He sits down cross-legged on the bed. I drag over the desk chair and sit in front of him. He squeezes lime juice over the beans. I dip in a small piece of the bread. I chew an end of it without really caring. I say that I don’t like fava beans. He says that when he was a schoolboy, he would grab his breakfast from a pot of cold leftovers from the night before. His mother would call down to him from the upper floor each morning: “There’s a pot of leftovers in the skylight.”
We finish breakfast. We go out of the room and rinse the dishes at the wash basin. The doorbell rings. He opens the door for the milkman. He brings a small pan and takes a gallon. He lights the fire and puts the pan over it until the milk boils, then puts a metal pitcher in its place to make the cinnamon. He keeps standing next to it until the cinnamon water has come to the boil several times. He pours me a cup then adds the milk to it. I bring the cup to my mouth. I notice a smell of gas. I give the cup back to him. He gets mad and sits drinking from his cup quietly.
The doorbell rings again. I rush to the door and open it. Um Nazira comes in. Short and skinny. Her hair is wrapped in a black scarf tied over her forehead with white hairs hanging from the sides. Her face is pale and her eyes are sunken. She takes off her black sandals and leaves them by the door. She puts a bag of vegetables on the dining table. She says she was late because the women who volunteer with the cholera service stopped her on her way and took her to the inoculation center.
Father gives her the leftovers from our breakfast. When she sits down on the floor, he tells her she can sit on one of the dining-room chairs. He asks about her husband and children. He pays her for the vegetables she brought. He makes himself a cup of Turkish coffee over a Sterno can in the small brass coffee pot. He pours it into a hand-painted china cup and carries it by its saucer. I follow him to our room and he sits cross-legged on the bed. He sips at the coffee slowly. I put the chair back in its place at the desk. I sit and take out my math notebook.
I start to solve my homework questions. I get stuck on one of the problems. I look up at him. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide without even using a pen and pad, but the scowl on his face scares me from asking for help. He lights his black cigarette. I try to think of a trick. I remember the vocabulary lesson from Arabic class. I ask him what type of house we have. I list off on my fingers the types I have learned: a palace, a castle, a hermitage, a cellar, a shack. He shakes his head and says our house is in its own class. I show him my math problem and he solves it for me.
I put on my glasses and walk out of our room and into the living area. Um Nazira lines up the dishes she has just washed on the marble surface of the sideboard. I pause in front of the door of the constable’s room. I steal a glance through the keyhole but I can’t see anything but the edge of a bed with its covers all ruffled in a stack. I put my ear to the hole, but I can’t hear any movement.
I go back behind the dining table. I move away from the glass door that leads to the skylight where the cold wind is leaking inside. I turn around again and stop in front of the door of the third room. I turn the doorknob and go in. It has a worn and ragged wooden floor full of holes. Our old furniture: a rocking chair made of wicker with one side torn off, two armchairs and a couch. One of the armchairs has a sunken seat.
The room is cold. The paint on the walls is cracked, showing the plaster underneath it. Some of the cracks are covered with colored paper. I walk up to them. They’re pages from a green photography magazine fastened with staples. A picture of King Farouk when he was young and pretty, with short trousers and a fez. Another picture shows him in a convertible with his three beautiful sisters. Another shows him next to his father, King Fuad, with his pointy moustache and its long handlebars curving upwards. I reach with my hand to touch the shiny surface of the pictures. The dry plaster behind it falls off. Um Nazira calls me to come out so she can sweep the room.
Father sits on the bed with his prayer beads in his hand. The blinds of the balcony across from us are open, but the lace curtains hang down behind the glass door. It’s small and narrow like our own balcony and the ones on the first floor. Above it are two big balconies next to each other in the same apartment. A clerk lives there who is married to two wives, each with her own balcony. One of them is open, its covers spread out over the ledge to take the sun. The other is closed up. That means he spent the night there. Today, it will be the other balcony’s turn.
I stand behind the glass. I press my cheek against the pane so I can see the house on the corner. Sabry Effendi’s window is open. His wife appears for an instant then disappears. Short and fat. Her face is covered with pock marks from heat rash. Also her children: Siham, the oldest girl, Soha, the middle girl, then Selma, the youngest girl, and Samir, the youngest of them all.
Um Nazira calls us and tells us to leave the room so she can sweep and mop it. Father rocks himself off the bed. He puts his feet into his clogs. She opens the door to the balcony, drags the rug out, and spreads it over the ledge. She sweeps the floor. We watch her from the doorway between the room and the hall. He’s scared that she’ll try to get in the pockets of his clothes hanging on the rack.
She finishes sweeping and puts her swath of sackcloth into the mop bucket, then she takes it out and flings the water around over the surface of the floor. She bends over at the waist to wipe the floor with it. Her gallabiya comes up over her bony knee caps. She wrings out the cloth in the bucket. She dries the floor, then straightens up, panting.
She picks up the bucket and gets ready to leave the room. Father stops her. He points to a wet patch near the balcony. She says she didn’t see it, but anyway it’ll be dry in no time if we leave the balcony door open. He screams at her: “Do what I tell you!” She obeys but doesn’t really want to.
My father steps into the room and closes the door to the balcony. He stays there for a moment, keeping his eyes on the balcony facing ours.
Um Nazira calls out from the living area: “The water is hot.” I pick up my clean clothes and my loofah and leave our room. Father follows me carrying an old newspaper. He closes the door, locks it, and puts the key in the pocket of his robe. We head towards the guest room. The iron washbasin is in the middle. There’s a primus stove with a water tap over it that gives off wafts of steam. A large can of cold water. Father takes off his robe. He squats. He mixes the cold water with the hot and then tests its temperature with his hand. I try to remember what the science teacher taught us about how to measure the boiling point. The water boils over the primus stove. Mother fills a metal pitcher with boiling water. She adds water from the tap, then she pours it over my naked body. She fills the pitcher with the hot water again, but this time, she forgets to add the cool tap water before she pours it over me. I scream. My father rushes to me. He carries me to the bedroom. He dries me off tenderly. He sprinkles white powder on me. He dresses me and takes me with him to the mosque.
I take my clothes off and plunge into the water in the basin. He scrubs my head with the Nablus soap and my body with the loofah. He asks me to stand up, so he can rinse me off with clean water. He dries me off. I look up at the picture of the king on the wall. He wraps the newspaper around my chest and I put my clothes on over it. He calls Um Nazira to throw out the dirty water and refill the can.