Shelf Life Page 2
Others had less benevolent intentions.
A typical interaction went like this. “I demand to speak to the owner,” a customer would say, marching up to Nihal, Hind, or me.
“I’m one of them,” Nihal or Hind would respond. I always tried to recede into the background, busying myself with some suddenly pressing task.
“I need to return this book.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Is there something wrong with it?”
“I bought it. I read it. I don’t like it. I want my money back.”
From here, the exchange differed based on the listener. Nihal would always nod, helping the customer feel heard. She’d kindly explain that Diwan was not a library. Frequently, the customer would respond and say that we should be one. Wasn’t culture a shared resource? At this stage, unable to control myself, I’d jump in, saying how this backward belief was what had gotten us where we were in Egypt—until, after many similar interactions, I finally learned to hold my tongue. Nihal would gently direct customers toward the many government-run libraries that could fulfill their needs, all the while commiserating that Diwan didn’t follow the same model. In her encounters, Hind, who had a taste for the absurd, would engage in extensive discussions to test the limits of these customers’ logic. In polite tones of faux naïveté, she would disprove their arguments with a debater’s agility. If the conversation grew tedious, she would look at her watch and politely excuse herself. Hind is the least punctual person I know. Like my mother, she has a quiet ruthlessness and an ability to subtly dismiss a person if she no longer has time for them.
Other customers were kinder, even as they struggled to navigate this foreign terrain. They’d admire the cleanliness, the meticulous attention to detail, the décor, the staff, and then mount the same challenge: Why was this a store and not a library? Hind, Nihal, and I—forever present on the shop floor—pointed out that a library couldn’t sustain the costs of rent, salaries, uniforms, taxes, and the host of other expenditures small businesses contend with. When we were inevitably asked if Diwan was part of Mrs. Mubarak’s literacy initiative, we would reply that it had nothing to do with the First Lady or the government—this was a private endeavor. They’d respond with surprise: Why would any sane person invest money in the losing venture of bookselling?
* * *
Even before we opened Diwan, our venture met with disbelief. During our research phase, Ali, Nihal’s husband and one of our cofounders, suggested we interview writers about where they bought their books. An alum of the Deutsche Evangelische Oberschule, one of Cairo’s German schools, Ali was an avid reader and a people person with an infectious laugh. I marveled at his ability to spark friendships, and maintain them, across generations, continents, and ideologies. One afternoon, we accompanied him on a meeting with one of Egypt’s eminent journalists. As the journalist listened to Hind’s and my pitch, he looked us up and down. Finally, the journalist issued his verdict: we were bourgeois housewives wasting our time and money. Since the demise of the middle class, people in Egypt didn’t read anymore.
“But do things need to be financially sustainable to exist?” I asked the journalist. “Governments maintain public spaces like gardens, museums, libraries, to better the cultural health of nations. So why do you condemn individuals to failure when they go on similar missions?”
“You are young women with no experience of the world. I speak to you as I would to my children. I’m trying to spare you the disappointment. You don’t know the challenges that going into business entails, let alone if that business is based on reading. You will be eaten alive by your suppliers and your clients.”
Never mind my disappointment, I thought to myself—what about Egypt’s? What happens to countries that neglect their cultural projects in favor of dams and highways? The answer was clear to see. Our museums had become graveyards, dead spaces devoted to the triumphs of a few strongmen. Our schoolbooks echoed these lies and omissions. The journalist believed that culture had become a preoccupation of the elite, and that books were irrelevant to people who were fighting to stay above the poverty line. He wasn’t wrong. But we had to believe in our store and our books. If we Egyptians became alienated from who we were, we’d never know who we could be.
* * *
Diwan emerged onto this cultural landscape, standing directly at the crossroads of the present and the past. Nihal designed the café accordingly, adapting the intimate tearooms of Quiberon, in western France, where she’d spent summers, for Cairo’s bustle. She approached aesthetics with her trademark fairness, pairing marble-topped tables with wooden-and-chrome chairs. The chairs were a compromise—she’d initially wanted more comfortable seating, but Hind thought that that would limit client turnover. Variations of cappuccinos, Turkish coffees, and infusions of chamomile, hibiscus, cinnamon, and mint were listed on one side of the menu; on the other, cheese pâtés, doughy pizzas, slices of carrot cake, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies. Knives and forks, wrapped in napkins bearing Diwan’s logo, stood at the ready. Hassan, the principal server, was a Sudanese refugee with a stutter who frequently lost his temper with clients who didn’t understand his enunciation. Nihal appreciated his smile as well as his rigorous hygiene standards. Through her coaxing of both Hassan and the clientele, customers grew used to Hassan, and Hassan grew into his words.
Graceful mediation came naturally to Nihal, who was the youngest of three sisters and yet somehow the most maternal of us. I waited to witness a situation where Nihal didn’t get her way—I’m still waiting. She’s the only person I know who fasts the entire month of Ramadan without complaining once. We have managed to argue for two decades, and forgive each other for two decades.
Nihal’s disposition uniquely prepared her for the eclectic characters and behaviors that mingled in our seemingly chaste café. Like most spaces, it had a mind of its own, regardless of what we called it. I remember applying for a license for Diwan. I told the bureaucrat at the municipality office that we would sell books, films, music, and stationery, and that we would have a café. He gave me a blank stare. “You can’t,” he said in a bored tone, not raising his head from the form in front of him.
“Why not?” I questioned, lacing defiance with naïveté, hoping he would engage with me.
“A space can only be licensed for one activity. You can’t be a bank and a school. Pick one.”
“Can’t I be a teacher by day and a belly dancer by night?” I asked.
He gave a halfhearted smile. “Someone with two mindsets is a liar,” he said, quoting a popular saying to terminate our discussion.
“And we’re a bookstore,” I declared. He sighed, filled in the last line on the form, stamped it with faded blue ink, and handed it back to me, all without glancing up from the next form on his desk. I withheld my final retort: we are a bookstore where people will spend not only money, but time.
* * *
One cruel irony of Egypt in the latter half of the twentieth century: just as people began to have more free time, the physical spaces designed for recreation began to shrink. Urban development encroached on city parks. Promenades and cafés along the banks of the Nile were turned into private clubs for army officers and government syndicates. The “public sphere,” a spatial and theoretical concept introduced by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, was in transition. Habermas’s public sphere describes the social arenas in which people gather to share ideas, where private individuals enter into a collective. The term informed the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s theory of the “third place” (after home, the first place, and work, the second). Third places are locations for community building, which, by his definition, include cafés, like ours. In Egypt, men had their mosques, barbershops, and the ahwa—coffee shops where they smoked sheesha, played backgammon and dominoes, listened to the radio, and watched the television and the world go by. Young men had their sports clubs. Women had their homes, which they rarely owned.
Men are defined by what they do, and women, by their inti
mate relationships. Take Ada Lovelace. Even though she was a renowned mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer, she’s probably just as famous for being Byron’s daughter. A few years after we founded the shop, customers, friends, and acquaintances began calling me “Mrs. Diwan.” I’d begun spending all my time at Diwan. I dreamed of Diwan. I was at my desk by eight o’clock most mornings and left well into the evening. I wanted to overlap with the morning and afternoon shifts, as well as make sure that staff in the head office knew that I would be there when they arrived and after they left. And when I wasn’t there, I was thinking about Diwan. It was true that my identity had gradually become indistinguishable from the store’s, in a way that threatened my relationship with Number One—but more on that later. Still, I bristled at the idea that even in my sobriquet, Diwan was positioned as “the man,” making me subservient to the very thing I’d created.
* * *
Bookstores are both private and public spaces, in which we escape the world and also participate in it more fully. Our café in particular held these contradictions: a place where friends gathered, where people lingered for hours (despite the chairs), where I often brought my daughters on the weekends. A place that resembled a home but that wasn’t a home. Prior to becoming Diwan, the whole shop had been a testosterone-filled gym called Sports Palace. I savored the irony of our female-owned-and-operated bookstore replacing that temple of masculinity.
Hind and I had grown up in a world that constantly excluded us; it neither belonged to us nor granted us belonging. As kids, most mornings, we would leave our home at seven thirty and walk down the muted marble corridor to the elevators. I would press the button over and over—out of impatience, and disbelief that the elevator had registered my request. I hated the steel cuboid with neon lights that had replaced the original Schindler wooden compartment, with its foldable miniature banquette and bronze, crystal-domed ceiling light, but going down four flights of marble that were coated in soapy water from the morning cleaner seemed ill-advised. A hospital-like tone announced the elevator’s arrival. Most mornings, the left panel slid into the right to reveal one of our neighbors from the floor above: an older gentleman, with a lit cigarette between his lips. We would enter the matte-silver compartment, watching the rings of smoke, holding our breath in protest. If I had been a man, would he have extinguished his cigarette on the floor the moment I entered? The elevator nodded into place on the ground floor. As soon as the doors opened, we pushed our way out, past a fresh puff.
I remember one formative conversation I had with my father when I was a teenager. Following some long-forgotten infraction, I complained to him about this world, the world I was beginning to understand kept women in their place. He drew my attention to the next world: in the Muslim promise of heaven, houris—beautiful virgins—are offered as rewards to pious men.
“It’s a man’s world. Change it on your own time, but until then, learn to deal with it,” my father suggested with gruff pragmatism.
“How can heaven be so exclusionist? Why should I even try to be good if all I end up with is a bunch of virgins?” I cried.
“You aren’t the target audience,” my father said, laughing at the world he glimpsed through my eyes.
“God’s bestseller has half the world as a captive audience, that’s the problem.”
“As always, you are misdiagnosing the problem.” He placed his rectangular glasses on the rim of his nose, picked up the newspaper, and resumed his reading, with one afterthought: “Maybe one day you can push other bestsellers.”
* * *
We decided to make Diwan a space that catered to us, rather than the other way around. Soon, other women began to find respite in Diwan—a home away from the burdens of home, a public place less fraught with the pressures of being a woman in public, where we are constantly reminded of our nonexistence. Public toilets in Egypt were normally attached to mosques or churches. The state offered few other alternatives. Men were free to urinate under flyovers or against the sides of buildings. Women’s toilets in public spaces were putrid-smelling holes in the ground, flooded by running taps. Soap and toilet paper were never available, and no one expected them to be. It was this reality that brought to Diwan an entire cross-section of women who were not necessarily readers but who found relief at the end of its winding corridors: it became their toilet on 26th of July Street. Few shops had facilities, and if they did, the proprietors were not inclined to share them. Diwan was more gracious. And the café, with its book-covered walls, became a makeshift barrier between women and their harassers, men who knew that we, the women of Diwan, wouldn’t tolerate their hostility.
Diwan’s café served numerous purposes and patrons. Ardent readers browsed through the pile of books they had collected before making their selection. Visitors came to idle away a portion of their days, while others made it their gathering place, catching up with old friends or acquaintances they didn’t want to host at home. Gray economies unfolded over the marble-topped tables: people had their astrological charts or fortunes read, while nearby, private tutors coaxed reluctant pupils.
* * *
“She’s back at her usual table. In four hours, she has consumed one Turkish coffee and a bottle of water,” said Nihal one day, with a hint of irritation.
“Did she buy any books?” asked Hind.
“No. She’s just here to tutor. People like her don’t leave space for our regulars.”
“The customer-service staff suggested we impose a minimum charge,” I said, testing the waters.
“Absolutely not! You can’t charge people for sitting in a space that you created to serve them,” said Nihal, her eyes wide with shock.
“You can’t ask for a commission on the lessons, so what else do you propose?”
“You built it. They came. Make the drinks more expensive, the chairs less comfortable, or the music more disruptive. Find a way to impose your business model onto theirs,” Hind said curtly, heading toward the Arabic book display. I avoided Nihal’s plaintive stare. As a control freak, I sympathized: How could we tailor a space to its designated purpose without evicting its occupants?
One young patron sat in the café almost every evening. She seldom read our books, instead passing the time scribbling into a leather-bound journal. I wondered what she did by day. In my mind, I named her Pavlova, since she had the guileless allure of a ballerina. Her hair was usually pulled into a bun, but sometimes she let it hang down her back. And in her eyes, there was a look of distance, of a soul displaced from the body it inhabited. We communicated via polite nods.
“You know the lady who sits in the café, your ballerina?” said Shahira, her lips pursed. Shahira was one of our earliest, and longest-standing, managers, a feisty young woman whose power extended well beyond her deceptively modest frame. Before her, we’d had a series of managers who’d quit within weeks of getting hired, overwhelmed by balancing the needs of staff, customers, and Cairo’s flaneurs simultaneously. Not Shahira.
“Yes, of course. Who upset her?” I asked, putting down my glasses and preparing to make amends.
“No one. One of the cleaning staff complained that she doesn’t wear underwear, so he is forced to view things he doesn’t want to. Apparently, she works all of 26th of July Street, and Diwan is her new fishing ground.”
“Surely not,” I said, faltering a bit as I considered the parade of eccentrics who used the café as their living room.
“I’ll monitor her and get back to you. If it’s true, we need to put an end to it,” Shahira said. I didn’t want it to be true. And if it was, I didn’t want to deal with it. Pavlova continued to frequent Diwan, but our polite nods became briefer. Her visits incited louder whispers from my staff. That week, Shahira had tea and gossiped with neighboring shopkeepers, gathering details of Pavlova’s interactions. Each one confirmed her suspicions. After hearing the news, I took my time, waiting for a quiet evening when business was slow and the audience was minimal. Finally, I approached Pavlov
a’s table. She looked up at me. I opened my mouth to speak, unsure of how to acknowledge what I knew.
“I’m told that you don’t like our coffee. Can I suggest one of the other coffee shops next to us?” I smiled politely.
“You must be misinformed. I like it fine here.” She didn’t return my smile. I hesitated, and then my words found their momentum.
“I mean no offense. We all work for a living, and work is to be respected. But could you kindly conduct your business elsewhere? You’re no longer welcome here. Please don’t come back.” I retreated, not wanting to witness the impact of my remarks. The following morning, Shahira asked how it went. I commented that our staff gossiped too much. Shahira was undeterred, so I recounted my exchange with Pavlova.
“Why do you feel guilty? She’s the one taking advantage of us.”
When Pavlova was little, I’m sure she didn’t look up at the sky and wish that when she grew up, she’d be working 26th of July Street. We allowed people to offer other services, like tutoring, in our café, but because Pavlova’s work was sexual, we acted self-righteous. Were we right to be so moralistic? I thought about the third space we’d created, a public place where intensely private interactions unfolded. In books, gestures, coffee cups, and tea leaves, we all searched for ourselves, each other, and a means for survival. A few days later, on my walk back home, I spotted Pavlova sitting in the upstairs window of a coffee shop nearby. Her legs swayed in a loose, frilly skirt.