The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz
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
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* 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).
Autumn Quail
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 Sharia Ibrahim35, 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 crashing 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,
Many things would 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!”
Fire, destruction, and smoke, the awful hallmarks of the day, made even worse by the air of conspiracy that lurked on street corners. Waves of berserk demonstrators kept crashing into him as if they didn’t see him in his long gray coat. Swallowing hard, he said nothing, though he lost his balance, and the briefcase he was clutching knocked against his leg. All the details of the report he had to submit to the minister, describing the way the battle had gone and the commandos’ requests, had gone right out of his mind and he thought only about the future, which seemed to loom before his eyes like the smoke of the city burning. Heading toward a street where things seemed calmer and more quiet, he recalled the comment of a shaikh who was a member of Parliament on the subject of the annulment of the treaty, “It’s the end for us,” he’d said. “Now things are in God’s hands.”
He’d been sitting next to the shaikh at the club and had lost his temper at the time. “That’s how you people in Parliament are,” he had yelled. “You only care about your own interests!”
“This is the end,” the shaikh had repeated with great emphasis, in a tone of voice not entirely devoid of irony. “Now it is in God’s hands.”
“In our entire glorious past,” he had said enthusiastically, “there’s never been a situation like this one!”
The shaikh had toyed with his mustache. “Oh yes there was,” he had replied sadly. “Saad’s*, 32 time, for example. But it’s the end now!”
A seasoned old man might be justified in having put the age of enthusiasm behind him. But here was Cairo burning. And these traitors standing on the street corners—there were so many of them! Everything was quite obvious, but there was so little that could be done about it that the best plan seemed to be to get drunk on a cocktail of woes, to wallow in it until you drowned. The sky itself was strewn with blackened splinters from all the destruction, and a sense of grief seemed to materialize out of it as palpably as from an animal’s dead carcass.
He felt tired and decided to head for home, imagining that, tortoiselike, he would have to spend a long time on the road before glimpsing the high parts of Dokki.
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* An linked number indicates that the name or term so denoted is explained in the Notes section at the end of the book.
TWO
Later, at nightfall, he went to Shukri Pasha28 Abd al-Halim’s palatial house, a quarter of an hour away from his own home in Dokki.13 The Pasha received him in his study and they sat down facing each other. The Pasha’s stubby form seemed almost lost in the big chair and his small, round, smooth-skinned face showed gloom wrapped in the tranquillity of old age. His gray English suit was extremely smart and he wore a red tarboosh on his babylike bald head. The greetings they exchanged were cursory, a sign of the critical nature of the situation. Isa felt awkward at first: the Pasha had had his eye on the ministerial position, but for a month or more Isa himself had hesitated about putting his name forward for the first cabinet reshuffle; and wondered what this old man would be thinking. He’d waited so long for a ministry. But the Pasha’s energies for office work had sunk to their lowest ebb and he no longer had any real job except to serve on the Finance Committee in Parliament. Isa felt as sorry for him as he did for himself and looked at him diffidently, as though it were a kind of consolation. After a rest at home some of Isa’s color had returned and he felt better as he sat there in the chair, while the Pasha kept turning the wedding ring on his finger. The worst kind of loss was one that affected both private and public life at the same time.
“We’ll be dating things from today for a long time to come,” the Pasha said.
“I saw some of it myself,” Isa said, eager to hear any news. “What a black day!” He lowered his head—which looked large and elongated in the mirror across the room—until his black wavy hair came close to the Pasha’s eyes. Then, frowning, he lifted it again so that he could look straight at the Pasha.
“So Cairo was burning when you came in?”
“Yes, Pasha. It was pure hell.”
“How terrible! What were things like over at the Canal?”
“The young men were all full of enthusiasm, but they need weapons desperately. The massacre of the policemen shattered everyone.”
“That was a criminal affair. A disaster.”
“Yes,” Isa replied angrily. “We’re being pushed toward—” The rest of his sentence needed no saying and his words faded away. Their eyes met sadly.
“What are people saying about us?” the Pasha asked.
“Nationalist feelings are running very high. Our enemies are saying that we manufactured a battle to take people’s minds off us.” He lowered the corner of his mouth in contempt. “They’ll always find something to say,” he went on. “Miserable wretches—scoundrels!”
Between them was a table with a silver jug and a tray of biscuits on it. The Pasha motioned to Isa to pour out two glasses and they proceeded to drink although neither of them enjoyed it. During all this, Isa looked around at the picture of Saad Zaghlul49 hanging on the wall above the huge desk to the right of where they were sitting.
“Would you believe, sir, that I haven’t been able to contact my minister so far?” Isa asked.
The Pasha quietly stroked his silver-gray mustache. “I can’t blame you for complaining these days,” he said. “Where’s the minister? No one knows. Where’s the Army? No one knows. Where are the police? No one knows. The public security system has disappeared and meanwhile the devil’s on a rampage.”
“I wonder if the fire’s still burning.”
The Pasha stretched his legs till they reached around one of the ebony legs of the table. His black shoes shone more brightly in the gleam of the quadrangular crystal chandelier. Isa glanced at the heater mounted on the wall and was struck by the transparency of the flickering red flame; it made him think of the Magi and he began to enjoy the pleasant warmth it was giving out. His eyes glided over the classical-style furniture, which seemed to be shrouded in a kind of dignit
“The fire should be out by now,” Shukri Pasha Abd al-Halim replied with careful indifference. That is, now that it has done its job!”
The young man’s honey-brown eyes gleamed. He tried to draw some more out of the Pasha. “Maybe it was just reckless anger,” he suggested tentatively.
The Pasha showed his teeth as he smiled. “It was anger all right!” he replied. “But beyond that anger there was envy. Anger may be genuinely reckless, but envy always follows a distinct plan of action.”
“How can this happen when we’re in power?”
The Pasha gave a dry and abrupt laugh. “Today’s like an overcast night,” he replied. “Wait till we find out where the head and feet are.”
Isa breathed in sharply and then sighed so hard that the fringe of the velvet tablecloth rustled. “What about the parties?” he muttered.