Subject to investigation
Maqtal Fakhreddin (The Killing of Fakhreddin), Ezzeddin Shukri, Cairo: Samizdat, 1995. pp231
Published at the author's expense in the wake of the first Gulf War, Maqtal Fakhreddin remains, at some level, the manifesto for a novel. It deals with the disappearance of a symbolic figure of the author's generation, a left-wing idealist and champion of social equity, Arab nationalism and progressive thought. What saves the text from falling into the trap of didacticism is that the author adopts the genre of the detective novel as a surface framework through which to present his narrative, making the central voice that of the prosecutor who investigates Fakhreddin's case and tries, through reviewing available testimonies, to work out the secret of his death.
This "whodunit" approach facilitates the progress of the action, lending it suspense. However, at a deeper level it allows for a multiplicity of voices, since each of the testimonies and documents reviewed by the prosecutor -- personal diaries, official reports, letters -- make for one character's version of the story. In this and other ways Maqtal Fakhreddin is reminiscent of Gamal El-Ghitani's novel Hikayat Al-Gharib (Tales of the Stranger), in which an otherwise undistinguished Suez War veteran emerges as a multi-faceted hero; after he disappears, never to be found, his story too is divulged through the testimonies of many voices.
The book opens with Fakhreddin, a lawyer disqualified from practice, waking up far earlier than usual feeling a kind of premonition, the object of which remains unspecified. He leaves his modest living quarters and walks down towards a caravan of police cars, only to be shot dead. It is unclear whether this introductory episode describes an actual event, or whether it is an unreliable narrator's version of events. From here, the novel moves to Omar Fares, the prosecutor assigned to work on the Fakhreddin case. Investigation does not lead to anything concrete, however, and Fares decides to take matters into his hands: he resolves to investigate the whole of Fakhreddin's personal history, and here the reader senses Fakhreddin's importance as not merely the subject of an investigation, but someone whose life is pertinent to many issues.
These issues are approached through the device of a sympathetic prosecutor, Fares's investigation lasting five years, and through the investigation Fakhreddin himself begins to emerge.
Fakhreddin, it turns out, has neither father nor mother, and this is an essential condition of his predicament. His father died before his birth, and his mother when he was three years old. Brought up by a paternal uncle, who happened to be married to a maternal aunt, he later has a serious dispute with this uncle and leaves his village for good. In a sedate, almost static idiom the author thus introduces one early version of Fakhreddin's death, this version, like later ones, corresponding to just one version of Fakhreddin. At times, the author's sedate language is overly conventional, too complacent to place this novel on a par with the best of contemporary writing.
In this first version of Fakhreddin's death, his cousin, daughter of the aforementioned uncle, has lost her virginity, and, to save face, the uncle is obliged to get her married but not to the lover to whom she has lost her virginity. Instead, he proposes that Fakhreddin should do the honours. Refusing, Fakhreddin urges his uncle to let his cousin marry the person she loves, threatening that if he does not he will spread the real reason for their marriage and create a scandal. Infuriated, the uncle resolves to kill him. In the course of the investigation it becomes apparent that Fakhreddin has already started carrying out this threat, and that his uncle knows this. Was Fakhreddin killed by his uncle?
The author puts forward a series of roles for Fakhreddin, each of which could have led to his death. Fakhreddin the Moralist, for example, could have been killed by his uncle. But another version of the story concerns Fakhreddin the Revolutionary, who, a radical university student, is approached by the authorities to work as an informer, and, refusing, discovers that he has been betrayed by the girl he loves. An extension of this version, perhaps the central story of the novel, recounts how Fakhreddin, an army conscript, initially refuses to go to war against Iraq. Eventually succumbing to pressure, he is stationed in Hafrelbaten, Saudi Arabia, and here he refuses orders to fight. At the point of his execution, a stray American bomb lands on the site, and Fakhreddin disappears, nobody being sure whether he has died at the hands of the firing squad, or whether he has managed to escape.
Ezzeddin Shukri's hero, then, is obstinate, dissenting and determined, going against the grain and rejecting the status quo. His is a battle that has been lost in advance, but perhaps this is Shukri's message: that it is nevertheless a necessary battle that has been worth waging. A victim of reactionary politics, or of an immoral society, Fakhreddin represents purity of motive and is an example to follow.
Yet another version of the story concerns Fakhreddin the Tragic Lover. Here, Fakhreddin is rejected by the well-to-do and worldly father of Sherine, the girl he wants to marry. Though the two young people are in love with each other, Sherine fails to emulate Fakhreddin's uncompromising stance, and, when her father takes her to France she gets engaged to someone else. Fakhreddin finds out and dies as a result of an overdose of tranquilisers. This narrative ties in with that of Fakhreddin's role as Social Reformer, his dealings with Sherine's father reflecting a calling to fight injustice and promote individual rights in a reactionary and stifling society.
This view is supported by the testimony of the head of the Lawyers' Syndicate, who declares Fakhreddin to be mad. If he were not, why would he walk into court and demand that his client receive the worst available punishment, declaring that he already knows his guilt? However, Fakhreddin's neighbours declare him to be of good character, someone who has always played a central role in resolving disputes and facilitating social harmony. He had defended many of them in court in return for simple favours, such as food, and many of them are shocked by his murder.
The novel ends with the same, equivocal scene with which it started: Fakhreddin leaving his house and being killed. However, in this final scene the story is told differently, as if to emphasise the fact that, while it may initially have seemed that the mystery was solved, the case was never that simple.
The prosecutor's voice, focussed and unaffected in tone, returns tersely at the end of the novel: "Five whole years I've spent researching and recounting the events leading up to Fakhreddin's death. Five whole years, during which I abandoned my job, my family and my future, which unwound before me and whose end I could see emerging out of its beginning. Five years of travelling around the places Fakhreddin visited, or those of which he dreamed: the many villages and towns of Egypt's Nile, cafés and corners, every inch he passed through I visited, every wall he wrote on I read. I relived his every look, and I attempted to arrange all the contradictions I collected in order to understand his life, his days, his murder, the occurrence of which I was repeatedly assured. I made efforts whose magnitude I cannot even imagine. But in the end I understood him, and I understood his aims."
Wondering what to do now that he has found out the truth, the prosecutor does not give voice to that knowledge, but instead merely implies, here as elsewhere in the novel, that the police or the government are responsible for Fakhreddin's death. By this point, Fakhreddin has been lionised, and the reader responds not so much to his story, or stories, but to the principles and values of the generation from which he comes, and to what his death, with all its possible causes, could be said to represent.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
