The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail (6 page)

           

S
he sat facing him on the balcony that Friday, their holiday, and he reflected uneasily that he'd hardly seen her the past week. The rays of the sun crossed her lap and her legs and sparkled on the Nile beneath them. It was strange that he couldn't remember her as a child, whether she was a devil like Jamila. Now she's a beautiful girl, intelligent, studious, refined, poetic. Her resemblance to her mother as a girl he preferred to forget.

“You're too serious for a poet!”

Jamila, who'd been standing at the entrance to the balcony, shouted defiantly, “A poet!”

He shook his finger at her, then turned to Buthayna, whose serious expression showed signs of displeasure. “You're too thin, and your sister's too fat. What do the two of you eat?”

Jamila shouted, “She eats.”

Umm Mohammed, the maid, carried off the protesting Jamila.

“Mama's unwell,” Buthayna said.

“Mama's all right. Tell me about you.”

“There's nothing much to say, but Mama's not all right.”

The chase never stops in this house. And you, Buthayna, does nothing concern you but poetry, math, and chemistry? Is God alone your lover?

“You don't like to talk about Mama?”

“She no longer understands my illness.”

Their eyes met for a moment; then, defeated, he turned to look at the Nile.

“But the doctor, Papa.”

He interrupted her gently, trying to hide his exasperation. “I'm the doctor, no one else.”

“I'm sorry, but you've taught me to be open with you.”

“Of course.”

Suddenly a shrill little voice shouted, “Course!” He held the little girl's arm until Umm Mohammed took her away again.

“Have we caused you irritation?”

“God forbid. But we tend to escape when we're disturbed within ourselves.”

“She cries a lot and that's very painful.”

“You must convince her that she's mistaken.”

She said, playing with the bracelet of her gold watch, “But you treat her differently now. You told her very harshly you'd do as you pleased.”

“She told you that, too?”

“I'm the only one she can complain to.”

Depressed, he muttered, “It was just anger, as you know.”

“Anyway, she's willing to help you as much as she can.”

“There's nothing she can do.”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “Mightn't she think…”

“Isn't it better for us to go over your latest poems?”

“There's nothing new.”

“But your lover still inspires you.”

“Maybe she thinks…well, you know.”

“She even lets you in on her ridiculous fears.”

“It makes me very sad.”

Lighting a cigarette, he said, “Ridiculous illusions.”

She said anxiously, “I'll believe you. You've always been a model of truth. Are they merely illusions?”

You're backed into a corner. “Your mother has upset you too much.”

“Say that they're just illusions.”

He glanced at her reproachfully, but she avoided his eyes. Looking at the Nile, she asked, “There's no other woman?”

“A woman!” the shrill little voice returned.

This time he pulled her onto his lap as though seeking her protection and started roughhousing with her, the only way to deal with the little imp. But Buthayna continued her worrying. “I want an answer, Papa.”

“What do you think of your father?”

“I believe you, so speak. Please, for my sake, speak.”

In bitter despair, he said, “There's nothing.”

Her face brightened while his heart sank. Her eyes shone with victorious relief but the world scowled. Autumn was in the air, a tinge of yellow had spread over the treetops, and flocks of white clouds were reflected in the gray water. The emptiness was filled with silent tunes, sad and delicate, and weary questions with hard answers. His lie expanded until it threatened him with annihilation.

In the depths of despair, he went to visit Mustapha at his office. After a futile discussion, Mustapha concluded, “I've gone along with you and helped, hoping that you'd realize the futility of this venture, but you're drowned.”

He sighed. “You don't realize I'm living the art I always longed to create.”

Mustapha finished the page he was writing, then sent it down to the press. “I've often thought the crisis you're suffering resulted from suppressed art.”

He rejected the idea with a shake of his head, then said, “No, it's not art, but it may be what we turn to art in search of.”

Mustapha paused a minute, then said, “If we were scientists, spending twenty years of our lives searching for an equation, perhaps we'd be invulnerable to despair.”

Shaking his head sorrowfully, he said, “My misfortune may be that I'm searching for an equation without scientific qualifications.”

Mustapha laughed. “And since there's no revelation in our age, people like you can only go begging.”

Begging, day and night in aimless reading, in futile poetry, in pagan prayers in the nightclub halls, in stirring the deaf heart through infernal adventures.

Mustapha spoke about Zeinab and said that she was suffering, both from his desertion and from the effects of her pregnancy. She must be in a bad way. You've become so hard-hearted, yet you're prepared to be magnanimous if she'd only free you from the shackles of this dead love.

“Yes, Zeinab, there is another woman, since you insist on knowing.”

Disgust has sprouted in a fetid swamp choked with traditional platitudes and household management. What wealth and success you've attained offer no comfort, for
all is consumed by decay. Your soul is sealed in a putrid jar like an aborted fetus, your heart suffocated by apathy and by grimy ashes. The flowers of life, withered and fallen, will come to rest on the garbage heap.

“Weep all you like, you'll have to accept things as they are.”

Disaffection has killed everything. A few questions have tumbled the very foundations of life. I said to him, “Suppose you win the case today and the government confiscates your land tomorrow?” to which he replied, “Don't we live our lives knowing that our fate rests with God?”

He was in his office, dawdling over a memorandum, when the office boy announced Mr. Yazbeck. The man walked in, his paunch bulging in front of him, greeted Omar with a bow, and sat down.

“Since I was passing through Al-Azhar Square, I thought I'd drop by for a visit.”

Omar said with a sarcastic smile, “You'd come from the far ends of the earth for Warda's sake, wouldn't you?”

“My dear counselor, you know that my garden is full of roses.”

“Fine, so don't talk about Warda.”

He smiled broadly and said, “It would be foolish to think I could get around you, but let's try to bridge the distance between us as directly as possible.”

“Yes?”

His eyelids lowered and he said seriously, “Warda's been neglecting her duties.”

“She has duties other than dancing?”

“You didn't honor us with your presence that night, sir, just to watch Warda dance.”

“So?”

“So I said I'd complain to the great man himself.”

Omar frowned but remained silent. Yazbeck continued. “Business is business, sir, and I don't like…”

He interrupted curtly. “Do whatever you think is in your interest.”

“I don't want to anger you…”

“But I'm excusing you in advance.”

The man bowed his head gratefully. “And I promise I'll take her back to work if you tire of her in the future.”

“That day will never come, Mr. Yazbeck.”

“I wish you happiness,
mon chéri
.”

Yazbeck was about to get up, but Omar, overcome by a sudden absurd impulse, detained him. “Tell me, Mr. Yazbeck, what meaning does life hold for you?”

The man raised his eyebrows in surprise, then, reading the seriousness of Omar's expression, answered, “Life is life….”

“Are you happy?”

“Praise the Lord….Sometimes business is slow, sometimes the club is disturbed by a love affair like Warda's, but the carnival goes on….”

“So you live knowing your fate rests with God?”

“That's undeniable, of course. But I have a beautiful house, a good wife, a son studying chemistry in Switzerland who's going to settle there.”

He smiled. “Do you believe in God?”

The man replied in astonishment, “Naturally. What an odd question.”

“Then tell me what He is.”

He laughed openly, for the strange questions had removed all ceremony. “Will your infatuation for Warda last long?”

“Of course.”

“Couldn't it…?”

He interrupted. “If you tell me what God is, I promise I'll let you have her immediately!”

The man rose, bowed once more, and said on his way out, “I'm always at your service.”

           

H
e kissed her with fervent gratitude. “I know it's a great sacrifice to quit your job.”

Her wide eyes shone with tears. “For your sake.”

The Oriental room exuded the breath of love. He'd never dreamed he would love her so intensely. She withdrew a dark blue box from the pocket of her robe and handed it to him shyly—a gift of golden cuff links.

He exclaimed, as though he'd never owned gold before, “Sweetheart!”

“The cuff links, you can see, have two hearts.”

“Because your heart is made of gold, as I told you.”

Running her fingers through his thick black hair, she asked, “Why did you bring all your clothes with you today?”

His face clouded, and he said in a voice devoid of tenderness, “I've left home for good.”

She exclaimed in astonishment, “No!”

“It's the only solution.”

“But I told you, I don't want to cause you any trouble.”

“Let's not talk about it.”

The room's atmosphere in the silence of dawn was electric. She looked at him with angry and desperate eyes, her makeup smudged with all the tears she'd shed. How ravaged by anger is a face which had remained placid for twenty years.

“You should train yourself to accept the facts.”

“While you stain your honor with a prostitute.”

“Your voice will wake everyone up.”

“Look at the lipstick on your handkerchief. How disgusting!”

Overcome by anger, he shouted, “What of it?”

“Your daughter is of marriageable age.”

“I'm ridding myself of death.”

“Aren't you ashamed? I'm ashamed for you.”

His anger increasing, he replied, “Accepting death is even more shameful.”

Her head dropped as she wept. “Twenty years without knowing your filth,” she said in a choked voice.

He said insanely, “So, let it be the end.”

“I'll wander around aimlessly.”

“No, this is your home; so stay. I'll go.”

You threw yourself on a chair in the living room, your eyes closed with pain. Hearing a noise, you raised your head and found Buthayna standing before you, pale-faced and still drowsy-eyed with sleep.

The atmosphere was charged with guilt and reproach as you gazed at each other in silence. You remembered the disgraceful lie, and in all your life had never felt so ashamed.

“I'm sorry, Buthayna, for upsetting you.”

The compressed lips revealed her wounded pride. “There's no use talking,” she said, then reverted to silence, succumbing to the burden which had fallen upon her.

“Your mother will remain in the house, provided with every comfort.”

He prayed to God that she wouldn't cry. “It's distressing,” he murmured, “but I'm ridding my soul of something more serious.”

She looked sadly into his eyes. “But you told me there was nothing.”

His face burning, he sighed. “The truth was inappropriate.”

“Why?”

“Let's preserve what love there is between us.”

You left, unable to meet her glance again until she pardons you.

Warda commented, “You'll regret your decision.”

“No, I can't stand the hypocrisy anymore.”

She said anxiously, “I'm so afraid that I'll fail to make you happy.”

“But I am happy, really.”

And so he applied himself to happiness and shunned all disturbing thoughts. Anticipating resistance from Mustapha, he accosted him. “I'm happy. Does that displease you? I even feel some poetic stirrings.”

He also became more receptive to work, though he was still reluctant to accept cases. His work breaks were spent talking to her on the phone, and at the end of the day, he would rush back to his nest and she would welcome him with a shining face. They usually stayed in the Oriental room, but sometimes they'd go out to the distant parts of Cairo, to the rendezvous of lovers; sometimes they'd take
night excursions to Fayum or to the rest house on the Desert Road. When she learned that his poetical aspirations of the past were again seeking expression, she encouraged him with superb recitations of her own. As a student at the Drama Institute, she'd memorized Shawki's plays, and many love poems as well.

He said to her admiringly, “Your love of poetry is wonderful.”

She urged him to start writing again, but he was reluctant. “Isn't it better to live poetry than to write it?”

One day she remarked, “You haven't asked me about my past.”

Giving her a kiss, he answered, “When we're in love, we accept everything on faith. There's no need to ask questions.”

But she wanted to talk about her past. “My father was an English teacher, a wonderful teacher, the sort that students never forget. If he'd been alive when I decided to enter the Drama Institute, he would have given me his blessings and encouragement. But my mother's a very pious, narrow-minded woman. I entered the Institute against her wishes, and when I decided to take up dancing, she was furious. So were my uncles, on both sides. It ended in our cutting off relations. I deserted my family.”

“And how did you manage on your own?”

“I lived in the house of one of my actress friends.”

He fondled her soft hand and asked, “Have you always loved dancing?”

“Yes, I loved to dance, but I had aspirations of being an actress. I tried, and failed, and so ended up as I started, as a dancer.”

He asked, disturbed, “Did Yazbeck bully you?”

“Actually, he's kinder than the others, and I knew what working in a nightclub entailed.”

“You're my first and last love,” he said fervently, pressing her to him in gratitude. Then he asked, “Why didn't you return to your mother after you'd failed in acting?”

“It was too late. I have my pride, and failure only intensified it.”

Failure! The curse that never ends. It's awful that no one listens to your songs, that your love for the secret of existence dies, so that existence itself loses all mystery. Sighs of lament will one day destroy everything.

The office witnessed sober visits from his uncle, a justice, and from his only sister. They besought him not to marry “the dancer” and his uncle observed, “If this relationship continues, you won't be considered for the justiceship.”

He said rather abruptly, “I haven't striven for it or wanted it.”

He defended his happiness fiercely, with all the force of despair which had seized him. He seemed so childishly gay and innocent that Mustapha remarked, laughing, “Now tell us about the meaning of life.”

Omar laughed loudly. “That question nags at us only when our hearts are empty….A full vessel doesn't produce hollow sounds. Ecstasy is fulfillment, so I can only hope that love will bring everlasting ecstasy.”

“Sometimes I pity you, other times I envy you.” Omar's eyes shone triumphantly as Mustapha continued. “As fast as I speed through life, now and then the old sense of failure, buried deep in my heart, returns—perhaps on one of the dusty days of the sandstorm season, and I'm bedeviled by questions about life's meaning, but I soon repress them, like shameful memories.”

A wintry wind rattled the windows of the office and the
late afternoon faded into night. Mustapha's bald head would now brave the cold. He went on. “Why do we ask? Religious conviction provided meaning. Now we try to fill the void with the verifications of natural law. Yesterday, frustrated and dissatisfied, I asserted that my artistic commentaries were meaningful, that my past and present radio programs were meaningful, that my television plays were meaningful, and so I had no right to question.”

“What a hero you are!”

He continued enumerating his achievements. “The way I made love to my wife last night was so fantastic that I suggested to the editor that it be written up as ‘The Artistic Event of the Week.' My son Omar, unfortunately named after you, has become a sulky adolescent, as mad about soccer as we once were about overturning the world.”

He overturned the world and landed in jail. But someday he'd get out, in a few years, and astonished glances would be exchanged. Let others worry about it.

Mustapha remarked in a more serious vein, “The editor suggested that I give a lecture to the employees on socialist consciousness.”

“In what capacity?”

“In my capacity as an old socialist!”

“You accepted, of course?”

“Of course, but I wonder, with the state so intent on applying its progressive ideals, isn't it better for us to be concerned with our own private affairs?”

“Such as selling popcorn and watermelon seeds and wondering about the meaning of life?”

“Or falling in love to find the ecstasy of fulfillment.”

“Or growing ill without cause.”

They smoked in silence, then Omar asked suddenly, “How are they?”

Mustapha smiled. “Zeinab is fine, back to normal, though exhausted by her pregnancy. But there's something you should know.”

Omar showed signs of interest.

“She's thinking of looking for work after the delivery.”

He made a gesture of annoyance as Mustapha continued. “As a translator, for example. I'm afraid that she'll leave home one day.”

“But it's her home.”

Mustapha looked at him sarcastically. “Buthayna's immersed in her studies, and Jamila has almost forgotten you.”

He lowered his eyes, disconcerted.

“And I fulfill my duty by criticizing you relentlessly in the bitterest terms.”

Omar laughed. “You old hypocrite.”

“My wife, on her part, never ceases attacking you.”

“Of course, of course.”

“I often defend you when we're alone and attribute your behavior to a ‘severe psychological illness,' reassuring her at the same time that it's not infectious!”