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Written by Abdel Fattah Abdel Salam* March 4, 2026 Narrative “The Fugitives” Episode Fifteen “We live in a sleeping world that we must awaken through dialogue with others.” Gaston Bachelard • The Last Day in EgyptYes, I do not believe Bachelard’s statement above. Dialogue is speech. If we want to know the other, even the intimate, we must have a conversation with him, or at least listen to what he says. Just like drinking football or drinking in Khartoum parks in the past; The boy player’s conversation with his opponent in the Dafouri arena is a kind of interrogation. Is he violent, cunning, a thief, a pervert? Or peaceful, noble, honest, disciplined and reliable? …And I do not know where this football term “conversation” came from?! …Is she Egyptian? I have not heard it anywhere else among speakers of Arabic dialects…and that is how I came across the owner of the mini market, in his fifties or sixties, who complained frequently about the difficult living conditions whenever I entered his shop. I remember that he once mentioned to me that he was an employee in the public sector, but he was removed because he was not one of their patients! . He did not disclose the nature of his previous work, and I guessed that he might be from their group!… I noticed that he was a traditional, first-class accountant, and even though he was using the barcode scanner very slowly so as not to make mistakes, he was re-reading the prices of the goods in a notebook next to him on the counter, which indicates that he was new to the profession and truthful in what he said about his work in the public sector… I thought I would ask him about the price of a haircut, and he assured me: You don’t pay. More than 60-70 pounds, which also includes tips. I also asked him about a “dry cleaning” shop to iron jackets, shirts, and trousers for airplane travel, so he pointed to me a shop not very far from his shop.. and I bid him farewell briefly. He, like Uncle Ahmed, the bread and vegetable seller, never once asked me about what happened to us there, far away in the vast land of the Nile located south of ancient Wadi Halfa, or Lake Nasser, or Lake Nubia, or Lake the High Dam!! Call it whatever you want…on my way to the apartment, I was worried that I had not received anything from this mother of the world, and I realized with a slight dismay that I had to visit or see the house or museum in which Taha Hussein lived, for example, or the street that Naguib Mahfouz used to greet every morning on his way to work as a public employee, just as I wandered through some streets and stood in the windows of a few of the shops that the Irishman James Joyce mentioned in his novel “Ulysses” in The city of Dublin, which I visited many times more than a decade ago, with the difference that those streets and shops were numbered by the municipality and placed plates and signs to make it easier for someone like me, coming from the end of the world, to follow Mr. Bloom’s path in one day in the city, is the entire time of the novel… However, what saddened me most was that I had an old desire to visit the “Kit Kat” neighborhood in Cairo for the sake of a sad writer despite his prominence in his last years as the owner of a newspaper column or columns in some of the newspapers that we used to read. . Yes, he is Ibrahim Aslan, who came from the Egyptian Delta countryside to Cairo with thick mustaches and a short stature. Then he created his works, “Evening Lake,” “Malik Al-Heron,” “The Night Shift,” “The Solitude of the Fools,” and others. I had a hidden desire to ask people about Fadlallah Othman Street, where Aslan lived and wrote about that street that became a crowning hero for his stories and creativity… a tour of that narrow and short street and just a look. From afar, I saw Aslan’s house and the windows through which he overlooked the world around him…but I had a vague feeling that I would not only be able to visit Kit Kat, but even Old Cairo and tour its landmarks, including its tents, its palaces, its castle, and its books in the Azbakeya wall. I felt that Cairo and the heritage of its thinkers and innovators might disappear in this sea of millions one day due to an active action, and no trace of them would be left behind…. Then the days may not slow down… who knows?! … • You are not a drop in the ocean, but rather you are the entire ocean in a drop, and does a person feel any other feeling than being lost in the midst of these millions crawling and riding? In my belief, Ibrahim Aslan approached, or let us say embodied in some way, the wisdom of the ancient Konya mystic, Jalal al-Din al-Rumi. He lived in that old and crowded popular neighborhood, as if he were a drop in the ocean amidst the roar of the crashing people, but he made of his creations a very vast circular wave visible from afar, and its existence may not be bothered except by a few who understand the calligraphy and care about the magic of speech and its lasting effect… I imagined Aslan among these crowds that were awake during the day and who slept for a long time just as Aza Al-Khalil slept here in the twenties, and as if he was carrying a hidden camera with which he was capturing this. Lives that are static and absent of tomorrow in all its dimensions, lives that live today’s living day by day, or an employee who refuses to go to work because there is no benefit and the whole world around him is “…dogs”… Aslan draws all these worlds and formulates them without noise…but it is “noiseless” in question…he may be “dialogue” with the discourse of authority that has not changed! …When you find yourself in the middle of all this chaos and not a glimmer of hope, and where the ends do not meet, as the Franks say, then your day is ruined and your day is black, as people in Egypt and its neighbourhood say, and when obsessions overwhelm actual creativity, not only in literature, but also advancement, progress, and competition from other similar nations that have nurtured their human beings and made them citizens, I realize that the glow of knowledge and modern education is the only path available to conquer darkness and backwardness. The question remains: What happened?! Why stumble and why limp? … • Fear and the absence of questions. Fear of asking questions leads to the death of knowledge, and the death of knowledge leads to silence. Who said that? Maybe Confucius! I am not sure, but Confucius is credited with saying something similar: “The man who asks a question is a fool for a moment, but the man who does not ask is a fool for his whole life.”…And fearing the specter of the tyranny of the delusional is also foolishness…The officer in a black dress and his white uniform and his inappropriate words about the sergeant who allowed me to sit in the empty seat…When the old Sudanese woman came to ask permission to sit in the shade, she cried and turned to me…You are sitting here. How?! … That was on a day when I went to the Sudanese embassy to authenticate some papers, and we had to wait for hours until we received them, so we took refuge in the shade cast by the buildings opposite… It seemed that they had brought the police to regulate the crowd, and the same officer was sitting in the shade on a chair with a small table in front of him… And I was sitting in the other chair far from the table, which I thought was the chair of the sergeant, who then disappeared… and his mockery of the young soldier Al-Falah before my eyes and my astonishment… So what we saw in the past in Adel’s films Imam, Samir Ghanem, Nour Al-Sharif and others on the authority of Al-Khashaiba and the oath was not a pure fantasy but a reality that walks on bare feet…And are the people of the northern half of the earth right when in the past they demanded from those living in its southern half the horizon of citizenship and equal rights…instead of rent and subjects?! I do not think that Ibrahim Aslan has answered such a question…he asked his questions, rather it is one question in all his creativity…and He passed… just as a group of creative people and others who were insightful in thought and awareness passed before him… • An aversion to brokers. On the path of escape and refuge, you sometimes meet people who are characterized by companionship… but I have always had a vague feeling that we have not yet gotten rid of tribalism (and I do not say tribalism in its primary or primitive sense) and that tribalism may have been the mother of nepotism and its companion – brokerage… and I do not really know why I I have always, and for a long time, detested this craft, everyone who belongs to it, and everything related to it, and which is unconsciously linked to other vocabulary that is not palatable or benign!! “Why? I don’t know… After I returned from a long expatriate and lived in Omdurman, which I did not know, we offered a car that I had brought with me and shipped to the port of Suakin, and I received it months later at the Keren site in Bahri, which I had seen and toured for the first time. We drove it home and put it in the garage… Then after a short period we offered it for sale… and crowds of brokers of all kinds flocked to us, and among them was one who I asked if he was Ethiopian… and He was from the Amhara specifically, and he answered me after a slight stutter that he was actually from there, but I suspected that he was lying, as he might be from any other similar nationality, and I thought I would let him have fun with his quackery. Isn’t he a broker? That’s what I said in secret, despite my feeling of being unnecessarily cruel to him. After all, he was a foreigner among a group of “wolves,” and he might be the least fortunate among them It was alleged that they were among them, but I ignored their words and closed my two ears to their language, as their open eyes expressed what they meant more than their words!! This reminded me of Dr. Abdul Karim, whom I met on the Berlin metro, the one who crawls underground, decades ago. I had come there as a student looking for work during the summer vacation, and I was wearing old shoes, and since the passengers were facing each other and there was no way to look out of the windows, my gaze would automatically fall on their shoes, some of which were new and some of which were new. Brilliant… and Dr. Abdul Karim, from whom I learned that he had come to Germany to specialize in ear, nose and throat, rescued me from my silence and staring at my shoes by telling me a strange story when he had to wait in Istanbul, Turkey, for a German visa for three full months there… and during that period he suffered from a syndrome – this is how he explained it – an aversion to the Turkish language, even though the Turks were, in his view, good and peaceful people… and he found himself helpless whenever he ascended. On the bus or walking in the street, his ears are closed from hearing!! And he does not hear the Turks speaking their language, which he fled for a reason he does not know!!… • Temporary relationships. I realize that many are burdened with disappointment and confusion, and this was evident in the faces of the women, especially during the first days of escaping on the buses, even though I described that stage before as “bohemian” because, perhaps, and the majority of the escapees believed that we were returning to our homes and our pre-war lives in A matter of a few weeks or months…and I later realized that this was an illusion…especially after the experience of our friend “Tammam” who was looking for a wekah in the Faisal neighborhood while I was looking for tortillas that I had to eat with milk tea in the morning because I cannot stand biscuits…and I mentioned previously that we met by chance at the microbus station in the Haram neighborhood and I asked him about the vehicles heading to the Faisal neighborhood, and fortunately he was going there, so he accompanied us, and He was wearing a jalabiya and a hat like mine… and I learned from him that he had a shop that sold Sudanese supplies in a part of the Al-Haram neighborhood and that he used to bring some goods from Faisal, where the wholesale shops were… and we wandered together in Faisal and his many grocery stores extending along a long street and some side streets. He would ask about the wicket, bargain, and negotiate, and he would also ask the vendors about the tortillas I was looking for… but we never found the tortillas. …He contented himself with finding out about the prices of the wicket and was determined to return at another opportunity to get it when he liked the prices…and we exchanged phone numbers…and after a few days I decided to call him and ask him about Al-Ahwal, and he briefly mentioned to me that he had abandoned the shop in the Al-Haram neighborhood…and I noticed that it was as if he had asked me to call him too much…as he would say a word and then be silent…so I would ask him and then he would be silent again until I felt the burden of talking to him and I cut the call short under the pretext of He might be busy… and I did not contact him again until I left Egypt….. To be continued… the last episode * fattah71@gmail.com
