Chawki wanted to live forever so as never to have to take his eyes off this feast of flesh; but fate, ever blind, thwarted his wishes by a ludicrous incident. At the height of his excitement, he suddenly saw Samaraï appear in the living room. This revenant — whose sleep had no doubt been disturbed by the boisterousness of the group — was limping forward, and it was easy to see why: he was wearing only one shoe; he held the other shoe in his hand, brandishing it about like a makeshift weapon with a view to massacre. Without explaining his bizarre behavior, he went directly to Chawki and said firmly:
“Curses on your mother! I’m going to kill you!”
The speed with which Chawki protected himself against the danger by covering his face with his arms accentuated the farcical side of this onslaught even more. Shaking with laughter, everyone in the room stayed where they were and none of them thought to help him. Luckily, the shoe Samaraï tossed at Chawki only hit him on the shoulder. Still, he let out the cry of a chicken having its throat slit, and fainted.
: VI:
teymour was waiting for felfel in front of the statue of The Awakening of the Nation. In her stylized peasant dress the woman was still raising her arm to encourage a heedless people to revive but, as if responding to her ludicrous call, against the metal railing that surrounded the monument, a vagrant was sleeping, snoring shamelessly and thus undermining the morale of his fellow citizens with his unfortunate conduct; whether by coincidence or design, serious damage was being done to the government’s attempt — by means of this insomniac and imperious peasant woman — to rouse the crowds from their torpor. Teymour endorsed heart and soul the act of this beggar, whose ostensible ignorance concealed an age-old wisdom. The young man was now in a position to appreciate the humor of such a spectacle, seeing in it the expression of the lucidity of an entire people impervious to the entreaties of a propaganda so obviously tendentious. Not so long ago, the vagrant’s attitude would have insulted Teymuor’s intelligence and reinforced his bitterness; now it seemed the only legitimate reaction to the attempt to reduce a people to slavery that lay behind the esthetic of this modern sculpture. Denouncing its decadent symbolism by means of the most passive attitude of all — sleep — showed, he thought, a remarkable ferocity and was imbued with much more meaning than anything any rebellious intellectual, tangled up in his pronouncements, could have done or said against the system that had created the statue to serve its villainous cause. This revelation led him to have joyous confidence in the future and completely transformed his vision of things; already he no longer thought much about all those years spent abroad, and the memories he still retained of them no longer struck the same painful chords. As if trying to help him forget that period of his life, none of his acquaintances ever asked the slightest question about the countries in which he had resided, nor did they seem interested in what he might have done there. At first he found this odd conspiracy of silence somewhat distressing. He could not understand their reserve and thought it almost insulting. He had especially suffered from not being able to recount certain adventures to Medhat; his old friend showed himself to be particularly unreceptive to confidences of this sort, as if he found Teymour’s long absence entirely negligible, nonexistent even. However, having searched and searched for the motives of such indifference, Teymour wound up suspecting that his friends were trying, by their tact, to help him forget a past that they sensed he still missed deep down. He was touched by this show of thoughtfulness, and had done his best to be worthy of their esteem by adapting as quickly as possible to his new existence and by erasing from his behavior and his appearance all traces that could have markedly set him apart from his surroundings. To this end, he’d given up his lavish clothing with its foreign cut and fabric that made him look like a sad-faced tourist roaming the catacombs.
The previous day, when they had met unexpectedly in the street, Felfel had arranged this rendezvous as if she were a breathless conspirator pursued by a pack of policemen; then she rode off on her bicycle like some mythical creature, without leaving him time to respond. The bold artlessness with which the girl had tried to hatch a love affair had greatly surprised Teymour and, at the same time, filled him with unanticipated happiness. He was impatient to learn just how this mysterious meeting with the young saltimbanque would unfold. Suddenly it seemed as if there were no superior places for love. Even in this dismal city, frozen in its gloomy austerity, hidden forces were at work to encourage desire. With genuine anxiety he looked in every corner of the square, hoping to see little Felfel’s figure emerge as she sliced through the air on her bicycle. But the huge square was empty; he saw only a police officer of the most moronic kind walking at the speed of a grazing cow, half asleep with a sulky expression, for it was siesta time. As if drawn by a magnet, this policeman, lonely and starved for power, was heading straight for the statue. For a moment Teymour imagined he was going to interrogate it for some breach of the law, but in reality the policeman had it in for the poor beggar sleeping against the railing; no doubt he was jealous of the man’s blessed fate.
The officer bent down, grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him with that skillful sadism so characteristic of policemen carrying out their duties.
“Hey you, wake up!” he said. “You should be ashamed to be sleeping here, my man!
The vagabond turned his head, opened a bleary eye, and asked in a calm and distant voice:
“Why would I be ashamed?”
“What!” cried the officer indignantly. “Don’t you realize you’re sleeping beneath The Awakening of the Nation? Show a little respect, my man.”
The dirty, wrinkled face of the man took on an expression of immense weariness, as if the officer’s remonstrance were coming from infinitely far away and a superhuman effort were necessary for him to understand and react to it. He closed his eye and answered with morose seriousness:
“There’s no rush. When you have woken up the entire nation, let me know. Why should I be the first?”
And he went back to sleep.
The officer gave vent to his rancor by spitting on the statue’s pedestal, then walked away shaking his head as if he no longer understood the reasons for his presence on earth. His authority had been thwarted by a beggar’s destitution and ignorance, and this incident — which occurred repeatedly — overwhelmed him with inexpressible despondency. A ghostly silhouette, he faded slowly, swept up by the dust that swirled across the square.
This surprising dialogue had the opposite effect on Teymour; it caused him to burst out laughing. For a moment this laughter was uncontrollable, as if he were drunk. Then he realized what bad manners it would be to disturb the noble sleeper with his boisterous, misplaced good spirits. He suddenly stopped laughing and allowed his gaze to rest upon the man with brotherly affection.
At the risk of breaking her neck, Felfel was pedaling as fast as she could through the treacherous streets. With great skill she circumvented puddles, avoided potholes, and threaded her way among the horde of street children without slowing down or stopping. And sometimes, while she was performing these amazing feats, she would raise her head to admire a sliver of blue sky between the rooftops of houses with their crumbling façades; she found a resemblance between this sunny afternoon and the elation that gripped her heart — a young girl in love racing to her first date. For this exceptional occasion she had scrubbed her face and replaced her saltimbanque’s outfit with a short cotton print skirt, an almost transparent yellow blouse, and white canvas shoes that had just been polished; the final touch to this elegant outfit was a slightly shabby leather bag slung across her shoulder that struck her on the side as she pedaled furiously. Dressed in this way, with her hair combed and braided, without a trace of makeup, she looked like a barely nubile little girl racing to school. Her desire to surprise Teymour had inspired her to carry out this magnificent metamorphosis — showing herself to him as wholesome, childish — the only thing that could in novelty rival the charming sophisticated creatures he had loved during his travels. She was counting on her youth to make him forget those distant conquests that his memory still cherished. Nonetheless, she remained vaguely fearful. In Teymour’s prestigious person there was something of the inaccessible ideal that worried her; the young man seemed to have fallen from another planet. When she’d first seen him sitting on the café terrace and brooding, she’d understood that he did not belong in these abominable surroundings and that he was not going to drag out his exile here. She had smiled at him instinctively, as if trying to help him endure his misery, with the hope that he would recognize in her smile a sign of a complicity that united them in their shared horror of this city. She had believed she could buy time in this way — and save for later everything in her power to hold on to him through her tenderness and her love. When she had approached him the previous day on the street to set up the meeting to which she was now impatiently hastening, she had intended to confess her decision to belong to him without further delay. Teymour might leave the city from one moment to the next and she would have no warning; it was becoming urgent not to abandon him any longer to his depressing solitude. But what would happen if she had come too late, and, worse, if he were not interested in the love she had to offer? After all, she was only a child of the people, obliged in order to get by to perform this thankless job that was almost like begging. Yes, she was nothing put a poor beggar. She made a sad little pout at the sudden realization of her lowliness and began pedaling with increased ardor. The possibility that Teymour might rebuff her made her want to throw herself off a cliff and die.