Karnak Café by Naguib Mahfouz Page A

prison.’
    â€œÂ â€˜Are you suggesting that you haven’t been well treated here?’
    â€œÂ â€˜My dear sir,’ I replied in a tone that was tantamount to an appeal for help, ‘the treatment I have received here has been appalling and utterly unjustified.’
    â€œÂ â€˜God forbid!’
    â€œI realized at once that I had just made a dreadful mistake, but it was too late.
    â€œÂ â€˜So,’ he asked again, ‘when did you join the Muslim Brotherhood?’
    â€œÂ â€˜I never …,’ I started to reply but never finished the sentence. I started falling to the floor in a crumpled mass; it rushed up to greet me in a manner that seemed almost magical. Khalid Safwan soon disappeared into the gloom. Later on, Hilmi Hamada told me that one of the devils standing behind me had hit me so hard that I fainted. When I came to, I was back in the same place they had taken me from—on the asphalt floor in the cell.”
    â€œWhat an ordeal!” I said.
    â€œYes, it was,” he replied. “The whole thing ended suddenly and unexpectedly. What’s more, it was actually in Khalid Safwan’s own room.”
    â€œÂ â€˜We now have proof,’ he told me as soon as they brought me in, ‘that your name was recorded on a list because you had donated a piaster to build a mosque. You never had an actual connection with them.’
    â€œÂ â€˜Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been telling you?’ I asked in a voice quivering with emotion.
    â€œÂ â€˜It’s an excusable error,’ he replied. ‘But contempt for the revolution is inexcusable.’ With that he proceeded to deliver his lecture with the greatest conviction. ‘We are here to protect the state that manages to keep you free of all kinds of subservience.’
    â€œÂ â€˜I am one of its loyal children.’
    â€œÂ â€˜Just look on the time you have spent here as a period of hospitality. Always remember how well you were treated. I trust that you’ll always remember that. Just bear in mind the fact that scores of people have been laboring night and day in order to prove your innocence.’
    â€œÂ â€˜I thank both God and you, sir.’ ”
    The sheer memory of that moment led Isma‘il al-Shaykh to let out a bitter laugh.
    â€œWere other people arrested for the same reason?” I asked.
    â€œThere were in fact two members of the Muslim Brothers in our group,” he replied. “They interrogated Zaynab and learned of her relationship with me, so they released her as well. It was because of us that they had arrested Hilmi. When they discovered that I was innocent, they did the same for him too.”
    It was all a very bitter experience for him. As a result hehad come to totally distrust a government agency, namely the secret police. In spite of that, his belief in the state itself and the revolution remained rock-solid and unshaken; neither doubt nor corruption could alter his opinion on that score. As far as he was concerned, the secret police were using techniques of their own devising, but the people in authority remained in the dark.
    â€œWhen I was released,” Isma‘il said, “I thought about complaining to the government authorities, but Hilmi Hamada used every argument he could to stop me.”
    â€œHe obviously didn’t believe in the very state itself, wouldn’t you say?”
    â€œYes.”
    After the dreadful defeat of June 1967, Isma‘il set himself to study modern Egyptian history for the first time.
    â€œI have to tell you,” he said, “that I’ve been constantly surprised by the power and freedom that the opposition always had and also by the role played by the Egyptian judiciary. It wasn’t a period of undiluted evil. Quite the contrary, there was a whole series of intellectual trends that deserved to continue, and indeed to grow and flourish. It is the