My Chinese text had been cagey toward its foreign readers—there wasn’t a word of negative commentary about China or the Chinese people. But Dardasha was never shy about bad behavior. This was the flip side to the book’s emphasis on politeness: it illustrated the many ways in which actual life failed to live up to beautiful phrases. Dardasha even included a dialogue of a bizarrely tenacious wrong-number conversation. Ever since Leslie and I had acquired Egyptian cell phones, we had been puzzled by all the calls we received from people asking for strangers, or demanding weird things, or saying nothing at all. Dardasha’s unit 8 prepared students for the experience:
Ali: Hello!
Khamis: Hello! Is Mr. Gumaa there?
Ali: No, wrong number.
Khamis: Yes? How? I want Mr. Gumaa.
Ali: Ya habibi, there is nobody here called Mr. Gumaa.
Khamis: I’m Khamis. He knows me.
Ali: Again? Wrong number. Good-bye.
Khamis: Fine! But he knows who I am.
Ali: Good-bye.”
When we covered this lesson at Kalimat, Rifaat was away, and our teacher was a friendly man named Sami. To me, the dialogue seemed straightforward and fairly uninteresting. But Sami read it like a Hemingway story: the things that had been left out were the things that mattered.
“I think that Mr. Gumaa is actually there,” Sami said seriously. He expounded on the various reasons why Ali might be lying on behalf of Mr. Gumaa. Perhaps Mr. Gumaa owed Khamis money, or maybe Khamis was trying to ask for a favor. Sami said this kind of behavior is common in Egypt.
“Sometimes we hide what people want,” he said. “Sometimes we say he’s not here, when in fact he’s here.”
I asked him where this deception comes from.
“From seven thousand years,” Sami said. “Always a dictator. Always we are afraid. So we don’t trust each other.”
Now I reread the nine lines with new paranoia. Why did Ali call him habibi? Why did Khamis speak with such familiarity? “He knows me.” And what about that cryptic closing sentence? “But he knows who I am.” That was the day’s lesson: in Egypt, nothing is too small for a conspiracy theory.引自 Part One: The President
