The Pillars of Hercules

Dr. Yahyah el-Salameh said, “The hand problem was caused by nerve damage. The knife hit the radial nerve. So his hand is paralyzed.”

“My eyesight is bad, and I can’t hear,” he said. “That wasn’t the attack. That is because of my diabetes.”

Some of this was in English, some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accent of one of his characters that he had described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.” Raymond stood behind me, translating. Mahfouz understood most of what I asked him, though from time to time he needed Raymond’s help.

“Tell the people at the American Academy that I am very grateful,” he said, clutching my hand. “Please thank them.”

“I know they’re worried about your health.”

“It was a shock, but—” He smiled, he laughed a little; he did not want to dwell on the attack.

“What do you think about those people?”

“I feel no hatred,” he said, slowly, in English. “But—”

He was gasping, having a hard time getting the words out. Dr. Yahyah looked anxious, but Mahfouz waved him away.

“—it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven’t read.”

He was sniggering again, and seeing me laugh, he kept on talking, gesturing with his wounded hand.

“If you read the book and don’t like it,” he managed to say, stopping and starting, “then, okay, maybe you have a reason to stab the author. Eh? Eh?”

It was as though he was turning the whole attack into a violent absurdity. Something of the same kind occurs in his strange story “At the Bus Stop,” where the passive onlookers to a series of disconnected intrusions and sudden incidents all die in a senseless hail of bullets. That story and some others in the collection The Time and the Place have the logic and distortion of a nightmare, a blend of comedy and horror and the lack of logic that life confronts us with. He was saying: As a shy and peaceful man—elderly, deaf, half-blind, diabetic—wasn’t it ludicrous that he had been knifed? He was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote: “There’s nothing left for death to devour—a wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and sharp bones.”

“But I am sad,” he said.

And he explained that the whole thing was pathetic. This was silly and futile. The fundamentalists were, most of all, ignorant.

“I thought they had learned something. I thought they were better than before. But they are as bad as always.”

“I think he is getting tired,” Dr. Yahyah said. “Maybe you—”

As though defying the doctor, Mahfouz said, “Fight thought with thought—not thought with violence.”

It was what he had said when defending Salman Rushdie against the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The effort of his speaking, much of this in English, had wearied him. He saluted us. He said he would be better soon—“Come back to Egypt then—we’ll talk”—and he gripped my hand in his left hand and tugged it with affection.

Afterwards, I realized that I had been the one who had raised the religious issue and harped on the attack. But in retrospect I had the feeling that Mahfouz would have been much happier talking about something else—his work, perhaps, or Islamic aesthetics, or the weather, or Alexandria, or the French philosopher Bergson (who had worked on a theory of humor), or music, for which—before his deafness—Mahfouz had had a passion. He did not regard himself as a victim. His fatalism was part of his humor, and his modesty, and most of all it made him fearless.

My train back to Alexandria was El-Isbani, “The Spaniard,” though no one could explain why it was called that. It was an express, it rushed across the Delta, stopping two or three times, and Alexandria on the return seemed serene, as Mahfouz had described it: “Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.”

I had a drink at the Cecil and walked down the Corniche in the darkness, listening to the waves lap at the shore. “A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz, in his novel Miramar. “Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”