“Heaven forbid, Boss!” Ahmad replied, entirely unclear as to whether or not he was telling the truth.
“Al-Zaytun’s a long way away,” Boss Zifta said. “You can only get there by train.”
“Train rides shouldn’t keep friends apart!” Ahmad replied with a smile.
Abbas Shifa raised his eyebrows as though he were recalling something significant. “I know al-Zaytun just as well as I know Khan al-Khalili,” he said. “A while back I used to go there at least once a week. I’d come back with the very best hashish!”
Ahmad grinned. “So can I expect to be seeing a lot of you?” he asked.
“Oh, those days are long gone!” Abbas Shifa said sadly. “They threw the seller into prison, and that’s where he died.”
Everyone said how sorry they were that he was leaving. They complimented him on his fine family and gave their condolences for the loss of his brother. Even Sulayman Ata had nice things to say. At this final moment Ahmad’s heart was bursting with affection for all of them, the ones he liked such as Boss Nunu and the others he did not like such as Ahmad Rashid. He was surprised to realize that, when it came time to say farewell, his heart was always sorry to leave anything, however tedious and burdensome it might have been.
At this point everyone started talking as usual about the war situation. They mentioned that the German advance had been halted at al-Alamein. It was Ahmad Rashid’s opinion that the Germans had now lost the battle for Egypt. Sayyid Arif had another take on it. According to him, Hitler had ordered Rommel to halt so as to avoid attacking Egypt — the throbbing heart of Islam — and all the suffering that an invasion would cause. If it weren’t for the Fuhrer’s merciful judgment, the Germans would already have been in Cairo a month ago. Ahmad stayed with them, listening to their conversation and banter, but when it was nine-thirty, he stood up to say farewell for the last time. Shaking their hands one by one, he received their best wishes with thanks. With that he headed back to the apartment.
Once in his room, he opened the window and looked out on the quarter. It was the middle of the month of Shaaban, and the moon was gleaming brightly in the clear August sky. All around it stars were twinkling coyly as though to express their regret that the moon had again appeared in its youthful guise, something that they had always known would not last. The moonlight bathed the entire quarter in a shimmering silver glow that banished the lonely darkness of night and imbued street corners and alleyways with a particular magic.
It was the night of mid-Shaaban, and the prayers for that holy night could be heard through the neighboring windows. You could hear a boy shouting in his high-pitched voice: “O God, the one and only Bestower, Possessor of Majesty and Honor,” and the family repeated it after him. And he was the only silent one among them. What kind of prayer could he offer to his Lord, he wondered? He thought for a while, then lifted his hands toward the shining moon.
“O God,” he said humbly, “Creator of the universe, Ordainer of everything, envelop him in the broad expanse of Your mercy and let him dwell in Your spacious heavens. Grant to his grieving parents solace and perseverance, and to my own heart bring peace and tranquility. In the days ahead grant that I may find consolation for what is past” (and at this point Ahmad put his hand over his heart). “This heart of mine has endured a great deal of pain and swallowed failure and frustration.”
Was he remembering the day he had arrived in this old quarter, with the same quest for change in mind? Well, change had certainly taken place, but all it had brought were tears and despair. Ramadan would soon be here again. What memories! Could he still remember the last Ramadan, with him poised by the window waiting for the sunset prayer, then looking upward and seeing her there?
Now here was history itself, passing in front of his eyes just as it had been recorded by the onward march of days and nights, written with the ink of hope, love, pain, and sorrow. So this was the final night. Tomorrow he would be living in a new home, in a different quarter, turning his back on the past … a past with all its hopes and dashed aspirations.
Farewell then, Khan al-Khalili!
Translator’s Afterword
At my first meeting with Naguib Mahfouz (d. 2006) in 1969, the discussion began with the topic of translation, but not of his own work. At the time I was revising my doctoral dissertation on the renowned narrative of the Egyptian writer Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (d. 1930), Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham (which was originally published in 1907; my translation and study of it eventually appeared in book form as A Period of Time in 1992). Mahfouz was delighted to hear of my interest in that work, since he acknowledged to me that it had long been a favorite of his family and had had a great influence on him as a teenager as, it would appear, it did on another great Egyptian storyteller, Mahmud Taymur (d. 1973). Inevitably, however, the conversation gradually shifted to his own works, and I told him that I had read and greatly admired many of the short stories in his recently published collection, Khammarat al-qitt al-aswad (Black Cat Tavern, 1967). When I asked him if he would allow me to translate some of them, he readily agreed and asked me to make a list of the ones I particularly liked. Once I had recorded the names of five or six stories, he asked if I was interested in any of the novels. Because its political context is set during and after the 1952 revolution, I had recently purchased al-Summan wa-l-kharif (1962; Autumn Quail, 1985), and thus that title was added to the list. Mahfouz signed his name to the paper (which I still cherish in my files), and my career as a translator of Mahfouz began.
In fact, it began, somewhat unusually perhaps, not with his novels, but rather with a collection of short stories — the ones on the list that I had chosen myself, and others that I proceeded to translate with an Egyptian colleague, Akef Abadir. The collection, God’s World, containing a selection of short stories culled from all his collections up until the year 1970, was published in 1973 and was mentioned in the Nobel Committee’s citation in October 1988 (although most critics in the Arab world incorrectly assumed that it was a reference to the Arabic collection Dunya Allah (1962), from which we had selected its title story for inclusion in our own collection).
Over the ensuing decades that short story collection was to be followed by my translations of Autumn Quail (1985), Mirrors (1977, 1999, based on al-Maraya, 1972), some individual short stories, and finally Karnak Café (2007) (a translation of the highly controversial novel, al-Karnak, 1974). This translation into English of Khan al-Khalili (1945), certainly one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of his “novels of the 1940s,” thus takes me back to a much earlier period in his novelistic output. It is to the impressions that such a return to beginnings has brought about for a translator that I would now like to turn.
The novel, Khan al-Khalili, is named for one of the most famous quarters of the old city of Cairo, the one founded in the tenth century following the invasion of Egypt by Shi’ite Fatimid forces. The new city was constructed in the area immediately below the Muqattam Hills. At its center was the mosque of al-Azhar, originally established in 972 CE as a center for Shi’ite learning but one that over the centuries has become a primary source of both education and doctrinal discussion within the Sunni community. However, the most prominent Islamic monument in the Khan al-Khalili quarter itself is the mosque — shrine of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was slain during the tragic schism that, within decades of Muhammad’s death in 632, had split the early Islamic community in two. The mosque itself contains some of the relics of al-Husayn and is thus a shrine frequently visited by devout Muslims, among whom we may list both the father of the Akif family in the present novel and the mother of the ‘Abd al-Gawwad family in Mahfouz’s renowned trilogy of novels; during her visit to the al-Husayn shrine, she is knocked down, with tragic consequences for herself and her family, as recounted in Bayn al-qasrayn (1956; Palace Walk, 1990).