Morning and Evening Talk Read Free Page A

heart.”
    Ahmad lifted his heavy eyelids. It was clear he was trying to speak but could not get any words out, though no one doubted his flushed cheeks were quivering with goodwill. He passed away in the middle of that sad night.
Adham Hazim Surur
    He graduated as an architect in 1978. He entered working life aged twenty-five in a Cairo awash with troubles, yet never encountered a single problem in his own life. Torrents of people and vehicles surged around him, the noise erupting like the rumble of a volcano, yet he lived happily at his parents’ villa in Dokki in peace and tranquillity amid the scent of roses and flowers. While his generation fumbled about, searching for identity, a home, marriage, and selfhood, he found an important position awaiting him at his father’s engineering office. He was good looking like his father and similarly shortsighted, almost blind, in his left eye. He cared for nothing in the world except his chosen field and knew only dreams of fortune and success. So mild was his faith he had almost none, without being an atheist.
    “We lost his older brother. Let me arrange his marriage!” Samiha Hanem, his mother, said to his father, Hazim.
    “This generation makes its own choices. Don’t provoke him,” the man replied gently, careful as always not to anger her. But she flared up as usual.
    “There’s a rotten root in your family and I’m frightened it’ll lead him down the same path as his brother,” she shouted.
    His father lit a cigarette. “Do what you think is right.”
    But Adham was much quicker than she imagined and informed them one morning during the holidays, as they sat in Mena House Garden, that he had chosen his life partner. Samiha was alarmed. She stared into his face questioningly. The young man guessed her fears and smiled. “Karima. She is in her final year of law school. Her father is Muhammad Fawzi, a government legal advisor.”
    His mother’s nerves appeared to relax. She put a spoon of ice cream between her wrinkled lips and began chewing.
    “Inquiries will have to be made,” she mumbled.
    Adham frowned.
    “It’s just the formalities. I’m optimistic,” his father said obligingly.
    Visits were exchanged and the choice met with approval, though some critical comments on Samiha’s part were inevitable.
    “The mother is evidently not educated,” she said to her husband.
    The man was amazed at her remark since she—Samiha—had not herself obtained the baccalaureate, but he said only, “It’s not important.”
    Everything was agreed on. Hazim bought his son an apartment in al-Ma’adi for six thousand Egyptian pounds and Adham moved there with his bride at the end of the year.
    Of his family tree Adham knew only his mother’s branch; his grandfather, Muhammad Salama, who set up the engineering office, and his maternal aunts and uncles. As for his father’s side, he knew vaguely that his grandfather, Surur Effendi Aziz, was employed in the railways, that his great uncle, Amr Effendi, worked at the ministry of education, and that he had paternal aunts with children, but he never saw any of them. He also knew his family came from al-Hussein, a quarter he associated with poverty and backwardness, but there was no reason to remember it and he only ever passed through in a car. He often encountered members of his family in squares and public places without him recognizing them or them recognizing him. His father followed his movements with pleasure, confident that when he retired one day in the not too distant future the office would be left in capable hands. He once said to him with respect to the corruption that was rife, “There is plenty of opportunity out there. You have knowledge, intelligence, and ambition. Don’t digress. Don’t scorn advice. If you mock values then at least strive for a good reputation and beware of jail.”
Amana Muhammad Ibrahim
    She had a radiant complexion, delicate features, soft hair, and was the image of her mother,