Whispers from the Beyond

My village, finally!

My kind, old village, where my childhood and adolescence were spent before I moved to Cairo to study medicine and settle there...

Nothing has changed...

The mud-brick houses... the waterwheel... the mosque with its crumbling walls... the stagnant canal... the palm tree leaning over the wall of the village school... the barefoot children playing their primitive games, with snot dripping from their noses...

And there I was, in a taxi... one of those ancient cars fit only for dumping its unfortunate peasant passengers into the canal. My own car couldn't handle this rough road, so I left it in Cairo...

An old, skeptical peasant sat beside me, his lips trembling with Quranic verses the entire time. Every three minutes, he would shout at the driver:

"Take it easy, Saleh... Has the world gone mad?!"

The driver would laugh gruffly and raise his voice in song with a hoarse tone—fortunately, car cassette players weren't common back then—and the car would speed up even more...

And today, I return to it after a long absence, feeling like a plant in need of its roots...

The curious gazes of the children follow me, and the teenage beauties steal glances, then nudge each other playfully...

Almost no one remembers me... no one...

I arrived at our home... the tender home where I spent the most beautiful days of my life. Like most village houses, it was made of mud bricks, with a cracked kerosene lamp perched at its entrance... then the giant wooden door... the courtyard where ducks and chickens roam, pecking at insects from the slippery clay ground... a room to the right of the entrance, and the ancient oven... then haphazardly carved mud steps leading to the upper floor, where the roof held piles of figs and discs of cattle dung drying in the sun... and next to them, my room... Of course, electricity had not yet reached my village at that time...

At the door, I cleared my throat, then entered and glanced at the little goat, which stared at me in astonishment... An elderly woman...

Sitting before her was a large copper basin filled with rice, which she had begun to sort... Beside her sat a beautiful young woman, exhausted, cleaning a completely naked little child.

The elderly woman raised her weary eyes and saw me... "My son... Rifaat!" "Mother!" I threw myself into her arms and kissed her hands eagerly... those familiar, dear hands... Meanwhile, the young woman began to hug me from behind, tears streaming down her face, her hands still wet... "My brother!"

Oh, the tenderness... the sweetness! Never in my life had I received such genuine, selfless kisses from any woman except my mother and sister. And never had anyone cried so sincerely upon seeing me except these two dear souls. But it wasn't until that moment that I truly noticed the poverty and hardship they were living in... These signs of struggle had always been there, accepted as a given in my eyes. Yet, my time away from them made me realize that it was my duty to provide them with more material care.

Now, I am capable of building them a house of bricks... and providing them with many comforts they truly deserve...

But something in my mother's eyes made me hesitate to bring it up... Her heightened sensitivity would not see my suggestion as an act of kindness toward my family, but rather as a form of condescension toward our humble home. The thought of me living alone in Cairo and traveling abroad repeatedly never leaves her mind... She firmly believes, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have changed, and she waits for the slightest hint from me that would break her heart...

Yes... let's postpone this conversation for now...

My return, unfortunately, spelled doom for the birds in the house...

A bloody massacre carried out by my sister... and a grand feast was prepared in my honor, while my mother orchestrated the "operation" like a general in a war he knows exactly how to win... May God have mercy on her, how brave and energetic she was...

Sitting like Harun al-Rashid at the low dining table, surrounded by piles of pastry sheets, meat, yogurt, bread, and flatbread, I realized that I had to devour every last bit of it, or else I would break the hearts of these two dear souls!

My mother—like every Egyptian mother—believes that her son's health is never quite right at any given moment, and she believes that eating is the only reliable sign of good health. And, of course, she thinks that my delay in getting married is downright terrifying...

"How I wish I could see you settled with a wife... She would know how to take care of your health and your meals..." Oh, the painful refrain...

At that time, I had begun to feel the pangs of loneliness and that instinct we all sense, making us desire to become two, then three, then four, and so on... My heart was no different from that of the doorman, the plumber, or the newspaper vendor... that urgent need for a companion who would wait for you at night and bid you farewell in the morning...

May God have mercy on you, Mother... How would she have reacted—and how would I have known—that I would reach the age of sixty-six alone? I never imagined that I would witness all that I have seen, or that I would spend the prime of my life among vampires and monsters, leaving me with neither the time nor the emotional capacity to find a kind girl to share my life with.

I swallowed the piece of meat I had been chewing... and muttered: "May God make it easy!"

I looked at her kind, gentle face... What if she knew what I had been through in England and Romania?! If she knew, she would have died of grief... and would have sworn to keep me under her wing until one of us passed away...

I reached out my hand to playfully pinch the chin of the naked child, my nephew, and asked: "How is your husband, Talaat, doing, Reifa?" "He's fine... He'll be back tonight..."

I dipped my bite into the cream and popped it into my mouth, then continued inquiring: "And what about Reza?!" Reza—in case you didn't know—is my brother, a farmer who chose to tend to our land in the village and live with his wife on the other side of town because his high-strung, haughty wife refused to live with my mother and sister... A few minutes passed before I noticed that neither of them had answered my question...

"I'm asking... how is Reza doing?"

A vacant look in my mother's eyes... and a frozen tear in my sister's eye as she tried to ignore the question by busying herself with feeding her child... What had happened?!

"Mother... what's wrong...?"

My mother realized there was no avoiding my question, so she looked into my eyes and whispered:

"May God protect him and keep him safe..."

"What... is he sick...? Did he get into some trouble...? Is it his wife, Nagat...?"

"Don't accuse anyone, my son... It's God's will..."

"Then what happened...?"

My sister lifted her child from her lap and whispered:

"Reza... the Nadaha called him..."