The Pillars of Hercules

Alexandria made sense to me now. It was not a derelict or threatening place. It was an ancient city, founded by Alexander the Great around 332 B.C., and rising and falling with the fortunes of this end of the Mediterranean, it had been many different cities since then. Mahfouz had been born in 1911 and had witnessed the violent 1919 revolution, the various occupations—Greek, Turkish, British; the Second World War, the rise of Nasser, the fall of Nasser, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the humiliation of the Israeli Six Day War of 1967. He had seen E. M. Forster come and go; he had been in Alexandria in the late 1940s, when the action of Durrell’s novels had unfolded. He had watched these writers and their characters depart. And it was right that after the romantics and the fabulists had finished with the city, and the fantasies had ceased to be credible, the city had been reclaimed by a realist like Mahfouz, who possessed sympathy, and alarming humor.

I slept in my cabin on the Akdeniz, and woke exhausted and enervated by my dreams. Then I went into town again, bought the newspaper, and went to a cafe to read it. An Alexandrian joined me, Mr. Mohammed Ali.

“Cairo people are not like Alexandria people,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“We are Mediterranean people,” he said. “We are used to so many other nations, so many other different people.”

“But everyone in Alexandria is the same now. Isn’t that so?”

“We are people of the shoreline and the water,” he protested. “We have maybe three million people. Cairo has fifteen million!”

While I was in Alexandria, on the evening of my third day, the Arabic newspaper Al-Ahali (The People) published Naguib Mahfouz’s offending novel, Children of the Alley, in a special edition that sold out within a few hours of its hitting the street. “After 25 years of its absence from the Egyptian people!” the headline said. The whole book, in thirty broadsheet pages, had been printed without permission, infringing Mahfouz’s copyright. At first glance, it seemed a challenge to the hard-liners, but Raymond Stock had lived in Egypt long enough to find a sinister motive possible: Remember when Mao started the Hundred Flowers Campaign in order to get intellectuals and rebels out of the woodwork? he said. Well, this might be something similar, the publication of the blaspheming novel encouraged by the fundamentalist sheiks, to see who would applaud it. In this way, identifying the infidels, and rousing potential stabbers of Mahfouz. Whatever, it was an event, and it seemed to electrify the city. All at once, in the space of a few hours, everyone in Alexandria was reading Mahfouz’s novel.

“All gone,” the newsboys told me.

Looking for someone to help me buy a copy, I met a man who had bought five. They were at his house, he said, or he would have given me one.

“I spent forty pounds [about $14] on one copy last year!”

This man, Mohammed Okiel, asked one of the newsboys who had turned me away earlier, claiming he did not have a copy. Browbeaten by Mohammed Okiel, he found a copy of the special edition under some movie magazines. He had the decency to say “Sorry” to me in English.

“He is ashamed,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed was a lawyer. We found a quiet backstreet cafe, where young men were puffing on hookahs, and we drank a cup of coffee and talked about Mahfouz. I did not say that I had seen him in the hospital in Cairo—it was too improbable, and it was boasting. Besides, I wanted to know what other people thought.

“Naguib Mahfouz is a great man,” Mohammed said. “And he is a very great writer.”

“Have you read the novel?”

“Yes, Aulad Haratina is a great novel. I like it very much,” he said. “All the prophets are in it. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed. But it is also about us—we people.”

“Are you a religious person?”

“No. I have no religion,” he said. “Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish—all false.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they cause trouble.”

“Don’t they bring peace and understanding, too?”

“People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,” he said. “You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.”

The texture of Alexandria, all the metaphors, and the romance and the layers of history were irrelevant to that simple reflection. It seemed a salutary and humane thought, too, because in a matter of hours the ship’s lines were loosed from the quayside, and we sailed out of this sea-level city, passed the lovely palace of Ras el Tin, and the old yacht club, and the lighthouses, and the ships at anchor. As the sun set directly behind our stern, we plowed east along the crescent of the Delta, towards Israel.

On deck after dinner, watching the Rosetta lighthouse winking from the Egyptian shore, at the narrow mouth of the Rashid Nile, Onan said—speaking as though I were not present—“Paul ran away from Alexandria. Where did he go?”