“Welcome!” exclaimed Karamallah. “What an honor. Sit down. Today is a day of honey! Allow me to introduce myself, Excellency. My name is Karamallah, and here are Professor Nimr and our young friend Ossama, to whom we owe the immense pleasure of meeting you. A celebrity of your repute has no need to introduce himself. You are known the world over. I’m not mistaken, am I?”
“You are very kind; I don’t deserve such praise,” answered Suleyman, not taking his eyes off Nimr. “May I ask what Professor Nimr teaches? If I’m not prying. .”
“Not at all. I’m pleased to inform you that Professor Nimr teaches sociology. Right now, however, he is taking a leave of absence because of a broken heart.”
“Sociology you say? I’ve heard of it. What exactly is this
science?”
“Sociology is the science of survival in society,” Karamallah answered. “Professor Nimr teaches young boys how to get by in life.”
“May Allah protect him! He is a decent man. Ah, to have met someone like him in my youth. I did not have such good fortune.”
“On the contrary, I find that you have had a great deal of good fortune,” Karamallah said sententiously.
“Why do you say that?” asked Suleyman, taken aback by this slightly after-the-fact prediction.
“Because none of his students made a fortune. That’s why I think that you have been fortunate.”
“That’s quite sad. There must certainly be a reason for this collective failure.”
Suleyman was being drawn in more than he would have liked, but the circumstances offered no way out. His interlocutor was leading things and it would have been impolite not to follow him in his rather hasty conclusions. The discussion was just beginning and he had to appear friendly, understanding, and even capable of generosity. To this effect he had brought with him a judiciously calculated sum of money that he intended to place on the table at an opportune moment to set the transaction in motion. In his mind, nothing had changed; just business as usual — only the partners were different.
“I trust that my friend Nimr will forgive me, but it has always seemed to me that his teachings lacked virulence,” resumed Karamallah. “For his students’ participation in the world’s future he preaches virtue, disdain for money, and modesty. Can you tell me, Excellency, you who know all the pitfalls and difficulties of business — is it possible to be virtuous and become rich? I wanted to see you to ask you this fundamental question that harks back to ancient times.”
Suleyman looked at his three companions one after the other, hoping for a sign, a clue that would set him on the road to a suitable response. Instead, they seemed amused by his hesitation.
“Well, it’s more complicated than that,” he said at last, as if he were excusing himself.
“A sublime response!” cried Karamallah. “Thank you for providing me with it. Of course, I didn’t expect any less from you, Excellency.”
Karamallah’s wonder was not feigned; he was truly amazed by the persistence and extent of such an inept ideology; he’d never thought it could flourish in sun-drenched lands. So, the old idea dreamed up by illustrious thinkers from cold climes — according to which the world was complicated and absurd — had crossed oceans and borders to come lodge itself in the brain of this abominable crook on the banks of the Nile. This vileness, which consisted in denying the Edenic simplicity of the world, served the interests of the powerful because it justified all the hardships endured by the ignorant masses. Karamallah rebelled against this pernicious disinformation with all the might of his great love of life.
“Could His Excellency tell us about his personal success?” Ossama asked. “I must confess that, for me, there is something magical about it.”
“There is no magic at all,” Suleyman assured him. “It is the determination I bring to my work that lies at the heart of my success.”
“And what a success it is!” declared Karamallah. “Unfortunately it’s been spoiled by that horrid catastrophe. I am so sorry for you. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it was nothing but bad luck. Or is there some other explanation?”
“I am also extremely sorry, believe me. But nothing can be done to prevent natural disasters. They’re a curse that spares no one. And so I don’t complain.”
“Natural disasters?” asked Karamallah, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“May Allah keep you from ever finding yourself in such a situation. Who in the world could have expected an earthquake on such a quiet summer night? Well, the earth quaked, creating an unfathomable mystery around Nasr City. We will never know how or why I was made the victim of nature’s whim.”
“An earthquake? Where?” asked Nimr worriedly, taking off his glasses in order to perceive the event more clearly.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Karamallah advised. “We escaped this earthquake — it didn’t do us the honor of coming through our neighborhood. I find that it lacked tact in respect to us.”
Karamallah’s pleasant little speech seemed full of innuendo to Suleyman, like a clever refutation of the lovely tale he had just told.
“What? You didn’t know about it?” he asked, as if he were completely stunned by his companions’ amazing ignorance of such a terrifying bit of news. “True, Nasr City is far enough away that one doesn’t always know what goes on there. And then, the government asked the newspapers not to reveal the incident so the people wouldn’t find out about it. But I thought men of your education must have heard about the disaster in one of those cynical intellectual circles always on the lookout for scandal.”
“No,” said Karamallah. “As you can see, even people with our education were not aware of it. Yet you have warmed our hearts. My friends and I are happy to learn that the true cause of the building’s collapse was a natural disaster and had nothing to do with faulty construction materials. The martyrs sacrificed beneath the ruins have only cantankerous nature to blame.”
“On my honor, it’s the plain truth,” Suleyman assured them. “In fact it was confirmed by two experts I brought in from abroad to rule out any accusation of fraud. They examined every piece of rubble, analyzed the air around the site, and concluded that it had indeed been an earthquake. Those scientists cost enough for me to set great store by their conclusion.”
“I’ve noticed,” said Ossama, “that earthquakes always occur in the poorest regions of the world. One has to wonder if nature doesn’t despise the poor.”
“It only proves that nature behaves as basely toward the poor as men do,” said Karamallah. “But these frivolous ideas won’t interest our eminent guest in the least.”
It would be an understatement to say that Karamallah was overjoyed with this meeting he had arranged in the hope of learning something new about ignominy in all its glory. He was choking with admiration for the inventive cynicism of the man with his persecuted apartment building. The stroke of inspiration — a selective earthquake that had targeted his building! — deserved to be noted as crucial progress in the long history of human abjection. Karamallah only feared not being able to control his sarcastic remarks, thereby irritating Suleyman, who would then put an end to this feast for the mind.
As always when he appealed to his honor, Suleyman thought he had fooled Karamallah and his friends, and he looked at them with the smugness of someone proven innocent by foreign experts. Was it scorn or his complete ignorance of people’s ability to see through his lies that guaranteed his perfect serenity? No one had mentioned the letter, and he did not understand the silence that surrounded the subject as if it were some shady business. He didn’t know that Ossama — following the instructions of the master — was to broach the matter as late as possible so as to make the pleasure last. The young man was feeling a pressing need to get the conversation going again when Suleyman beat him to it, suddenly having decided it was time to deal with this scandalous missive, the work of a notorious imbecile, by speaking directly to Ossama, the presumed keeper of the thing.