"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."
He recalled how good he was at Arabic, as good as the Head of Department; witness the man's decision to cut two days' pay from his salary, for no reason except that he had written a blank page. And he remembered also how Layla had said to him once: "You have no heart." One night it was, when all the friends had gone and only Khalid Azzuz and Layla remained on the houseboat. And without any preliminary Anis had grasped her arm and said: "You are mine tonight." Why did it always have to be Khalid? Khalid who inherited you after Ragab left you! And so, for me, only the night is mine. His voice had been raised in anger that night, raised against the dawn prayer. Amm Abduh outside, calling to prayer, you yourself yelling like a madman inside; and Khalid, spreading his hands wide in supplication, and saying: "You've made a scandal of us!"
Layla had laughed at first, and then cried. She had raised a highly philosophical question. For she loved Khalid, and on account of that could not give in to Anis, in spite of their friendship — if she did, she would be a whore. And he had shouted that night that the call to prayer was easier to understand than these riddles!
"Friendship is more important," Layla pleaded now, to clear the air. "Friendship is for life."
"May God grant you a long one, then."
He filled the pipe so that they could smoke together while waiting for the others. She took a greedy puff and coughed for a long time. And he said again what he usually said, that the first pull on the pipe made you cough; it was after that that the pleasure came. And he thought to himself that it was not so strange that the Egyptians had worshipped the Pharaoh; what was extraordinary was that the Pharaoh had believed himself to be a god…
The houseboat shook, more violently this time, and a hubbub of voices came from outside. He glanced toward the doorway concealed by the screen and saw a lively group of companions follow one another in: Ahmad Nasr, Mustafa Rashid, Ali al-Sayyid, and Khalid Azzuz… "Good evening… Good evening to you!" Khalid sat down next to Layla; as for Ali al-Sayyid, he threw himself down to the right of Anis, crying: "Come to our aid!" So Anis set about filling the pipe and stacking glowing pieces of charcoal on top, and the water pipe was soon being passed around the circle. "Any news of Ragab?" Mustafa Rashid inquired.
Anis told him that Ragab had telephoned to say that he was in the studio, and that he would come as soon as he had finished work.
A breeze blowing in from the balcony made the coals glow on the brazier. Anis was now as animated as he would become. His broad face suffused with a profound rapture, he announced that whoever it was who had made a magnificent tomb out of human history, a tomb that graced the shelves of every library, had not begrudged them a few moments of pleasure.
Khalid Azzuz looked toward Ali al-Sayyid. "So does the press have any news?" he asked.
Ali indicated Layla with a lift of his chin. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is here before you."
"But I heard the most astonishing facts…"
"Don't bother our brains with it," Anis said cynically. "Whatever else we get to hear, this world of ours will still be here, the same as ever it was, absolutely nothing happening at all."
Mustafa Rashid cleared his throat. "And what's more," he said, "the world does not concern us any more than we concern it. In any way at all."
Anis agreed. "As long as the pipe is still being passed around, what does it matter to you?"
Khalid regarded him, delighted. "Wisdom," he said, "from the mouth of the intoxicated!"
"Let me tell you what happened to me today with the Director General," Anis continued, and the story of the pen provoked a storm of laughter. "Pens like that are used to sign peace treaties," Ali said finally.
The water pipe continued on its glowing, melodious way. A halo of midges clustered around the neon light. Outside, beyond the balcony, darkness had set in. The Nile had vanished save for a few geometric shapes, some regular, some irregular: the reflections of the streetlights on the opposite bank, and the illuminated windows of the other houseboats. The Director's bald pate loomed, like the hull of an upturned boat, in the embrace of darkness. He must surely be a scion of the Hyksos kings, and one day would return to the desert… The worst thing Anis had to fear was that the evening would come to an end like the youth of Layla Zaydan, like the gray ash encroaching on the heart of the embers…