Madam Afaf Strikes Again

When the landline rings at 8 a.m. on the 2nd of the month, one can be fairly certain who’s calling.
However, I feigned delighted surprise through my morning gravelliness to hear Madam Afaf, our landlady, on the other end.

“Izzayyik?”
“Winti izayyik?”
“Al-humdulillah, bikhayr!”
“Al-humdulillah.”

As the cordialities unfurled and ran their normal gamut of repetition and variation, I began to prepare myself for the inevitable question. Where was the rent money? My answer: Tomorrow. But it turned out Madam Afaf had other fish to fry.

“Habibti, you speak such good Arabic. Listen: a man will be coming around to take the census,” she began. “He will want to know how many people are living in the apartment and who it belongs to.”

How sweet of Madam to make sure that her half-wit foreign tenants got an advance warning to reflect on these puzzles. I eagerly solved them on the spot to put her soul at ease:
“Well, there are still just three of us . . . and the apartment belongs to you.”
Not so fast. As it turns out, all is, as usual, not as it seems.
“No, no habibti . . . Tell him, this apartment belongs to Mohammad Fahim, but he is traveling and you are guests in his home.” She spoke as clearly as possible. I was not to fuck this up.

Huh?

“Do not say you are residents. You are guests. He will be traveling for a few months, then he will be back.” I detected a shade of affected conspiratorial hush.

Duh, okay. My sluggish morning brain, fully charged with the task of linguistic decoding, did not manage to articulate any of the rather obvious relevant questions regarding this enigma (e.g. Who on earth is this absent and endlessly generous Mohammad Fahim?). Instead, I repeated back the command to her evident delight, as if we had plotted out this grand government trumping (or tax evasion, or whatever) together. Well, lucky you, Afaf. This one follows directions. As our chat was going quite swimmingly so far, she threw out what she now staged as an incidental interest: our paying the three months of rent we owed her.

Last time we had been late too. I had explained to her that as soon as my other roommates returned from America we would pay immediately, to which she cooed that she certainly hoped so, or we would have to leave the apartment at once. Madam Afaf doesn’t mess around. Then she showed up a day before we had agreed upon, only to be greeted at the door by one of the Italian boys I had met in Dahab and was harboring during their stay in Cairo. Shirtless and singing, as was his wont, Umberto slung the door wide, then ran off to fetch me with his tail between his legs. By the time I got there, Afaf had already turned on her heel and informed me primly over her shoulder that she would return tomorrow. Now, she implied when I protested, I was quite ostentatiously indisposed.

The next day as she sat in our de-Italianoed and re-ladied living room, I blubbered an explanation for my rambunctious and plentiful male company, but the impeccable, fashionable-purse-clutching Afaf seemed unfazed. Her voice still honeyed beneath what just might have been a derisive curl of her lip, she prounounced,
“Inti hurra.”
"You are free." You are free to commit whatever sins you want on the old-lady couches I bought for your apartment.
“As long as you give me the money!” she snipped, then forced an accompanying gale of titters at once both girlish and shrewd, in which we were invited to join. The fat wad of bills exchanged hands amidst this eruption of shared mirth.

This time around, I offered my landlady yet another viable excuse: I had been in the hospital getting my appendix out and hadn’t left the house all week. Madam Afaf was properly horrified and pledged readiness to bring me anything I might need. I assured her that I was well taken care of, that I had a substitute family (Aaron-the-Supermom, for those that know him) here in Cairo and would be just fine.
“But I’m a mother too,” she reminded me, in her sugariest tones. Right, Mama Afaf. As long as we give you the money.
What bothered Afaf most in my tale of woe however was not that I had had emergency surgery but that I had not thought to have her brother, my upstairs neighbor, do it.
“Why did you go through all that trouble? Doctor Sharif was right upstairs, he could have taken care of it right away!”

I have visited Doctor Sharif’s drawing room, in search of a cure for a nasty, face-deforming bugbite. I do not remember seeing sufficient machinery for removing an appendix. Rather than pursue her logic on this one, I decided to simply express my confidence that had I thought more quickly before mincing off to the hospital, Doctor Sharif could have performed an exemplary surgery. His devout sister agreed whole-heartedly. Once again, family connections trump all other rationale. Was I not as good as Doctor Sharif’s territory, living as I did in such convenient range?

The rent now decisively relegated to a comfortably auxiliary role in our conversation, we agreed in passing that I would leave it downstairs with Nabil, tomorrow at 4. We said a cheery goodbye amidst her refrain of “Alfi salaama”s to quicken my healing. It occurred to me as I puzzled through this new shade of sketch shed on our habitation of 40 Sharia‘ Mesaha by the mysterious Mohamad Fahim that I might ought to work my way deeper into Madam Afaf's enigmatic ring, and further master its accompanying rules of etiquette and trickery. For the discussion effecting the retrieval of my security deposit will require an epic performance indeed.