Adrift on the Nile

Taking a towel, Anis went through a side door to wash his hands at the basin, and came back, saying to himself that it was due to excess alone that most of the Caliphs had not lived long. He saw Amm Abduh busily wiping the table, his back bent like a bowed palm tree. Playfully, he asked him: "Have you ever seen a ghost?"

"I've seen everything," Amm Abduh replied.

Anis winked. "So there has never been a good family living on this houseboat?" he asked.

"Hmm!"

"O guardian of our pleasures! If you did not like this life, you would have left it on the first day!"

"How could I, when I built the mosque with my own hands?"

Anis looked now at the books on the shelves, which covered the whole of the long wall to the left of the door. It was a library of history, from the dawn of time to the atomic age, domain of his imagination and storehouse of his dreams. At random, he took down a book on monasticism in the Coptic period in order to read, as he did every day, for an hour or two before his siesta. Amm Abduh finished his work, and came to ask if Anis wanted anything else before he left.

"What is going on outside, Amm Abduh?" Anis asked him.

"The same as usual, sir."

"Nothing new?"

"Why don't you go out, sir?"

"I go to the Ministry every day."

"I mean, for relaxation."

Anis laughed. "My eyes look inward, not outward like the rest of God's servants!" And he dismissed Amm Abduh, telling him to wake him if he was still asleep at sunset.

3

Everything was ready. The mattresses were arranged in a large semicircle just inside the door to the balcony. On a brass tray in the middle of the semicircle stood the water pipe and the brazier for the charcoal. Dusk came down over the trees and the water, and a clement calm reigned. Homecoming flocks of white doves flew swiftly over the Nile.

Anis sat cross-legged behind the tray, staring out at the sunset with his customary sleepy gaze--sleepy, that is, until the lump of kif, dissolved in the bitter black coffee, worked its magic. Then things would change. Abstract, cubist, surrealist, fauvist forms would take the place of the evergreen and guava and acacia trees and the girls on the other houseboats; and humankind would return to the primeval age of mosses. . . . What could it have been that had turned a whole band of Egyptians into monks?

And what was that last joke he had heard, the one about the monk and the cobbler?

The houseboat shook faintly; there were footsteps on the gangway. He prepared to greet the newcomer. It was a girl of medium build, with golden hair. She came out onto the balcony, greeting him gaily.

"I bid a welcome to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs!" he murmured in reply.

Layla Zaydan had been a friend for the past ten years. She was thirty-five and unmarried, which was appropriate for one of the first explorers of the space of female liberty; one, moreover, who had set out from a bastion of conservatism. You have not touched her, Anis, but age has. Look at those wrinkles as light as down at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and that tinge of dryness, harsh and bleak, like a water jar long since drained. There was still a desirable beauty in her clear skin, in spite of a thickness to the tip of her nose, and in spite of something obscure, something encroaching on her which threatened her ruin. In the age of Cheops she was a shepherdess in the Sinai, but died, bitten by a blind snake, leaving no trace . . .

She did not turn to him as she spoke. She seemed to be addressing the Nile. "I had a hard day at the Ministry. I translated twenty pages of foolscap."

"And how is our foreign policy today?"

"What do you expect?"

"Oh, all I want is a quiet life. Quiet and respectable. . . ."

She left the balcony for the farthest mattress on the right-hand side, where she sat down. "It's the same scene as ever," she said. "Amm Abduh is sitting in the garden like a statue, and here you are, filling the pipe."

"That is because Man has to work."

He yielded to a reeling sensation. The evening seemed personified, a wanton creature, one who had lived for millions of years. He began to talk, in a roundabout way, about a woman who he said was the slave of love; whenever one lover deserted her, he said, she threw herself into the arms of another. He added that such behavior could be explained by the waxing and waning of the moon.

Layla smiled coldly. Copying his previous ironic tone, she said: "And that's because Woman has to love!"

And then she grumbled: "Wretched man!" and he detected in her face the faint warnings of anger, but no trace of real antipathy. He was sure that when it came to jokes she was no Queen Victoria, ruler of an age bound by convention.

"Why don't you take me as your lover?" he suggested, not particularly seriously.

When he continued to look at her, she answered: "If one day you ever used the word "love" as the subject of a sentence," she said, "you would never remember what the predicate was. Ever."