Summary
Chapter 8
Said sneaks into the Sheikh’s home and is pleased that this will be a good place to hide. He can still hear the gunshot in his head and knows he ought to announce himself to the Sheikh but he is too exhausted. The call to dawn prayers echo, and he thinks of how much he has always loved dawn—it is a time of promise, of love and joy in his past life.
When he sleeps, he dreams of jail. The dream morphs into a car chase, then Rauf Ilwan appears to menace him. The Sheikh appears next and demands his identity card, which he cannot procure. He gives him the revolver instead; the Sheikh’s insistence about the card makes him wonder why the government is involved. The Sheikh informs him Rauf Ilwan is up for Supreme Sheikh, and will offer a new exegesis of the Koran so all interpretations are valued.
Said wakes and sees the Sheikh there. The Sheikh tells him it is late afternoon and he must have food. Said wonders if people saw him sleeping there. The Sheikh sighs that he is wretched, that he has slept long but has no rest. Said wonders what the Sheikh would say if he pointed the revolver at him.
Said wishes he could tell him everything but he knows he cannot. Outside the window a voice hawks the newspaper, which Said gets up and pays for. He sees the blaring headline “Dastardly Murder in the Citadel Quarter” and sees his picture, and those of Nabawiyya and Ilish. Confused, he reads that the victim was actually another man. Ilish had moved his family out and a new family moved in, so Said had pointlessly killed a man named Shaban Husayn. It was all so insane to him.
The Sheikh has an ambiguous smile as he gazes outside, and Said wishes he could look out the window and smile like that. But now he is a hunted man, alone for the rest of his days. He will have to go up the hill and stay until dark. His thoughts turn to the murdered man: who was he? Did he have children?
The Sheikh comments that Said is tired, and Said replies that this world makes him tired. Said stands and says farewell, and the Sheikh responds that he ought to say “until we meet again” (83).
Chapter 9
It is dark in Nur’s flat and Said wonders when Nur will be back. When he hears her, he clears his throat so she will not be afraid, and announces himself. She is exultant when she sees him, and tells him that it was very stressful with the police yesterday.
Said comments that the air is very fresh here, and she replies that it is open country, with only a cemetery outside. Nur says he can stay as long as he wants, and asks about his people. He coldly says he has no people. He sees her beaming with happiness and is irritated, but tells her he is divorced. She tells him Nabawiyya does not deserve him. He thinks that at least his ex-wife was full of vitality, while Nur only arouses pity in him.
Nur says she will let him stay forever, but nervously asks if he has done something serious. He demurs, and becomes annoyed when she pouts that he used to be so cold to her. She sees his face and apologizes, then suggests a cold shower. He agrees, and she adds that she will make some food.
Chapter 10
Said looks out to the cemetery. There are graves as far as the eye can see; it is “a city of silence and truth, where success and failure, murderer and victim, come together, where thieves and policemen lie side by side in peace for the first and last time” (89).
Nur goes to the bathroom to fix her hair. She and Said are both thirty, but she lies, hoping to appear younger.
After she leaves, Said lolls about the room. He has nothing to do but think. He finds Sana’s coldness disquieting, and knows she will never love him. He thinks back to when he first met Nabawiyya. She was a servant girl, working for a wealthy Turkish woman who wanted her servants to dress nicely, and he saw her often at the grocery near the students’ hostel where he worked. He would stare at her and wait for her after work, infatuated with her beauty and grace. Over time he noticed her form reacted to his stare, so he decided to approach her. She feigned annoyance, but he could tell she was interested in him. Later on, he asked her to marry him and she was full of happiness. Their future seemed bright; he had good wages, a flat, and excellent prospects. The wedding was lovely and Ilish Sidra, who was there, seemed overjoyed at it all. Said wishes he hadn’t been taken in by his former friend, but at the time he trusted Ilish and Nabawiyya implicitly. He still cannot believe she “could ever give up a lion and take to a dog” (94).
The graves outside are silent and dark, but Said cannot turn the light on; everything has to look the same when Nur is out. Even the dead must not know he is here. He thinks he may have to take a walk at some point or another, but hopes Shaban Husayn is not buried outside. For now, though, he will have to tolerate darkness and loneliness.
Said dozes off and when he wakes, Nur is coming in. She is ebullient, and tells him she bought a lot of food to prepare a feast for them. He can tell she was drinking, but she shrugs that it is part of her job. He reads through all the papers she brought him. They all focus on the crime, especially Rauf’s paper, which discusses his history as a thief and the things that came out at his trial. It suggests he is insane, which he finds amusing. Imagine all the people discussing him and Nabawiyya’s infidelity—he is the center of the news, the man of the hour. This makes him apprehensive and proud, and he wishes he could communicate with all the people outside. He wants to tell them he will win, even if it is after death. Yet he is separate from everyone, and no one knows what he is enduring.
He turns to the picture of Sana in the paper. She is smiling in it, and he feels an immense sense of failure. He wishes he could run away with her.
Nur calls him in to eat. He can tell she spent a lot of money and is proud of her work. This makes him feel glad, and he tells her he is happy being with her. As they eat and drink, he asks her to buy some cloth for him that could make an officer’s uniform. She is uneasy, but he says he learned tailoring in jail and the time has come for his military service. He confidently adds that she should not worry about him.
They kiss, and she says frankly that the truth is that “to live at all we’ve got to be afraid of nothing” (100). When he asks about death, she says when she is with someone she loves, she is not afraid of even that. He is surprised and pleased by the strength of her affection.
Analysis
Having no home of his own, Said seeks solace and sustenance under the roofs of both the Sheikh and Nur. As a holy man, the Sheikh would naturally be different from most people, but the contrast between him and Said is quite striking. The Sheikh is calm while Said is constantly rankled by the world, by his past, by the unfairness of it all. The Sheikh has a home that is a refuge, while Said has no home and no place is really a refuge for him. The Sheikh finds joy in life while Said does not; at one point Said watches the Sheikh looking out the window, smiling, and thinks, “The smile, for some reason or other, frightened Said: he wished he could stand at the window and look at exactly the same bit of sky the Sheikh was looking at so he could see what it was that made him smile. But the wish was unfulfilled” (81). Ultimately, the Sheikh has made his peace with the world while Said never will.
That is not the say that Mahfouz is suggesting the Sheikh is perfect, or that if only Said would be like him all his problems would be solved. In fact, as critic R. El-Enany suggests, Mahfouz’s novels, especially The Thief and the Dogs, ultimately express the “irrelevance of religion to the predicament of modern life.” There is a “complete divorce between the harsh reality in which Said Mahran lives and the imperturbable peace of the mystic Shakyh Junaydi,” and “Junaydi can not save Said from his anguish, nor can Said afford to retreat into a transcendental world as if he had not been betrayed and wronged.” El-Enany believes that Mahfouz’s world is one in which “God is dead and buried, and in which the history of man consists in a protracted and unrelenting struggle for the achievement of a just social order on earth.”
Said’s struggles are expressed through his inner monologues, delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. Critic Michelle Hartman sees the structure and style of the novel as important in Mahfouz’s development as an author, explaining “Mahfouz is best known for his ‘realistic’ novels—conventional, long narratives tracing the lives of entire families with lengthy and detailed descriptive passages. Al-Liss wa'l kilab [The Thief and the Dogs] breaks from this earlier style by using concise and sparing language, as well as formal innovations such as shifting narrative voices, long passages of interior monologues and flashbacks. These techniques confuse time sequences and linear narrative progression. A work that makes such a radical break in formal techniques re-writes novelistic discourse. This re-writing is part of a larger project of experimentation in al-Liss wa'V kilab, and is the first of a series of modernist novels by Mahfouz.”
As aforementioned, Said also weaves in memories of the past with his current ruminations; those past memories are almost always very positive, as if it helps him maintain his current rage to sugarcoat the past and think of it as a time when everything was perfect. He can more easily maintain the “justness” of his actions if he never did anything wrong and was betrayed by everyone he loved.
The past is an ideal time, but Said doesn’t necessarily want to get back to it—what he wants to do instead is create a new world that makes sense to him. He chides himself not to dream or lighten his grip on his plan for revenge, thinking, “Does your ruined life have any meaning at all unless it is to kill your enemies—Ilish Sidra, whereabouts unknown, and Rauf Ilwan, in his mansion of steel? What meaning will there have been in your life if you fail to teach your enemies a lesson? No power on earth will prevent the punishing of the dogs!” (112). He can have no peace unless he kills Rauf especially: “What nonsense life would turn out to be if I were myself killed tomorrow—in retribution for murdering a man I didn’t even know! If there’s going to be any meaning to life—and to death, too—I simply have to kill [Rauf]. My last outburst of rage at the evil of the world” (114). Clearly he isn’t trying to have a future in which he is living, working, happy, at peace; instead, the only future he can imagine is an immediate one in which his enemies are vanquished.
