An Egyptian Journal by William Golding
We came down from the roof and the doctor led us away. We went down the alley past a snorting mill, which was grinding flour for the village. It was co-operatively owned. It was crowded with women, all with baskets or sacks of grain to be ground. Probing, I found that the mill had once belonged to ‘a rich man, a landlord’. But after the revolution….
What had happened to the landlord? Well, the landlord was still about. Yes, he still has some land, not much.
We came away and the landlord was pointed out to me. He glanced our way then walked sideways into a thicket and disappeared. The doctor led us onwards to a large stable with barred windows and a big, rickety wooden door. Only, of course, it was no stable but the house of the doctor’s father. He tapped the door then opened it. His mother appeared, tiny in black, with wrinkled, yellow face. She welcomed us to the usual complex of haphazard walls and screes of rubble. She was sharing the kitchen with a goat. She showed us a door at the top of two steps. We went up into the main room.
On our left that end of the room was occupied by a vast bed, the fabrics of which seemed not to have been touched for years. There was a couch opposite us, then another on our left under the iron-barred windows. On the couch opposite us was what I first took to be a pile of rags. But then I saw a cap and shawl with an aquiline and emaciated face between them. This was the doctor’s father, Mustapha. The doctor bent down and kissed him on both cheeks. He was ancient and sick. He held out a lean hand to me and Alaa in turn, then relapsed into a drawn preoccupation with his own sufferings. I sat under the window with Alaa. At first the doctor sat on the couch by his father but his mother brought him a chair. The cousin came in and took the place the doctor had left. Alaa began to murmur in my ear. ‘The old man is Mustapha. He is seventy-six. He farms two acres and deals in corn.’ It was strange. Once more, what is dirt? I had ceased to know, except in the starkest terms of filth and decay. In this room there seemed to be no more than dust and a worn, desolate look about every object among the customary untidiness. Already the doctor’s sharp, black suit was affected. The dust of the place, the cobwebs pendent from the high ceiling, the oily patterns of the cement walls had modified his startling otherness, his city slickness, and made him part of the rest. Suddenly there was loud discussion. Father Mustapha was shouting. ‘No! No! No!’
I turned to Alaa who murmured again.
‘They are talking about Mustapha’s granddaughter. She is – how would you say – our doctor’s niece.’
The old man went on crying out. There was now another woman in the room. She was the doctor’s sister and the niece was her daughter. She was the daughter of Mustapha and the old woman. She looked the same age as her mother, wrinkled, drawn, yellow-faced in black. Indeed, there was no more than fourteen years between them.
The doctor talked soothingly to his father. The two women went away to prepare a meal. What would I like, meat or vegetables? Oh, vegetables for sure! So very soon the meal came, bread, old cheese, and new cheese, and huge, hot pizza-like cakes on a vast tray of pewter. We used our right hands to eat with in the traditional manner, delicately keeping our left hands hidden except for an occasional furtive shove at a recalcitrant piece. It was an excellent meal. The old cheese was good but fierce. The doctor went on talking to his father between bites. The old man ate nothing and answered grumpily.
Alaa murmured again.
‘The price of corn is going down. The doctor knows corn merchants in the city – big men. They say Mustapha should hold on. But the old man is pessimistic and wants to sell now, even if he loses money.’
‘What are they all saying about a girl?’
‘That’s the granddaughter, the doctor’s niece.’
I soon saw that Alaa had killed two birds with one stone. I needed to have a glimpse of the Delta and the doctor needed to see his family. The girl was in trouble sure enough. She was at the university. She had sat or was about to sit on a committee of protest at student conditions. There had been no violence or illegality or even protest, so far. The president of the university had agreed to meet the committee and had appointed a day for it. The matter was wholly internal to the university. Nevertheless, a few days before the police had called on the doctor’s brother-in-law, had brow-beaten him, an ordinary peasant farmer – a fellah. ‘You have bad children,’ they said. ‘You should be careful. You don’t know what trouble you may get your family into, not controlling a girl like that. We want you to order your daughter to come home so that she is in the care of her parents. What does a girl want with a university?’
I exclaimed at this as in duty bound, my liberal habits of thought, if not conviction, outraged.
Alaa murmured reminders. After the Ultras murdered Sadat there was trouble throughout Egypt which never got into the papers. The Ultras had stormed the police stations at Asyut – oh, our ragged river police with their shining guns! They had killed the policemen and taken their weapons. They held Asyut for three days until the government dropped paratroops on them. Did I not remember the new camps for training a ‘sort of police’? After Sadat’s murder there had been shooting in Cairo for weeks. The cost in lives would never be known, the truth never told. Now the government was still scared of the least breath of criticism and at the first hint of it, would send in the police.
The talking had become fierce again. This time the doctor’s sister, who, of course, was the girl’s mother, was doing the shouting. I could just make out the tenor.
‘It’ll be a scandal! I won’t have it! She will go to prison and the family will be ruined! Scandal! Scandal!’
The doctor’s little mother chipped in. Alaa swore that his translation was exact.
‘We shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about it. It’s really rather honourable to take part in a protest.’
At this, the heap of old clothes erupted. Thin arms shot out of it and shook fists in the air.
‘No! No! I won’t have it! Consider me! The price of corn is going down, my piles are torturing me and now the police – what have I done to get this wretched girl as a trouble on top of everything else? Bring her to me here, and I’ll kill her!’
The master had spoken it seemed and there was silence for a while. Then the doctor began to talk again, quietly, soothingly. No one else said anything. This was what it was all about, evidently. The doctor would go and see his brother-in-law and together they would consider what should be done. After all, he himself knew the university. There were good men in the university after all. So he would leave us for fifteen minutes.
Water was brought and poured over our hands into a bowl. The doctor stood up and went off for his fifteen minutes. The father of the cousin – the old man with the full, red lips who had known the Koran by heart when he was twelve – came in, bowing to all. He sat down by the heap of rags and the yellow, aquiline face, which I could now see had a touch of the doctor’s profile in it. The grandfather withdrew into his preoccupation with corn and piles and granddaughters and piles again. The father of the cousin talked soothingly with his full, red lips. He was quoting from the Koran it seemed.
The old man’s eyes shut. Fifteen minutes passed, thirty, forty-five. An hour. There was silence except for the bee-murmur of the Koran.
The doctor returned. There was talk. He had advised his brother-in-law to wait – to do nothing for ten days. It might well be no more than a scare. To bring the girl home would be to admit that the family had done wrong. Everyone should wait and see. Simpler all round to wait and see. Probably nothing would happen, nothing at all.
It was time to go. The show was over and I should never find out what did in fact happen. We stood up and said our thanks. It had all been dramatic. But the question of the corn was not settled, the piles a little worse and the girl – there was no conclusion. It had been dramatic but it was not a drama.
In the car on the way back along the dirt road the doctor turned to me.
‘How would it have been in England?’
The differences were so v
‘The police wouldn’t … no. Let me think.’
Presently the basic difference appeared to me.
‘In England the family involvement would not be so widespread. It would be – nuclear, if you see what I mean!’
‘I understand.’
‘Only if the girl was very young would it be seen as a matter for her parents.’
‘Ah!’
‘Uncles and aunts, grandparents – they wouldn’t be brought into the picture at all.’
‘Not ever?’
‘They wouldn’t expect it.’
The doctor nodded.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Now you have had a glimpse of what the books mean when they talk about the Third World and the extended family.’
‘I’d always thought of the extended family as rather a good thing, in itself.’
Alaa and the doctor laughed together but said nothing.
So we came back along the treaty road, then along tarmac between the heaps of unsold oranges in the hot sun. It had all been depressing in some ways but I had asked to move a little closer to Egyptian life, particularly the life of the fellah and there it was, wide of family, narrow of outlook. The patriarch and his piles, a grandfather wounded in his self-esteem by his granddaughter! The mother more bitter than anxious, the father no more concerned than the others, the educated son, smoothing things down and persuading everyone to do nothing.
But things had improved for them. The doctor was a doctor, the cousin who was a driver in Iraq had a diploma of agriculture.
‘Alaa – the cousin’s diploma – what will he do when he comes back?’
‘He proposes to buy taxis and start a firm.’
‘What about his land?’
‘Who knows?’
They had piped water from the city, their few beasts had looked healthy and the old man had surplus corn to sell.
‘Alaa – how much money was involved in the corn deal that didn’t come off?’
‘About two thousand pounds.’
The grandfather was a top fellah, then, a Kulak. The cousin will first drive a taxi then manage taxis, then be a ‘Big Man’. What will happen to the neat little fields that lap around the ill-angled house? The granddaughter – I imagined her as one of the round-faced girls you see in western dress with calf-length skirt and a handkerchief hiding her hair – she will be given in marriage; or if she stays the course and gets a degree she will join the serried ranks of the graduate unemployed. I remembered the cousin telling funny stories of how the Iranians attacked and how the Iraqis dealt with them. It was, he implied, really very amusing.
So it was back to the hotel again and an attempt on my part to pull things together. We had done most of the things we had set out to do but really very inadequately. This was, I now saw, inherent in our situation. I had resisted that realization for months but had now to accept that whatever I wrote would not be about Egypt, it would be about me, or if you like, us middleclass English from a peaceful bit of England, wandering more or less at will through infinite complexity, not even looking for anything specific but hoping that the lucky thing would turn up. It was not that there were so many Egypts, it was that there were so many Egypts in me, none of them conflicting but none of them connected. The canyon filled with the débris of ten million years, the long line of pyramids so recently erected, Muslim and Copt, Arab and Jew, the ankh in the apse of the Catholic church – I was trying to do in effect what the Egyptians themselves were trying to do with their adjective ‘Pharoni’. It was a pretence of unity throughout time where there was, and had been, none.
The traffic was a noisy river beneath the window. We could never be more than favoured tourists, seeing occasional strangenesses but unable to bring them into coherence. Even if I could bear to come back to Egypt I could only add to my own confusion rather than simplify an attitude. There was the country round Sinai to be seen, the oases to visit, Nubia to examine where it lay along the lake above its drowned villages. Even outside the window of our hotel the modern city was ineluctable. How to describe the high-rises that make this stretch of the Nile look like anywhere else? They look a little papery, those high-rises, the way Egyptian temples look like brown cardboard. Both types look like that but there’s no connection. There’s a bit of the insect’s nest about a high rise in the hot sun, they are not like honeycombs though but combs for the hair, set upright. They look like fitments for an electronic system where you slot bits in. The papery balconies give them the look of a corncob that has been gnawed all the way down so you have the core left and attachments where the seeds were. Or if their metal and concrete seems more solid than papery, then you feel that if you ran your thumbnail down them you would make a note, more or less. Colour? Biscuit, light brown, dark brown, ugly. They are deliberately ugly you’d say, ugly without compromise, a disease of the city, a formal deformity and unconscious insolence. In fact, of course, they are none of these things but neutral. In theory they should be a stack of homes in which inhabitants make a bit their own, slot a unit into the system but the attempts are invisible if they exist and the human sign is likely to be a scrap of paper floating down past empty balconies and sheets of glass, blank, blank, blank, until it lands in the river, where it does not move; and the stillness of the water in a river that once ran and spread is an emblem. It is the same shape and size and colour, that river, as the Thames.
We had meant to see Nubia but had seen Kalabsha. We had hoped to see poor fellaheen but for the most part had met prosperous ones and craftsmen. Either we had been steered deliberately in paths thought most suitable for us – which knowing Alaa now I did not believe – or Egyptian health and wealth, by the new supply of clean water and the mysterious non-operation of economic ‘laws’, had improved out of recognition. I had only seen one poor devil of a boy who was skeletal and surely dying. It had been said that a Nubian from Upper Egypt could do the work of ten Egyptians from the Delta. If that had ever been true, it was true no longer, of that I was certain, yet the proper person to report on this would be a medical statistician, a doctor.
I was tired. Tired I went to bed and endured a confusion of dreams and tired I woke to a day that in prospect seemed as long as the river. This was the day on which (as cultural objects) we were to be presented to the Minister for Cultural Affairs. I braced myself to ask questions. I think Ann had an idea that given an opening she would put in a word for the research station that was trying to produce a million olive trees and stop it from being closed down. On the other hand she had come to an understanding of what a wife should be in Egypt: at least one step behind her husband and not speaking until spoken to, if then. To me, who knew her so well, the conflict was perceptible.
We were called for after breakfast by a ministerial side-kick and driven to the appropriate ministry. It was not much like the house we had been in the day before. It was a mansion that would not have been out of place in the Champs-Élysées. Ann, Alaa and I went in and were seated. The minister was surrounded by aides but proved to be a very large Egyptian gentleman, dressed by Savile Row and speaking excellent English. He had that extraordinary air of sheer happiness and good nature, an enjoyment in the act of living which I had come mistakenly to believe was inseparable from the good luck of being Nubian. Evidently you could have it and be Egyptian too. We began to talk, Alaa now silent, because unneeded. Everything was amiability. I was not asking questions, I was being asked them! After a certain number of queries as to our health and comfort, the ministerial penny dropped. It was conceived that as a cultural object I might have some influence with those two rock like institutions the British Museum and the British Government! This was flattering but unnerving. I did manage to mention Kalabsha and the plea for a road back into Nubia; and once I saw Ann open her mouth then shut it again. It seems, though, that roads are not really cultural. Certain objects in the British Museum undoubtedly are. It was all, said the minister, very difficult. Undeniably the Sphinx’s beard
We were also given a present of quite another kind and I found it very valuable. The minister, explaining the work of the ministry, told us that they had already shifted 50,000 tons of rubble out of Cairo and would ‘soon’ get rid of the rest, which was essential if the architecture of the city was to be seen at its best. When they had cleared the side-streets Cairo would be as clean as a western city. More than that, his department had given its approval to and was overseeing the plan to restore the ancient mosques of the city. Had we seen this work?
No, we had not.
In that case he would send Mr So-and-so (Mr So-and-so leapt smartly to his feet) with us and we should be given a chance to see what the Ministry of Culture was doing to preserve and protect Egypt’s Muslim heritage. So, with expressions of mutual esteem, we left, Ann never having had a chance to have her say about olive trees.
But I will, I promise you!’
You’ll have to lobby the Minister of Agriculture.’
We drove off through the city, slowly as necessary – one mile an hour is good going in Cairo. You sit in a jam, or stoppage – a ‘Sudd’. In between you do sixty miles an hour.
The mosque was enormous. It was fourteenth century and built right round a great square. It had been a school, too, or contained one – a university perhaps, but now the only people allowed in were the restorers. They were astonishing. At once, at a blow, we were given an insight into what Alaa, in his more committed moments, called the ‘Islamic Revival’. It was not so much the work of restoration itself as the attitude of the restorers. There must have been fifty of them. They were quiet and concentrated but they radiated a happiness, quieter than a Nubian’s but to be felt. They wore western dress, some of the young women not even covering their hair. Here and there they had set up trestle tables and plans were spread on these and objects, stone elements of a carving it might be, photographs or ink drawings to scale. Everywhere round these tables people were examining and talking in low tones to each other about the work in hand. Here and there young people, mere children, were busy with rough work; cleaning the surface of stone, picking dirt out of intricate carvings. These, too, seemed to be doing their humble work with the dedication of a lay brother in the monastic vegetable patch. It was all so quiet. Mr So-and-so from the ministry introduced us to the director, who took us round, first from table to table. In one part cooks were preparing food for the workers. In another a few experts were carving stone to replace what had worn or weathered away. At yet another table paints were being mixed, the strong, assertive colours of Islam and the Arab world.