The two rooms on the top floor are next door to each other. I can hear the talk that’s going on in the other room, which is occupied by a mother and her son. The sound intrudes on my privacy. The boy is no more than eight years old and the mother, thin and emaciated, is in her forties. It is always she who is talking, with not a sound to be heard from the boy. She has to persuade him to eat or to change his clothes, and to stop cutting up the paper that covers the floor of the room, with the boy not wanting to listen to her. She asks him what he does at school and about his lessons, then goes back to trying to persuade him to have his lunch before it gets cold. In a trembling voice she says, “Just tell me what food you’d like and I’ll make it for you.”
Sometimes the boy answers in such a soft voice that I can’t hear it. Then I hear her saying, “Just a minute and I’ll go down and buy the sesame paste,” and I hear her steps as she hurries toward the stairs.
The building has four floors, yet she’s not gone for long and I soon hear her panting as she approaches. Seeing me standing by the door of my room, she mutters, “Just so he eats.”
She sometimes seeks my help when faced by his stubbornness in not eating. I find her standing in front of her room waiting for me.
“He’s not eaten a mouthful for lunch, and he doesn’t want to have any supper. You speak to him, perhaps he’ll listen to you.”
There’s a plateful of rice with mulukhiya and a bit of chicken on the low, round table resting on the mat, and I see him squatting in a corner, as he gives me a fleeting look, with his thin neck slightly extended and a small frown on his face.
I ask him why he’s not eating.
He eyes me casually for a moment, then silently crawls toward the table and bends over the food.
I am surprised at his obeying me. My voice wasn’t angry, and it occurs to me that he refrains from opposing me lest he opens up an argument he doesn’t want to have.
There’s an empty space in front of the top of the stairway where we sometimes meet in the morning. She will be dressed in her clothes for going out. while he’ll be in his school uniform with the bag of books on his back. He goes down the stairs without a word, while his mother stays alongside me, casting a look into the stairwell until the sound of his footsteps dies away. Then she arranges her head covering with the words, “He doesn’t want me to go down with him—his friends are standing in front of the house. They walk together to the school.”
She fixes her faded jacket around her shoulders.
“It’s cold.” Then she says, “Keep an eye on him—I may be late. The key’s on the space by the window—he knows. Maybe I told you before about where it was, one forgets.”
A moment later she says, “So, I’ll be off to work.”
I hang around for a while so she’ll be ahead of me.
She was a housekeeper. Every day except for Fridays she’d be at a house. She had her clients, who were happy with her. She’d arrive early, before they left for work, and they’d leave her the flat. After cleaning and cooking she’d close the front door behind her. She doesn’t eat what she has cooked even though the people try to insist, preferring to eat with her son. Many of them ask her to come to them on Fridays, offering her more money, but she never agrees. She keeps it free so that she can go out with her son. They go to public gardens and the zoo or they take a boat on the Nile: a large motorboat. It’s just as he wants, she always asks him what he’d like to see before they go out, even the Pyramids, though she didn’t know where they were. She asked about them and they went there. She asks me if I’ve seen them and I say that I have.
They bring their lunch in a bundle that he insists on carrying.
“He doesn’t frown or get annoyed or bother me by refusing to carry it. He reminds me of the old days when his father was with us in the other flat and how he would pay attention to what I said.”
She talks away as she sits on the doorstep by my room, while I’m inside finishing off the remainder of the work I’d brought with me from the office. The time spent there, with so few employees, doesn’t help. I note down dozens of orders in the notebook with the numbers of receipts of fees, orders for installing water meters despite their not being available in the office’s storerooms.
She stops talking for a while, then goes on, “Only once did I do so,” and she asks me if she’s distracting me from my work, and I reply, “Not at all.”
I notice her craning her head inside, perhaps to make sure that she is not distracting me.
And she goes on talking.
“It was the only time—I never did it again. There was food left over, a great amount of it. The owner of the flat, who hadn’t gone to work that day, insisted that I take it with me. There was meat and vegetables and rice, also some things for dessert. There was a big package I brought back with me to the room. If only you’d seen him as I was opening the parcel on the table, while I called out to him to come and see the lovely food I’d brought. The sound of his groaning made me pay attention to him: his face was turning from red to yellow and he was shivering. He scared me and I called out. ‘What’s wrong?’ He kicked at the table, while I grabbed hold of the parcel of food. He stretched out on the mattress with his face to the wall. I talked to him about the food, saying this and that, and that it was I who had cooked it and that he should eat. Not a bit of it, and he wouldn’t even turn his face and talk to me. Nothing. That day I took the parcel to the doorman who was down below, and this went on for a couple of days, with him not eating or speaking to me. That’s how it was.”
She lapsed into silence, scratching with her fingernail at the dirt that had collected in the gap in front of the doorstep, craning her head inside so she could see me and inquiring, “Do you have a lot of work?”
“Some.”
“All right, so I’ll get going.”
But she doesn’t go anywhere. She stays for a while staring into space, with her head on her drawn-up knees.
She said that he was inside but didn’t want her sitting with him or seeing what he was drawing. He had a slate board she had bought him from the scrap merchant, and some colored chalk. He’d draw something then rub it out—animals. She said, “I don’t know what he liked about them: dogs and donkeys and mice. Once I stood up to see what he was drawing, but he no sooner felt me there than he turned the slate over, saying that he didn’t like anyone seeing what he’s drawing. I said to him, ‘You draw beautifully. Why not draw people and houses?’ I stretched out my hand to touch his head and he pushed it aside. When he saw me still standing there, he wiped out what he’d drawn and went to the mattress. After that I didn’t go near him. As soon as I saw him take hold of the slate I’d finish what I had in hand and go out to the roof.”
That day, as she was sitting at the threshold of my room, I asked her, “And where’s his father?”
“Who knows?”
She was mending a tear in her son’s shirt. Cutting the thread with her teeth, she spread out the shirt in front of her, then folded it into her lap.
“It’s been several months now that no one knows where he is.”
“And his family? His father, his mother, and brothers and sisters?”
“His father and mother died years ago, and I don’t know the rest of them. They’re right down in Upper Egypt. He once told me the name of the village, but I’ve forgotten it. Not one of them ever paid us a visit, nor us them. Even his friends—that’s if he had any. I never saw him greet anyone in the street. He’d be on his own, looking neither right nor left.”
She took up the shirt from her lap and once again spread it out. There was a hole at the armpit. She put her finger inside it, then began to mend it.
She said that they had been living in a room in a flat that was made up of three rooms, and each room was occupied by a family, with everyone living on their own and keeping their door closed. The lavatory was communal. It was quite a lifestyle. There was no place for any visitor in their room. It was just enough for them, with a bed and a mattress for the boy and two boxes for their clothes, and the pots and pans in a corner all higgledy-piggledy. No chairs or anything else. What did they need chairs for? She still doesn’t know the reason why he left. It was on a day like any other. He woke up early as usual to go to his work. He was a carpenter at a workshop not far away making windows, doors, and chairs. The lavatory was occupied, one of her neighbors was taking a shower and had decided to rinse out her undies while she was at it. The woman was a bit long in the bathroom, while the husband was clasping his stomach and twisting about in the narrow space of the room. From time to time she’d open the door and glance toward the lavatory, not knowing what to do. Embarrassed, she hurried to the lavatory and asked her neighbor to vacate it as her husband was late for work. Finally the woman came out and her husband, having relieved himself, went off to the workshop. There was nothing to suggest there was anything wrong. She took the boy to the school and, on her return, found that while she was away he had come back and had collected up his clothes and his belongings into a bundle and taken off. He had left her some money on the pillow to cover their expenses for a month. He hadn’t done this before, usually paying their way day by day. One of her neighbors told her that he was carrying a bundle with him as he left. She hurried off to the workshop to find out what she could and was told by the owner that, having paid him his due, he had left them.
“Where to?”
“The owner of the workshop doesn’t know.”
She waited around for a whole month, but there was no news of him. She couldn’t wait any longer. The money he had left had been used up. Finding work in people’s houses was easy enough and so she looked around for a separate room with its own bathroom.
I take a short walk at the end of the night on the roof, having finished writing down the applications in the notebook. There is a gentle breeze and the pale light of the moon. I look down from the wall: the streets are just as I am used to seeing them every night. For some time the light in the other room has been extinguished, and the woman’s slippers and those of the boy are right by the door. I enter my room to sleep.