The Anchor (Story of the Month)

Story of the Month

... The literature of Sheikh Said Takieddine is counted a summit of the true national vein. "The Anchor" is a living specimen of this literature, and it is taken from his book, "The Camphor Forest"..

Cairo, August 9, 1950

Mr. Hikmat Abdel-Jalil
(an Egyptian summer visitor)
Village of "Ain al-Burghush," Aley District — Lebanon.

Dear Hikmat,

The moment I returned this morning from Alexandria I telephoned your house, and was told you had gone off to summer in Lebanon.

Good God, good God!

Is there anyone left in Egypt whom madness drives to summer in Lebanon?

Do you not read the papers? Do you not follow our great man of letters' campaign against the summer resorts of Lebanon?

And why did you choose this village — the village of Ain al-Burghush — for a summer resort?

We have heard of Zahleh, and Aley, and Dhour el-Choueir — and none of these resorts pleased you, so you tucked yourself away among the mosquitoes; and then... — For God's sake, Hikmat, if you feel any nervous disturbance, pick up your bags and come back to us. I am very anxious about you, and I am eager that you hurry with an answer, if you will not hurry to come. And do not forget that I should be delighted to see to any errand you may want done in Egypt.

Keep well, Hikmat.

From your brother, Atiyah

*

August 28 — Village of "Ain al-Burghush"
Aley District — Lebanon

Dr. Atiyah Mohsen al-Barrawi, 54 Faggala Street —

Cairo — Egypt.

Dear Atiyah,

Greetings, doctor.

I laughed long and loud reading your letter. You ask whether I have any errand in Cairo. I do have one urgent errand there, and I beg you to see to it.

It is that you put on those tremendous boots with the steel hobnails that you used to wear for hunting on the upper Nile, then make for our great man of letters and kick him in the teeth. You ask me why I withdrew to this mosquito-village, and I answer that I am not far from the famous resorts you mention — indeed I often go over to them — but I preferred seclusion in this village (I assure you there is not a single mosquito in it), and I am proud of the choice. And I am going to tell you about these villages you have never heard of, which grow very great in your eyes when you live in them; and about their people, whose like you will not find in the world; and about what happened to me yesterday at a school celebration.

Truly, I am living in a strange world. After renting one of the village houses, I found myself stepping down from a car while a flock of the village boys gathered around me, most of them barefoot, rosy-faced. No sooner had the chauffeur set down my bags than the boys snatched them up in a festival of shouting and glee and carried them into the house.

And when I offered them some money they laughed at me and ran off, and would take no pay.

And when I opened the door to set the house in order, I found a company of the village's women and men who had volunteered to serve me, hailing me with honeyed phrases and smiling faces. Night had scarcely come when delegations arrived to spend the evening with me, welcoming me warmly and in poetic terms, until I fancied myself a son of theirs come home from some world-conquest.

And I found that wherever I walked, hands went up in greeting to me, so that I asked myself what I had done for these fellows to deserve all this honoring.

As for the grapes and figs and plums and cucumbers and tomatoes and all the other fruit and vegetables, I do not know what they cost, because every morning they pile up at my house as presents from the neighbors — I could open a shop. And when they learned that my daughter in Cairo collects stamps, colored letter-envelopes came to me by the dozens, until I had gathered hundreds of postage stamps — Brazilian, Argentine, American, Australian. It appears that a great number of the sons of "Ain al-Burghush" are scattered over the ends of the earth.

The most open-handed of them with stamps was the village baker, for he has a son studying engineering in Denmark.

Truly they are a rare people, with a mania for the education of their children that is like a touch of madness. You see one of them, teeth smashed, clothes in rags, bent over the stones, hewing them with steel from al-fajr to al-najr — a saying of theirs meaning from morning to evening — to save a lira, and add it to a lira, until they become hundreds, which he spends on one of his sons at some university in Beirut or Paris or New York; and he does it joyous and proud, to secure for his son the higher culture of which he himself was deprived.

One day I resolved to buy a piece of land and build myself a house on it to my liking, to be a summer place for me to live in every year. So I asked one of the village notables, by the name of Najm al-Azraq, whether he could direct me to a landowner who would sell to me. He answered that he owned many parcels, but that they were not for sale; indeed that there was no one in his family — the house of al-Azraq — who would sell any of his possessions; but he assured me that certain members of the Qahwaji family would be very much interested in selling lands, and advised me to approach the said family. And Mr. Najm al-Azraq's reply carried a certain testiness whose cause I did not know.

And when I approached Nimr al-Qahwaji — the head of his family — I heard the same answer I had heard from Najm al-Azraq. Mr. al-Qahwaji added, in an angry tone, that the possessions of the house of al-Qahwaji were not for sale, and advised me to approach the house of al-Azraq, who would doubtless be pleased to sell some of their possessions. So I was at a loss, and could not fathom the secret of the talk I had heard. I looked into the matter with tact, and learned that these villagers count it a disgrace for one of them to sell any land; that a traditional feud has reigned between the two families, al-Azraq and al-Qahwaji, since olden days — each family lives in a separate quarter; and that advising me to approach the other family to try to buy property was a jab, a slight, and an insult to the enemy family. And I remembered then how they used to call on me in two separate companies, and how one quarter would blaze with lights and thunder with rifle-fire at some political event while the other quarter stayed dark and silent.

So I became careful, in my dealings with the villagers, to keep the balance: if I visited someone of the house of al-Azraq in the morning, I reached the house of one of the Qahwajis in the afternoon, so as to wound nobody's dignity — for they are sentimental to a degree hard to imagine.

Your pardon, Si Atiyah — I meant to tell you what happened to us yesterday.

Some days ago a man came to me — the president of a school and orphanage in a neighboring village — and invited me to attend a celebration to be held at the school and orphanage; I accepted with thanks. And hardly had he gone out my door when another person came in, informing me that he was the director of the school and orphanage, and that he invited me to attend a celebration to be held there.

So I knew for certain that the entrenched enmity among the people of "Ain al-Burghush" is an exact copy of what spreads through all the rest of Lebanese life, and that each of the two men — the president and the director — wished to give me to understand that he was the host of the invitation and the master of the school and orphanage, and that the other was of no use and no consequence.

I hired a car, and we drove about a quarter of an hour until a village faced us, black of houses, flat of roofs — the eye would almost slide off it were it not for a small white building with two wings. The driver said: "There are the school and orphanage. That white building, a span long and a third of a span wide; inside it are two teachers and a quarter, and it holds nine pupils and a half."

I climbed the building's steps between two rows of scouts with their long staves, and the band rang out a military air, and at once I felt a thrill that woke my spirit, so that I began to admire everything I saw.

I followed the director, talking with him and listening to his talk. Everything I saw grew great in my eyes, and this building, which from afar had seemed paltry, grew vast. Here was a well the boys had dug with their own hands; and this was a room whose building an emigrant in Argentina had donated; and these were wooden benches the teachers had joined together to carpenter; and these were table covers the little girls had embroidered — handiworks that speak the efforts of the small ones and shine in their splendor with talent. My enthusiasm and admiration were not lost on the director; he warmed toward me — and perhaps he went too far in his confidence, for he plunged into complaining to me of the school's president and his fatuity, saying that everything he had in the school had come despite the president's contrariness and stupidity.

Then he stopped and said, in the tone of one betraying a grave secret: "It was I who brought Samir al-Shaarawi into this school, after the president had refused him and tried to accuse me of breaking the rules."

I said, "And who is Samir al-Shaarawi?" He stared at me, reproachful, astonished at my ignorance, and walked before me to a room, opened its door, and pointed to its walls, spread with bewitching hand-drawn pictures bearing the signature "Samir."

Samir al-Shaarawi is the son of Khattar al-Shaarawi. Look down into the valley — look hard, and you will see a room he called a house, which the olive trees almost hide. Those trees, and those vines on the four terraces, and the fig terrace at the edge of the dry channel, are all that Khattar al-Shaarawi owned. Yes — he also owned a donkey, and a double-barreled hunting gun. There Samir was born, and there his mother died when he was five years old. I have heard of fathers who all but worshipped their sons, but among them there is none who comes near Khattar al-Shaarawi in the madness of love. To his father, Samir was greatness itself whenever he felt smallness in himself, the palace on the summit whenever he turned his eyes about his hut, the dream come true whenever disappointment befell him. Samir would be everything, and every great deed. He dreamed of his son and his son's success sleeping and waking, until his dreams mingled with the facts of his life. Once a fleet admiral visited us — I swear to you Khattar came to tell me that his son's flag would be hoisted over the fleets of the world. And one day he heard that a certain famous physician had drawn a bullet out of a wounded man's head, and the man recovered; so Khattar began to talk of the miraculous surgical operations Samir — Dr. Samir al-Shaarawi — would perform. And there are people in the village today who will swear to you they heard the father call his son "Doctor." And how often he let his gaze wander over certain mansions of the town of Aley, and shook his head: "You will see people, in days to come, look at Samir's palace and laugh at these mansions."

The truth is that the village folk pinned the charge of madness on Khattar, for he was forever talking of his son and proclaiming that he would spread his banner over the world. As for the child, he could not understand his father's sayings; nor were there many signs of genius in him. Rather he was much given to absent-mindedness, like one swimming in a mirage. Often he would stand gazing at things that caught no one else's attention. His playfellows among the boys nicknamed him "Abu Fahmeh," because he was forever carrying a piece of charcoal with which he blackened the walls. Once his father nearly came to blows with an entire family, when they discovered that the child Samir had drawn upon the family tomb an animal with long ears and four hooves.

Yet the father, for all his appearances of madness, knew perfectly well that his son's success hung on his schooling, that schools require money, and that his struggle with the earth yielded him no surplus. So he had recourse to tact and to courting us: in me he found affection and kindness, and in that president he discovered arrogance and haughtiness. But Khattar did not despair. In summer he would present me with the birds he shot, and some grapes and figs. In autumn he would bring me a basket of green olives. In winter he was the first of the villagers to appear, to lend a hand shoveling the snow from the roof of the orphanage and school. And at every celebration he would go round the guests with the pitcher, and applaud the visitors and the speakers.

I was away in Beirut before the school opened, when they had begun registering the pupils. Khattar came out of his house in his best clothes, his face aflame with joy, saying to his son: "You are seven, my son; you have become a man, my son. Today you enter school;

you will study and strive and spread your learning over the roof of the world."

When the two arrived here, the father asked for me and was told I was away; so he asked to see the president, and went in to him, saying with pride: "I have brought you Samir, and I have not brought the school fee. But I am confident you will take him free. You know I am a poor man, and that Samir will be my pride, and the pride of this school — nay, the pride of the world, God willing."

The president fixed the peasant and his son with a look that had little admiration in it. Then he returned his eyes to the papers on his table and answered: "You are no pauper; you have a valuable piece of property. Besides, the school's rules do not allow us to take anyone free except orphans. Why do you not sell your property, if you believe your son will become the pride of the world? I am busy; I must go and see the director of education." Khattar was silent a moment, then answered: "I own no property to sell; the vineyard is my son's property as it was my father's. I shall come back tomorrow and see the director." And he took his leave and went.

On our way back toward the house the boy began to cry, and the father soothed the child's feelings and said: "Do not be afraid, my son. The president has refused us, but the director will not refuse us. He is my friend; he is kind-hearted and noble. Do not cry — trust your father. I shall get you into the school, God willing."

The next day I was in the courtyard when the president summoned me, pointed with a pencil at the list of pupils, and asked me in anger how I dared enter the name of Samir al-Shaarawi among the pupils who do not pay. Then he threatened: "I shall report you to the school's trustees. You have broken its rules by accepting a pupil who is not an orphan."

I answered: "I have not broken the school's rules. Have you not heard that Khattar al-Shaarawi killed himself last night?"

A storm of applause bursting out in the school hall cut the director's story short, and we went in. There the president announced that the celebration was being held in honor of the pupil Samir al-Shaarawi's winning of the first prize at the painting exhibition held in Beirut. And the president unveiled the winning canvas: it was an artist's picture of an enormous steamer riding in a harbor, held fast to the sea's floor by an anchor which none sees unless he peers into the picture. The canvas was signed "Samir," and its title was "The Anchor."

I went up to Samir al-Shaarawi and asked him what his picture signified, and what had inspired it.

He answered: "My father. My father killed himself so that I should become an orphan, and it would then be easy for me to get my education free. He is the anchor: it drowns itself so that another may ride at rest."

You say, my dear Atiyah, that you have heard of Zahleh, and Aley, and Dhour el-Choueir, and have never heard of "Ain al-Burghush." And I say to you that you will hear of the engineer who is studying in Denmark, and you will never hear of his father the baker.

You tell me you have come back from Alexandria. I wager you saw the steamers there, and did not see their anchors.

Let me know when you are coming to Lebanon, and I shall meet you at the airport.

Your brother, Hikmat