Bein Al-Aasara wa Al-Qasr (Between the Sugarcane Mill and the Palace) by Khaled Badawi, General Egyptian Book Organization, Cairo 2024, pp. 250

The village’s two main communities are the Mas’ood family represented by Al-Masry Saied, his uncle, and three cousins Obeid, Abd-Allah, and Rushdy along with the village's entire inhabitants.

The palace, which was built by Prince Youssef Kamal, whom the novelist did not mention his name ever, stood as a symbol of a bygone era.

The prince founded the Faculty of Fine Arts where he sent his servant’s son Al-Masry Saied to be a painter. When Al-Masry’s father died, the prince sent for him to replace his father.

The Mas’ood family didn’t forgive Saied for being in the service of the prince. The villagers described him in disdain as “the servant,” for Upper Egyptians always had a high sense of dignity.

The second community was that of the gipsies, who kept living in tents in very harsh conditions headed by Mahmoud, the blacksmith. His wife Bakheeta used to sell cloth and cosmetics to the wives of wealthy figures.

A passionate love triangle was formed between Al-Masry and Raseel, an enchanting gipsy orphan, and Belal, an excessively jealous gipsy youth who held a grudge against non-gipsies. His parents were killed by the villagers.

Al-Masry was killed by an unknown assailant.

Through the prosecutor’s investigations in the murder case of Al-Masry, it became clear that the victim was sexually impotent despite Raseel dying to marry him due to his sensitive and refined nature that was fulfilling to her.

Following the 1952 Revolution, its government decided to seize the prince’s palace and sell most of its contents in a public auction.

In a telling incident, a government employee used an arabesque table as a ladder, so it broke. Thus, the government guards used it as firewood! Rainwater filling the palace basement was left without any action. At the same time, the government started distributing the agricultural lands owned by the aristocracy among peasants.

Obeid took charge from his father in managing the mill, which transforms sugarcane into molasses, assisted by his brother Abd-Allah. Obeid was extremely ambitious both economically (he developed the mill to be mechanized instead of working manually) and socially (he sought to be a mayor and marry off his daughter Fatma to the former mayor’s son).

After his father decided to watch things from a distance, Obeid became the master of the house, seizing his cousin’s house, stopping the sugarcane mill, and building brick kilns.

Abd-Allah was sentenced to five years for causing a permanent disability to the husband of his niece Fatma after she returned to her father’s house severely beaten by him.

Raseel fled the gypsies’ tents after she was subjected to a cruel virginity test and Belal became mad in his search for her everywhere. It discovered that Raseel was married to Rushdy, Al-Masry’s cousin for the remarkable resemblance between the two men.

Their marriage was unregistered, and she agreed to his two conditions: never to go out of the house without him and her face to be covered.

In the meantime, she was seen on the apartment balcony by one of the gipsy youths who notified his community and the mayor. Afterwards, she objected to these conditions and left the house.

When Rushdy asked Obeid to fulfil his promise and build a separate house for him, he was astonished when Obeid gave him expenditure lists of his university education, his apartment rent, and furnishing his lawyer's office and confronted him with his secret marriage.

The big surprise was showing his security dossier that revealed he was detained for a month for an incident he hid from his immediate family.    

Rushdy incited Abd-Allah’s anger when he lied to him saying Obeid told him that the agricultural land, which is the property of all of them, is his own alone, while their father did not die yet!

Abd-Allah, who is known for his immense strength and hot temper, got into a fight with his brother, and when the police station commanding officer interfered, Rushdy threw him to the ground.

The commanding officer got furious and ordered Obeid to personally whip him while tied to a lamppost and stay like this until noon the next day after Obeid begged him many times not to take him to the police station. This spelt the end of the mayor in the eyes of the villagers.

At the same time, Obeid’s only daughter Fatma was suffering from being an outcast from everybody especially her mother and father following her divorce for being a sterile woman. She tried to escape from this oppressive atmosphere by leaving with her uncle Rushdy and living in his apartment in the governorate’s capital. However, he refused because this could have revealed his secret marriage to Raseel.

Consequently, her psychological health deteriorated culminating in committing suicide. This coincided with the official announcement of Egypt’s defeat in 1967.

The novelist hinted that the mayor was a mini model of late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, whom he did not mention his name except when describing him as the leader.

The similarities are obvious in Obeid’s desperate eagerness to be the mayor and consolidating his power by making his daughter marry the ex-mayor’s son and even executing the order of whipping his sibling in plain sight!

A sentence popped into Obeid’s mind: “Did he forsake the people or the people forsake him?” It was a fitting echo of Abdel-Nasser’s 1967 defeat.

The novel is divided into three parts, comprising 26 chapters. It could be seen as a classical Greek tragedy with its three parts, where the protagonist is a tragic hero (Obeid), who has a tragic flaw (his unrestrained ambition) and accordingly commits tragic mistakes leading to his downfall.

The book raises many good questions: why did the 1952 Revolution regime sell the contents of this palace and other palaces? Where did the money from the sold items go? Why did not this regime benefit from these palaces by turning them into museums, for instance?

Badawi seemed to sympathise with Al-Masry, unjustifiably defending him although he was a drunkard lost man without any life objective.

Raseel’s passionate love for Al-Masry and her extreme eagerness to marry him despite his sexual impotence is incomprehensible and unacceptable in the light of her challenge to the gipsy community’s rule that forbids marriage from outside the community and also their total refusal of this “platonic” relationship!

The novelist should have clarified the meaning of Raseel's name while every gipsy man or woman around her has an Arabic name; even her younger sister’s name was Salema.