Cover, illustrations and layout
Laurance Rudic
ISBN: 9781623095727
For Mohamed Metwalli
Who believed in the stories
To the memory of my grandmother,
Margaret Bell McCullough, (1910-1992),
Who listened to the first Cairo stories
And encouraged me to return to Cairo
Acknowledgements
The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the magazines in which stories in this volume first appeared:
Guernica: “The True Story of Fresh Springs”
Storyglossia: “The Empty Flat Upstairs” and “Taken Hostage by the Ugly Duck”
I would like to acknowledge and thank the American University in Cairo for their funding of this project. Many of the stories in this volume were written during a Professional Development Leave, Fall 2006.
William Melaney has offered many helpful suggestions on my stories and esssays.
Many thanks to the writers who encouraged me along the way: Tamas Aczel, Allen Wier, John Keeble, George Garrett, Jennifer Horne, Ann Powers and Melanie Carter.
I would like to thank Mohamed Metwalli—who loved the stories and wanted to translate them into Arabic for a Cairene audience—this project was his idea.
A special thanks to Laurance Rudic, who has given me valuable feedback on the stories and offered me insight into the creative process. He also drew wonderful illustrations for the stories.
I am grateful to Ahmed Taha, the publisher, for his enthusiasm and support of this project—he suggested that the volume be bi-lingual so that Arabic and English readers could read the stories.
Thanks also to Jasmine Maklad who proofread the manuscript.
Contents
The Empty Flat Upstairs
Taken Hostage by The Ugly Duck
The True Story of Fresh Springs
Biographies
The Empty Flat Upstairs
2006
Keiko heard drilling upstairs. She also heard banging early in the morning. The maid next door was beating carpets. When she asked the porter, the bawab of the building, about her neighbor’s maid, he told her that the maid did not come every day. Besides the drilling, the beating of the carpets, the knocking of the water in the pipes in the building, she could hear the man, who lived between the buildings clearing the mucous from his throat and the wailing of his wife when he beat her. The people upstairs also wore hard shoes, which made a clacking sound when they walked across the floor.
The bawab insisted no one lived upstairs.
She was sure that she heard drilling and the clacking of shoes. How could she concentrate on Arabic grammar with so much noise? She had a difficult time imagining herself teaching Arabic to Japanese businessman in Tokyo. It seemed too late to quit the course now, though. The earplugs she bought at the pharmacy did not muffle the noise.
Late at night, she also heard cats’ meowing and raucous laughter from above. Did the people who clomped across the floor, own cats?
She called the Egyptian landlord, a doctor who was teaching in America. No, he said, no one lived in the flat upstairs, although the flat belonged to his cousin. It was the only flat in the building which was not rented.
“Aaah so, but does your cousin let anyone else have the key?”
Like the bawab, the landlord insisted that no one lived in the flat.
Keiko complained so much about the drilling that her foreign neighbors concluded that she must be crazy. Maybe she should go back to Japan. Maybe she had been in Egypt too long. Maybe she needed psychological help. Her neighbor across the hall had even given her the number to the counseling service. For her kindness, Keiko had given the woman a small summer bell to ward off evil spirits.
She had not gone for counseling. She was sure she heard drilling. Anyway, the doctor would also tell her that she did not hear drilling, like the bawab, like the landlord, like her neighbors.
Keiko was disturbed, but it was also true that the landlord’s cousin had given a spare key to an overweight Swedish belly dancer named Batilda who lived in the building. Batilda was not a particularly talented belly dancer but she was likeable--she was always booked at the major hotels in Cairo.
Batilda had made a special arrangement with the bawab to keep it a secret. (Even though he was more honest than most and did not cheat the landlord on the rents he collected for him, he could not refuse Batilda’s generous offer. He had three unemployed sons in the village.)
Officially, no one was living in the flat upstairs.
bawab