddenly intruded into his consciousness and under his breath he cursed the chairman of the Purge Committee. “With a company or else in some private-sector enterprise,” he replied.

The tip of her tongue showed as she moistened her lips, an action so unstudied as to suggest that for a moment she had lost interest in the impression she was making. He was aware of how disappointed she must be. “Let me draw some strength from you,” he said hopefully.

Only her mouth smiled. “I wish you success,” she murmured.

He put his hand over hers on the arm of the chair. “Love,” he said in something close to a whisper, “can scoff at problems like these quite easily.”

“Yes, yes…”

She might have been a little phlegmatic by nature, but she undoubtedly loved him. Overwhelmed by an urge to clasp her, he leaned forward and put an arm around her. She gave him a velvety look, surrendered her body to his arm, and a spark of sudden lust shot out from deep down in his troubled soul. He lowered his eager lips against the
softness of hers and released himself to a passionate craving for consolation. But she reached up a hand to stop him, turning her face away to escape from this frenzied onslaught; they drew apart, panting, then sat back in an awful silence, during which each read the thoughts in the other's eyes, reprimand on her part and apology on his. His voice emerged broken from the confusion. “Salwa,” he said, “I love you. My entire life is embodied in one thing—you.”

She patted his hand sympathetically.

“You should say something,” he said.

She sighed deeply and seemed to regain composure. “We must face up to life,” she said, “and everything in it.”

He heard the sweet melody of her voice with a profound calm. He would have liked them to leave the world and go to some unknown place forever; a place where there were no politics, no jobs, no revolutions, and no past. “Will you give me your trust and encouragement?” he asked, the first signs of cheerfulness in his voice.

“You can have what you want and more,” she replied, dabbing her lips with a handkerchief.

He wanted to embrace her again, but Ali Bey Sulaiman's voice was heard outside announcing that he was about to come in.