Alaa Al Aswany
The Yacoubian Building
To My Guardian Angel — Iman Taymur
Cast of Characters
Abaskharon: Zaki Bey’s servant and the brother of Malak. His right leg was amputated when he was younger.
Abd Rabbuh: A police officer from northern Egypt doing military service in Cairo. He has a wife and a son, but is the love interest of Hatim Rasheed.
Busayna: The oldest daughter of a poor family that lives in the shacks on the roof of the Yacoubian Building. When her father died, she began earning money for her family by working at a clothing shop. She is Taha’s childhood sweetheart and wonders if their relationship will last.
Dawlat el Dessouki: Zaki Bey’s older sister, with whom he lives. While Zaki Bey loves her, they fight constantly. She has been married three times and has two children.
Fikri Abd el Shaheed: A lawyer and agent for the Yacoubian Building.
Hagg Muhammad Azzam: An extremely wealthy and successful businessman who started out as an immigrant shining shoes on the street. His business is located in the Yacoubian Building, and he aspires to hold a political office. He has a wife and three sons — Fawzi, Qadri, and Hamdi.
Hatim Rasheed: The editor in chief of Le Caire, a French language newspaper in Cairo. He is the son of aristocrats and his mother was French. He is a closeted homosexual who frequents Chez Nous, a gay bar in Cairo, and is in love with Abd Rabbuh. He lives in an apartment in the Yacoubian Building.
Kamal el Fouli: He is a secretary of the Patriotic Party; although he grew up in poverty, he has become a corrupt politician with major power over Egyptian elections.
Malak: A Christian shirtmaker and tailor, he longs to have a shop in the Yacoubian Building. Abaskharon is his brother.
Souad Gaber: She is a secretary from Alexandria with a son, Tamir, and has no husband. She catches the eye of Hagg Azzam and becomes his second wife.
Taha el Shazli: The son of the Yacoubian Building doorkeeper, who lives in shacks on the roof. He is a very devout Muslim who aspires to be a police officer and is in love with Busayna.
Zaki Bey el Dessouki: An aging playboy with inherited wealth, but is a failed engineer. He is the youngest son of Abd el Aal Basha Dessouki, who was a former prime minister and one of the richest men in Egypt before the revolution. He lives with his sister Dawlat, and has an office in the Yacoubian Building.
Translator’s Note
Alaa Al Aswany, born in 1957 and a dentist by profession, has written from an early age. His published works include novels, short stories, and a novella, as well as prolific contributions on literature, politics, and social issues to newspapers and magazines covering the political spectrum. The Yacoubian Building is his second published novel. Since appearing in 2002, it has gone through several editions and was the bestselling Arabic novel for the years 2002 and 2003. It was voted Best Novel for 2003 by listeners to Egypt’s Middle East Broadcasting service. In 2004 Al Aswany published a novella and nine short stories in Arabic in a collection called Niran Sadiqa (Friendly Fire). He is at work on a novel entitled Chicago. The Yacoubian Building exists, at the address given in the novel. Indeed, it was there that the author’s father (Abbas Al Aswany, himself a noted author and winner of the State Prize for Literature for 1974) maintained an office, and there that the author opened his first dental clinic. However, a wanderer on Cairo’s Suleiman Basha Street will notice that the real Yacoubian Building does not match its literary namesake in every detaiclass="underline" rather than being in the “high European style” and boasting “balconies decorated with Greek faces carved from stone,” it is a restrained albeit elegant exercise in art deco, innocent of balconies. Similarly, the real Halegian’s Bar is situated on Abd el Khaliq Sarwat Street, rather than Antikkhana Street. The same logic applies to the characters: while many Egyptian readers believe they know who a given character “really” is, few are portraits from life and in most cases a number of originals have contributed aspects to them. Likewise, the reader need not pay too much heed to the fact that the events described nominally take place before and during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait: the novel reflects the Egypt of the present.
It would be a mistake, in other words, to assume that everything mentioned in The Yacoubian Building is an exact portrait of an identifiable existing original. While the world of the book is undeniably that of today’s Egypt, the author achieves this sense of verisimilitude by taking recognizable features from multiple known originals to form new creations. That these collages are so convincing is a measure of the novel’s genius and explains in part its appeal.
Inevitably, the book contains numerous references to people and events that are likely to be unfamiliar to the non-Egyptian reader. These are explained in the Glossary at the end of the book. Quotations from the Qur’an are italicized and Arberry’s translation has been used (Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, Oxford University Press, 1998); a list of references follows the Glossary.
While taking full responsibility for any errors, the translator acknowledges his debt to Siham Abdel Salam, Jacinthe Assaad, Madiha Doss, Maria Golia, Fawzi Mansour, A. Rushdi Nasef, Sayed Ragab, Diya Rashwan, and, above all, the author for help on various aspects of the text.
This translation is dedicated to Gasim.
1
The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street. Clothing- and shoe-store owners, their employees (of both sexes), waiters, cinema staff, habitués of the Brazilian Coffee Stores, even doorkeepers, shoeshine men, beggars, and traffic cops — Zaki Bey knows them all by name and exchanges greetings and news with them. Zaki Bey is one of the oldest residents of Suleiman Basha Street, to which he came in the late 1940s after his return from his studies in France and which he has never thereafter left. To the residents of the street he cuts a well-loved, folkloric figure when he appears before them in his three-piece suit (winter and summer, its bagginess hiding his tiny, emaciated body); with his carefully ironed handkerchief always dangling from his jacket pocket and always of the same color as his tie; with his celebrated cigar, which, in his glory days, was Cuban deluxe but is now of the foul-smelling, tightly packed, low-quality local kind; and with his old, wrinkled face, his thick glasses, his gleaming false teeth, and his dyed black hair, whose few locks are arranged in rows from the leftmost to the right-most side of his head in the hope of covering the broad, naked, bald patch. In brief, Zaki Bey el Dessouki is something of a legend, which makes his presence both much looked for and completely unreal, as though he might disappear at any moment, or as though he were an actor playing a part, of whom it is understood that once done he will take off his costume and put his original clothes back on. If we add to the above his jolly temperament, his unceasing stream of scabrous jokes, and his amazing ability to engage in conversation anyone he meets as though he were an old friend, we will understand the secret of the warm welcome with which everyone on the street greets him. Indeed Zaki Bey has only to appear at the top end of the street at around ten in the morning for the salutations to ring out from every side, and often a number of his disciples among the young men who work in the stores will rush up to him to ask him jokingly about certain sexual matters that remain obscure to them, in which case Zaki Bey will draw on his vast and encyclopedic knowledge of the subject to explain to the youths — in great detail, with the utmost pleasure, and in a voice audible to all — the most subtle sexual secrets. Sometimes, in fact, he will ask for a pen and paper (provided in the twinkling of an eye) so that he can draw clearly for the young men some curious coital position that he himself tried in the days of his youth.