Fiction and Drama

Yasser Abdellatif

He saw Cairo as a cake dripping with delights

Seventeen years Mohammed Shatta spent in Cairo.

His time there ended in what, by the standards of the urban bourgeoisie, was catastrophic failure, but the rapid collapse of his marital and professional life had been set in motion by his own hand. It was as though, by means of the outrages for which he was responsible, he meant to spit on the modest institution whose foundations he had laid in that city, on a life that had him trussed up in ties whose size and strength he had failed to anticipate: his very body hooked to invisible silken threads, as if the Cairene middle class had rewired his limbs and set them dancing, even at home.

The acts in question (unpremeditated, or if premeditated, then unconsciously so) had been his way of breaking free. Had friends not intervened to contain the damage, they might well have landed him in prison. His wife had immediately asked for a divorce, and he had divorced her. Technically he wasn’t under contract, so he couldn’t be fired, but he’d understood that returning to work was out of the question.

And so it was that one scorching August afternoon, divorced and unemployed, he arrived back at his village and sat himself down on his mother’s low bed. She asked him how he was, how were his wife and his son.

“I’ve left everything in Cairo, Mother. I want to marry Cousin Amal.”

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Shatta went backto their village in the delta’s far north, back to the peasant life of his forebears, and there he married his 27-year-old cousin, in village terms a spinster. This cousin, the daughter of his mother’s sister, despite being a young, full-bodied, and vigorous woman, resembled not only her mother but his as well. Their union ignited a wild desire in Shatta, fanned higher by the clannish primitivism of their shared blood. It felt to him like he was breaking a taboo, violating a sacred body.

Down Shatta sank into the dark loam of the delta, overrun by Mother Nature’s rough waters and her earthy, peppery pleasures.

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In the early ’90s, Shatta graduated from high school with grades good enough to enroll at Cairo University, in what was at that time the only media studies department in the country. He had chosen media studies out of a passion for writing and literature and because he thought it would be the most direct route to employment in the press. Back then, Media Studies shared a building with another department, also the only one of its kind in Egypt: Economics and Political Science. And, my dear, you should have seen the Department of Economics and Political Science: Walk past the building and you’d have trouble recognizing it as part of Cairo University at all. In place of the usual wretched mob, there were young women like film stars, pink-cheeked youths turned out with an elegance entirely foreign to the undergraduates from Imbaba and Sayyida Zeinab who made up the majority of that venerable institution’s student body.

Media studies students might not have stood quite so high on the ladder of bourgeois respectability, but they did what they could to keep up with their neighbors. Given his inability to compete when it came to lavish spending and attire, Shatta’s most effective weapons in combating their casual arrogance were his academic excellence, an inoffensive demeanor, and the fact that he was more widely and better read than his contemporaries. “I got the highest marks in Melon Hamlet, guys,” he was wont to remark, which would prompt gales of laughter from his audience, who assumed that Melon Hamlet was a joke name, a satirical (indeed, a Cairene) stand-in for rural Egypt and its peasantry as a whole. But Shatta spoke the plain truth. He came from Damietta, from Koheil, one of several benighted villages in the district of Melon Hamlet, which was no longer a hamlet but a town, a provincial center of some importance. And Shatta had indeed attended secondary school at Melon Hamlet High (coed) and had, indeed, achieved the district’s highest marks.