Audible Silence

Tanta, Sunday morning, 13 October 2024, a quarter of an hour before assembly. A twelve-year-old boy named Youssef stands in the headmaster's office at Al-Zohour Preparatory School and makes a request no one has made before: to be moved into class 1/3, not out of it. The science teacher of that class, Mr. Kamal El-Sawy, does not speak. Not a word. Since his son drowned in the Al-Qased canal in the summer of 2022, he has taught only on the blackboard and answered people in a small notebook in his shirt pocket. In the first lesson he writes "Good morning" in chalk, the class laughs, and Youssef looks at him and wants, with all he has, to know what is in his head. Suddenly a heavy sadness that is not his own falls on his chest, and an image passes before his eyes: a red ball floating on green water, and a eucalyptus tree leaning over the bank.

From that day Youssef feels what Kamal feels, without words. He does not hear his thoughts; only feelings and a few images reach him, as long as they are within about 100 meters of each other. He knows the answer before the teacher writes the question, and he follows him every Thursday to the eucalyptus tree by the canal. But the link has a price: a headache that grows every day, nosebleeds, falling grades, and a mother, a seamstress, who fears for him and knows more than she says. At school there is Ammar, who mocks the "mute teacher", Seif, the friend who counts everything in numbers, and Amr, who waits on his old bike at the gate and looks at Youssef as if he has seen him before. No one knows that Youssef is the boy Kamal's son saved on the day of the drowning, or that he carries a last sentence that never arrived. Will he say it and lose the only man who understands him, or stay silent and lose his own head?

The link between Youssef and Kamal is imagined, but the ideas behind it are real. In 1992 a team in Italy found cells in a monkey's brain that fire when it reaches out its hand, and also when it watches someone else do it, as if the brain does what it sees. In 2010 scientists found that a listener's brain moves like the speaker's brain when it understands, like two people dancing to the same song without agreeing on the steps. In a real school class in New York, students' brain waves became more alike when they were absorbed in the lesson, like a stadium crowd cheering together. In 2014 a simple word travelled from a man in India to a man in France, but through wires and the internet, letter by letter like a telegram. You will also see why shock can close the door to speech in some people, like a door locked from the inside. No equations and no difficult terms. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" clearly separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.