Respected Sir, Wedding Song, the Search by Naguib Mahfouz
I took two days off from work at Faisal in order to finish my play, which I offered to Sirhan al-Hilaly. He looked at me smiling. “You haven’t given up?” he asked.
During the days of waiting for his reaction I lived with my beautiful dreams. Art had become not only the one way I had of satisfying my deepest longings but also my only route to actual living. I’d begun writing this particular play, however, before I’d had the idea about the house as a brothel; it hadn’t yet jelled, but I’d finished it anyway, still happy with its idealistic moral philosophy.
Sirhan al-Hilaly returned it to me with one remark: “You still have a long way to go.”
“What does it lack?” I asked, sighing.
“It’s a story,” he said crisply, “but it won’t do as drama.” There was no encouragement for me to continue.
What unparalleled agony! Worse than what I’d gone through in the old house. Failure in art is death itself—that’s the way we’re made—and art, in my case, was not just art but the surrogate for the action that an idealist like me is unable to take. What will I have done to combat the evil around me? What will I do if I have not the strength to carry on the struggle in the only field granted me, the theater?
The days went by. I worked nonstop, like a machine, making hurried love, cutting myself off from the life of the spirit. No reading. No writing. Living—reduced to daily encounters with universal blight, the filth and slime of overflowing sewers, and a beastly transportation system—lost all its joy. Examined during brief intervals of relaxation, with Tahiya close to me, my life seemed a calendar of days dwindling away in sterile mockery. It was in such an oppressive atmosphere that we exchanged endearments, buoyed by cautious daydreams, the life that pulsated in her womb playing on the strings of my hoped-for, dreamed-of success—though sometimes the dreams burned with wild anger, against shame and sin, with visions of fire destroying the old house and the fornicators in it. I could never have such visions, however, without feeling ashamed and self-recriminatory afterward. It’s quite true that my heart held not one speck of love for my father, but I had a sort of wavering compassion for my mother.
When I expressed this inner conflict, Tahiya said to me, “A secret gambling den is a crime in the eyes of the law, but the rise in prices is just as bad.”
“Would you be willing to have that go on in your house?” I asked.
“God forbid! But what I want to say is that there are people who, when they are in trouble, act like a drowning man and grab at anything to save themselves.”
I told myself that I was acting like that drowning person, even though I had committed no crime according to the law: to earn our bread, I had filled all my time with worthless work, and life in consequence had become a dry reed. Wasn’t that somehow criminal, too?
The days passed by, my agony increased, and some satanic power enabled me to give form to my innermost desire: sitting at the typewriter, I was suddenly overcome with a longing for freedom, for my lost humanity, and for my dissipated creativity. How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.
Ah! What a dream. What kind of devil lurks in the heart that has consecrated itself to goodness? The image of my angel brought me remorse. I should feel mortally ashamed before that woman, who exudes love and patience. May God protect my wife and forgive my parents.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
I touched her hand tenderly. “I’m thinking about the new arrival and what we should have ready for him.”
One day, about to sit down at Amm Ahmad’s bar, I noticed a morose look on his face that portended bad news. “Are you all right, Amm Ahmad?” I asked.
“It seems you haven’t heard yet.”
“I just arrived. What’s happened?”
“The police,” he began. “Last night—I mean at dawn—they made a raid on the house.”
“My father’s?” He nodded. “And what happened?”
“The same as always happens in such cases: they let the gamblers go free and arrested your parents.”
I was absolutely devastated. Filled with a suffocating anxiety, I forgot my former sentiments, forgot my enduring anger. My father and mother’s dreadful fate stabbed me so deeply that I broke into sobs. Sirhan al-Hilaly summoned me at once. “I’ll engage an expert lawyer as legal counsel for them,” he told me. “The money has been confiscated. They came across quite a lot of drugs. There’s some hope, though.”
“I want to see them right away.”
“No doubt you’ll be able to, but I’m afraid I can’t let you off work tonight. That’s a matter of course in the theater. The show must go on, even when there’s been a death. I mean, even the death of a loved one doesn’t prevent a professional actor from playing his role. Even if it’s a comic one.”
I left his room feeling defeated, and the guilty memory of my frightful dreams intensified my suffering.
Taher was born just before the trial, into an atmosphere so heavy with dejections, so teeming with sorrows and humiliations that Tahiya hid even her joy in front of me. Before the baby was a month old his grandparents went to prison. He was sickly, which worried us both, but I fled, to drown my anxieties and sense of guilt in endless work. I was destined, however, to face another blow, so cruel that it would make me almost forget the sorrow I felt then.
When Taher was just over five months old, Tahiya’s health broke down. We diagnosed the malady ourselves as influenza, but after a week had gone by with no signs of improvement, I fetched the local doctor. “She must have tests done,” he said when we were alone. “I suspect typhoid.” As a precautionary measure he prescribed some medicine and suggested moving her to a fever hospital.
Having made up my mind to look after her myself, I rejected the idea, though I had to quit my job at Faisal’s typing bureau. To make up for the loss of income and to cope with added expenses, I sold the refrigerator. I became Tahiya’s nurse and Taher’s nursemaid, moving him into the other room and giving him his bottle while I tended her, applying myself to both tasks with devotion. Unlike the baby’s, Tahiya’s health improved.
Driven by love and a sense of grateful indebtedness to this woman who had always been so sweet and good to me, I did all I could for her. After three weeks of care she’d recovered enough strength to leave her bed and sit in a comfortable chair in the sunshine. She had lost most of her fresh beauty and all her vitality, but she asked incessantly about the baby. Her recovery gave me a little respite, despite Taher’s continuing misery. He received no attention during my long hours at the theater, from eight in the evening until two in the morning, and I had hoped that Tahiya would soon be able to take over my duties. Suddenly, however, her condition deteriorated, so much so that I called the doctor again. “She shouldn’t have got up,” he said. “She’s had a relapse. It often happens, with no serious results.” I went back to my nursing feeling twice as depressed but with twice the determination. Umm Hany got to know about our predicament, and offered to stay with Tahiya during my absences.
Despite the assurance of the doctor’s repeated visits, my heart contracted, and I had a sense of imminent sorrow. Was I going to have to go on living without Tahiya? Could I bear to live without her? Torn between her and the weakening baby, I worried about how quickly the money was running out and wondered what else I could sell. I would gaze at her sallow, shrunken face, summoning up recollections of our beautiful relationship, as if I were bidding her farewell. The whole world seemed black to me. When the final warning came, I was outside the flat, returning from the theater, had just rung the bell, and heard Umm Hany’s loud wailing. I closed my eyes in acceptance of my fate, and opened my heart to the blackest sorrow.
—
A week after Tahiya’s death Taher joined her, as was to be expected. The doctor had predicted it. I hadn’t had a proper chance to learn what fatherhood was like: his tortured existence had always been a source of pain to me.
I don’t remember anything about those days except Tariq Ramadan’s weeping. Having cried my heart out alone, I had been able to bear up fairly well in front of the people gathered for the funeral, when all of a sudden Tariq’s outburst made everyone from the theater turn to look at him. I wondered what lay behind this show of emotion. Had he loved her, this animal, who had moved his canned imitation of love to Umm Hany’s house? I couldn’t help speculating on the meaning of his tears, not only in my capacity as a widower but also as a dramatist; for not even in my dazed grief had I forgotten my dormant aspirations.
This was loneliness: a silent house filled with memories and ghosts, a heart ravaged not only by sorrow but also by a sense of sin, for the icy reality that stared me in the face also whispered in my ear that my imaginings had been realized. I wanted to forget the imagination, even if it meant grieving more deeply.
Yet when grief is so intense, plunges so deeply that it finally hits bottom, it begins to radiate a strange intoxication, bringing a little solace with it. Could it be that Tariq Ramadan, when he affronted the mourners with an outburst of tears, deep down inside had been laughing? This, too, is loneliness: grief, accompanied by forbearance and challenge. Together they showed me a prospect that tempted me: lifelong bachelorhood, satisfied pride, and immersion in writing until death.
I had already begun drawing up plans for a play to be entitled The Old House—The Brothel when in a flash came a vision of Tahiya as she had been, strong and well, lusciously full of joie de vivre. A new idea sprang up: the setting would actually be the old house, its actual transformation into a brothel would still pertain, and the characters would be actual people themselves; but the plot would be what I’d imagined and not the actuality. Which—what I’d imagined or what had actually happened—was theatrically stronger? What I’d imagined, unquestionably. In reality the house had been raided by police and sickness had killed Tahiya and her son, but there was another murderer: my imagination, which had informed the police and had killed both Tahiya and the baby, and was thus the ultimate protagonist in a plot that fulfilled all the requirements of a drama—a plot through which I would confess, do penance, and write a real play for the first time. I would challenge Sirhan al-Hilaly to reject it, though he and a few others might think I was confessing to outward reality rather than to the substance of a dream. Inwardly, art is a means of expurgation, outwardly a means of battle, incumbent on men born and reared in sin and determined to rebel against it. Nothing else matters. The fever of creation had infected my whole being.
On my way to keep my appointment with Sirhan al-Hilaly, the month allotted to reading the play having now gone by, my heart had been beating wildly. A refusal this time would be beyond my endurance. It would finish me. The glee I saw hiding in his eyes made my heavy heart tremble, however, and I sat down where he indicated with increasing optimism, to hear his booming voice say, “At last you’ve created a real play,” and to feel him staring at me interrogatively, as if to ask, “How did you do it?” At that moment all my cares momentarily evaporated and I could feel my face going red. “It’s wonderful, terrifying, potentially a great success! Why did you call it Afrah al-Qubbah?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, bewildered.
“Artists’ wiles are beyond me,” he said with a resounding laugh. “I wonder if you’re alluding to the joys—shall we say?—of moral struggle in the midst of spreading vermin? Or are you being ironic, the way we are when we call a black servant girl Sabah or Nur?”*5 I smiled in agreement. “I’ll give you three hundred pounds,” he said. “Generosity is, probably, my sole virtue. It’s the largest sum ever paid for a first play.” If only you could have lived long enough to share my happiness. “But don’t you expect some embarrassing questions?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.
“It’s a play. There’s no need to look beyond it.”
“Well answered. I’m not interested in anything but the play. It’s bound to arouse a storm of suspicion, though, among people we know.”
“I don’t care if it does,” I said calmly.
“Bravo! What else have you got?”
“I hope to begin writing a new play soon.”
“Good for you! It’s the rainy season for you. I’m all anticipation. I’ll spring it on the company as a surprise this coming fall.”
—
My little flat made me subject to frequent fits of gloom and I wished I could find another place to live, but where? Changing the rooms around, selling the bed, buying a new one, I realized that Tahiya had penetrated much further into my life than I had ever imagined. My mourning was not the kind that began deep and became lighter. It had been comparatively bearable to begin with—probably because of the state of shock I’d been in—but then became so entrenched that I could only hope for forgetfulness through the passage of time. My apparent lack of reaction would look to many people like evidence that I had killed her. But she knows the whole truth now.
—
Shortly before the onset of autumn, my parents were released from jail. A sense of duty, which in my mind always overrides sentiment, led me to welcome them with sympathetic charity, but to see them so broken deepened my depression. I proposed to Sirhan al-Hilaly that they return to their former jobs in the theater; I would make work available for them, freeing myself from the job so as to spend all my time on my art. He agreed, but they absolutely refused, making it clear that they wanted to have nothing more to do with either the theater or its people, none of whom, with the exception of Amm Ahmad Burgal and Umm Hany, had even taken the trouble to visit them.
I was glad. Father now conformed to the picture I had drawn of him in the play. He was still strange, despite his forced withdrawal from opium; we had nothing in common, and I didn’t understand him. But then I don’t lay claim ever to have understood him with any certainty. It was the play that had willed me to present him as the victim of poverty and drugs. I wonder what he’ll say about his role. Will I be able to face him after its performance?
As for Mother, she was still attached to me and still wanted to live with me, but I wanted to be unencumbered, to discover some new place to live on my own, even if it was only one room. If I didn’t feel any love toward her, neither did I harbor any feelings of hate. And she will be dismayed when she sees herself portrayed on the stage and realizes that I was aware of everything she had tried to hide from me. After that, would I be able to look her in the eye? Never!
I would leave them to themselves, but in some security. The idea of the shop—Amm Ahmad Burgal had suggested it—was a good one. I hoped they would make a living, and sincerely repent.
I was face-to-face with Tariq Ramadan. We’d always exchanged the usual greetings in passing. This time, however, with typical insolence, he actually intruded into my solitude. Tariq is one of those few who have no notion at all of what it is to feel awkward or embarrassed over doing anything at other people’s expense; I’d scolded Umm Hany several times for living with him.
“I came to congratulate you,” he said, “on the play.”
I didn’t believe him. You came, rather, to conduct a cruel inquiry. I tried to be courteous, however, and thanked him.
“The hero is totally disgusting, an odious person,” he said. “The audience won’t have any sympathy for him.” The remark was mainly his sly way of letting me know the director’s opinion and I ignored this criticism completely: the hero wasn’t like that, either in real life or in the play. I saw that Tariq was simply attacking me, nothing more or less, and I looked at him so contemptuously that he asked, “Didn’t it occur to you that the events of the play would make people think the worst about you?”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“What a cold-blooded killer you are!” he blurted
“Now you’re going back to the past,” I said disdainfully. “As far as I’m concerned, the main thing was an attempt at love, whereas with you it was all nothing but an ordeal marked by your own spite.”
“Are you going to be able to defend yourself?”
“I haven’t been accused.”
“You’re going to find yourself in the office of the prosecuting attorney.”
“You’re a stupid ass.”
He got up. “She deserved to be killed in any case,” he said contemptuously. “But what you deserve,” he added, “is hanging.” Then he left.
This hateful visitation made me feel as if I were being caught up in a whirlpool; it convinced me that I had to hide myself somewhere, out of reach of these ignoramuses. Did I really deserve to be hanged? Not in the least, not even if I were charged with my own hidden desires. My imaginings—symbols of escape from actual burdens, not of flight from love or my loved one—had arisen out of temporary agitation, not out of deep-seated feelings. Anyway, I could no longer go on living where this devil could get at me.
An agent suggested a room in the pension La Côte d’Azur in Helwan.*6 This again was loneliness, but of a different kind: myself, my craft, and my imagination. Keeping mostly to my room, I set aside time during the night to get some exercise by walking. As I’d resigned from my job and had nothing to do but write, I told myself that I had to sit down and choose one of the dozens of ideas floating around in my head, then concentrate. When it came to it, however, it became quite clear to me that after all I didn’t possess a single idea. What was wrong?
I wasn’t living merely alone, but in a vacuum. My grief for Tahiya returned, penetrating, deep, and subjugating. Even the image of Taher took shape before my eyes, innocent, emaciated, struggling against some unknown entity. In my attempt to escape from my depression by writing, I would encounter only a void. I was burned out. And what had extinguished the flame had not only smothered my creativity but left nothing in its place except endless listlessness and aversion to life itself.