Shelf Life Page 3
* * *
Diwan’s café doubled as our office before we could afford a real one. When Hind, Nihal, and I weren’t taking turns suffocating in the back room (once Sports Palace’s sauna), adding prices and security tags to books, we were on the shop floor supervising our staff, ensuring that displays were inviting, and trying to keep little nuisances from becoming larger troubles. I think most of our customers appreciated our visibility, that we weren’t hiding behind closed doors. But some, accustomed to being ignored in bookstores, misinterpreted the behavior of our eager staff. Overzealous patrons insisted on returning books to shelves, often putting them in the wrong location. When our booksellers asked these patrons to let us do the reshelving, they felt they weren’t trusted to do it correctly, or that we were needlessly suspicious. Sitting in the café allowed me to watch these interactions (that is, until I discovered the joy of webcams and motion sensors) and, sometimes, to address misunderstandings before they escalated. And then there was the trouble that came in through the front door: bill collectors who erroneously claimed to have come many times, in order to fine us; or a customer who had called in a favor from a police connection and filed a fabricated complaint of some wrongdoing because he hadn’t been allowed to return a book. We regrouped at our table intermittently to have coffee, conduct meetings, and answer emails. Whenever my mother felt she hadn’t heard sufficient news of her daughters, she would drop in to the café, knowing she would find either of the two she’d raised, or her chosen daughter, Nihal.
With time, hard work—so much hard work that in hindsight I can’t fathom how we mustered the energy to sustain it—and increased book sales, the situation began to shift in our shop, and outside of it. So much happened so quickly. Diwan’s second year was the start of my thirtieth. For the first time in my life, seven years into our marriage, I suggested to Number One that we have a child. He accepted. Zein was born in 2004 and Layla in 2006, just before Diwan’s fourth birthday. Hind gave birth to her son, Ramzi, named after our father, in 2005. I don’t know how we managed it all. It was constantly trying; I felt pulled in opposite directions.
There were small joys, and places we found relief. Eventually, we were able to afford separate office space and hire dedicated staff for the infinite tasks that we’d initially split on an ad hoc basis. An apartment became vacant on the ground floor of one of the Baehler Mansions. Miraculously (since licensing was a nightmare), it was already licensed to function as an office space. The entrance was in the courtyard, behind the main road. To one side was a wooden bench where the building’s porters held court, observing and commenting on visitor comings and goings. These busybodies played versatile roles: amenable security guards, handymen, personal shoppers, and, at times, real estate agents. We’d heard about the office space from the head porter, ‘Am Ibrahim, with whom I exchanged salutations every morning. He spoke in a choppy Nubian dialect. I never understood much of what he said, but we conversed in smiles and laughter. At the end of every month, he would enter Diwan in his immaculate white galabeya and white skullcap to collect the rent for the owner of the building. When we moved to the new office, he rerouted to visit us. When he died, his son took over his duties. In our world, professions were passed on, and people knew you even if they didn’t know your name. Relationships governed our actions far more than established systems or written laws.
We hired a man named Mohyy as a mukhalasati (a finisher or handler), a position that lacks an American counterpart. He began as an office cleaner. He served refreshments to visitors, ran errands, paid bills, and submitted papers at government offices. His levity was a useful counterpoint to the debilitating bureaucracy. Everyone, from other shop workers to government officials, took a liking to him instantly. He nurtured these relationships, exchanging phone numbers and thoughtful tokens of appreciation, so that he could one day call in favors. As an underdog, he understood the power of reciprocity. He avoided managers and department heads, knowing that others, at the bottom of the ladder, did the real work.
As with all things Diwanian, our new office was unconventional: a large high-ceilinged room, which contained three desks for the three managing partners, Hind, Nihal, and me. One side of the room held a large bookcase, home to signed texts by Diwan’s favorite authors, upcoming releases, toys for when our children came to visit, and piles of book catalogs. Framed newspaper clippings and photographs of business milestones—articles in the Egyptian papers about our bestseller lists, small write-ups in foreign publications like Monocle, images from the Zamalek shop’s opening—hung on the walls. Behind my desk was a bulletin board that reminded me to shoot for the stars and be myself, a picture of my daughters and me, and worn remnants of to-do lists. A receipt from the largest transaction carried out by a customer-service staff member—one and a half meters of books, worth fourteen thousand Egyptian pounds—dangled to the floor.
In the center of the room, there was a round meeting table that, at lunchtime, became a buffet: we would each unpack cutlery, crockery, and a dish from home, and share our meals with employees or visitors. In our early days, Nihal would bake chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies at home and bring them to sell at Diwan’s café. As demand increased, Nihal’s workload became unmanageable, and she sought to outsource the baking. Some of the women who frequented the café expressed interest in the job. They were tested on their abilities to bake and price goods. Miriam, one of these women, ended up being our principal baked-goods supplier for over a decade, becoming known as the “cake lady.” She was, I later learned, a mother of four, using her new income to fund her children’s education. As Diwan grew, so did Miriam’s enterprise. She went from baking at home to starting her own company that also catered to other businesses.
In our office, we overshared our problems, we overheard one another on the phone, and we made room for each other. Our accountant saw us as three ladies with a strained relationship to numbers and encouraged us to hire a midlevel accountant named Maged, whose office we placed at the other end of our headquarters. While store staff were mostly men, we primarily hired women for the new office. They shared our responsibilities for marketing, human resources, events, data, and warehousing. Maged joined Amir, Hind’s Arabic-book-buying assistant, as one of the few men in the office. After handling the accounts for nine months, Maged suggested that he take the more prestigious title of finance manager. As a man looking to move up in the world, he said, he believed that titles mattered just as much as numbers. We didn’t care what he called himself, as long as he eased Diwan’s growing pains. He insisted on being given a large office, which he refused to share, citing the “sensitive nature” of his work. Over two decades, numerous economic crashes, devaluations, and revolutions, the size of our headquarters shrank to accommodate financial strain—that is, except for Maged’s office.
* * *
Minou hated office meetings as much as she loved Diwan’s decaf coffee. Whenever we needed to meet, we would do so in the café. She also wanted to see her work live, to watch people’s interactions with what she had created. Diwan’s logo had been her triumph, followed by Diwan’s shopping bag, free with every purchase, an accidental marketing success. Right before we were due to open, with barely any start-up money left, Minou showed me her designs for beautifully crafted bags. They featured our bold logo, contrasted with a multilayered background of typography and modernized Arabo-Islamic patterns in earth tones. Coated paper. German-imported glue. Sturdy black handles. No expense spared. She’d successfully captured my attention. I asked for an initial run of ten thousand. Hind and Nihal gawked. We didn’t have ten thousand books in stock! How long would it take to use the bags? Where would we store them? And how would we pay for them? My guilt was apparent enough that they refrained from telling me off further. It was the best mistake of my life. We set a trend of below-the-line advertising, which was unprecedented in our market: we never paid for advertising in a magazine or on a billboard, trusting the bags to speak for us. Whenever our stock ran
low, Minou and I would meet to discuss whether to reprint or produce a different style.
“You know, koskosita”—in truth, what we called each other was way worse—“I am the artist and you are the bookseller,” Minou would say before I could finish a sentence.
“So, I can’t have an opinion?”
“I create. You pimp. You peddle other people’s shit and take your cut. I can’t believe some of the crap you sell.”
“That crap pays the bills. Schopenhauer doesn’t.”
“Fine. Sell the lowbrow shit in plastic. Don’t put it in my bags.” She said all of this while smiling.
I feigned shock. “What happened to ‘the customer is always right’?”
“You don’t pay me enough for cunnilingus,” she snapped back.
“I’m glad your corporates do, so that you keep Diwan as a passion project.”
“Everyone needs a piece on the side.” Patrons at nearby tables glared at us with disapproval, disturbed by what they overheard. And new staff members were terrified. When Minou hired an office manager and I finally took on a marketing manager, I could tell they dreaded the day they would have to deal with one of us alone. We cherished the verbal abuse we hurled at one another, recognizing it for what it was: a precious source of creativity and play. With every new initiative or anniversary we would meet in the café, trade foul remarks and ideas, and produce a new line of bags, each a work of art. But Minou had her rules.
“Don’t send in the white witch. I can’t work with her.” Minou’s tone shifted from threatening to wary.
“You mean Nihal? Seriously? What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said, my impatience growing.
“I can’t deal with her. She’s too nice. She puts those fucking homeopathy drops in my water, she disarms me, and then she screws me with her shrewdness. You never see it coming. That’s her strength.”
“Okay, what about Hind?”
“Definitely not. I am not fooled by her quietness. That one works from the shadows. The monochrome clothes, the flat shoes, the way she tries to go unnoticed. Your weapon is your noise. Hers is her silence. She scares me more. You want your fucking bags, you play by my rules, bitch.” And I did. Because I wasn’t the only one who wanted them. Customers had literally begun collecting them.
In 2007, for Diwan’s fifth anniversary, we launched a new line of bags featuring the Hand of Fatima—the so-called five of fives, a palm-shaped symbol said to ward off evil—in deep turquoise tones. We approached the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, housed in the grounds of the Cairo Opera House complex, with a request to host our anniversary celebration there. Our store couldn’t accommodate a fraction of the friends and fans Diwan had amassed over our first half decade. They declined; museums weren’t spaces for parties, and it would be disrespectful to the art to treat it as a backdrop. Instead, we compromised and celebrated in the main open-air auditorium outside the Cairo Opera House, which was separated from the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art by a courtyard with a fountain. Customers and friends filled the space, some seated in chairs, others on the ground or leaning against the surrounding arches. I remember looking up at the sky in gratitude to all the forces that had made the last five years possible. We invited five of Diwan’s favorite authors—Robert Fisk, Bahaa Taher, Ahdaf Soueif, Galal Amin, and Ahmed Al-‘Aidy—to talk about the past five years and the coming five. Nobody dared to hope for, or predict, the impending revolution. Ahmed, a rising young author whom Hind had selected to join the more established writers, reminisced about how, when Diwan first opened, he used to look up at the bestseller lists papering the walls and imagine his book among them. I remembered the missing ISBNs that would have threatened the existence of those lists, had Hind not soldiered on.
* * *
Diwan’s café was supposed to be a quaint, idyllic haven at the heart of our bookstore. It had a mind of its own, as did its patrons. We’d made Sports Palace into a room of our own. We’d outgrown the café and rented the new office. We’d even begun to discuss expanding to a second location. There had been few spaces that welcomed women, let alone allowed them to pee, and so we’d tried to make room. As Mrs. Diwan, I tried to reimagine the role of Egyptian womanhood to fit myself and others like me. When a friend wrote on Facebook that she was “proud to be Mrs. So-and-So,” I realized that I could never feel that proud of a husband, proud enough to sacrifice my identity. But I would, happily, for Diwan. The English writer Jeanette Winterson writes: “It seems to me that being the right size for your world—and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions—is a valuable clue to learning how to live.” I kept her guidance in mind. I built unexpected alliances and learned to compromise: with itinerant strangers, callous coworkers, and, eventually, myself. I tried to live in the spaces that let me in, or forge new ones. We all do.
* * *
“This is my daily outing. I absolutely love Diwan,” said one of the café regulars with rabid enthusiasm.
“You must be a voracious reader,” Nihal said admiringly.
“I come for the carrot cake.”
“Good for you!” Nihal was relentless in her optimism.
2
EGYPT ESSENTIALS
We knew from the beginning that Diwan would sell books in Arabic, English, French, and German. We also knew that these categories were porous—so, early on, we decided to create a section that we called “Egypt Essentials,” to house all four languages and cut across genres. Like authors of science-fiction novels, we crafted a world that existed only in our imagination. On its shelves, we wove a modern mythology using the threads of fiction, biography, history, economics, and photography. Some of the titles we chose to include became steadfast members, while others enjoyed a brief stint before returning to their permanent shelves. The section name made me think of essential oils: sold in curved glass bottles in bazaars, their origins entrenched in a secret and distant past, they distilled the intangible into a drop, a scent. Egypt Essentials promised similar access to readers, who were a mix of tourists, outsiders yearning to become insiders, and Egyptians who’d seen their country only through a keyhole.
There was a reason our section name was plural. Any singular narrative of Egypt is a lie. The story of Cairo is, primarily, a tale of two cities: one takes place in Egyptian pounds, the other in foreign currency (as the economist Galal Amin has noted). People who live on the Egyptian pound go to government schools, take public transport, and try to stay above the poverty line. Their most prized possession is a subsidy card that enables them to buy produce from government-run outlets. The size and price of one loaf of baladi bread governs their existence. Books are not a necessity, but a luxury. Others, like me, who exist in the sheltered, U.S.-dollar-denominated Cairo, go to international schools, often learn to speak English or French better than Arabic, shop at supermarkets and malls, have access to imported food and medicine, and employ others to cook, clean, and drive for them. Cairo is the place in which they live, but her soul does not always dwell in theirs; they have to really look to see their own city.
Hind and I competed along these lines—her Arabic books on one side, my English books on the other. While the English-language books I sourced contributed more to Diwan’s bottom line, because they were bought in foreign currency and converted against an exchange rate that made them more expensive than locally produced books, Hind’s Arabic books outsold mine in quantity. She never missed an opportunity to remind me of this fact, like during every monthly staff meeting. I knew that her books garnered Diwan the regional admiration and the legitimacy of a local Egyptian bookstore, setting us apart from the flimsy franchises of international bookstores that had recently begun spreading through the Gulf states.
Our ancient sibling rivalry lived on. We argued constantly. Hind was strategic: she saw the bigger picture. I, on the other hand, had hardly any impulse control, and I relished getting lost in any and all minutiae. We guarded our competing sections like military men. We fought over shelf alloca
tions, which of our sections had higher book turnover, and the space new releases would occupy in window displays. As a kid, I’d felt endless awe and admiration for Hind, so I did what any younger sister would—I relentlessly stalked and annoyed her. When we were teenagers, our fury was mutual, as was our desire for destruction. Doors were slammed amid vows of exclusion and execution. Finally, we’d learned the value of sisterhood in a stubbornly misogynistic landscape. We became friends, vowing to support and protect one another. And through it all, we knew how to piss each other off better than anyone.
* * *
In school, we’d learned more about the exploits of William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, than we had of Muhammad Ali or Nasser. We encountered the ancient Egyptians alongside the Romans and the Greeks, but our country was largely absent from our contemporary lessons, save one module on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I read Shakespeare and other mainstays of the English canon before I’d heard of Imru’ al-Qais or Al-Khansa’. Poorly funded state-run schools offered a “free” education in Arabic, but those who could afford to placed their children in foreign-language schools, the thriving remains of colonial, missionary, and diplomatic endeavors. Hind and I attended the British International School in Cairo, but we were very much outside of Cairo. Our weekends were Saturdays and Sundays, whereas Egypt’s weekends were Fridays and Saturdays. We were not allowed to utter a word of Arabic on school premises. This was Great Britain, complete with lemon-and-sugar pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, Guy Fawkes celebrations, and charity garden fêtes. White teachers were paid in British pounds. One of these teachers who remains singed in my memory is Mr. Powell, my Junior Four teacher. He had an angry red face, stingy blue eyes, ferocious teeth, and a mouth whose corners appeared to be pulled downward. He used to hold his hand across his belly in a Napoleonic pose, and he always smelled of stale booze. “Are you deaf, daft, or stupid?” was his refrain of choice.