We moved into an apartment on the fourth floor of a large building in Nasr City where the elevator became my favorite playground. As usual, Ragi claimed the largest room, which was the master bedroom, so my mother and father closed the dining room off with painted wooded panels to turn it into their bedroom. I slept in a curtained-off alcove next to the dining room on a pink aluminum bed, which I can still smell now as I write this. Despite the adjustment, the new apartment felt spacious. It had two living rooms, which my mother furnished with the elegant wooden set from Assiut that she’d inherited from my grandmother, a daybed upholstered in striped silk, a beautiful model sailboat in wood, a statue of Aphrodite in plaster, and some other small decorations from our old house.

Moving from Alf Maskan in Heliopolis to a completely different district of the city felt like an adventure. What really mattered was that our new apartment, like the one before it, wasn’t a rental so we could maintain our middle-class position, which gave us much pride, especially since Alf Maskan “had gone downhill” as my mother often said toward the end of our time there.

Between our new ten-story building and my school, which was named after Abd El-Aziz Gawish, lay a wide street and open desert. In the other direction, two identical buildings stood behind ours in a line on Khedr El-Touny Street.

The new apartment had a big balcony, which I liked, and I liked my new school. The tearful goodbyes with friends as we left our old house had faded from memory, and I didn’t think about them at all when I was walk- ing to school through the desert, dressed in a stiff khaki pinafore, as my chubby classmate Khaled led the way, singing, “O Adawiya” and we echoed in chorus “A-hey, a-hey, a-hey!”

My new school was much nicer than Nabil El-Waqqad Elementary in Alf Maskan, but I did miss the sky-blue pinafore that we used to wear. The teachers at Nabil El-Waqqad had been strict and violent, so I had done my best to avoid punishment by getting good grades, but there was nothing I could do about the cane on my cold hands when I was late for roll call in the mornings. I can remember blowing on them to warm them up so the cane would hurt less. There wasn’t much corporal punishment at Abd El-Aziz Gawish school, and what little there was, my mother eventually saved me from. One morning, I refused to go to school because I was already late, so she came with me and laid into the teacher who was standing by the gate with a cane. He never hit me again after that. After school, we kids would gather in the street out- side our building and play, the girls playing blind man’s bluff and the boys marbles. I liked playing marbles, and after I showed the other kids the marble collection that Ramzi had assembled for me with his exquisite taste, they enthusiastically invited me to join them.

We used to play war, too. Our building took turns being Egypt or Israel, and when we played as Egypt, we used to chant, “We’re going to fight the Israeli chickens!” The low brick wall in front of the building provided cover as we attacked the enemy. The team playing Israel was destined to lose every time and have their soldiers taken prisoner, but we always distributed the weapons equally. We made rifles out of pieces of wood, putting a nail on one end and a clothespin on the other. We’d stretch a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and load it up with a paper projectile so that it would shoot through the air when you released the clothespin.

The only thing that upset me was that all the other kids had bicycles and I didn’t. I would watch them race around on their bikes, and they’d occasionally let me go for a spin. The small bike that my father had brought back from Saudi Arabia for me when I was three had a training wheel, so it was essentially a tricycle, and it was far too small for me. My mother had gifted it to one of Umm Muhammad’s sons during our move and promised me that she’d buy me one that suited my growing frame.

No matter how much I sobbed and wailed, my mother couldn’t afford to get me a bike. Every month, she promised to, and every month, she let me down. There was just never enough left over after she’d given my brothers their allowance and paid for their tutors. One summer month, she was able to set aside enough from the household budget in order to get me the next best thing: a scooter.

I’d already told her how much I liked the one that one of her friends’ sons had, so when she returned home one afternoon carrying a scooter wrapped in colorful paper, I bolted to my feet and cheered and then kissed my mother over and over and over. Of course, it wasn’t as good as a bike, but scooters weren’t very common in those days, so I finally had some leverage with the other kids: “I’ll let you ride on my scooter, if you let me ride your bike.”

I liked an older boy called Ala, but I kept that information to myself, and one evening, I discovered that he liked an older girl, who was also called Ala. I sat on the staircase outside our building, my scooter lying beside me, and cried as I watched them together. He grabbed her shoulder and they smiled at each other. Then he kissed her furtively on the cheek before they set off together on their bikes, which appeared to move as one. I was nine years old and in the third grade when a girl told me that her brother liked me and that it made him jealous to see me playing marbles with the other boys.

Her brother was a humorless sixth-grader called Mahmoud and unsurprisingly his unspoken affection failed to make up for the heartbreak caused by the gregarious and handsome Ala.

In spite of the war, we had three happy years interspersed with fun holidays, including ones that came by surprise, like the day of Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. Ragi was taking the university entrance exams for the first time, and Ramzi was in the first year of secondary school. My father spent hours at home, which was unheard of, sitting on the balcony from time to time with a mug of warm cinnamon milk or anise tea. My mother cooked meals and occasionally surprised us with a simple cake.

In joyful moments, my father would give me a bath or tickle my feet, and the house would fill with laughter. When I think back on it now, it occurs to me that my father and Ramzi were trying to make up for the toys that I used to get when we still lived in Alf Maskan. They tickled me because they wanted to make me laugh, but also because they wanted to see me laughing. Ragi and Ramzi used to pick up a Corona chocolate bar for me when they came back from the cinema. They’d hide it under my pillow so that it was the first thing I saw when I woke up. “Who got me chocolate?” I’d scream with excitement.

It was usually Ramzi who replied. “An angel came looking for you last night, but when he saw you were sleeping, he decided to leave the chocolate under your pillow.” I knew it had been them, of course, and would give them big smooches of gratitude.

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Excerpt from EMPTY CAGES published by Hoopoe, an imprint of The American University in Cairo Press. Copyright ©️ 2025 by Fatma Qandil. English translation copyright ©️ 2025 by Adam Talib. Reproduced by permission.

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