Early 20th Century Short Fiction in Translation: Muhammad Taymour’s ‘A Boy Who Became a Man’

This short story originally appeared in Muhammad Taymour’s collection What the Eyes Can See (1922), and this story was written in 1917. It recounts events in the life a fictional young scallywag, Ahmad Mahjoub, who was raised and pampered by his nanny. Taymour himself was a well-to-do literary dabbler and the elder brother of the famed Mahmoud Taymour.

A Boy Who Became a Man

By Muhammad Taymour

Translated by Amr El-Zawawy

Twenty-year-old Ahmad Mahjoub was a tall, handsome figure of a man, with an aquiline nose, black eyes, thick eyebrows, and an elegant mien. If women caught sight of him, they would steal glances at him, but if he saw a woman, he would casually saunter on. His father, who was among Cairo’s well-to-do, owned a thousand feddans of the finest lands in both Upper and Lower Egypt, and his mother came from a family of distinguished ancestry. His father raised him as purely Egyptian, which meant he grew up fearing his father and did not dare converse with him. Still, he managed to strike up friendships with some ne’er-do-well peers, who turned him into a compulsive gambler. He also had a forty-five-old nanny, who had come into the house when he was five and she was twenty-five, and had been in charge of his upbringing ever since. She’d been divorced from her husband, who was a superintendent at the Fiscal Farms Authority. Mahjoub loved his nanny, but did not dread her. If she angered him, he would mock her, but soon he would make up, so that she would forget his offense and hold him to her breast, laughing and rejoicing.

Mahjoub was twenty, yet he had not forgotten the days when his nanny would beat him, back when he was a child who’d made a mistake or committed some small sin.

How could he forget the day he’d climbed the buckthorn tree in the garden and almost fell to the ground? His nanny had grabbed him, smacking him with the stick in her right hand and warning him not to do it again. And had he forgotten the day when he’d stayed in the yard frolicking and having fun until it was noon, so that the water vendor Amm Abd Al-Razek warned him against staying out in the heat, and he’d cursed the man and kicked him with his little leg? He had not forgotten the day, since his nanny had slapped his cheeks as she scolded him for what he had done. Had he forgotten the day he had plucked up his father’s cigarette butt from off the ground and tried to take a pull? His nanny saw him from the window and yelled at him, so he ran away and refused to enter the house until the eunuch carried him back to her to teach him a lesson. He had not forgotten all of that. Childhood has its events, which remain engraved on the memories of men, both young and old, forever.

The mansion in which Mahjoub and his family lived was in an Egyptian neighborhood with narrow streets. It was surrounded by several small houses, owned by people from a class neither rich nor poor. The house facing their mansion was inhabited by a trader of good reputation who had a a wife, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and a twenty-year-old son who lent a hand in managing his father’s store.

The trader’s wife spent the whole day laboring at the housework, while her daughter helped her from time to time. If the girl was alone, she would sit at the window that overlooked Mahjoub’s room, waiting for him to come back from school. If he went into his room, she would say hello, and they would flirt. One day, his nanny came into his room and found him waving his right hand at the girl. She gave him a suspicious and resentful look, and then she left the room without uttering a word. But he didn’t care a jot, and the whole thing blew over. Yet he noticed that his nanny now came into his room, again and again, whenever he was at home, as though she wanted to prevent him from talking to the girl. He took offense, and he wanted her to stop spying him, so he employed a useful trick: After returning from school, he would lock the door to his room so he would do whatever he wished.

Once his nanny had figured out his trick, she knocked on his door. He opened up after he had motioned to his girl to hide, and the nanny entered and found the girl’s window empty, so she smiled mockingly and said: “The bird has fled the cage!”

“And what do you mean by that?

“My boy, you are doing yourself a disservice. You forget that love distracts a person from doing his coursework.”

“I’m keen to do it, so don’t look at me.”

“What a naïve fool you are!”

“I won’t bear insults from anyone.”

“And yet you commit sins in public. Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell your father what you’re doing?”

“My father hasn’t yet come out of his room. So will you go in and tell him about it?”

“I will!”

She stormed out of the room, and Mahjoub was afraid that she would tell his father about his romantic adventures. When the dinner hour approached, he refused to eat with his father. Instead, he feigned illness and went to sleep hungry.

Several days passed. He wondered at the secret behind his nanny spying on him, but he did not reach any conclusion. He didn’t notice anything strange in her movements or otherwise. Why didn’t she leave him to do whatever he wanted, which in any event did her no harm? Why was she jealous of this girl who had yet not reached the age of fifteen, while she was a woman of more than forty-five? This was an arcane secret that called for serious thought.

One Friday, Mahjoub went out to see some of his friends. He gambled with them until lost his last penny. Then, regretting what he’d done, he went home. He asked after his father, but was told that he had gone out. He asked after his mother, but was told that she would have dinner with his aunt. So, he went into his room and sat in front of his window, picking up one of the modern novels to kill time.  After a while, he saw his sweetheart at the window, smiling at him. He fell to gesturing and chatting with her until he saw the silhouette of his nanny in the other room. He stopped talking to his sweetheart and motioned that she should go away, which she did. He sat alone, bracing himself for his ever-vigilant nanny.

His nanny entered a few minutes later, incensed, and said in a trembling voice: “I am giving you an ultimatum! If you do this again, I will inform your father!”

“What exactly is bothering you, when I have done nothing wrong?”

“You want to know what bothers me? You truly are naïve. You know nothing about the bottomless pit to which you’re being led, and I’m afraid it will backfire on you.”

“I hate this kind of talk.”

“So you won’t take my advice?”

“It’s no good for me now that I’ve grown into a fine figure of a man.”

“What a stupid young cad you are!”

On hearing this, Mahjoub was filled with fury. He was about to leave the room, but his nanny grabbed him and wrapped her arm around his waist, preventing him from leaving. He tried to wriggle free from her grasp, and as he did so, his body pressed against hers. He did not find anything wrong with staying right there, so he too wrapped an arm around her waist, pretending to fight back in defense of himself. When his gaze fell on her face, he noticed strange, lustful features that he had not seen there before, on that face he’d known ever since the day he was a baby crawling oh the pillows of his own bed. For a while, he stood eying her as she eyed him.  She still had a firm complexion, tinged with beauty, despite her forty-five years. Mahjoub was a young man liable to be aroused at any small stimulus, so he leered at her and she leered back. He heard her breathing noisily as she stared at a lock of his hair dangling over his brow. Then she kissed him on the mouth, and so he kissed her on the mouth, too, and they embraced. Her body touched his, and he felt her sagging breasts rub against his chest.

Then they both fainted.

He had been a beautiful child, and his nanny used to love him like an affectionate mother. But now he was a beautiful young man, and his nanny loved him like a lover whose passion kindled hers.

How strange!

1917

Muhammad Taymour (1892 – 1921) was the elder brother of Mahmoud Taymour, a pioneer of the Arabic short story. He studied in Europe and came back with ideas that impressed his younger brother, who was to become an important figure in twentieth century Egyptian literature.

Amr El-Zawawy is Professor of Linguistics and Translation, Faculty of Education, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. He has also practiced written and simultaneous translation for more than 20 years now. He contributed important articles to different international scholarly journals, including but not limited to Babel (John Benjamins), Journal of Psycholinguistics, California Linguistic Notes and Advances in Language and Literary Studies. He published a number of books and translations, including Studies in Contrastive Linguistics and Stylistics (Novika, USA), Exploring the Cognitive Processes of Simultaneous Interpreting (Lexington Books, USA), Seminal Studies in Linguistics and Translation (Cambridge Scholars, UK), and Selections from Arabic Poetry (Kindle, Amazon).