Finally he was home. He bolted the door and picked his way carefully in the dark…And when he found his woman he did not nudge her. He took her hand and began to crack her knuckles one by one, and to rub against her feet caked with tons of dirt. He tickled her roughly…She heaved herself over…Abd al-Kerim muttered, cursing whoever drove him to do this, as he fumbled with his clothes preparing for what was about to be. Months later the woman came to him once again to announce the birth of a son. His seventh.
-The Cheapest Nights, Yusuf Idris
I read this story in my Arabic class at AUC and remember having to look up too many new words to get quickly to the punch line. Abd al-Kerim didn’t have even a piaster in his pocket, so he couldn’t spend the evening idling in the coffee house. Nothing to do but go home and yaneeq. And I remember reading about how people in the Eastern Bloc regarded sex…in bed with your own wife was the one place you wouldn’t be surveiled by the Stasi. Maybe Egyptians in the Muslim Brotherhood felt the same about Nasser’s mukhabaraat. The cheapest of nights and the most private of places.
When I was in Egypt in later years as a project evaluator, I helped the non-Arabic speakers on the team to parse the uplifting folk wisdom in the scripts for the ramadan TV series Wa Ma Zaala Yigri al-Nil, And the Nile Keeps Flowing, and in the thirty second spots featuring a clever peasant woman who teaches the poor to plan their families just like she breeds her gamousa. But they never got near Yusuf Idris’ nihilism of poverty. Abd al-Kerim’s wife could have just switched on the overhead light if she wanted to stop at her sixth. But I forgot…that story was written before the Aswan Dam was finished and delivered its juice to the villages.