THE CHEAPEST NIGHTS
by Yusuf Idris, 1954

"The Cheapest Nights," the title piece from Yusuf Idris's first collection of short stories, published in 1954, is one of the author's best-known works. It demonstrates many characteristics of his short fiction: a small town or village setting, characters drawn from Egypt's hardworking lower classes, uncomfortable descriptions of poverty and ignorance, and a style that mixes both literary and colloquial forms of language.

Set in a small town, probably not unlike the many Nile delta towns in which Idris spent a number of years as a youth, the story opens with an ironic juxtaposition of evening prayers at the mosque and "a torrent of abuse gushing" from the mouth of the protagonist, Abdel Kerim, "sweeping Tantawi and all his ancestors in its wake." One does not know why Abdel Kerim is angry, nor who Tantawi is. However, the curses are many and the anger fervent. It would seem that Tantawi has done something unforgivable to Abdel Kerim. Thus a certain dramatic tension is built up immediately.

As he passes the children "scattered like breadcrumbs" in the lane, Abdel Kerim "lash[es] out at them vituperating furiously against their fathers and their forefathers, the rotten seed that gave them life, and the midwife who brought them to existence." He bears a grudge against all children because he is the father of six, whom he cannot feed in spite of his hard work. He is comforted that half the children in the lane will starve to death while the remainder will die of cholera.

Gradually the reason for his spleen becomes clear: earlier in the evening he had accepted a glass of very strong black tea from Tantawi the watchman. As a result Abdel Kerim had to rush through evening prayers, presumably because of the need to empty his full bladder. The tea was so strong that it makes his head spin. As he regains his composure he finds himself fully awake and agitated. He realizes that he is alone on a cold winter night in the middle of the deserted square. Except for the wild children in the lane, almost everyone else is home in bed. He has nothing to do, nowhere to go, and does not know what to do with himself. He cannot afford to go to the local cafe for coffee and smoke a water pipe, or listen to the blaring radio and watch better-off men joke and play cards. He thinks of his friend Sama'an, who is out of town at his father-in-law's, making up with his estranged wife.

Thinking of Sama'an and his wife makes Abdel Kerim think about going home to his own wife, who would be "lying like a bag of maize with her brood of six scattered round her like a litter of puppies." He hopes that she might have saved him some food or even a little tea. But then he realizes that his six hungry children have probably eaten everything. Thinking for a long time about what he should do, he finally decides to return home. He makes his way in the darkness past his children, and he settles down next to his wife, whose knuckles he starts to crack and whose mud-caked feet he starts to tickle. Eventually she awakens as he fumbles with his clothes "preparing for what was about to be," his cheapest form of entertainment.

Months later his seventh child arrives. And even more months and years later additional children are born whom he cannot afford to feed. As if oblivious to cause and effect, Abdel Kerim "still wondered what pit in heaven or earth kept throwing them up."

This story can be read as a blistering critique of Egypt's inability to deal with its overwhelming population problem and the ineffectiveness of its birth control programs. Idris seems to be saying that men from this particular class of Egyptian society—indeed, society at large—are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they do not have enough money for a glass of tea, much less birth control devices; yet they must have some sort of pleasure in their lives. What seems like a cheap form of entertainment is, in fact, over the life of a resulting child a very expensive proposition that will cost the parents, and by extension the country, dearly.

Here, as in many of Idris's early stories, sex is depicted entirely from the male point of view. It is all urgency and need, lacking in intimacy or finesse. Even in the later stories Idris's protagonists seem to view women as objects to be pursued and possessed. This is especially well depicted in "Dregs of the City," the title story from his 1959 collection in which the protagonist, Judge Abdollah, is caught up in a hapless round of sexual conquests.

In Abdel Kerim's curses and angry remarks, one can also see features of one of Idris's major stylistic contributions to the modern Arabic short story: the juxtaposition of classical Arabic in the narrative with highly colloquial Arabic in the speech of lower-class characters. A rough approximation to this situation in English is found in the contrast between the narrative prose and the speech of Huck and Jim in Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

One of Idris's most popular stories, "The Cheapest Nights" has been widely translated into European, Asian, and African languages and is regularly anthologized in collections of Middle Eastern literature.

—Carlo Coppola