Free Morning and Evening Talk by Naguib Mahfouz Page B

schooling complete. The family was overjoyed with his homecoming, but it was short-lived for he said, “They’re sending us on a delegation to France.”
    “A land of infidels!” cried Yazid.
    “To study medicine.”
    “If God hadn’t been looking out for me I’d be going too!” exclaimed Aziz.
    Dawud left to begin an experience he would never have dreamed of. During his absence, Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad died, Aziz fathered Rashwana, Amr, and Surur, and Ata al-Murakibi leaped from the depths of poverty to the summits of wealth and moved from al-Ghuriya to the mansion on Khayrat Square. Dawud returned a doctor and headed to his old house in al-Ghuriya, where Aziz and his family lived alone. Affection united the two brothers once more. Aziz began observing his brother with interest and apprehension. He was happy to find him observing his prayers and still as fond as before of visiting al-Hussein, though his clothes had changed and, to a degree, so had the way he spoke. He seemed to behiding another side of himself that he had obtained in the infidel land. “Didn’t they try to turn you away from your religion?” Aziz asked him.
    “Not at all,” he answered laughing.
    Aziz would have liked to talk to him more about “them” but didn’t want to upset the peace. He also asked, “Is it true you cut bodies open?”
    “When necessary. For the good of the patient,” Dawud replied.
    Aziz praised God in secret for conferring flight on him that day long ago.
    “If things had been different you could be a father by now,” he said to his brother.
    “That’s uppermost in my mind,” Dawud said.
    There was a Turkish family in Darb Qirmiz, the Rafat family. He pointed them out and said, “Maybe they’d approve a doctor returned from France for their daughter.”
    They decided that Ata al-Murakibi, in his new circumstances, was the right person to raise the matter. But Dawud was refused as a vulgar peasant. Neither his knowledge nor his suit or job could intercede on his behalf. The young man was hurt and looked to his brother, Aziz, for guidance. “There’s the Warraq family that owns the paper supplier where our father works,” said Aziz. They were a family with Syrio-Egyptian roots. The brothers found what they were looking for in the great al-Warraq’s granddaughter, Saniya. The family welcomed the groom. The wedding was held and Dawud took his bride to a new house in al-Sayyida. She gave him a son, Abd al-Azim, and three daughters whom death snatched away as infants. Dawud advanced in his profession until he earned the rank of pasha and his official and intellectual standing was firmly established. It was destined that he should successfully reconcile his two incongruous identities. In his medical profession he was a fine emissary for the new civilization, with a vision of thenation’s future driven by a painful awareness of what the country lacked in his field and with close friends among both his Egyptian and foreign colleagues. Yet he was also in tune with his wife who, despite her beauty, social rank, and basic education, was not really any different from his mother, Farga al-Sayyad, and older brother’s wife, Ni‘ma al-Murakibi. He never renounced the customs of his family and environment, and visited the house in al-Ghuriya out of love and duty. There he would completely forget his assumed identity, sit at the low round table, tuck into the fish, bean cakes, lentil broth, salted fish, and green onions, and observe the love and affection developing between Abd al-Azim and Rashwana, Amr, and Surur. He visited al-Hussein and wandered around Bab al-Akhdar and got to know his brother’s brother-in-law, Ata al-Murakibi, and two sons, Mahmud and Ahmad, and friend Shaykh al-Qalyubi, the father-in-law of Dawud’s nephew Amr. During these times, he would revert to being the old Dawud, son of Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad, son of al-Ghuriya and its fragrant, penetrating smells, towering