Summary
Chapter 1
Said Mahran is just out of jail, stepping into the air of freedom. Yet there is dust, and heat, and no one in the world seems happy. No one has suffered more than him, though; he has lost four years due to betrayal from Nabawiyya and Ilish. The two of them have no idea he is going to come for them someday.
He thinks of his daughter, Sana, wondering how much she even knows of him. He then decides he must focus, must pull together his cunning and prepare to strike at his ex-wife and her new husband.
Consumed with gloom and rage, he walks through the evening streets. He remembers the strange street of al-Saayrafi and its dark memories. He remembers the glorious days of love and parenthood and crime and food. Now he must seem conciliatory and friendly so no one will suspect anything.
People begin to notice him and greet him with surprise, but he is not happy; these are Ilish’s men, his spies. As they are standing near Ilish’s house, a man calls up to Ilish to congratulate Said. Said does not want a drink with the men, telling them he has things to settle first. They tell him to reach an understanding. He replies he is there to do that.
Above him, Said sees the detective, Hasaballah, in Ilish’s window. The detective comes down and pats him down for weapons, and aggressively asks what he wants. Said tells him he is here to reach an understanding about his daughter. Hasaballah scoffs that he can always go to court.
Ilish calls down that they should all come upstairs. When he enters the room, he is well-dressed and fat, his voice booming that he is glad Said is home and they will let bygones be bygones. Said listens, and feels “like a tiger crouched to spring on an elephant” (19). He tells Ilish he agrees with what he says, but in his mind he curses him, thinking of his stolen wife and fortune.
Another man tells him Sana is safe with her mother, and according to the law that is where she should be. Said replies that according to the law she should be with him, especially in view of various circumstances. He did not commit a crime, he did not leave the girl in need. The detective roars at him that it was loot, and Ilish says there was no money. Said responds by asking how he lives so well, and Ilish sputters that he will not account for himself to Said.
The detective tells Said to stick to the point of the daughter, and then tells him he knows he doesn’t really want the girl. It is best, though, if he gets to see her. Ilish goes to fetch the girl. Said is filled with anticipation. Sana looks surprised. He cannot take his eyes off of her. She is pushed toward him but tries to move back and Said is crushed with loss. It seems like she is not even his daughter. She does not want to shake hands with him, and starts crying and yelling for her mother. Said pleads with her to come to him and tells her she is his, but she is screaming.
Finally the detective says to leave her be, as she does not know him. Angry, Said says he will take her, but the detective says a judge can decide. Said desperately tries to suppress his rage. He takes a deep breath and says yes, he understands—he will find a real job and reassess the situation.
Before he leaves, he asks for his books. Ilish says most of them were destroyed by Sana. Said is saddened to see that most of them have indeed been lost.
Chapter 2
Said walks out into the setting sun. He comes to a house, remembering the last time he crossed this simple threshold. His mind takes him back to childhood with his father, which was a gentle, loving time.
Inside the room he can hear a man concluding prayers. It is the Sheikh, cross-legged, eyes closed, with a long white beard and a beatific expression. Said enters and kisses the man’s hands, “suppressing tears of nostalgia for his father, his boyish hopes, the innocent purity of the distant past” (26).
Said sits before the holy man and asks his forgiveness; he has nowhere else to go. He announces that he got out of jail today. The Sheikh sorrowfully says he has not come from jail. Said smiles, remembering how cryptic and full of double meanings that Sheikh’s words always were.
Said asks if he remembers his father, but he cannot understand the Sheikh’s reply like his father could. He says his own daughter rejected him. The Sheikh intones that he seeks a roof and nothing else. Said feels uneasy.
He asks more of the Sheikh, who responds in riddles. He says he needs a kind word; the Sheikh tells him not to tell lies. He asks what he can do for the Sheikh, and the Sheikh says to take the Koran and read. Said is confused and tells him of his wife, who committed adultery with one of his servile pupils and then divorced him. Now the man is a big man, and he and Said’s wife betrayed him. The Sheikh repeats his call for Said to read and say verses.
Said’s mind flashes to his father listening to the Sheikh, and how happy he’d been in childhood. He remembers the first time he saw Nabawiyya coming towards him. Now, though, he is faced with the first night of his freedom and he is alone.
Chapter 3
Said flips through Al-Zahra to find Rauf Ilwan’s column. It seems more vapid, albeit diverting enough. He needs Rauf to begin his life anew, so he goes to the paper’s offices. His glaring eyes unnerve people.
He waits for Rauf, who is clearly now a very important man. He wonders what Rauf is like now; will he have changed? Will he disown him? He tries to be more positive, thinking of Rauf as a friend and mentor.
He decides to go to Rauf’s villa instead. He marvels at this palace of a home, and wonders how his friend achieved it. As for himself, he only looked at houses like this when he was figuring out how to break into them.
A car pulls up to the gate and Said springs up. He announces himself and though he cannot read Rauf’s expression, Rauf tells him to get in. They drive through the gate and down the drive. Said is pleased, thinking Rauf is the same as he was. Rauf asks when he got out and they make small talk as they pull up to the house.
Inside, Said is impressed with the luxurious decor and objets d’art. Yet when he looks at Rauf, there is something chilly and unfamiliar in the man’s expression, a “quality that could only have come from a touch of blue blood” (39). They sit down, and a servant brings in drinks and light snacks. Said toasts to freedom.
As they sip, Said tells him of his experience with his daughter and the detective. Rauf tells him the daughter is young, and will grow to love him. The phone rings and Rauf goes out on the veranda. Said can tell he is talking to a woman. He begins to wonder if Rauf has betrayed their former ideals, and is certain that he will have to make him pay for it.
Rauf returns and congratulates Said on his release. He smoothly states that Said has come out of prison to find a new world. These words rankle Said; he feels stupid to have thought Rauf was sincere. He changes the subject to the villa, and makes a comment about the decor that offends Rauf.
Rauf asks, as if he wishes to end their meeting, what sort of future Said is thinking about—after all, things must change completely. Said says in his whole life he’s only managed to master one trade. Shocked, Rauf asks if he is planning to go back to burglary. Said shrugs and says it is rewarding. Rauf says firmly that in the past Said was both a thief and his friend, but now the situation has changed—if Said goes back to burglary, he will not be his friend.
Said is annoyed and springs to his feet, but tries to calm himself and asks what is a suitable profession. He says he’d be happy to be a journalist at Rauf’s paper. Rauf shakes his head. He tells Said not to joke, and that he is no writer and just got out of jail. Said scoffs that Rauf wants him to get a menial job and Rauf replies that no job is menial if it is honest. Exasperated, Said says it is marvelous for the rich to recommend poverty to others.
Said decides he must go, and Rauf acknowledges that he is busy and will have no free time like this in the future. He gives Said a bit of money. Said thanks him and wishes him good fortune.
Analysis
The first thing readers learn about Said Mahran is that he is just out of jail, but it takes a bit longer to ascertain that it was for theft, that Said feels wrongly convicted (but was indeed guilty), and that it was his former pupil and friend who turned him in—and, to add insult to injury, this former pupil is now married to Said’s ex-wife, who divorced him in jail. While Said certainly has much to be furious about, we never learn anything else about the situation with his wife—was Said a good husband? Were they happy? How long did she think he was going to be away? Did she just want a father figure for Sana?—so his intense ire towards her doesn’t seem like it’s the whole story.
In fact, Mahfouz structures the novel so we only have Said’s thoughts and feelings and memories to guide us. He keeps his narrative focus explicitly on Said and interjects sections of Said’s stream-of-consciousness narration, itself often centered on memories that could be misremembered, hazy, or embellished. We never get into the minds of the people who surround Said, so there is no way to ascertain the veracity of his assertions.
In terms of sympathy for Said, Mahfouz lets the reader start off with a modicum of it. Said’s thieving apparently never bothered his now-enemies Ilish (who may have been involved), Nabawiyya (who was definitely involved), and Rauf (who gave his approval to Said’s “profession”), yet Ilish turned him in and perhaps took all of his money. His wife did leave him, whether he deserved it or not, and in a heartbreaking scene, his daughter Sana brutally rejects him as her father. His own parents are not living, so he has no one to turn to. The world itself seems forbidding when he gets out: “there was stifling dust in the air, almost unbearable heat, and no one was waiting for him...No one seemed smiled or seemed happy” (13). His one hope of Rauf, with whom he seems to have had a solid relationship before prison, turns out to be unfounded, and he is made to feel worse than he did before he reached out to his former friend.
As we will see in subsequent analyses, however, readers’ sympathy for Said will soon evaporate. There are already glimpses in these first few chapters of Said’s obsessiveness and lack of desire to create a new life for himself. He crows of his endurance in jail and how he will be able to “culminate in a blow” (14). He sneers about his enemies—“I swear I hate you all” (14)—and when the hour comes for his revenge, “neither detective nor walls will do you any good” (18). Hasaballah’s claim that Said doesn’t actually want his daughter will come to sound more and more true as Said abandons any pretense of making a new life for himself and finding an appropriate way for Sana to be part of it in favor of his taking his long-awaited revenge.
One of the places Said finds some peace in this world that has no place for him is the Sheikh’s home. He and the Sheikh are diametrically opposed, however, with the differences between the two rapidly expanding every time they meet. Rasheed El-Enany notes: “[Said and the Sheikh] are the emblems of two worlds that cannot meet: the mystic has achieved peace with the world by completely withdrawing from its harsh reality and creating an inner invisible one for himself, while Said is too enmeshed in the ugliness of reality to be able to see or seek a way to deal with it other than by self-condemning confrontation. The incompatibility of the two worlds and the irrelevance of transcendental escapism are shown through masterful pieces of dialogue at cross-purposes, worthy of the best traditions of the Theatre of the Absurd, between Said and the holy man.”
