Muhammad, “All in a Summer’s Night”
Muhammad is the member of the group of young men in this story who relax after a long day’s work on a pile of hay telling stories. It is Muhammad’s insistence that his tale of actual hands-on experience with a better life offering leisure and excitement and the potential for escape from poverty that is the engine which drives the turn in the plot from mere observance into a call to action.
Abdul Aal, “The Treasure”
This is a very short and simple story told by a dispassionate third-person narrator. Abdul is a plain-clothes policeman who has recently been interrogated in connection with one item of missing evidence. He gives into the pressure and confesses, but cannot come up with an adequate reason for doing what he does. That he remains on the force with only barely detectable punishment is not the real gut-punch of the story, however. There is a coda to that ending which challenges the expected notions of subject and theme.
El Shabrawi, “The Errand”
Shabrawi is another policeman, but quite different from Abdul Aal. He grew up in Cairo and wants to relive the innocence of his youth by returning there when the opportunity presents itself in the form of delivering a woman to an insane asylum located in the city. Like most attempts to extricate nostalgic memories from the brutality of reality, his journey becomes a long dark night of the soul in which the trip is an urban nightmare that ends with a renewed appreciation of the conditions of his current situation.
Abdel al-Kerim, “The Cheapest Nights”
A character who is in many ways the embodiment of the author’s obsessive portrayal of the theme of the cycle of poverty. Abdel cannot find sleep on a cold night because he has consumed too much caffeine. Too poor to afford any way of entertaining himself during the night, he walks with eyes wide shut over the sleeping figures of his many children and into the warmth of his wife’s sleeping body. Sex is free when you are married and the wife is prime choice when you are too poor to afford a prostitute. Nine months later his brood of six has increased by one and all the many factors contributing to his unbreakable poverty are revealed as working in perfect harmony to keep him down.
