The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail (32 page)

           

T
hey all spent the summer at Ra's al-Barr, which was in itself unusual; even Abbas Sadiq, a devotee of Alexandria, was there. Ibrahim Khairat got a room ready in his chalet where they could play cards and drink, and they all went back there after their regular exercise on the banks of the Nile. Shaikh Abd at-Tawwab as-Salhubi was on vacation at the same time and joined up with them. Isa slid into poker with no trouble at all; the gambling and the fact that it kept him up till dawn led to his first serious quarrel with Qadriyya. When there was a quarrel, he found that she could be as stubborn as a mule. But he did not care and carried on scornfully in his own sweet way. When he took his place at the table, Ibrahim Khairat poured him out a glass of cognac and asked how things were going at home.

“Lousy,” Isa replied tersely.

“Our wives are more tolerant than Qadriyya Hanem,” commented Abbas Sadiq. “She shouldn't keep such a close watch on you in a beautiful haven like Ra's al-Barr.”

Isa looked at his hand and was delighted to see he had
a pair of aces. He entered the round with high hopes, and then luck gave him a pair of eights. He won six piasters.

“Just look after your profits,” said Shaikh As-Salhubi with a smile, “and things will get better at home!”

“His wife's not worried about money,” Abbas Sadiq said to put things straight.

The remark was quite spontaneous, but it hurt Isa very much, particularly as he was usually unlucky at card games; so much so that he had had to withdraw a hundred pounds from the bank to cover his losses.

Ibrahim Khairat asked Shaikh As-Salhubi about Abd al-Halim Pasha Shukri.

“He went abroad at the right time,” the Shaikh replied, “and with the appropriate excuse. He won't be coming back, of course.”

“It's no better than it is here,” said Samir Abd al-Baqi. “The foreign policy page reads like the obituaries!”

“Then the world really is threatened by total destruction,” Abbas Sadiq said.

“It's threatened by destruction,” said Isa as he dealt the hand, “whether it's war or peace!”

“You only philosophize when you're feeling in low spirits,” Shaikh As-Salhubi said with a laugh. “Maybe your flood of good luck is drying up!”

Isa lost the round even though he had three tens. “One word from you,” he told the Shaikh angrily, “would bring a whole town bad luck.”

“Rubbish!” As-Salhubi replied with a laugh. “I've chased the present generation with my blessed words since the day it was born. And just look what's happened to it!”

Isa put his whole heart and soul into the game. He enjoyed the ardor, hope, enthusiasm, and absorption of it all with a languid vitality. Everything was forgotten, even
history and the disasters which it had brought with it. He joined with pleasure in its crazy existence. There were at least seven pounds on the table. He pinned his hopes on a solitary ace and then drew a card. There was the ace smiling at him with its red face. But then Ibrahim threw down his flush like a thunderbolt. His nervous system leapt several times, just as it had done on the day when the dissolution of the political parties was announced. He wondered what his wife was doing at that moment; would she be talking to her mother? Maybe the old woman would be telling her that they had accepted their particular problem, but it did not seem to have accepted them. He's out of work, she would be saying, expelled because of his bad reputation; and he doesn't worship God either. Too bad for Qadriyya if she got in his way. She had been married several times and was barren, naturally barren, and she was at least ten years older than him too!

When he came to himself again, Shaikh As-Salhubi was carrying on with what he had been saying earlier. “That's why we're in the age of fundamental principles,” he was saying, “just like the days when the great religions were in conflict with each other!”

“What hope have the small nations got in life,” asked Samir Abd al-Baqi, “if the great nations don't disagree with each other?”

“The atom is the flood,” Shaikh As-Salhubi said with conviction. “Either we turn in truth to Almighty God, or else there will be ‘clear destruction'!”
⁸

Isa tried hard to remember where he had come across that idea before, the idea of the flood. He forgot this philosophizing when he found four tens in his hand. He sprang into action so as to make up for his losses during the long night. He opened with twenty-five piasters to
draw them into the round, but they all passed because they had such poor hands. His head was spinning. Then he showed his winning hand.

“Your luck's worse when you're winning than when you're losing!” shouted Ibrahim Khairat.

“You're undoubtedly lucky in love,” Shaikh As-Salhubi remarked.

Isa was about to boil over. Gambling can eventually become a deadly disease, he told himself. He started to reckon up what kind of crisis was waiting for him at home. Everyone stopped playing just as dawn was about to appear.

Abbas Sadiq stood up. “What fun would there be at Ra's al-Barr,” he said, “if it weren't for gambling?”

Isa went out into the street feeling like a candle with only the vestige of the wick left. Abbas Sadiq and Samir Abd al-Baqi walked one way, and he walked another with Shaikh As-Salhubi. A dewy breeze blew quietly, and the sounds of people sleeping happily resounded in a darkness broken only by the light of the stars and by the moon rising at the end of the month. From afar, the horizon echoed the roaring of the sea. Shaikh As-Salhubi yawned as he intoned the word “Allah.” “How beautiful it is at this time of night,” he murmured.

“Especially when you've won!” Isa replied with a laugh.

“I've left this evening session of ours with no wins or losses,” the Shaikh said with a laugh. “Abbas Sadiq is God's own lighted fire.” Then, after a pause: “Isa, you're a risky gambler, you know!”

“I lost,” Isa replied with a tone full of meaning, “even though I had a pair of aces in my right hand.”

The Shaikh realized what he meant. “That's the way the world is,” he replied. “Do we deserve the things that happen
to us? Let's admit that we do make mistakes, but then, who doesn't? How can this renegade nation have forgotten us? How can it forget the people who used to treat it as a sympathetic mother treats her only child?”

A feeling of sadness overwhelmed Isa and his willful pride softened. “We were a party with the very loftiest ideals,” he said, responding to a sudden desire to make a confession, “a party of self-sacrifice and absolute integrity. In the face of all kinds of temptations and threats, we were the party which said, ‘No, and no again.' We were like that before 1936. So how did our pure spirit get so senile? How did we sink little by little till we had lost all the good qualities we had? Now here we are turning up our hands in despair in the darkness, feeling sad and guilt-stricken. It's too bad.”

“We were the best of them all,” the Shaikh said insistently, “right up till the very last moment.”

“That's a relative judgment,” Isa replied in a bitter tone which was really aimed at himself. “It doesn't fit in with the nature of things, nor does it satisfy the people who are tackling life so enthusiastically. Too bad, then…”

Isa said good night to him at the end of the street. He watched him as he walked slowly away with the wind blowing in his loose-fitting
gallabiyya
. The Shaikh had started his life, Isa thought sadly, by being imprisoned in Tanta when the Australian soldiers had arrested him as he was shouting. “Long live the homeland…long live Saad.” He had ended up in 1942 trading in vacant jobs, just as I finished up with bank account number 33123 at the Bank of Egypt.

He looked up at the universe. The rising moon was shining brightly, and the stars were gleaming, infinity overwhelming everything else. “What does it all mean?” he
asked himself in an audible voice. “Tell me; my guide's all confused.”

The doorbell rang loudly in the nocturnal silence when he pressed it. He waited for a while, then rang it again. He waited, and then rang again. He kept on pressing the bell, but there was no answer. She must have decided not to open the door! he thought. He stamped on the ground, then turned around and walked away.

           

H
e spent the night at Ibrahim Khairat's house. The next day he took a room in the Grand Hotel on the Nile. After a week he had to draw another hundred pounds to cover his never-ending losses and his daily expenses. Ibrahim's wife went to see Qadriyya at her husband's suggestion to apologize for the unintentional role which Ibrahim had played in her quarrel with her husband. Then she tried to bring about a reconciliation, but got no response. Isa kept on gambling without the slightest consideration of the consequences. Samir stopped coming to their evening sessions because he was so disgusted by the dissipation he could see in his friend. “You should really take a look at your entire situation,” he told Isa one day.

They were sitting in the Soprano Casino overlooking the sea. It was noon, the time of day when he usually woke up. With his round eyes, Isa was following a group of swimming girls. He did not comment on his friend's remark, but continued enjoying the view. Samir repeated what he had said.

“I'd really like to try an experiment,” Isa said, “one that has never been possible at the right time. I'd like to flirt with a pretty girl and get to know her, then propose to her. Meanwhile, we'd be exchanging presents, talking to each other, and making promises to each other over the telephone.”

“Do you really want to get married again?” Samir asked him.

He looked up at a slow-moving cloud which had a shape like a camel. “Just look at that cloud,” he said. “Tell me, is it possible that our life was created like that shape up there?”

“Even that fleeting shape is inevitable,” Samir replied with a smile. “It's the result of hundreds of different factors of air and nature. But tell me, do you want to get married?”

Isa laughed and finished his Spatis.
³⁸
Just a dream,” he said. “Why do Sufis always believe everything?”

“Well, then,” Samir said angrily, “let's discuss your situation.”

“Just imagine,” Isa replied in a similar tone, “as I was coming from the hotel, I met Sami Pasha Abd ar-Rahman, the old Free Constitutionalist. I felt rather attached to him personally because we both belonged to the past generation. We shook hands with each other and stood there talking. Strangely enough, if it hadn't been for Saad Zaghlul, we wouldn't have got into this situation!”

Samir laughed so loudly that lots of people sitting around stared at them.

“The biggest trick I let them pull on me was the dowry balance,” Isa said in a different tone of voice. “The old woman's a farsighted old devil!”

“Qadriyya Hanem is a very reasonable woman, Isa,” Samir said sorrowfully. “You're mad to be doing all this gambling.”

Isa breathed in angrily. “It's boredom,” he muttered.

“Work and work again,” said Samir, patting his hand. “That's my first and last piece of advice to you.”

Samir came in at the very beginning of the evening session, when Isa was concentrating on the game, and invited him to accompany him on some urgent and important business. Isa tried to ignore the invitation and continue playing, but Samir dragged him from the table in spite of his cries of protest and the silent protests of the people around him as well.

He found himself in Samir's chalet confronted by Ihsan, Samir's wife, and Qadriyya, his own wife, who was sitting on a large chair with her head lowered. Ihsan welcomed him and sat him down next to her on a long, ornate semicircular sofa. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. She gestured at Qadriyya Hanem. “May I present to you a dear friend of mine. She's married to a fine man who's been lost in action.”

Isa frowned and Qadriyya blushed. Her eyes moistened and Samir noticed it. “That's a good sign,” he said. “What do you say?”

They did not stop speaking for a single moment. “Every problem can be solved without an argument,” Ihsan said.

“Things can be put right again with a little kindness,” Samir told Qadriyya with a smile. “Your husband is a stubborn man. In the past, he was subjected to all kinds of terror and torture without changing his mind.”

“Are you happy with this situation?” Qadriyya asked. “Tell me.”

A silver tray with
cassata
cakes and pastries from the local market was passed around. There was a pause while they ate.

“Humanity as a whole needs some doses of Sufism,” Samir said. “Without it, life would lose it pleasure.”

“We need to come back to life several times,” said Isa, “till we perfect it.”

Qadriyya now spoke to him for the first time. “I hope you're not holding back your kindness toward me till some other life, then,” she said.

Samir had moistened the edge of his handkerchief with water and was using it to rub his trouser leg at the knee where a drop of strawberry juice had spilled. “Let's talk about the future,” he suggested. “Please…”

“I'm quite sure,” Qadriyya said, “that the only thing that could get him out of his difficulties is a job. I'll accept any sacrifice to achieve that much!”

“I completely agree with you,” Samir said. “But he must move away from Ra's al-Barr so that that excellent idea can sink in. You've spent the month of August here; that's enough. Go to Alexandria and spend the rest of the summer there. That seems both essential and urgent.”

“We'll leave tomorrow,” Qadriyya said, “provided he agrees.”

“You'll find ample time to think in Alexandria,” Samir said as he led them to the outside door of the chalet. “When you get back to Cairo in October, you'll start work immediately.”

They walked side by side in the street, which was almost empty. The half-moon was fixed above the horizon like a cosmic smile in a clear sky. He had a thought; all that beauty scattered around in such remarkable order was just
some unknown, mocking force, compelling mankind to realize the intensity and chaos of its own misery.

“I've found out that I've got high blood pressure,” Qadriyya muttered, “and you're the cause of it all!”

“Really?”

“Yes. The doctor examined me and gave me some medicine and put me on a diet.”

“I hope you'll soon get better,” he told her, stroking her back very gently. He felt he was not getting any further in his quest for happiness. A marriage with no love, a life without hope. Even if he did have some success with a job, he would still be out of work.