Cigarette Number Seven

Donia Kamal is an Egyptian novelist and producer. She has produced more than fifty documentary films and numerous television shows for various Arab networks. She currently lives between Egypt and the UAE, working as a senior producer for the Middle East broadcasting network Al Hurra TV, producing interactive shows mainly focused on current events and world news. Cigarette Number Seven is her second novel.

Nariman Youssef is a translator and researcher working primarily in Arabic and English. Her translation projects have included fiction, poetry, song lyrics, and the controversial 2012 Egyptian constitution draft. She serves as translation manager at the British Library for a digital archive launched in 2014. Having grown up in Cairo, Nariman has lived and worked between Egypt and the UK since 2001. She holds a master’s degree in translation studies from the University of Edinburgh.

Cigarette Number Seven

Donia Kamal

Translated by

Nariman Youssef

This electronic edition published in 2017 by

Hoopoe

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.hoopoefiction.com

Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2012 by Donia Kamal

First published in Arabic in 2012 as Sijara sabi‘a by Dar Merit

Protected under the Berne Convention

English translation copyright © 2017 by Nariman Youssef

Published by arrangement with Dar Merit

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 850 5

eISBN 978 1 61797 842 5

Version 1

Nothing lies between us and happiness

but the demons that lie within us.

—Naguib Mahfouz

Dedication

I like introductions but don’t really know how to write them. Maybe by my next novel I will have developed the ability to craft the kind of opening that draws the reader in. But for now, let me stick to a few words of dedication.

To “the demigods” and to the violin player whose music travels to me across communication channels—you are not like the others, so stay as you are!

To the faces I lost track of, the faces I tried to keep, and the faces that hurried past me but left a lasting impact. To the moments we spend lifetimes trying to capture. To the child who has not yet read my words, and to the promised day when she will. To my family by birth, and to my other family by choice. To the friend who chose to leave but is still—I’m certain of this—watching over me from afar. To good company, to allies, and to the small, colorful places that bring together our troubles and reluctant joys.

Finally, to the one who keeps the promise of a more innocent world alive.

1

I sat next to my grandmother on an old wooden couch in the spacious apartment and watched as she sifted uncooked rice to remove the small stones and mites that might have crept into the cloth sack she had bought at the cooperative. On a bed in the same room, my grandfather lay on his side next to the radio. The voice of Umm Kulthum was interspersed with radio static. For the rest of my life I would never learn to appreciate Umm Kulthum without the static.

I was not yet five years old, and had been living with my grandparents for as long as I could remember. My grandparents lived on the fifth floor of a huge, ancient building on the main road of a small city. There was no elevator, and Grandma often carried me up the wide staircase. I didn’t talk much, but I absorbed every detail around me: every grain of rice on the red tray on Grandma’s lap, every word in the song coming out of the radio—“the evening sauntered toward us, then harked to the love in our eyes”—and every line on Grandpa’s serene face as he listened.

Grandpa gestured, calling me over to him, and, still lying on his side, took me in his arms and rocked me in time with the music. The joy on his face in that moment is stored deep within my memory. But so is the way his face suddenly contorted and his arms slackened around my small body. I also remember how Grandma jumped to her feet and rushed over to us, and that he tried to reassure us both.

I wasn’t a child who cried. I didn’t cry when Grandma closed Grandpa’s eyes, calmly carried me into bed next to him, and pulled the covers over the three of us. Nor did I cry the following morning, when men and women in dark and ugly clothes came to console my grandmother, who wasn’t crying either. My grandfather’s illness had eaten away at his liver and killed him. The only time I cried was when Grandma switched the radio from Umm Kulthum to the Quran. By the time my mother arrived from the Gulf, also in black and tearfully mourning her father, I had stopped crying.

Grandma wore black from the day of Grandpa’s death until her own, fifteen years later. Her spacious home was filled with sadness. I would look at the photograph of my grandparents on the wall, then at Anwar Wagdy and Layla Murad on TV, and feel confused—I couldn’t tell them apart. Although, as contradictory as it may sound, my grandmother resembled both Layla Murad and Amina Rizq. She was Layla Murad with her big smile and her gravity-defying hairstyle, but she was also Amina Rizq with her sternness and strength and the handkerchief wound tightly around her head.

Grandma rarely took me out. All I knew of the world was the rusty black radio, the books that she brought to teach me to read, and Grandpa’s room at the end of the apartment, where I wasn’t allowed on my own because she said it was full of ghosts—and there was something ghostly and magical about that room with the old wooden TV that