The Cheapest Nights
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE CHEAPEST NIGHTS
A physician as well as a writer, YUSUF IDRIS (1927–1991) was imprisoned for political activism under both Farouk and Nasser. For a time he was forced to retire from public view, but he emerged after the 1973 war, when he was appointed literary editor of Cairo’s Al-Ahram newspaper. His stories are powerful reflections of both the experiences of his own rebellious life and his concern with social injustice.
EZZEDINE C. FISHERE is an Egyptian novelist and diplomat. He has published seven novels, mostly depicting Egyptian social and political decay, two of which were nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2009 and 2012) and another two adapted into Arabic TV series. Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge, a novel about identity construction and shifts, was published in English in 2017. The Egyptian Assassin, a novel on violence, followed in 2019. Other novels are being translated into English, Italian, and Hebrew. Fishere is currently a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Middle East politics and cultures.
WADIDA WASSEF was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1926. Having grown up speaking Arabic, French, and Italian, Wadida studied English in the government school she attended in her youth. Wadida continued her studies at the American Mission College in Cairo and then taught English language and literature, as well as European history at El-Nasr Girls’ College, and began writing in the 1970s.
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This translation first published in the United States of America by Three Continents Press 1978 and 1989
Published by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1996
This edition with a foreword by Ezzedine C. Fishere published in Penguin Books 2020
Copyright © 1954, 1959, 1960, 1967, 1970, 1978 by Yusuf Idris
Translation copyright © 1954, 1989 by Wadida Wassef
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Ezzedine C. Fishere
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Idrīs, Yūsuf, author. | Fishere, Ezzedine C. (Ezzedine Choukri), 1966– author of foreword. | Wassef, Wadida, 1926– translator author of introduction.
Title: The cheapest nights / Yusuf Idris ; foreword by Ezzedine C. Fishere ; translated with an introduction by Wadida Wassef.
Other titles: Arkhaṣ layālī. English
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2020. | Series: Penguin classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2019031797 (print) | LCCN 2019031798 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133988 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505761 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Idrīs, Yūsuf—Translations into English. | Egypt—Social life and customs—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PJ7838.D7 A7913 2020 (print) | LCC PJ7838.D7 (ebook) | DDC 893/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031797
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031798
Cover illustration by Christina Chung
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Contents
Foreword by EZZEDINE C. FISHERE
Introduction by WADIDA WASSEF
Translator’s Note
The Cheapest Nights
You Are Everything to Me
The Errand
Hard Up
The Queue
The Funeral Ceremony
All on a Summer’s Night
The Caller in the Night
The Dregs of the City
Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Li-Li?
Death from Old Age
Bringing in the Bride
The Shame
Because the Day of Judgment Never Comes
The Freak
Notes
Foreword
I was probably twelve when I first read Yusuf Idris’s short stories. At that time, I lived with my aunt; my mother had left Egypt to join my father in Kuwait, where he was working. Like millions of Egyptian migrant workers, my parents couldn’t take me or my five siblings with them—due to their host country’s visa regulations. Living with my aunt was a blessing for one particular reason: availability of books. Mansura, the sleepy town where we lived, had no real bookshops or accessible public libraries. But my aunt had a daughter studying in Cairo who brought books when she returned for visits. As a starved bookworm, I often raided her book bags as soon as she arrived, mostly without her knowledge. This is how I was introduced to Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Arthur Miller, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, and, most important, Yusuf Idris. I still have a visual memory of the moment I opened her bag and saw that glossy green cover with a cubist painting and a weird title: The Summoner, Collection of Short Stories.
The title rang a bell; a movie with the same name had been shown on TV recently, of which I understood little and found rather boring. Yet this was a different matter—it was a book, and I couldn’t resist the temptation. I opened it and read the first paragraph, immediately mesmerized:
Hamed died when he opened the door and saw that terrible scene—just died. He stood still, unable to feel or think. His senses stopped functioning. The whole world fell silent and died; gone. Fat’hya, his wife, was on the floor. The little boy clinging to her, crying in terror, and pulling her hair. Her head uncovered, her legs naked, all of her naked, almost. On top of her was a gentleman in a jacket, with no trousers or underwear; his buttocks immersed in Fat’hya’s openings. It was over. [My translation.]
I devoured the rest of the story on the spot; I had never read such a graphic description in Arabic. It was so poignant, it almost hurt physically; it was gripping. It burst the bubble of middle-class respectability that shrouded public discourse in Egypt at the time. Hence creating a private channel with the reader—or at least with me. As I read, I could feel the pain and loss of Hamed, who had brought his family from the poverty-stricken countryside to the city only to lose it all. I could also understand how Fat’hya fell for the attraction of the city and its pleasures, embodied by the “gentleman,” as well as her ultimate demise. The door Hamed opened destroyed his life in Idris’s story, but it saved mine; it showed me what probably every good story can show: things fall apart for no particular fault of individuals who are just trying—and failing—to keep it together. There is nothing in the story that can be reasonably expected to prevent the loss of Hamed, Fat’hya, or the nameless child. While I empathized with all three—maybe because I did—I felt the only salvation was the telling of the story in itself. Idris gave me a world of beauty in the midst of seemingly inevitable suffering. Although the deeper meanings of the story must have escaped my twelve-year-old mind, its incisive language, its cinematic images and rhythm, its staunch realism, its crystallization of the “Egyptian tragedy” was so poignant that it has stayed with me since then, a constant reminder of the human condition.
Each of Idris’s short stories—and I think I have read them all—has common characteristics: a surgical style; an economical use of language, hostile to the redundancy, hyperbole, and melodrama that characterize much of Arabic fiction before him. You can easily cut his stories into scenes and film them without much change. Some of these are one-scene stories, often the more powerful ones.
While brief a
nd pointed, his style captures small details of the characters—their postures, feelings, and the situations in which they acted—and place them all together in a cinematic whole. Yet despite its deliberate austerity, Idris’s writing is aesthetically outstanding. The combination of his linguistic incisiveness and his visual descriptions transforms Egypt’s human and social misery into beautiful, powerful, and lasting images. Yusuf Idris is to the Arabic short story what Naguib Mahfouz is to the Arabic novel: a founder. Although the two men resented each other, and were occasionally mean to each other, their contributions clearly mirror each other.
Idris’s distinctive mark is his individualism, from which comes his unbent rebelliousness and his complex relationship with ideology and authority. It is also this individualism that makes his writing eminently modern. Yusuf Idris is not a neutral eye on society and individuals; not a camera left rolling unattended. He is deliberate and focused, directing the gaze of his reader to see his characters fighting for survival in the middle of Egypt’s tragic conditions. He takes us to the “dregs of the city” in order to see and smell it, but also to incite us to search for a way out. His stories deal mostly with poverty and injustice—and there was no shortage of either, especially in Egypt’s countryside in the 1930s and beyond. His ideological commitment is therefore clear; he stood with the poor and underprivileged and traced the source of their suffering to Egypt’s political and social conditions. Yet Idris’s characters, even the most rudimentarily described, are real; they are conflicted, struggling and facing real-life challenges, not types. This is why they stay with the reader long after one’s finished reading.
Fat’hya, for example, was not just a “villager in the city”; she was a person, with specific traits and conflicting emotions and hesitations. She was a real person, someone you could meet. No wonder she stayed with me for forty years. Yet his characters have a universal presence; they translate dilemmas and challenges that Egyptians have struggled with for a long time. In a nutshell, his characters and their struggles are both individuals and a reflection of their “social condition.” They are social beings.
This is the key to understanding Idris’s relationship to ideology. He is undoubtedly a committed writer. But his writing is above all about the complexity—and individuality—of human suffering. “The Queue,” included in this collection, provides a perfect example of this dual commitment to “the cause” and to individual freedom—probably his personal struggle as well. While clearly placing the struggle of his characters within their social context, he also mocks and derides ideological promises. This is why his fascination with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and other leaders after him, was short-lived. This is also why he fell out of favor with the Communist Party and other leftist groups—and harshly criticized them in his novella The White. Idris’s individualism made his commitment to freedom and dissent paramount; they are not only the writer’s inalienable rights, they are also necessary tools to achieve the goals all ideologies claimed to seek. When ideology and individualism clashed, his commitment to freedom and dissent prevailed, both in his writing and in his life.
Idris thought he would only write for a decade in order to transform Egypt’s condition, then spend the rest of his life enjoying that revived and healthy Egypt. He lived long enough to mock his own dream. Nasser died younger than Idris but lived long enough to see his dream crumble as well. Both men left a legacy, a vision, and ardent defenders. Today, there are people who still believe that Egypt’s salvation will be achieved through discipline, mobilization, and a united march toward its dream. On the other side are the followers of Idris’s path, people like me who advocate freedom, dissent, and creativity as necessary tools for human salvation.
But above all, Yusuf Idris’s contribution was literary. In my experience, reading Idris’s stories considerably shaped my relationship with Arabic fiction. That day I came across the The Summoner, all I had read in Arabic literature were old and heavy texts. Idris organized modern Arabic words for me; their meaning, their use, their relationship to external and internal realities, and to my own imagination. He did this by charting a course to follow, not by preaching. Although I ultimately opted for the novel rather than the short story, his call led me to my writing and left a deep imprint on it, just like it did to many other writers of my generation.
EZZEDINE C. FISHERE
Introduction
Yusuf Idris was born on May 19, 1927. His father worked on land reclamation projects, a job that required him to be constantly on the move, away from his family and far from city life. Yusuf, his eldest son, was sent at an early age to the country to live with his grandparents. It was a lonely life and the young boy, homesick and estranged, craved affection in a household full of adults and dominated by his grandmother, a dour and undemonstrative woman. He would not have been any happier in his own home, his mother being as stern and intractable as his grandmother. Theirs was a distant relationship with none of the intimate ties that normally bind mother and child. Yusuf missed his father, whom he loved, and grew up a solitary and timid boy.
His school was some distance away and on the long walks there and back he learned to take refuge in a dreamworld of his own where his troubles vanished and he was in possession of all the things he missed in reality. At the age of ten his talent was already germinating as he spun himself a whole web of tales which lived in his imagination.
He returned to live with his parents as an adolescent, joining his two brothers and two sisters. The family moved a good deal from one town in the Delta to another before settling finally in Cairo. It was there that Idris awakened to sex. At the age of fourteen he was having affairs with women frequently twice his age. His main concern then was to vanquish and possess; he was unable to imagine a relationship other than sex binding a man and a woman. It was only later that he felt the need for a deeper tie. Although he longed for love he feared to give it. In the story “The Dregs of the City” the hero’s restless pursuit of women may well be an echo of the frustrations and secret longings of those days.
Idris decided early in his student career that he wanted to be a doctor, but his years as a medical student were increasingly interrupted by the turbulent political situation in postwar Egypt. He took part in demonstrations against the British and the corrupt system of King Farouk and became executive secretary of the committee for the defense of students. As secretary of the student council he was responsible for revolutionary publications for which he was imprisoned and suspended from college. It was then that he attempted his first short story (1951) which became popular in student circles.
After graduation he was appointed to the Kasr el Eini, Cairo’s largest government hospital. His political career continued, however, and he joined underground organizations fighting the British. He supported Nasser’s rise to power but, like many others, soon became disillusioned. The clash with Nasser came in 1954 when it became clear that the revolution had accomplished few of its glowing promises. Idris was arrested and interned. During his detention he joined the Communist Party, only to resign in 1956 when he realized he could never accept the totalitarian side of communism.
Yusuf Idris’s literary career began when he was a medical student. His short stories started to appear in Al Masri, a prominent Cairo newspaper, and in Rose el Youssef, a leading weekly magazine. In 1954 his first collection of short stories was published under the title Arkhas Layali (The Cheapest Nights) with an introduction by the eminent Egyptian writer and scholar Taha Hussein, who hailed him as a young writer of outstanding talent. It was followed by another collection in 1956 that included his first short novel, A Love Story. Idris was then still practicing medicine, and occupied a post as Health Inspector in the Ministry of Health. The story “Death from Old Age” is inspired by his experiences there. While continuing to practice as a doctor he briefly took up psychiatry.
In 1960, having decided on a literary career, Idris gave up medicine for good and became ed
itor of the Cairo newspaper Al Gomhoureya. Between 1956 and 1960 he traveled extensively throughout the Arab world, observing new trends and developments. 1961 found him caught up in the Algerian struggle against the French. He joined the rebels in the Algerian mountains and remained there for six months, fighting on their side and later being decorated for valor by the Algerian government.
On being wounded he returned to Egypt. He was already an established journalist and with the regular publication of his novels, short stories and plays he was soon recognized as one of Egypt’s foremost contemporary writers. His short stories were singled out for particular praise, Tewfik El Hakim saying of him that “Yusuf Idris, in my opinion, is the renovator and genius of the short story.” In 1963 Idris was awarded the Order of the Republic.
Success and recognition did not divert him from political issues. In 1969 he wrote The Schemers, a play banned by the censor for being highly critical of Nasser’s policies. Nevertheless his short stories and nonpolitical works continued to appear both in Cairo and Beirut, and he kept up his attacks on the existing regime until forced to retire from public view, emerging only after the October war of 1973 when he was appointed one of the literary editors of Al Ahram, the leading Cairo newspaper.
* * *
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In many writings and interviews Yusuf Idris reiterates his conviction that life is a constant process of change with which views and values must keep up. Nothing must remain static. Where there is standstill there is no life. People are not born to accept the situations imposed upon them by previous generations. He is therefore always alert to new concepts and new philosophies. “In a constantly changing world,” he says, “a writer is a major factor in revolution. He has a part to play in society. A writer differs from other people in that he is more impressionable, with a keener sensitivity to his surroundings.” “When I start writing,” he adds, “I do not plan ahead. I write from intuition, reflecting the state of man. I have only a general notion in my mind, but I do not know beforehand how the characters are going to behave, or how the story will end. My thoughts are the inspiration of the moment.”