When he bought this house a few years after moving to London, Diab had imagined for himself a simple workspace with a bookcase, table, and space to think, but Malak believed a Chesterfield set was more appropriate for an academic, just like Professor Higgins. Never mind that it would be difficult to get that kind of thing through the doors, let alone up the narrow staircase to the attic where she had set up the study. Still, no sooner had they put down a deposit on the house than she was dashing around in her silver Honda hatchback getting to know the area. Just fifteen minutes away from their new home, beyond the ugly crisscross of flyovers of the North Circular Road, was the Brent Cross shopping centre, a massive featureless rectangle of shops and restaurants that gave her somewhere to go, and fed her impulsive urges. She shopped, met new friends, made acquaintances, had lengthy, warm chats with salespeople. Her favourite question “where are you from?” opened the door to a spirited presentation on Egypt, its people, history and music, its hidden cosmopolitanism, and how Muslims were really very misunderstood in this part of the world, and often ended with an invitation to Cairo and an insistence that the John Lewis shop assistant—or whoever it was that day—stay with her at the family home whenever they did visit. On one of these trips to the shopping centre, Malak spotted a sign in a shop window advertising a “Buy Now, Pay Later” scheme and within minutes, she had bought the whole office set for Diab—a pedestal desk with matching glass cabinet and a wall clock in beautiful walnut casing with a loud pendulum—in what would turn out to be a very long installment plan.
Diab headed the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of West London. Outside of teaching, he poured most of his hours into his book project on the semantic and cultural loss that occurs in translation. He began his research with a focus on Egyptian short stories, more specifically on the jokes used in them that revealed the depth of contempt between rich and poor, urban and rural. Every evening, he took a long walk around their neighbourhood that was entirely devoted to thinking. Questions bounced around his head looking for answers: “How do you transfer a joke, with all its bulk, to a new language? How can a joke be cathartic if the reader doesn’t share your anxieties? Can a reader of translation ever have a genuine encounter with an original text?” To explain all this, he needed to lay out context, and to do that he needed to expound on the country’s politics, economy, history, sociology and psychology. There was great irony, his friends thought, in the fact that someone like Diab would pick humour as their topic.
Six years into his research, his hoard of material had filled his study twice over and spilled into other parts of the house. But the more research he collected, the less equipped he felt to write. So he read in the morning, he read at night, and he went about the rest of the day laden with an intense, suffocating urge to read more. His ever-expanding reading list had elbowed the parameters of his research wider every day, until there were no more borders. Before he knew it, he was collecting books, essays, magazine stories, newspaper articles and even cartoons on anything related to humour, in any language. On his evening walks, he shaped and reshaped his arguments. At his desk, he removed passages, put ideas back in, expanded, enlarged, and then furiously chopped. Sometimes, quite often actually, he himself no longer understood the point he was trying to make. His mind, an overcrowded population of words and sentences, had no room left for analysis, or much else really.
It was 11 o’clock and by now, Diab would normally be running errands around Bayswater, moving through the streets with urgency, his heavyset frame hinged forward as if motored by impatience. He bought his newspapers in Queensway and occasionally indulged in minor spending sprees at the Arabic bookshop on Westbourne Grove. Sometimes he met a friend for a quick shot of bitter Turkish coffee on the corner of Porchester Gardens. And, if he still had time left on the parking meter, he would visit the Greek supermarket on Moscow Road that sold the sort of soft white cheese he had in his mother’s house. Today, however, he wouldn’t be leaving the house because a colleague in the department, Jonathan Hughes, and his wife were coming for dinner at six o’clock, and Diab preferred not to pack too many activities into a single day.
At around midday, Diab made his way down to the kitchen, sidestepping the stain on the olive-green stair carpet that had repeatedly been pointed out to Malak. He was dressed, like every day, as if to go out. He did this even when he planned to stay home all day: short sleeves and vest in the summer, long sleeves and jumper in the winter, and always a tie. His belt was fastened at the fourth hole, too tight for him now. In fact, this had been too tight for many years and from the side, he was starting to look like a capital B. He insisted this had no impact whatsoever on his breathing, which was not altogether untrue because Diab was not really one for deep breaths.
In the kitchen, there was no indication that anyone was expected over later that day: nothing on the stove, no ingredients laid out, no shopping bags. He looked around for a washed coffee pot, but couldn’t find one, and opted for tea instead. At home, Diab often asked for directions to things like mugs or spoons or socks on the odd occasion he fetched something for himself, which he did with some irritation. He put the kettle on and reached for a teabag from the large jar on the counter. Malak always did this, saying she’d be home at one time and showing up one, two, three hours late, arriving always the same way, bringing in noise and commotion, carrying bags and keys, slamming the front door shut with her heel, giving a breathless and detailed description of the day—then the car broke down on Ladbroke Grove, but thank God the man from the petrol station happened to be walking by and recognized me and came to help me and it took so long because . . . there was a bomb scare in Fenwick and we had to run out and wait until the all-clear, but my bag was still inside so . . . an Egyptian lady fainted on Oxford Street so I waited until the ambulance came because I had to translate and then . . . The thing is, all these things were usually true but her gift/curse for always being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time exasperated him. This was not to mention the regular clamping of the car because she’d parked on a double yellow line just for five minutes, or chance run-ins with long-lost friends You will never believe who I ran into, which delayed his 6 p.m. dinner, or the ambush of surprise visitors Diab, look who’s here she often brought back home with her.
A rustle at the door brought Diab fleeting relief, until he realized it was just the post coming through the letterbox. He walked over to the front of the house and picked up the letters, careful not to spill his tea. It was the usual medley of bills, invoices and the inevitable parking ticket, but this time there was also an envelope from Her Majesty’s Theatre. Their wedding anniversary was coming up, and ordinarily, Diab would walk into the first branch of any high-street jeweller and buy the first item within budget that the salesperson recommended. This time though, things would have to be different. Last year, Malak had spoken about wanting to see a new musical in the West End, The Phantom of the Opera. When Diab’s less than enthusiastic response came, she used an arsenal of persuasion methods for weeks: hinting, teasing, sulking, begging, flirting. One day, she even cooked his favourite tripe stew, which she’d never even heard of until she met him, and the texture of which made her want to vomit. On the anniversary itself, when he handed her a small velvet box that contained a golden pelican brooch with a ruby eye, she was visibly crushed. She didn’t mention Phantom again, not directly anyway, but she bought the cassette and played the soundtrack in the kitchen every day for weeks. So, this year, Diab asked the department secretary to buy two good tickets to the show, in spite of his indifference to music and a chronic distaste for crowds.
With the clump of letters in one hand and the brimming mug of tea in the other, Diab steadily made his way up the stairs. On the wall hung a series of framed prints of serene Nile landscapes by a certain David Roberts that barely looked like the bustling banks he’d grown up near. He set the letters and tea down on his desk and leaned back into the button-tufted backrest of his bulky chair. His desk was crowded with neat stacks of chaos: a pile of photocopies—to be classified; a cardboard box full of receipts—to be sorted; a stack of phone bills—to be filed; two identical staplers, four unopened packets of staples and an overstuffed EgyptAir toiletry bag into which he’d packed all the little hotel soaps and shampoos he collected from his conference trips. There were also several volumes of the Journal of Arabic Literature, a new release on the history of Egypt, a copy of the Socialist Register, which he’d started buying after attending a talk by Ralph Miliband years ago, and a box of cassettes of English Pronunciation In Use, which had been sitting on his desk unopened, reproaching him for years.
As he became increasingly aware of the time, Diab’s gut was beginning to tighten at the thought of Malak being late again. He removed his gold-rimmed glasses and massaged the sides of his nose bridge. He rarely socialized outside the tight-knit Arabic community of North West London, but Dr. Hughes had invited Diab for dinner a few weeks earlier to discuss a talk they were co-organizing on the translatability of metaphors, and it would have been rude not to return the invitation. How he dreaded hosting events in such small settings. Though his relationship with Dr. Hughes was very cordial—friendly even—and the pair had spent hours in their small department offices exchanging excellent banter on cultural loyalty versus cultural flexibility in texts, the thought of having these discussions with the wives present made Diab feel self-conscious. Unlike Malak, who could weave any topic into a wonderfully colourful anecdote—often with great embellishment—social conversation paralysed Diab. Despite encyclopaedic knowledge on a broad range of topics, he found it difficult to summon the ease with which he could speak to students, or even address an anonymous crowd. He picked up his book, trying to ignore the ticking of the wall clock, and began to read where he’d left off.
At one o’clock, Diab went down to the bedroom on the first floor, which had a clearer view of the street. Outside, a learner driver appeared to be struggling with a three-point turn. Their bedroom was painted salmon; the bedspread featured a trellis motif in off-white and sage green with shell-pink roses. On the wall behind their upholstered bed, Malak had hung a collection of Venetian masks she’d bought at a fair nearby, and no matter where in the room he stood, Diab couldn’t escape their scrutiny. Three-and-a-half of the four compartments of their fitted wardrobe belonged to her, and the countertop of their small bathroom was appropriated by her creams and conditioners. When they were first married, Malak spent long afternoons setting her crow-black hair in hot rollers, moisturizing her arms and legs, applying a fine line of liquid kohl at the base of her lashes, and sweeping coral blush over her dimpled cheeks. She would wear one of the pretty silk sets in pistachio or powder blue that her mother had bought as part of the bridal trousseau and she would wait patiently for Diab to put his books down. Even when she looked into his study to ask if he’d like dinner or tea, he would wave her away, barely lifting his head. After some years, she decided that if she was going to spend that much time alone in the room, she might as well make it hers.
On the armchair by the window were three of Diab’s shirts, contorted in a heap and in need of mending. He had planned to take them to the shop on Kilburn High Road—he liked to do these errands himself every once in a while because, he said, it kept him in touch with the pulse of the street. But in a burst of well-meaning enthusiasm, Malak took them out of his hand, insisting she knew how to fix them herself, gave him a peck on the cheek and said that he would have his shirts later that evening. It had been two weeks. He was quite used to her unreliability, and when it came to things like failing to press his trousers or forgetting to buy milk, he usually had a plan B. But it’s when a third party was involved that he was less forgiving, and the pressure inside him really built up. On several occasions, Malak had forgotten that Diab was bringing someone home and he would arrive at a house in the full purge of a spring clean, or to a living room taken over by sewing materials because, after watching The Sound of Music again, she had decided to repurpose some old curtains. When the children were little and she was late to pick them up from school, which was often, he would be on the receiving end of irritable phone calls from the headmistress. She once forgot to pick up his sister from the airport, leaving her waiting for two hours at the Arrivals terminal, frightened and overwhelmed by the vastness of Heathrow. And today, here she was again, teetering him on the edge of humiliation, and he could feel his blood heating up.
He went back upstairs to the study, making mental calculations for cut-off points, trying to work out the latest possible time Malak could arrive and still manage to organize this dinner. It had happened before that she’d made a three-course meal materialize in less than two hours. When she wanted to, usually when there was a deadline of sorts, Malak could split her attention into a dozen separate sharp shooters each aiming at one specific task. So, Diab thought, if the guests were coming at six and Malak needed, let’s say . . . an hour to get ready . . . that’s five o’clock . . . and then two more hours to cook the meal . . . that’s three o’clock. He nodded to himself as if in reassurance. He opened his mouth wide to stretch his jaw, which briefly relieved the hissing in his ears, a constant noise he carried in his head from childhood, like the sound of a radio between frequencies. He picked up his book again and returned to reading, but it wasn’t too long before the thoughts knocking at his attention started to make themselves heard in the body through the cracking of knuckles, the tiny bounce of a knee, the shuffling in the chair, the sitting up straight to snap back into focus.
When the clock struck two, Diab stood up abruptly, unsure of where to go and after a faltering pause, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen again. By the small mirror was a wall-mounted apple-green telephone on which Malak spent hours delivering news of various members of the Arabic community to other members of the community. Well no one really knows what he does for a living, but suddenly they’ve moved from Willesden to Hamilton Terrace. New furniture and everything. Mais la pauvre, even a house in Hamilton Terrace could never hide her origins. All that gold furniture. Diab decided to call Malak’s friend Salma to ask if she was there. He was not in the habit of calling people, let alone Malak’s people. He picked up the handset, but the telephone cord was twisted so tightly around itself that it wouldn’t reach his ear. He jerked it closer, which only made the twist tighter. He exhaled sharply and held the cord from the top, letting the handset hang down to spin out of itself, round and round like an ice-skater, until it was fully untangled. By now he’d changed his mind about the call and slammed the receiver down hard.
Just then, the phone rang, and it startled him. He took a second to compose himself.
“Yeeeeeas?” Diab said.
He always answered the phone like this, with a long baritone “yes” that sounded like a cassette being played in slow motion. Yes, he thought, made him sound more English. Yes, he thought, was one less vowel to trip over than “hello.” It’s always the vowels that give you away.
Diab had been taught rudimentary English at the school in his rural village and had always been a voracious learner, reading anything he could get his hands on: books, magazines, journals, textbooks. It didn’t matter if it was literature, politics, history or children’s stories. He even enjoyed leafing through reference books and was top of his class every year, by a long distance. On trips to Cairo, he spent hours at the book market and improved his English by buying the same book in both languages and reading them simultaneously.
One day, when he must have been around sixteen, he stumbled on a newly released Arabic translation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That night, alone in his room, as he read the passages detailing the cruelty of Huck’s father, who locked and beat Huck in a remote cabin by the river, he thought back to his younger self, to when his own father had forced him to spend the night in an empty well in the fields because he’d admitted he was afraid of the dark. Or when his father stuffed burning hot chilli peppers in his mouth leaving him with blisters for a week because he caught him singing out loud. Or that time he was giggling with his older sisters and his father dragged him away by his hair, smacking the back of his head with a hard palm muttering something about boys and girls. Of course, he understood now that these were just crude forms of discipline not uncommon in that time, but still, they did implant in him a conviction that joy was a petty thing.
He went on to study Arabic literature and philosophy at the prestigious Dar El Ulum institute, and eventually received a full government scholarship to do postgraduate studies in London and then Cambridge. In England, he met a new type of Egyptian who’d been to private school, who grew up speaking three languages from birth, who’d accrued vast cultural capital without the slightest bit of personal initiative. These people understood the social language of their host country much better than he ever could or would. It was in Cambridge that he met Malak, who was studying French literature and had been attending the same leftist events, in what she would later dismiss as her university socialist phase. Diab was instantly captured by her lightness of spirit, her ability to keep a conversation afloat even when he didn’t imagine there was more to say, the way she gave herself permission to laugh out loud, and her gift for interacting with people freely with no worry for all the possible outcomes her words or actions could trigger. The particular magic of Malak was that alongside her effervescence, there was also an attentive and generous side. She listened to him for hours with genuine interest, asking questions about his life, his ideas, his plans. If he happened to mention a favourite book or meal, these things would materialize in front of him weeks later in the form of a gift. When he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he had ever experienced euphoria before meeting Malak. She was, in the words of Huckleberry Finn, “Sunshine most always.”
In him, she saw a handsome and brilliant intellectual, who opened her up to new ideas, tested her assumptions, and showed her a whole world outside herself full of things to fight for. Life with him was bound to be full of exploration and adventure. When he proposed, she knew it would be a struggle to convince her parents, who were firmly embedded in the Alexandrian elite. But titles mattered and the Cambridge-issued “Dr.” before his name, as well as his excellent manners, greatly helped his cause.
“Yeeeas,” Diab said. It was Karen on the phone, calling to confirm Malak’s facial appointment the following Monday. He’s lovely your Dee-yab, such a gentleman! Karen would tell Malak every week when she came over, lugging a suitcase of creams and gels and a contraption to steam them into the face. Diab wrapped up the call politely and put the phone down. He wandered over to the dining table and sat for a moment staring vacantly at the display cabinet set against the wall, where Malak had arranged her mother’s porcelain dining set with the flowers and scalloped edges. The table was covered in a tablecloth that he disliked intensely for its elaborate floral motifs made of thick gold thread. Malak had two similar ones in red and green, which both looked identical to him because he had the type of colour blindness that couldn’t distinguish red from green. It’s something he learned about himself later in life, following repeated frustrated conversations with Malak where they gradually began to understand that they weren’t seeing the same thing. They never fought, never raised their voices in anger. She didn’t tell him if something was wrong, his sulks were just too big. In fact, most of their important conversations were silent. He shut the door to the study when he was angry, she brought up a cup of coffee to say sorry. She cooked to say I love you, he bought gifts to say I can’t manage this life without you.
Over the years, the muscles of their pasts began to tighten their grip on every choice and decision, exposing the fragility of their union, with the hardest battles fought over the children. They disagreed over state school vs private school, over ballet classes or Arabic classes at the weekends, over the size of birthday parties and the need for children’s entertainers. As the girls got older, the disagreements revolved around curfews, make-up and boys. He argued every point—major or minor—like an academic, with an introduction, body and conclusion, with a reason and logic that drained her. The more she disagreed with him, the longer his arguments became. When she tried to say something, he spoke over her like parliamentarians do when someone interrupts them in the House of Commons and after a while, everything he said began to sound like a manifesto. Malak was beginning to find herself handcuffed to a decision she’d made some twenty years ago. She couldn’t remember falling in love with Diab. In fact, she and her former self were complete strangers to each other. Faced with his oppressive sobriety and rationality, she began to weaponize her contempt, using every opportunity in private and in public—especially in public—to remind him of their different beginnings, referencing childhood holidays abroad with her family, deliberately speaking French in his presence, and—and this is the one that stung the most—laughing heartily at jokes that disparaged rural life in Egypt.
It was now half past two and still no sign of Malak. Diab strode back up the stairs and into the bedroom. He stomped towards the cupboard, unsure why. He opened its doors with disproportionate force and shut them again. He walked to the window again, this time imploring the sounds to come closer. Perhaps he could come up with some sort of emergency and cancel the dinner. He could just call Dr. Hughes and say something had come up. There was still time. They lived in Islington. How long does it take to get from Islington to Kilburn? Half an hour? But they would be coming at rush hour, so more likely an hour. Yes, probably closer to an hour. So, in fact he had until five o’clock to ring and cancel. He sat on the edge of the bed, clammy palms on knees, feeling like his insides were being scooped out, the thud of his heartbeat echoing in the hollowness.
Maybe he could call the Lebanese restaurant, he still had time to drive there, pick up food and come back. He had the number somewhere. Where was that number? Actually, maybe he could just take them out to dinner. He took his jumper off and placed it next to him on the bed. Two identical stains had started to spread below his armpits. He loosened his tie and undid the first button of his shirt. The ticking of his wristwatch only increased his agitation, mainly because it was refusing to catch up with the drumming in his own body. Ice-cold water was being poured into his veins, rising up through the arteries, filling his head like a cistern, pushing against the walls of his head, making his temples throb. The little remaining resolve he had left was about to be swept away by a tide of incoming sweat. His mind was like a mill now, grinding out different combinations and permutations of the scenarios of disgrace that seemed inevitable. Just then, he heard the unmistakable sound of a car approaching, its loud music swallowing up the silence of the street bit by bit.
Diab stood up cautiously and staggered back to the window, the floor softening under his feet. As he watched the Honda pull into the driveway, he made a small punch with his fist to free his watch from the cuff: two forty-seven. The hissing in his head filled the space around him. He inhaled deeply and turned to leave the bedroom, feeling as though his blood was disappearing via an inner sinkhole. Outside, the car music stopped, the car door slammed, the spiky footsteps approached the front door. Diab looked up to face the top of the stairs, holding on to the bannister to steady himself, and as the key turned in the lock downstairs, he began a slow climb up to the study, dragging his heavy legs up each step. He sat down at his desk and stared at the clock. He reached for the top envelope on the stack of letters, snipped the corner off and tore it open along the edge. He retrieved the contents—two Royal Circle tickets for The Phantom of the Opera—and looked at them for what felt like many minutes. Slowly, he began slumping in his chair, but before he had touched the backrest, he pulled himself back up and shook his head lightly as if to urge away any chance of lenience. He held the top of the tickets with his fingertips and twisted his wrists to tear them neatly down the middle. He placed the stubs back into the envelope and slid everything into the drawer. He picked up his book and returned to his reading.
