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

the other side. He had discovered an enchanted world hidden deep in an Arabian Nights vault to which he stole at night to enjoy beauty before being assailed by the hostile, ugly daylight. He no longer cared about day-to-day life. He stopped thinking about Chris, divorce, his sexual impotence, or even his job. He spent his days half there, in a casual and nonchalant manner, waiting for the moment of release. At midnight he would begin his trip: he would take a bath and wear cologne as if going on a date. Then he would go downstairs to the basement and put on his 1970s clothes. He had found a good tailor who restored his old clothes to a new life by taking them out to his new measurements for a fee that would have been enough for a brand-new wardrobe. Before starting his nightly journey, he locked himself in, perhaps to feel completely isolated from the outside world or perhaps for fear that Chris might open the door; if she did, she would be certain that he had gone crazy. He wouldn’t be able to explain what he was doing. He himself did not understand it. His overpowering desire was stronger than understanding or resistance. The clothes carried within their folds his history, the scent of his real days. Every piece of clothing brought back a different memory: those were the light cotton Shurbagi shirts that he used to buy from the Swailam store in downtown Cairo; the white sharkskin suit that he wore during summer evening special occasions; the blue suit for Thursday outings; and that was the striped black suit that he had bought especially to celebrate Zeinab’s birthday. They had dinner at Le Restaurant Union in front of the High Court building then went to the Cinema Rivoli, where they watched the movie My Father Is up the Tree. In the inner jacket pocket he found a folded piece of paper that had been in the same place for thirty years: the stub of a ticket for an Umm Kulthum concert that he had attended in 1969. An idea occurred to him, so he left the basement and came back carrying a tape recorder. He put on the song “al-Atlal” and sat listening to it wearing the same suit that he was wearing when he heard it for the first time.

There, he was finally going back to his true self, riding the time machine described by H. G. Wells in the famous novel. He began to hum with Umm Kulthum and shout in ecstasy and cheer at the cadences exactly as he had done at the concert. Now he was listening to Umm Kulthum every night, and when it got close to 2 A.M. Chicago time, 9 A.M. Cairo time, Dr. Muhammad Salah turned off the recorder, put on his reading glasses, opened his telephone book, and began to call his old friends and acquaintances. All Cairo’s telephone numbers had changed: all the five-digit numbers were changed to seven-digit numbers. The numbers beginning with 3 now became 35 or 79. Every time he dialed, there were surprises. It was as if he were one of those cave sleepers at Ephesus, as if he had been asleep for thirty years then woke up and went back to his city. He dialed many wrong numbers, probably because the people he knew had moved. Sometimes he found the right number and then discovered that the person had died. Sometimes he reached those he was calling, whereupon he would say enthusiastically right away, “Don’t you remember me? I am Muhammad Salah, your colleague at Cairo University College of Medicine 1970.”

They all remembered him, some immediately and the others after a little thought. There would be shouts of greeting and laughter, and then he would go on, “I’m now a professor in a medical school in Chicago.”

“That’s great.”

After the surprise and the shouting and the remembering of bygone days, there was bound to come a moment when the warmth of the conversation wore off. As if the person on the other end were asking, “What reminded you of me now? Why are you calling me?” He had to offer an answer. He would lie by talking of a fictitious reunion of the Class of 1970 of the College of Medicine at Cairo University, or claim that there was a cooperative project between doctors in Illinois and Egypt. He talked fast and lied with an enthusiasm that surprised even him, aiming to distract the other person so that he wouldn’t think how bizarre the conversation was and so that he wouldn’t pity him. They should not find out that nostalgia had crushed him, that he had discovered, after turning sixty, that he had made a mistake leaving his country, that he regretted emigration to death. He should not show them his weakness and sorrows. All that he wanted was for them to talk to him a little about the past, to remember with them his real life.

Salah spent the late hours of the night making calls until the morning. Then he would take a bath and drink several cups of coffee and go to the university. Every two or three days his nervous system collapsed and he slept like a log until the following morning then once again resumed his journey to the past. He stumbled upon a true treasure when he discovered, on the Internet, a complete Cairo telephone directory. He gave up the old telephone book and started using the directory. Now he was able to make direct hits: he would remember the full name, then look it up in the Internet directory until he found the number and call. He was able to reconnect with a group of old acquaintances until he got to his target, his destination, the name that had persistently pressed itself on him from the beginning but which he had avoided, the name that he had exerted strenuous effort to dismiss from his mind, but