Pharaoh is intrigued and will set his upon that face. Of course he cannot join the men, however highborn, who knock on the Biga island palace door. It seems odd and amusing that there is no rivalry for her bed and favours shown. Is Mahfouz slyly exposing another side ofthat noble quality, brotherhood — decadence? They share her. There is music and witty exchange, she may dance or sing for them if the mood takes her and there's informed political debate in this salon-cum-brothel before she indicates which distinguished guest she will allow to her bed at the end of the entertainment.
If kingly rank had not proscribed Pharaoh from joining the brotherhood he might have gained political insight to the issues facing his kingdom. Aside from the priests’ demands, there is a rebellion of the Maasayu tribes, and from the courtiers comes the familiar justification of colonialism which is to be exposed with such subtlety and conviction in Mahfouz's future fiction. One of Rhadopis's admirers questions, ‘Why are the Maasayu always in revolt?’ when ‘Those lands under Egyptian rule enjoy peace and prosperity. We do not oppose the creeds of others.’ The more politically astute supporter of the imperial-colonial system: ‘The truth… is that the Maasayu question has nothing to do with politics or religion… They are threatened by starvation… and at the same time they possess treasure [natural resources] of gold and silver… and when the Egyptians undertake to put it to good use, they attack them.’ There's argument, for and against, over the priests’ demands and Pharaoh's intransigence. ‘The theocrats now own a third of all the agricultural land in the kingdom.’ ‘Surely there are causes more deserving of money than temples?'
The ironic dynamism of the story is that it is to be how the ‘cause’ of young Pharaoh's desire to build palaces and acquire a woman whose extravagance matches his — political power and erotic power clasped together — contests the place of ‘more deserving'.
Yes it's Milan Kundera's maxim — the novelist is asking questions, not supplying answers — that makes this novel as challenging and entertaining as the conversation in Rhadopis's salon. House of fame, house of shame? As she becomes Pharaoh's mistress and obsession, is she the cause of his downfall, his people turning against him, their worshipped representative of the gods, because of his squandering of the nation's wealth on a courtesan? Or is Pharaoh a figure of the fatality of inherent human weakness? Is it not in our stars — fall from the sky of a gold sandal — but in ourselves, the Pharaoh himself, to fulfil personal desires? And further: isn't it the terrible danger in power itself that it may be used for ultimate distorted purpose. Dictators, tyrants. Mahfouz sets one's mind off beyond the instance of his story.
Rhadopis herself. Beginning with the introduction as prototype Barbie Doll as well as femme fatale the young Mahfouz achieves an evocation of the inner contradictions of the life she lives that no other writer whose work I know has matched. Zola's Nana must retire before her. On the evening at the end of the Nile festival, Rhadopis's admirer-clients knock on her door as usual. After dancing suggestively at the men's request, ‘dalliance and sarcasm came over her again'. To Hof, eminent philosopher among them: ‘You have seen nothing of the things I have seen.’ Pointing to the drunken throng, ‘… the cream of Egypt… prostrating themselves at my feet… It is as if I am among wolves.’ All this regarded amid laughter, as her titillating audacity. No one among these distinguished men seems to feel shame at this degradation of a woman; no one sees it as a consequence of the poverty she was born into, and from which it was perhaps her only escape. The class-based denial of the existence of any critical intelligence in menial women, including prostitutes, is always an injustice refuted convincingly by Mahfouz's women. This night she uses the only weapon they respect, capriciously withholds herself. ‘Tonight I shall belong to no man.'
A theatrical ‘storm of defiance’ is brewing in her as she lies sleepless. It may read like the cliche passing repentance of one who lives by the sale of her body. But the salutary mood is followed next night by her order that her door should be kept closed to everyone.
That is the night Pharaoh comes to her. No door may be closed to him. He is described as sensually as Mahfouz's female characters. The encounter is one of erotic beauty and meaning without necessity of scenes of sexual gyration. It is also the beginning of Pharaoh's neglect of state affairs for the power of a ‘love affair that was costing Egypt a fortune'. The price: prime minister Khnumhotep has had to carry out Pharaoh's decree to sequester temple estates. Pharaoh's choice is for tragedy, if we accept that the fall of the mighty is tragedy's definition, as against the clumsy disasters of ordinary, fallible people. Rhadopis, in conflict between passion for a man who is also a king and the epiphany of concern for the Egyptian people of whom she is one, uses her acute mind to devise means by which Pharoah may falsely claim that there is a revolt of the Maasayu tribes in the region of the priests’ lands and summon his army there to overcome the real rebellion, that of the priests. The intricate subterfuge involves exploiting an innocent boy — also in love with her — when Rhadopis resorts to her old powers of seduction to use him as messenger.
Tragedy is by definition inexorable as defeated Pharaoh speaks after the priests have exposed his actions to his people and the mob is about to storm the walls of his palace. ‘Madness will remain as long as there are people alive… I have made for myself a name that no Pharaoh before me ever was called: The Frivolous King.’ An arrow from the mob pierces his breast. ‘Rhadopis,’ he orders his men, ‘Take me to her… I want… to expire on Biga.’ We hardly have been aware of the existence of Pharaoh's unloved wife, the queen; how impressively she emerges now with a quiet command, ‘Garry out my lord's desire.’ Mahfouz's nascent brilliance as, above all political, moral, philosophical purpose, a story-teller, is revealed in the emotional pace of events by which this story meets its moving, questioning end, with the irony that Rhadopis's last demand on a man is to have the adoring boy messenger find a phial of poison with which she will join Pharaoh in death, final consummation of sexual passion. For the last, unrequited lover, asked how he obtained the phial, Mahfouz plumbs the boy's horror in the answer: “I brought it to her myself What was the young writer, Mahfouz, saying about love?
The Nile is the flowing harbinger of Egypt's destiny in the scope of Mahfouz's re-imagined pharaonic history, starting with Khufu's Wisdom, Fourth Dynasty, continuing with Rhadophis of Nubia, Sixth Dynasty, and concluding with Thebes at War, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Dynasty.
A ship from the North arrives up the Nile, at Thebes. On board not a courtesan or a princess but the chamberlain of Apophis, Pharaoh by conquest of both the North and South kingdoms. Again, through the indirection of an individual's thoughts, anticipation is roused as one reads the musing of this envoy: “I wonder, tomorrow will the trumpet sound… Will the peace of these tranquil houses be shattered…? Ah, how I wish these people knew what a warning this ship brings them and their master!’ He is the emissary of an ancient colonialism. Thebes is virtually a colony of Apophis's reign. The southerners are, within the traditional (unchanging) justification of colonization, different: darker than self-appointed superior beings — in this era the Hyksos of the North, from Memphis. Compared with these, a member of the chamberlain's mission remarks, the southerners are ‘like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun'. And the chamberlain adds, ‘Despite their colour and their nakedness… they claim they are descended from the loins of the gods and that their country is the wellspring of the true pharoahs.’ I wonder what Naguib Mahfouz, looking back to
1938 when his prescient young self wrote his novel, thought of how we know, not through any godly dispensation, but by palaeontological discovery, that black Africa — which the southerners and the Nubians represent in the story — is the home of the origin of all humankind.