Patience, however vacuous, may have its reward. Othman’s new leap forward was a real one and its great advantage lay in the fact that the Head of Archives presented important mail in person to His Excellency the Director General to receive his instructions confidentially and see that they were carried out. God was pleased with him at long last and the celestial gates were now opened to him, leading to the sublime administrative presence. Here was a royal opportunity that required him to exploit all his experience, culture, suavity, and sincerity. Here was the room, vast as a public square, from which he dreamed he would one day rule. It was a dream that had to come true, no matter what offerings must be made at its altar: a dream to which nobody had access save the meritorious who purchased it in exchange for the cheap and ephemeral pleasures of life.
He studied the enormous room meticulously: the smooth white ceiling, the crystal chandelier, the neatly decorated walls, the tiled fireplace, the blue carpet whose dimensions exceeded anything he had ever imagined possible, the conference table with its green felt cover, and the desk facing him with its strong, curved legs and glass top on which stood an array of silver objects: paper holders, inkpots, pens, a clock, a blotter, an ashtray as well as a wooden cigarette box from Khan al-Khalili.
Now he had ample opportunity to cast furtive looks at the lucky Director as he sat on his large chair: sharp dark eyes and a well-shaven face, a dark red tarboosh, a fragrant scent, a black mustache of medium length and width, an aura of vitality all around him, his girth moderate, though his height could not be ascertained with accuracy. Above all an air of solemn and unbending reticence, which made the earning of his friendship an aspiration difficult to achieve.
There he stood in audience before him, conscious of his breathing and within the aura of his fragrant scent, almost hearing his pulsebeat and reading his thoughts. He stood there seeking to learn his wishes and eager to obey his commands before they were uttered. In the light of his smile he read the future; and his dearest dream was always that he would one day sit in his place.
With pious deference he bowed and said, “Good morning, Your Excellency.”
The man looked up and mumbled some sort of reply to his greeting.
“Othman Bayyumi, Head of Archives,” he announced by way of introducing himself. In the way the Director lifted his normally level eyebrows Othman read the equivalent of a smile, though no smile showed on his lips.
“The new one, sir,” he added.
“And the translator. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” he answered, his heart beating.
“Your style is good,” he said in a low voice.
“Your encouragement is a great honor, sir.”
“Any important mail?”
He began opening the envelopes dexterously, showing the Director their contents and scrupulously taking down his instructions. He bowed again and left the room drunk with happiness. On his way back to Archives he thought how Hamza al-Suwayfi was now passing out of his life into the shadows, until the darkness should swallow him as it had swallowed Sa‘fan Basyuni, and how from that moment his future was in the hands of (next to Almighty God) His Excellency.
“Beware of slow progress, Othman,” he told himself. “One or two leaps forward will be essential.”
“When Sa‘fan Basyuni was pensioned off he had spent the last half of his service in the same grade,” he told himself again.
He knew only too well that the department had two Deputy Directors, which meant that a leap forward could only materialize through Hamza al-Suwayfi: through either his promotion, his retirement, or…his death. The thought made him feel ashamed, as his thoughts often did, and he prayed to God for forgiveness.
“Why did God create us in such a corrupt image?” he wondered.
He was anything but pleased with that aspect of his own nature, but he accepted it as it was. He believed that on either side of his sacred path the waves of good and evil clashed together, and that nothing could affect its sanctity except weakness, frailty, self-satisfaction, and indulgence in easy delights and daydreams. He prayed: “Forgive me, Oh almighty God! For my only sin is the love of glory You have instilled in me.”
“How can you convince His Excellency of your usefulness? That’s the question,” he said to himself with determination.
How and when would he have the opportunity to render services without immorality or shame: not as a debtor but as a creditor, in the same way as he treated Hamza al-Suwayfi, and within the limits of dignity and pride, yet according to the dictates of official decorum and its usual obsequious language? “My struggle is noble,” he thought to himself. “As for my feelings and thoughts, these belong to God alone.”
He believed that God made man for power and glory. Life was power. Survival was power. Perseverance was power. And God’s heaven could only be attained through power and struggle.
His chance came when His Excellency Bahjat Noor, the Director General, was awarded the Order of the Nile. He composed a congratulatory column and published it in a newspaper he usually supplied with his translations. He hailed the man’s firmness, propriety, good character, administrative talent, and idealism, and declared him a model Egyptian director, a species once thought incapable of replacing the English one.
When he entered the grand room with the mail, His Excellency smiled at him for the first time and said, “Thank you, Mr. Bayyumi.”
“Thanks are only due to God, Your Excellency,” he said as he bowed.
“Your style is really enviable.”
He admitted that it was not only vile wine that made man drunk. But drunkenness did not last and was often followed by a hangover. And he thought the chariot of time was going ever faster. He only remembered that in the distant past, time did not exist: al-Husayni Alley was simply space. Grade five was nothing great for a middle-aged man, a man who constantly lifted up his eyes toward the polestar, who confined himself to his tiny room packed with books, whose best food was ox cheek and kebab on feast days, and whose only pleasures in life were vile wine and the Negress Qadriyya in the bare room.
He needed real human warmth. A bride and a family. He could no longer bear to be consumed in the fire of life on his own.
How he needed a companion in this universe crammed with millions of universes.