Cover

Title Page

Copyright

AN ANCHOR 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 1986. First published in Arabic as al-Shahhādh in 1965. 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 –

[Shaḥḥādh. English]

The beggar / Naguib Mahfouz; translated by Kristin Walker Henry and Nariman Khales Naili al-Warraki.

— 1st Doubleday ed.

p.    cm.

Translation of: al-Shahhādh.

I. Title.

PJ7846.A46S413      1990      89-48672

892′.736—dc20

ISBN 0-385-26455-0

ISBN 0-385-26456-9 (pbk.)

eBook ISBN 9780525431688

Copyright © 1986 by The American University in Cairo Press

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION: AUGUST 1990

RRC

v4.1

a

FOREWORD

“The trouble with most modern Arabic literature,” I have frequently heard Western editors complain, “is that it’s always about politics.” The complaint itself is interesting, not only in what it presumes to be important but also in the historical attitude it implies toward even Western literature, in which from the ancient Greeks onward politics has been a central subject during every period—except perhaps the Dark Ages. What would the Dante of the Inferno or the Shakespeare of the Histories make of this complaint, for example, not to mention Milton, whose Council in Pandemonium remains our finest description of a Cabinet debate? What, for that matter, would a V. S. Naipaul or a Gabriel García Márquez have to say? One suspects that in this instance, as in so many others, special rules of some sort have been devised for application to Arabs only.

The Beggar is an ironic case in point, since few Western readers coming to it or to Mahfouz for the first time are likely to understand that it, too, like “most modern Arabic literature,” is a political book. First published in 1965, when Mahfouz was in his mid-fifties, it belongs to a remarkable series of novels (The Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, The Path, Small Talk on the Nile, and Miramar) in which he tried to assess the impact of political change upon the country he had known before the Revolution of July 1952.

Though his famous Cairo Trilogy was published between 1954 and 1957, Mahfouz had in fact composed its last words in 1952, then stopped writing for more than five years. “The world I had made it my mission to describe,” he told Philip Stewart, one of his translators, “had disappeared.” When a new work—The Children of Gebelawi—finally appeared in 1959, it created a scandal, not only because of its subject matter but also because of its technique, which represented a complete abandonment of the old-fashioned descriptive novel. Making allegorical use of religious history, it suggested that the new regime would ultimately not be much different from the old ones; and did so with a passionate, darting intelligence that seemed to have turned political disappointment—even despair—into a new freedom of expression.

Despair is the keynote of the series of six novels that followed, which ended with the debacle of the Six-Day War in 1967. Omar, the protagonist of The Beggar, belongs to the class and the generation that should have provided Egypt with leadership, but have instead been deprived of any significant function. His old classmates Mustapha and Othman, who are in some sense his alter egos, suggest the dangers of either accommodation or opposition, while Omar himself suggests one of the causes of their irrelevance: failure to care enough at the right time. Their liberal secularism, the central motif in Egyptian higher culture for the previous hundred years, of which they represent a kind of culmination, has simply been shelved as an operative ideal, though it may survive as an irrepressible yearning. It thus finds indirect expression, necessarily inadequate, as sex or poetry, though even in a Voltairean garden one can never be saved by such longings.

The Beggar then is a complex and passionate outcry against irrelevance and against what is likely to follow—alienation. Surely it is about things that matter; and matter in places other than the Arab world.

JOHN RODENBECK

ONE

White clouds floated in the blue expanse overlooking a vast green land where cows grazed serenely. Nothing indicated what country it was. In the foreground a child, mounted on a wooden horse, gazed toward the horizon, a mysterious semi-smile in his eyes. Omar wondered idly who did the painting as he sat alone in the waiting room. It was almost time for the appointment he’d made ten days earlier. The table in the middle of the room was strewn with newspapers and magazines; dangling over the edge was the photo of a woman accused of kidnapping children. He turned back to amuse himself with the painting—a pasture, cows, a child, the horizon. Although the painting had little value apart from its ornamental gold frame, he liked the searching child, the tranquil cows. But Omar’s condition was worsening, his eyelids were heavy and his heartbeats sluggish. There the child looks at the horizon, and how tightly it grips the earth, closes in upon the earth from any angle you observe it. What an infinite prison. Why the wooden horse, why the cows so full of tranquillity? Steady footsteps sounded in the hall outside, and then the male nurse appeared at the door, saying, “Come in, please.”

Would his old school friend recognize him after a quarter of a century? He entered the office of the distinguished physician. There he stood, smiling, a dark slender man with kinky hair and glowing eyes. He had hardly changed from their days in the school courtyard. The corner of his mouth had the same ironic turn, suggesting his old gaiety and sharp wit.

“Welcome, Omar. You’ve changed, but for the better!”

“I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

They shook hands warmly.

“What a giant you are! You were always very tall but now that you’ve put on weight you’ve become enormous,” he said, raising his head to Omar.

Omar smiled with pleasure and repeated, “I really didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“But I don’t forget anyone, so how could I forget you?”

It was a gracious welcome from one in his position. After all, a distinguished physician is widely renowned; who hears of the lawyer other than those with legal cases?

The physician laughed while surveying him and said, “You really have put on weight. You look like a business tycoon from the past, nothing missing except the cigar!”

A grin appeared on Omar’s dark, full face. Slightly abashed, he settled his glasses in place while raising his thick eyebrows.

“I’m happy to meet you again, Doctor.”

“And I you, though the occasion of seeing me is not usually pleasant.”

He returned to his desk, which was piled with books, papers, and various instruments and gestured to Omar to take a seat.

“Let’s leave our reminiscences until after we’ve reassured ourselves about your health.” He opened his case book and started to write. “Name: Omar al-Hamzawi. Profession: Lawyer. Age?” The physician laughed, saying in anticipation, “Don’t worry, we’re in the same predicament.”

“Forty-five.”

“Remember what a difference in age a month seemed when we were in school? But now, who cares? Any history of special illness in the family?”

“None, unless you consider high blood pressure after sixty extraordinary.”

The physician folded his arms and said seriously, “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

Omar stroked his thick black hair, in which the first strands of white were discernible, and said, “I don’t believe I’m ill in the usual sense.”

The physician regarded him attentively.

“I mean I don’t have the usual symptoms…”

“Yes.”

“But I feel a strange lethargy.”

“Is that all?”

“I think so.”

“Perhaps it’s overwork.”

“I’m not sure that’s the answer.”

“Of course not. Otherwise you wouldn’t have honored me with your visit.”

“In fact, I no longer feel any desire to work at all.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not fatigue. I suppose I could still work, but I have no desire to, no desire at all. I’ve left the work to the assistant lawyer in my office and postponed all my own cases for the past month…”

“Haven’t you thought of taking a vacation?”

Omar continued as though he hadn’t heard. “Very often I’m sick of life, people, even the family. The situation seemed too serious to keep silent.”

“Then the problem is not…”

“The problem is very serious. I don’t want to think, to move, or to feel. Everything is disintegrating and dying. My hope in coming here was to find some physical cause.”

The physician remarked with a smile, “If only we could solve our most serious problems with a pill after eating or a spoonful of medicine before sleeping.”

They proceeded into the examination room. Omar took off his clothes and lay down on the medical cot. The physician followed the usual procedure. He looked at Omar’s outstretched tongue, then pressed up his eyelids and examined his eyes, took his blood pressure, then measured his breathing with the stethoscope. Omar breathed deeply, coughed, and said “Ah” once from the throat, again from the chest, and glanced furtively at the physician’s face without reading anything. The elegant fingers then tapped on his chest and on his back and pressed with more force on his abdomen. The examination over, the physician returned to his office, where Omar joined him a few minutes later. He finished looking at the results of the urine analysis taken earlier, rubbed his hands, smiled broadly, and said, “My dear lawyer, there’s absolutely nothing.”

The nostrils of his long, sharp nose dilated and his face flushed. “Nothing at all?”

“At all,” the physician affirmed, but added cautiously, “I’m afraid the problem may be more serious.” Then he laughed. “Though it’s not a case which can be exaggerated to double the fees!”

Omar laughed while looking at him expectantly.

“Well, then,” the doctor stressed, “you should know that it’s nothing but…”

Omar asked uneasily, “Is the psychiatric ward my fate, then?”

“Neither a psychiatric nor any other kind of ward.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You’ve got a bourgeois disease, if I may use the term our newspapers are so fond of. You’re not sick,” he continued more slowly, “but I see the first signs of something more than a disease. You’ve come at the appropriate time. When did the lethargy appear?”

“Two months ago, perhaps a bit earlier, but for the last month it’s been agonizing.”

“Let me describe your life as I see it. You’re a successful, wealthy man. You’ve virtually forgotten how to walk. You eat the best food, drink good wine, and have overburdened yourself with work to the point of exhaustion. Your mind is preoccupied with your clients’ cases and your own holdings. Anxiety about the future of your work and your financial situation has got the better of you.”

Omar gave a slight laugh and said, “That’s the picture, in general, but now I’ve lost interest in everything.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with you for the time being, but the enemy lurks on the border.”

“Like Israel?”

“And if we don’t take care, serious danger may overwhelm us.”

“We’re getting to the point.”

“Be moderate in your eating, drink less, stick to regular exercise such as walking, and there’ll be no grounds for fear.”

Omar waited, thinking, but the doctor said no more. “Aren’t you going to write me a prescription?”

“No. You’re not a villager who needs a superfluous prescription to be convinced of my importance. The real cure is in your hands alone.”

“I’ll be my old self again?”

“And better…In spite of my heavy load of work at the university and the hospital and clinic, I walk every day for at least a half hour and I watch my diet.”

“I’ve never felt the advance of years.”

“Old age is a disease which you won’t feel as long as you follow a sensible regime. There are youths of over sixty. The important thing is to understand life.”

“To understand life?”

“I’m not speaking philosophically, of course.”

“But your treatment of me is based on some sort of philosophy. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you to question the meaning of your life?”

The physician laughed loudly and said, “I have no time for that. As long as I serve those in need each hour, what meaning does the question have?” Then he advised, with friendly concern, “Take a vacation.”

“My vacation is usually so interrupted that the summer months hardly seem more than one prolonged weekend.”

“No, take a real vacation, practice the new regime, and you’ll be on the road to recovery.”

“Perhaps.”

“Trust in God. You’ve been given a warning from nature. Listen to it. You should lose forty pounds, but gradually, and without strain.”

Omar pressed his hands on his knees and leaned foward in preparation to leave, but the doctor responded quickly, “Wait, you’re the last visitor today, so let’s sit together a while.”

Omar sat back in his seat smiling. “Dr. Hamid Sabri, I know what you want—to bury a quarter of a century and laugh again from the depths of your heart.”

“Ah, the days of the past.”

“Actually, Doctor, all periods except ‘now’ have their appeal.”

“You’re right. Memory is one thing, the experience another.”

“So it all passes and scatters without meaning.”

“Our love of life gives meaning.”

“How I’ve detested life these last days!”

“And now you’re searching for your lost love. Tell me, do you remember those days of politics, demonstrations, and dreams of Utopia?”

“Of course, but those too have passed and are not held in much esteem these days.”

“Even so, a great dream was realized. I mean the socialist state.”

“Yes…”

The doctor smiled. “You’re a man of many faces: the fervent socialist, the great lawyer, but the face I remember most vividly is that of Omar the poet.”

Omar dissembled his sudden agitation with a wan smile. “That’s unfortunate.”

“You’ve abandoned poetry?”

“Of course.”

“But, as I remember, you published a collection of poems.”

He lowered his eyes so that the doctor wouldn’t see his tension and discontent. “Childhood play, nothing more.”

“Some of my physician colleagues have given up medicine for the sake of poetry.”

The memory disturbed his consciousness like ill-omened weather. He wished the doctor would drop the subject.

“I remember one of our friends was Mustapha al-Minyawi. What was it we called him?”

“Little Baldy. We’re still very close friends. He’s now a prominent journalist and writes for radio and television.”

“My wife is a great fan of his. He was an enthusiastic socialist like you, but the most committed of all, without question, was Othman Khalil.”

Omar’s face clouded as memory hammered at him. He murmured, “He’s in jail.”

“Yes, he’s spent a long time in jail. Wasn’t he your classmate in the Faculty of Law?”

“We graduated in the same year, Mustapha, Othman, and I. I don’t really like the past.”

The physician said decisively, “So take an interest in the future.” Then, looking at his watch: “From now on you’re the doctor.”

In the waiting room, Omar raised his eyes once again to the picture. The child was still riding his wooden horse, gazing at the horizon. Was it this which prompted his mysterious smile? The horizon still closed in upon the earth. What did the beams of starlight traveling millions of light-years perceive? There are questions which no doctor can answer.

Outside the building he climbed into his black Cadillac, which floated away from the square like a bark on the Nile.

TWO

The faces peered at him expectantly even before they’d exchanged greetings. Their concern was sincere, and he was troubled by his dissatisfaction, the bitterness which spoiled the remaining affection. Behind them the balcony overlooked the Nile. He focused on his wife’s thick neck above her white collar and on her fleshy cheeks. She stood as the pillar of faith and virtue. Her green eyes were pouched in fat, but her smile was innocent and affectionate as she said, “My heart tells me all is well.”

Mustapha al-Minyawi stood beside her in his sharkskin suit, his slender build overshadowed by her sturdiness. His pale oval face, lackluster eyes, and bald head were turned toward Omar.

“Tell us about our old school friend. What did he say? Did he recognize you?”

Buthayna stood with her elbow leaning on the shoulder of a bronze statue, the statue of a woman stretching out her arms in welcome. Her green eyes looked at her father expectantly. She had the fine figure of her mother when she was fourteen, but it seemed unlikely that she would grow obese with the years, that she would allow fat to mar her beauty. As was often the case, the glance in her eyes expressed an unspoken communication. Jamila, her younger sister, played with her teddy bear between two armchairs, oblivious of his arrival.

They all sat down and he said calmly, “Nothing.”

Zeinab exclaimed gratefully, “Thank God. How many times did I say that you only needed rest?”

Her complacency exasperated him. Pointing to his wife, he said to Mustapha, “The responsibility is hers.” And he repeated the charge after summarizing the doctor’s remarks.

Mustapha said gleefully, “This is no more than play therapy!” But then he added ruefully, “Except for food and drinking. Curse them.”

Why should he curse them? He’s not the one affected. The one who sets out on the mysterious voyage, perplexed by love and dissatisfaction, unable to speak to himself in a suitable language, what is he to do? Omar said to Mustapha, “Dr. Hamid asked about Baldy.” After the burst of laughter had subsided, he added, “And congratulations on winning his wife’s admiration.”

Mustapha grinned boyishly, displaying his white teeth. “Thanks to the radio and TV, I’ve developed into a plague, striking those with weak resistance.”

Omar reflected about his other friend in jail. Ennui dulls even the sensitive conscience. Omar had been in the heat of danger, but his friend had not confessed. In spite of torture, he had not confessed. Now he’d melted into the darkness as though he’d never existed, while Omar grew sick with luxury, and his wife had become the exemplary symbol of the kitchen and the bank. Ask yourself whether the Nile beneath us doesn’t despair.

“Papa, should we get ready to travel?”

“We’ll have a great time. I’m going to teach your sister to swim as I once taught you.”

“Away to the life buoys.”

Here is your mother resembling a giant life buoy. How oppressive the horizon is. Freedom is hidden somewhere beyond it and no hope remains except a troubled conscience.

“Unfortunately my wife prefers the beach at Ras el Bar, and someone like me never gets a vacation unless he’s stricken with cancer.”

Jamila raised her head from her teddy bear, asking, “When will we leave, Papa?”

Mustapha was a monument to his love and marriage; counselor, helper, and witness. Every day he proved anew his friendship to Omar and the family. As yet he knew nothing of the waters which drifted in the river’s depths.

“The doctor reminded me of my poetical youth!”

Mustapha laughed. “It seems he hasn’t heard of my recent dramatic masterpieces.”

“I wish I’d told him of your experiences with art.”

“I wonder if the great physician believes in art.”

“His wife is fond of you. Isn’t that enough?”

“Then she’s fond of watermelon seeds and popcorn.”

Zeinab, who’d been watching the servant through the arched doorway, then said, “Let’s go in to dinner.”

Omar announced that he would restrict himself to a chicken breast, fruit, and one glass of whiskey, to which Mustapha replied, “How about the caviar? Do I consume it alone?” Then he proceeded to give the description of Churchill’s breakfast which appeared in one of the newspapers during his visit to Cyprus. Although Omar hesitated a bit at the beginning of the meal, he soon ate and drank without restraint. Zeinab likewise couldn’t resist temptation and drank a whole bottle of beer. Buthayna ate with moderation, a perversity in the eyes of her mother.

Mustapha remarked, “Food offers a better explanation of human behavior than sex does.”

Omar forgot himself for the first time, exclaiming merrily, “It seems you’ve got chickenitis!”

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