Karnak Café (12 page)

In just three months we forgot all about the person he had been. He used to appear on the arm of his helper at the same time every evening. He would be accorded the same kind of welcome as everyone else; it was almost as though there was absolutely nothing unusual about him. However, he felt somewhat isolated, so he was the one who opened the conversation.

“Are you all still talking?” he inquired, thus intruding on our general disinterest.

“As usual,” was Zayn al-‘Abidin's reply.

“Earlier I told you about what other groups are thinking these days,” he said, continuing his intrusion. “But I haven't told you what I think myself.”

“About the war, you mean?” asked Munir Ahmad.

“That seems to be the point that has everyone baffled,” he responded in a rush. “To me it seems perfectly simple. We were defeated. We were totally unprepared for war. That's the problem we have to solve, and quickly, even if it involves paying the price. We should be spending every single penny we have making ourselves more advanced culturally. But I really wanted to talk about our way of life in general.”

By now he had everyone's attention.

“In the minutes I have left here,” he continued, “I'm going to give you all a frank summary of my experiences. I've emerged from the defeat, or let's say from my past life, strongly believing in a set of principles from which I will never deviate as long as I am alive. So what are those principles?

“Firstly, a total disavowal of autocracy and dictatorship. Secondly, a disavowal of any resort to force or violence. Thirdly, we have to rely on the principles of freedom, public opinion, and respect for our fellow human beings as values needed to foster and advance progress. With them at our disposal it can be achieved. Fourthly, we must learn to accept from Western civilization the value of science and the scientific method, and without any argument. Nothing else should be automatically accepted without a full discussion of our current realities. With that in mind, we should be
prepared to get rid of all the fetters that tie us down, whether ancient or modern.

“So there is the philosophy of Khalid Safwan,” he said with a yawn. “I've learned its principles from within the deepest recesses of hell. I'm proclaiming it here today in Karnak Café, a place to which we have all been driven by a combination of ostracism and crime.”

“Maybe things will turn out better for you and your generation,” I said, leaning toward Munir Ahmad.

“There's a huge mound of dirt in our path,” he said, “and it's up to us to clear it away.”

“Truth to tell,” I said sincerely, “your generation—you and your contemporaries—are an unexpected dividend. Out of this all-encompassing darkness a bright light is shining forth, so bright that you might imagine it had been created by magic.”

“You don't know what we've been through.”

“But we're partners.”

He gave me a doubtful stare.

“Tell me,” I asked him, “what are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Which political label best fits you?”

“Damn all such labels!” he replied angrily.

“From your conversation I gather that you respect religion.”

“That's true.”

“And also that you respect leftist opinions. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you exactly?”

“I want to be myself, no more, no less.”

“Is it a kind of craving for cultural rootedness?” I asked after a pause for thought.

“Could be.”

“Does that imply a return to the heritage of the past?”

“Certainly not!”

“So where's this ‘rootedness' to be found?”

“Here!” he replied pointing to his heart.

Once again I had to pause for thought. “This idea needs further discussion,” I said.

“I'm sure it needs a great deal of discussion,” he responded in all innocence.

I let the others know how much I admired this young man's vision, to such an extent that one day Zayn al-‘Abidin lost his patience.

“Listen,” he said. “One day, in two or three years' time, that boy's going to find himself as a civil servant with a miserable salary. That'll leave him with just two choices, no more: corruption or emigration.”

That infuriated Qurunfula. “When are you ever going to make a bad mistake,” she asked, “and actually say something decent? Just for once!”

“O lovely source of all bounty,” he said with a smile of resignation, “the truth is always a bitter pill.”

“But there is a third choice,” she insisted stubbornly.

“And what might that be, my lady?” he asked humbly.

“Whatever our good Lord chooses!”

I was delighted that she had chosen to react that way. In her case I regarded it as a good sign; perhaps she was now ready to start her life again. However, a new and potentially fascinating idea struck me all of a sudden: could it be, I wondered, that she was beginning to fancy the young man? Was he going to take Hilmi Hamada's place? I'll confess to not being entirely ignorant of the way that some women of
her age can behave, how they can feel a passion for adolescent youths and allow folly and adventure to lead them to extremes. I found myself wishing dearly that, if any of the ideas circulating inside my mind were actually to come to pass, the love affair might follow a level path. I hoped that there would be no selfishness on the one side, and no exploitation on the other. The love might once again discover purity and innocence.

Yes indeed, purity and innocence.

D
edicated to the memory of Naguib Mahfouz, great Egyptian, intellectual, and littérateur, humble, warmhearted, and ever-witty individual. Allah yarhamuh.

Readers familiar with Naguib Mahfouz's writings will already be aware of the fact that his works handsomely reward those who are prepared to pay the most careful attention to the nuances of the text. In the case of
Karnak Café
, the English translation of the novel originally entitled
al-Karnak
, this is particularly so, but, in making that suggestion, I am thinking of one very particular instance: the way in which the novel ends. I am not here referring to the much-investigated narratological topic of the strategies employed by novel writers in order to achieve closure, but to the fact that the printed text ends with a reference to the fact that it was completed in December 1971.

A rapid survey of the printed editions of Mahfouz's other novels is sufficient to demonstrate that the author rarely indicates the date of completion in this fashion.

It would appear then that whenever Mahfouz decides to identify dates of composition and completion with such specificity, he has a point to make. So what precisely is that point with reference to
Karnak Café
? The attempt to answer
that question takes us conveniently into a discussion of the political context into which it was inserted.

To state that the atmosphere in Egypt in the period after the total defeat in the June War of 1967 was fraught is to indulge in a massive understatement. It was not merely the scale of the defeat and the loss of land that had such an impact on people, but equally, if not more important, the fact that the entire authority structure of the Arab world had been caught red-handed in the act of systematically lying for the entire six-day course of the conflict. In the flash of an eye, triumphal forward marches and victories in the air were turned into abject fiascos. What could be the response, not merely to such a total disaster and loss of precious sons in the Sinai Peninsula, but also to such arrant and deliberate deception? Where now was that national pride engendered by the forward progress of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952? Was it now a case of having to go all the way back to the drawing board? What kind of government could and should now take over the reins of power? What was to be the role and place of the individual? And what was the role of the intellectual, and, more specifically, the novelist?

The post-1967 era was then one of profound dismay, of reflection, of recrimination, of “looking back in anger.” The narrator of
Karnak Café
uses a very vivid image to describe the impact of the event: that of a hammer blow crushing the skull. The consequences were, it almost goes without saying, a mixture of utter despair and barely suppressed anger. Intellectuals responded in different ways. Many writers recorded, either at the time or later, that they felt powerless and totally unable to write anything. Naguib Mahfouz, however, was different. He immediately started writing a whole series of short stories, many of which appeared in his
1969 collection,
Tahta al-mizallah
(some of which are translated in the collection
God's World
[1973]). I mentioned above that Mahfouz pointedly adds a completion date to the text of
Karnak Café
, and it is equally important to note that he inserts in the front material of this short-story collection that they were all composed between October and December 1967; the reference to the aftermath of June 1967 could hardly be clearer. Many of those stories paint a disturbing picture of a world in which no one understands what is happening and, equally important, no one appears to be either in charge or accepting any kind of responsibility. Other stories like these continued to appear in the Egyptian press in 1968 and 1969, and were later published in the collections,
Hikaya bi-la bidaya wa-la nihaya
, and
Shahr al-‘asal
(both 1971).

This fraught period in the aftermath of the June 1967 disaster (known in Arabic as
al-naksa
[the setback]) initially saw the resignation of President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, the unchallenged figurehead of the Arab world, and then his restitution in the wake of enormous public outpourings demanding that he remain in his post. The toll on his health in the subsequent period was clearly enormous, and he died of a heart attack in 1970 after saying farewell to the Arab leaders who had gathered in Cairo in a vain attempt to formulate a common policy in the face of the crushing new realities. His successor was his longtime vice-president, Anwar (later Muhammad Anwar) Sadat.

I myself can vividly recall the atmosphere in Cairo in the days and months immediately following Sadat's assumption of the presidency of Egypt. The widespread debate on the causes and effects of the June War was still in full swing. To that was now added concern about the new regime and the way in which it would use, and/or react to, the different
social, political, and religious elements within the society. One major characteristic of this new era was the encouragement of a disarming level of frankness in describing the ‘Abd al-Nasir era, and most particularly the 1960s—they being the prelude to the June 1967 defeat. Naguib Mahfouz himself had been a vigorous participant in discussions concerning the course of the Egyptian revolution since 1952. This was seen most especially in the series of novels that he penned in the 1960s, beginning with
al-Liss wa-l-kilab
(1961;
The Thief and the Dogs
), via the extremely pessimistic vision of
Tharthara fawq al-Nil
(1966;
Adrift on the Nile
), to the most negative of them all,
Miramar
(1967;
Miramar
). What is particularly important to note about these dates and retrospectives refers back to the point I made at the beginning of this short commentary. The December 1971 date makes it clear that this novel belongs firmly to this particular period—the post-1967 period—and debates concerning the course of the revolution and the causes of the defeat to be found within them. This novel is, in a real sense, a continuation of the succession of novels I have just mentioned, those of the 1960s. What is frustrating in this context is that Naguib Mahfouz has left us no reliable record of the sequence of composition of his various works at this period; indeed it appears that there is in effect no ‘archive' of Mahfouz manuscripts, since he seems to have deposited most of them with his publisher for printing and not reclaimed the originals—except perhaps in the single case of
Miramar
, of which a manuscript copy appears to exist. That said, we are still left with some clues. I have already drawn attention above to the series of short stories that he wrote in the wake of the June 1967 War, and which, by 1971, had appeared in three book collections. I happened to be in Cairo in the summer of that year and received
a telephone call from Mahfouz in which he told me to look out for a new work of his which he was calling
al-Maraya (Mirrors);
it would, he told me, be a series of vignettes of Egyptian characters, for each of which his friend and colleague, the Alexandrian artist Sayf Wanli, had painted a portrait. Because of the need to publish these portraits in color, Mahfouz had decided to give the initial publication rights for this new work to the television journal
al-Idha‘a
. The publication of the series started on May 1, 1971, and continued weekly until the end of September. The book version of
al-Maraya
appeared in 1972 (and the only fully illustrated version of it, along with my English translation, was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 1999). We might therefore suggest that, if Mahfouz had not already started work on
Karnak Café
while penning the episodes of
al-Maraya
, then he started the former work very soon afterwards and finished it quickly. What we can surely say—and what a reading of both works readily confirms—is that they both belong to the same period, one involving a retrospective on the period in Egyptian history before and during the ‘setback' of June 1967.