Translated by Katherine Van De Vate
Chapter One
Replica
Origa, Cairo, 2045 A.D.
Origa remembers how he killed his father when he was a child. He pressed his forefinger to his father’s forehead, pretending it was a gun, and cried “Bang!” He was about to laugh at this childish game and demand to repeat it when his father opened his eyes after playing dead. But he couldn’t, because his father’s eyes never reopened.
A hole instantly bloomed in the man’s forehead—a real hole, a deep recess, spurting blood. Actual blood—dark, heavy, sticky. The child’s first thought, when his father’s head dropped onto his chest, was to retract his finger, as if that would bring the man back to the life he had in fact departed. With the egotism of a child fearing death will spoil his game, the boy promptly tucked his finger back into his hand as a killer might hide his weapon. No child would know that, but danger teaches everyone how to survive when they become killers. The boy stared distractedly at his finger as its nail smoked, his five-year-old mind struggling to grasp how it could have become a muzzle.
He would continue to look at that finger, brandishing it whenever he thought of killing someone, or killing himself. He had realized once and for all that it was no idle threat; he only needed to decide, and the gun would fire.
Now, twenty-five years later, Origa gazed at his finger, which had for no reason refused to grow ever since that long-ago evening in 2020, but remained its size at the time of the killing. The criminal finger reposing innocently on his hand was still that of a child.
He was reminded of this incident by the foreign woman seated across from him. She was the artistic director of the Cairo Work Gallery, City Arts Arena, where Origa had come to apply for a grant. “The Mrs,” they called her, just “the Mrs,” as if the title, which needed a name to give it value, was in its very truncation a complete identity. When the Mrs shook his hand, her glance fell upon the stunted digit between his thumb and middle finger, and as she buried her palm in his, he felt her touch the lethal finger. This always happened when someone greeted him for the first time, especially when they realized the finger was not amputated or atrophied, but simply a body part that had decided not to leave his childhood, even as the rest of his body extended into the world. One day that body would wither and die while his finger continued its childhood, as if through its power to kill, it had achieved pure, eternal life, unthreatened by the soil.
As the Mrs withdrew her hand, it lingered, as if giving his finger time to confess. He yanked his own hand back, though he knew it was impolite, glancing at the finger that had been rescued yet again, as if to make sure it hadn’t spoken.
After retrieving his hand, Origa sat opposite the Mrs, noticing for the first time the clarity of her eyes, so blue they convinced her audience that her very gaze was blue. Between them stretched a desk so vast that for a moment, it seemed to him to divide people living in separate worlds. The desk was actually a circular table mirroring the larger circle of the room. In its center was a narrow gap, a hollow where the Mrs sat, occasionally bumping into the rigid edges of the table. Scarcely able to adjust her position, she was imprisoned by that desk without openings, and Origa had no idea how she could leave it.
Jammed on the desk was a motley assortment of models, all miniatures, as if they were her personal amulets against evil spirits. He noticed among them a model of the Cairo Tower and shivered as he looked at it. It summoned up the childhood he’d tried to banish from his thoughts since he’d arrived, though everything in the room seemed determined to foil him. Inside the small satchel strapped across his body, Origa carried an identical model in the same dimensions.
The curved wall behind the Mrs was pale, as if drawing its hue from her face. In the centre of the wall, directly above her head, there hung a circular frame with an old black and white photograph of a child’s face. Origa was sure it was the face of the same woman long ago, more years than he could guess. It is when they grow old that people most resemble their childhood photographs. You can easily spot their earlier features in their photos, as if children are born merely to become old, and only then do they know which face they possess. Origa believed this, and as he silently contemplated the woman., he sensed she had grown old enough to return to childhood.
His eyes wandered between the picture of the Mrs on the wall and her face. With his usual habit of turning things around, he asked himself: “What if the face in the picture is alive and the one in the present is dead?” and wondered: “If one of those faces were real, and the other counterfeit, which would I choose?”
He sat in silence, obsessively turning over his questions in search of definitive answers before the Mrs broke the silence, for he had learned that any two persons meeting for the first time will remain friends until one of them starts to speak.
For her part, the Mrs. allowed him a few moments of silence once he’d taken his place on the circular chair designated for him along the curve of the desk, which was angled so they could not face each other directly. She seemed adept at manipulating those moments of suspense when people form their first impression of someone, which is so often their final impression.
“Cairo Maquette is an ambitious artistic project to construct a miniature model of the city on a scale of 35 to 1. When it’s done, we’ll have a complete replica of Cairo at a particular moment in history.”
That was the woman’s first comment. Only then did Origa realize she hadn’t said a word since he’d arrived, not even by way of greeting. Henceforth he would listen to her carefully, since it was the start of the interview. He needed to put his best foot forward in order to convince this woman, this Mrs, that only these two hands of his could counterfeit the heart of Cairo, though they hadn’t made a good impression so far, since one hand—the right, to be precise—had a stunted finger.
“The Gallery is launching a maquette of Cairo as a retrospective to revive the city’s memory. It’s one of the Gallery’s ongoing projects. The new iteration will be called “Cairo Maquette 2020.” Its goal is to document the way the Egyptian capital looked a quarter of a century ago.”
A quarter of a century. The words terrified him, evoking only his personal memories.
“Perhaps you were still a child at the time.”
“I was five.”
She glanced instinctively at his finger but quickly averted her gaze before lapsing into a lengthy silence, as if giving him time to think about what she’d said. Origa wasn’t focused on her words, though; he was submerged in her voice. The classical cadences of her Arabic with its Damascene accent and sharp, high-pitched tone reminded him of Arabic voiceovers from the cartoons of his youth, intensifying his memories of those days. He noticed how this Mrs emphasized certain words that would have been printed in bold, had they been in a literary text.
Finally she raised her folded hands from the desk and revealed two overlapping cards, laid face downwards as if to conceal them. To Origa, they seemed like identical playing cards, especially when she slid them over the table with a rustle, like a gambler. Without being asked, Origa turned them over as if he’d grasped the rules of the game immediately.
There were two photographs, one of the actual Gallery and the other of the Gallery in miniature. Both had been taken from an angle that made the Gallery appear the same size. From the first glance, Origa realized that they were his.
The grant solicitation had stated: “Each of the successful applicants to build a complete maquette will construct an urban unit in a separate wing of the Gallery.” The solicitation had further specified that each participant could choose the area “he feels best able to represent in his capacity as a maker of scale models.”
On his application, Origa had unhesitatingly written “downtown,” which was the heart of Cairo and included the gallery where he now sat. He had lived downtown his entire life, and it was listed as his place of birth in official registers, a privilege granted to very few, especially the poor. He felt so at home there that leaving it for another part of Cairo felt like embarking on an arduous journey to a foreign land.
The application form directed applicants to attach “a supporting photograph of an artistic miniature,” meaning a scale model of a building in the district they planned to construct which would illustrate their ability to recreate the area. Like a gambler laying all his cards on the table, Origa decided to submit a model of the Cairo Work Gallery itself.
He had sent both pictures electronically, and the Gallery had clearly printed them out on cardboard. As he looked at the pictures, overlapping like the legs of a seated old person, the Mrs asked him:
“Which is the original Gallery and which is the copy?”
With quiet satisfaction, Origa thought she was asking because she couldn’t tell the pictures apart, not because she was trying to prove she was in charge. But after deep thought, his pride was replaced by terror, and he answered honestly: “I dunno.” His confusion was genuine; he was baffled by his inability to tell the difference, not showing off or playing games.
The Mrs continued to look at him, examining him like a piece of antique furniture. But instead of expressing surprise or scepticism that he had actually made the model, she seemed, quite simply, to believe him. She gestured for him to return the two photographs and he pushed them back across the table. Once again, she gave him a moment to comment before swivelling her chair slightly to face the opposite wall. Without warning, the wall transformed into an illuminated screen, and a strange stick appeared in her hand. Long, thin and tapered, it seemed to have materialized out of thin air. As he perused it more closely, Origa discovered that it too was a replica of the Cairo Tower, but a longer, thinner version.
On the upper left-hand of the wall screen was a single giant yellow folder. The Mrs tapped it with her pointer and the two photographs reappeared side by side, dividing the screen in two. Though they were greatly enlarged this time, it was impossible to detect the slightest difference between them.
After a few moments of contemplation, or futile comparison perhaps, the Mrs glanced towards him with an apparent glimmer of approval, which shone like a dwarfish sun in the glacial sky of her face.
“They both look original.”
Without thinking, Origa blurted out: “They both look fake.”
With the tip of the pointer, the Mrs dragged one of the pictures across the other until they completely overlapped. They really were like identical playing cards, and no sooner had one covered the other than they both disappeared. She turned back towards Origa. On the wall where the pictures had been was her childhood picture, floating like a mysterious icon in the artificial blue sky of the screen.
“Can an imaginary place actually erase a real place so completely?” she asked as if to herself, though she clearly expected Origa to respond.
“An imaginary bullet can also erase a real person,” said Origa, unsheathing his finger and aiming it at the woman’s head.
END