Cover

Title Page

Copyright

ANANCHOR BOOK

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

ANCHOR BOOKS, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This English translation was first published by The American University in Cairo Press in 1985.

First published in Arabic as Al-Summan wal-Kharif in 1962.

Protected under the Berne Convention.

The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with The American University in Cairo Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maḥfūẓ, Najīb, 1911–

|Summān wa-al-kharīf. English|

Autumn quail / Naguib Mahfouz; translated by Roger Allen; revised by John Rodenbeck.—1st Doubleday ed.

p.   cm.

Translation of: al-Summān wa-al-kharīf.

I. Title.

PJ7846.A46S923   1990   89-48671

892′.736—dc20                          CIP

ISBN 0385264534

ISBN 0385264542 (pbk.)

eBook ISBN 9780525431664

Copyright © 1985 by The American University in Cairo Press

v4.1

a

Dedication

To Mary

INTRODUCTION

The stature which Naguib Mahfouz has earned as the Arab world’s most illustrious novelist is well captured by ‘Abd al-Rahman Yaghi when he entitles the fourth chapter of his book Al-Juhud al-Riwa’iyya (Endeavors in the Novel, 1972) “The Novel’s Establishment Stage, in other words the Naguib Mahfouz Stage.” Several studies of his works in English have by now been added to the myriad books, articles, and interviews on him which have appeared throughout the Arab world itself. While he is not yet as well known to Western readers as some other famous non-Western writers, several of his works are available in English and a number of others are to appear shortly.*

The word for “establishment” in Yaghi’s title quoted above is ta’sil, which literally implies giving something roots. That describes very well the role which Mahfouz has played in the development of the modern Arabic novel. Throughout a long career he has indeed laid the groundwork for the emergence of this most taxing and variegated genre and then proceeded to experiment with a number of forms and techniques. Some scholars have chosen to divide his works into “phases,” each one with its specific characteristics; others have preferred to illustrate the continuum of themes which occupy the author’s mind, pointing out at the same time that features of these “phases” will often have been presaged in earlier writings. In spite of the differences between these viewpoints, both acknowledge that Mahfouz has been constantly striving to find new ways to express his vision of Egypt’s present and therefore its past and future. This remains as true of his most recent writings, where, in addition to his continuing experiments with multi-sectional works and a variety of narrative voices, we find echoes of earlier Arabic literature, such as The Thousand and One Nights and the travels of Ibn Battuta.

During the 1960s, Mahfouz wrote a great deal: novels, short stories, and plays. Much of the inspiration for this outburst of creativity was certainly prompted by the wide success of his monumental three-part novel, Al-Thulathiyya (The Trilogy, 1956–57). And yet it is also abundantly clear from his writings in all the genres listed above that an equally cogent force impelling him to write was a deep disquiet with the course of the Egyptian revolution, a feeling which was to be vented at its fullest in Miramar (1967) and in works published after the June war of 1967. With that in mind it is of some interest to note that Mahfouz chose in the second of the novels of this decade, All-Summan wal-Kharif (Autumn Quail, 1962) to indulge in a historical retrospect by placing the action of the novel during the Revolution of 1952 itself and the years immediately following. Thus, while this work may be something of an anomaly within the sequence of Mahfouz’s works conceived and written during the 1960s, it surely possesses considerable significance as one of the very few works to treat the events of the Revolution itself within a fictional context.

The novel opens with a description of the famous Cairo fire which followed the massacre of Egyptian policemen at the Suez Canal by British soldiers in January 1952. It goes on to trace (often through the medium of radio broadcasts) the main events of the early stages of the Revolution—the purge of corrupt officials and the abolition of political parties, for example. It comes to an end sometime after the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company and the Tripartite (British, French, and Israeli) invasion of 1956. There is also a very concrete link to place in this work: to various districts of Cairo, each with its own memories and connotations; and to Alexandria, with its pounding winter seas, its foreign quarters, and its still much desired distance from the clamor of the capital city. Thus, of all the novels which Mahfouz published in the 1960s, Autumn Quail has the strongest connection with the realities of both time and place.

Against the backdrop of these places and events, the central character whose fall is portrayed in this novel is Isa ad-Dabbagh, a senior civil servant in the Egyptian government during the final days of the monarchy. He has just become engaged to Salwa, the beautiful and feckless daughter of Ali Bey Sulaiman, a justice and senior Palace official. Isa and his mother live in an opulent villa in Dokki, then as now a typical outward symbol of the nouveau arrivé. The graphic description of the Cairo fire—with its sinister symbols of smoke and fire—warns of dire things to come. Sure enough, after the revolution comes the Purge Committee. Isa’s past willingness to accept bribes catches up with him, and he is pensioned off. As a result of this loss of position and prestige his engagement to Salwa is abruptly terminated.

Isa is of course a symbol of all that the immediate past stands for. In his defense before the Purge Committee he excuses himself by pointing out that everyone behaved exactly as he did, and asks why it is that he is being singled out. However, in spite of Isa’s rapid and heavy fall, the past which he symbolizes throughout the novel does manage to display positive characteristics as well. For, unlike his friend Ibrahim Khairat, who almost immediately sets about penning hypocritical articles in praise of the revolution, Isa remains stubbornly loyal to the old regime and adamantly refuses to consider accepting the offer of a job from his cousin Hasan, who has become an important figure because of the revolution. This positive aspect of Isa’s character, his sense of loyalty and concern for his country, is perhaps best seen through his relationship with Qadriyya, the woman whom he eventually marries. At the outset Isa is aware that the marriage may not work and leaves himself an escape route by overlooking her previous marriages. But as the couple live together through the Suez Crisis of 1956, Isa is amazed by her total lack of concern with politics and the fate of Egypt. Qadriyya, the barren, overfed nonentity, brings out the positive side of Isa’s attitude.

On the intellectual level Isa seems to become reconciled to the idea of accepting the revolution and the changes which it is bringing about. But on every occasion his basic emotional instincts hold him back, at least until the very end of the novel. He suffers an internal conflict between mind and emotion, and it is in the latter area that the women of the novel play such an important role. If the marriage to Qadriyya, with its literal and figurative barrenness, is doomed from the start, then the relationship with Riri, the Alexandrian prostitute, represents Isa’s real fight with emotion, his total failure to meet his moral responsibilities, and his eventual realization through a very bitter lesson of what those responsibilities are. This relationship is as creative—literally—as that with Qadriyya is not. Isa’s failure to regain his real family (as he comes to call it) symbolizes the failure of his emotions to react responsibly to the circumstances in which his own past has left him. As he realizes this bitter fact and its consequences for the future, his life with Qadriyya emerges as the sham which it really is and always has been; in his own words, he has no home with her.

The final pages bring Isa together with a young man whom he had imprisoned during his period as a powerful civil servant. By now, his emotions have been jolted into some kind of reality by the sight of his own daughter and by Riri’s bitter words to him. Past and present encounter each other in the dark under the statue of Saad Zaghlul, the poignant symbol of the past mentioned several times in this book and with equal effect in Miramar. Isa is disturbed and troubled by the young man’s friendly attitude and by his enthusiasm for the revolution. When the latter gives up hope of converting Isa and heads toward the city, Isa follows him. Since it is past midnight, this may perhaps be considered a move away from Saad Zaghlul’s statue, out of the darkness toward some new dawn.

From an artistic point of view, this ending—with Isa running after the young man into an uncertain future—has been regarded as contrived. We have already noted that Isa had given several signs of a dispassionate intellectual acceptance of the revolution. The question to be posed in the current context thus concerns his stubborn adherence to his own past and his emotional attitudes. What is the role of his final encounters with Riri and his own daughter, Ni‘mat, in this process? Has it shaken him into a sense of emotional and moral responsibility sufficient to justify his decision to run after the young man? Is the Indian palm reader’s comment about “recovery from a serious illness” a forewarning of his eventual decision to follow the young man? I must leave it to the readers of Autumn Quail to make their own judgments on the artistic efficacy of the ending vis-à-vis these questions; I would merely comment that I find it less unconvincing than many of its critics do.

The long period of time (over four years) covered by this novel, the close linkage with the political events of the day, and the optimistic ending have all been criticized on artistic, if not political, grounds. It has been suggested that Autumn Quail represents a response on Mahfouz’s part to critical reactions (including presumably those of “the official cultural sector” of which he himself was a part) to the subtly negative commentary on the Revolution to be found in Al-Liss wal-Kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1961), the first novel in the series of works published in the 1960s. In the latter work, a man who has been “framed” is released from prison and vows vengeance on his wife and her lover, who have tricked him. In trying to kill them, he mistakenly kills two other people and is then hunted (or hounded) down by the police as a homicidal maniac, meeting his death in a cemetery as the police dogs chase after him. Autumn Quail certainly represents—at least in the implications of its ending—a more “upbeat” view of Egyptian society than that. I would not wish to imply that Mahfouz felt himself to be under the same constraints as Dimitri Shostakovich, who prefaced his Fifth Symphony with the phrase “an artist’s response to just criticism” in the wake of his ostracism from Russian cultural life (in turn a reaction to his Fourth Symphony). However, one may legitimately wonder whether the general intellectual atmosphere in Egypt during the early 1960s—a period about which many details concerning assaults on civil liberties have only recently come to light—did not suggest to Mahfouz that a retrospect with positive contemporary implications might be at least apropos.

Whatever the artistic and societal motivations may have been in writing Autumn Quail, Mahfouz decided to trace within a novelistic framework the relationship of past and present within the Egyptian Revolution and the possibilities of cooperation, or perhaps coexistence, in the future. It has to be admitted that the novel’s narrative suffers from the extended time period. Bearing in mind Isa’s frequent travel back and forth between Cairo and Alexandria, the links of time and place seem to be extended beyond endurance in a comparatively short novel (compared, for example, with The Trilogy, a huge societal canvas in which these two aspects can be more expansively and successfully managed).

All this said, Autumn Quail will provide the Western reader with insights and reflections on the Egyptian Revolution and its progress, put into the mouths of Egyptian characters from different backgrounds and with varying social and political attitudes. Indeed, several themes of this work—alienation, political downfall, moral responsibility, to name a few—transcend the boundaries of independent national literary traditions and are to be found in much of contemporary world fiction. As for the characters themselves (quite apart from the intrinsic interest of their comments about politics, religion, and the world situation), the symbolic mesh within which Mahfouz illustrates their relationships gives this work a peculiar fascination.

ROGER ALLEN

* A listing of many of these works and translations into English can be found in my book The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982).

ONE

When the train drew to a halt, he could see no one waiting for him. Where was his secretary? Where were the office staff and the messengers? He looked among the people standing outside on the platform but failed to find anyone he recognized. What had happened? At the Canal the blow had been vicious, but was Cairo reeling as well?

He left his place in the front of the carriage and walked toward the exit, briefcase in hand, feeling irritated and tense, then worried, until, driven by some natural impulse, he began to examine people’s faces closely. They seemed to mirror a terrifying anxiety. He himself felt apprehensive. What was the cause? The massacre at the Canal the day before or some new miseries on the way? Should he ask people what was going on? No one had been waiting for him; nobody from his office had taken the trouble to come and meet him. Incredible behavior! These were strange days indeed.

His mind still held the bloody scenes at the Canal, the slaughtered policemen, their defenseless heroism. He still heard the earsplitting shouts of the young commando: “Where are you people? Where’s the government? Weren’t you the ones who proclaimed the holy war?”

“Yes!” he’d replied in anguish. “That’s why I’m standing here in the middle of nowhere.”

The young man had turned on him. “What we need is weapons!” he’d shouted. “Why aren’t you people providing them?”

“Money’s tight and the government’s position is precarious.”

“What about us? And the people whose homes have been destroyed?”

“I’m well aware of that. We all are. Be patient. We’ll do everything we can.”

“Or is it enough for you just to watch?” What fury! Just like fire.

But what was going on in Cairo?

There was no car to take him anywhere. In the station square, people were walking in every direction, anger on their faces, heaping curses on the British. It was cold. The sky was hidden by ominous clouds; the wind was still and lifeless. Shops were closed as if for mourning, and thick smoke rose along on the skyline.

What was going on in Cairo?

Cautiously, he began to walk, then beckoned to a man coming toward him. “What’s going on in town?” he asked.

“The last day’s come,” was the bewildered reply.

“What do you mean? Protest demonstrations?”

“Fire and destruction,” the man yelled, moving on.

As he started walking again, slowly and cautiously, looking carefully at what was going on around him, he asked himself in bewilderment where the police and the Army were.

In Sharia35 Ibrahim, things looked even worse and showed clearly what was really happening: the whole square had been given over to angry people. Feelings from the depths of their subconscious had erupted like a volcano and they were shrieking, howling like dogs. Anyone standing on either side was seized; gasoline was flowing, fires were burning, doors were being knocked in, all kinds of merchandise was being strewn about, and water was gushing out in clashing waves. This insanity, uncontrolled, was Cairo in revolt, but revolting against itself, bringing on itself the very thing it wanted to bring on its enemies. It was suicide. And he asked himself in dismay what could be behind it all.

His instinct warned him of grave danger in the future. Tomorrow the true extent of the tragedy would become clear, and with it a real danger, threatening the very essence of our lives—threatening us, not the British, threatening Cairo, the course of battle at the Canal, and the stability of the government. Threatening him too in that he was considered a part of that government. This flood would uproot the government, the party, and himself. It was no good trying to squeeze the fear out of his mind or pretending—in the face of this swirling spirit of unreason that engulfed him on all sides, more powerful than madness, destruction, and fire—pretending to forget it. He trusted this instinct of his implicitly; it had been his harbinger in times of political crisis, warning him time after time on the eve of all those occasions when his party had been dismissed from office. Perhaps this was the end. If so, it would be a fatal one. And there would have been nothing like it before.

Feeling utterly bewildered, he kept walking toward the center of the city. He decided to find out all he could. After all, he was a responsible person, and even though his position was a minor one, relatively speaking, he was still responsible and should see everything for himself.

The din was unbearable, as though every atom on earth were yelling at once. Flames were spreading everywhere, dancing in windows, crackling on roofs, licking at walls, and flying up into the smoke that hung where the sky should have been. The burning smelled hellish, a concoction of wood, clothes, and different kinds of oil. Stifled cries could be heard coming out of the smoke. Young men and boys, in frenzied unconcern, were destroying everything, and walls kept collapsing with a rumble like thunder. Concealed anger, suppressed despair, unreleased tension, all the things people had been nursing inside them, had suddenly burst their bottle, exploding like some hurricane of demons.

Many things should be burned, he told himself, but not Cairo. You people don’t know what you’re doing. A whole division of British troops couldn’t do a tenth of the damage you’re doing here. The battle at the Canal is over. We lost. I’ve been through hardships before and my heart doesn’t lie to me. The government has no soldiers and the fire is raging out of control. Is it to be allowed to consume this whole great city? Are three million people going to spend the night without any shelter? Are destruction, disease, and chaos going to spread, until the British come back to restore order again? Have people put aside independence, nationalism, and their greater aspirations merely to go through this ordeal of destruction? Creeping into his heart like an ant came a sense of despair and the world momentarily went black before his eyes, and his confidence disappeared.

Men on the street corners urged people on. “Burn! Destroy! Long live the homeland!” they yelled.

He looked at them with curious resentment and would have liked to be able to stop them, but the buffeting stream of people made it impossible even to pause. They were unknown faces to him; not from his party or any other, strangers, who seemed to exude the smell of treason, of which he imagined a putrid reek in the air even more gloomy than the smoke itself. Disconsolate and at a loss, he gave an angry sigh.

“Burn! Destroy! Long live the homeland!”

Miserable wretches! Had all that blood been wasted at the Canal? What about the dead policemen and their officers? Everything valuable, everything worthwhile, was going up in smoke. How could he get to the ministry and find the people in charge? The streets were full of smashed cars; the sky had turned a deep red color as the fires blazed away under their black cloud of smoke. What would the furious commando have to say if he could see this bloody spectacle of treason? What would he say if he could hear these shouts?

“Burn! Destroy! Long live the homeland!”

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!