Chicago, Alaa Aswany [first e reader .TXT] 📗

your permission, may I read it later?”

“No, now, please.”

I moved a little to the right so I could get closer to the light. The papers were written in Arabic. I began to read, “A proposal submitted by Dr. Karam Doss, professor of open heart surgery at Northwestern University, to the College of Medicine, Ain Shams University.”

He didn’t let me finish reading. He leaned his elbows on the table and said, “I submitted this proposal last year to Ain Shams University.”

He ordered another drink and continued enthusiastically, “I’m now a big name in heart surgery. My fees for each operation are very high. And yet I offered the officials at Ain Shams Medical School Hospital my services, to perform operations for free for a month every year. I wanted to help poor patients and transfer to Egypt advanced surgery techniques.”

“That’s great.”

“More than that. I submitted a proposal to establish a modern surgery unit that would have cost them next to nothing. I was going to secure funding for them through my connections with American universities and research centers.”

“Excellent idea!” I exclaimed, my sense of guilt increasing.

“Do you know what their answer was?”

“Of course they welcomed it.”

He laughed. “They didn’t reply and when I called the dean of Ain Shams Medical School, he said my idea was not feasible at this time.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

He took another sip of his drink, and it seemed to me that he was having a hard time concentrating. I knew that drinking again after a hangover got rid of the headache, but it also made the liquor more potent.

“I haven’t told this story to anyone, but you should know it because yesterday you accused me of fleeing from Egypt.”

“I apologize again.”

He bowed his head and said in a soft voice, as if talking to himself, “Please stop apologizing. I just want you to know me as I really am. For the last thirty years that I’ve lived in America, I haven’t forgotten Egypt for a single day.”

“Aren’t you happy with your life here?”

He looked at me as if trying to find the right words, and then he smiled and said, “Have you had any American fruits?”

“Not yet.”

“Here they use genetic engineering to make the fruit much larger and yet it doesn’t taste so good. Life in America, Nagi, is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless.”

“You’re saying that after all you’ve achieved?”

“All success outside one’s homeland is deficient.”

“Why don’t you go back to Egypt?”

“It’s difficult to erase thirty years of your life. It’s a difficult decision, but I’ve thought about it. The proposal I submitted was my first step toward going back, but they turned it down.”

He said the last few words bitterly, and I said, “It’s really sad for Egypt to lose people like you.”

“Perhaps you find this hard to understand because you’re still young. It’s like when a man loves a woman and gets very attached to her and then discovers that she is cheating on him: do you understand this kind of agony? To curse the woman and at the same time to love her and never be able to forget her—that’s how I feel toward Egypt. I love her and I wish to offer her all I’ve got, but she rejects me.”

I saw that his eyes were welling up with tears, so I leaned over and put my arm around him and bent over to kiss his head, but he gently pushed me away, saying as he tried to smile, “How about ending this melodrama?”

He began to change the subject and asked me about my studies. We spent about half an hour talking about various subjects, and suddenly we heard a woman’s voice close to us: “Hi, sorry to interrupt. I have a question.”

“Go ahead,” I said quickly. She was a young woman in her twenties, blond and shapely. I had noticed her while we were talking, coming in from the bar and sitting at the table next to us.

“What language are you speaking?”

“Arabic.”

“Are you Arabs?”

“We’re from Egypt. Dr. Karam is a heart surgeon and I am studying medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

“I’m Wendy Shore. I work at the Chicago Stock Exchange.”

“You’re lucky, then. You have lots of money.”

She laughed. “I only handle the money. I don’t own it, unfortunately.”

A jovial atmosphere filled the place. Suddenly Dr. Karam got up and patted me on the shoulder, saying, “I have to go now. I haven’t slept since yesterday and I have surgery at seven in the morning.”

Then he turned to Wendy, shook hands with her, and said, “Glad to meet you, Ms. Shore. I hope to see you again.”

I kept following him with my eyes until he disappeared through the bar door. I felt that I loved him and said to myself that I should take my time before judging people so as not to jump to the wrong conclusions as I had done. I came to when I heard Wendy’s merry voice saying, “Okay, tell me about Egypt.”

I carried my glass and moved to her table. She was beautiful; she had gathered her blond hair up and her gorgeous neck showed. There were light freckles on her cheeks that gave her a childlike appearance made all the more pronounced by her big blue eyes, which made her look as if she were in a state of constant astonishment. I remembered Graham’s advice, so I said, “I won’t tell you about Egypt until you let me buy you a drink.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“What would you like?”

“A gin and tonic, please.”

CHAPTER 17

Since Chicago was settled, black migration to it has not stopped. Hundreds of thousands escaped slavery in the southern states and came to Chicago driven by the dream of becoming free citizens with dignity. The men worked in factories and their wives worked as domestics in homes or as nannies. They soon discovered that they had replaced slaves’ iron chains with other invisible but no less cruel