A Dead Man's Memory

Shubra, March 2023. One week after his grandfather's burial, Mazen stands at the door of the "Radio El-Banhawy" shop and closes his eyes to hear the place, as he has done since he became a sound editor. The shelves are full of radios whose owners never came back for them, and Uncle Shehata sits on his chair by the door. Under the repair bench Mazen finds a box with 32 reels labelled in his grandfather's hand, and an old German tape recorder wired to a leather band with 8 metal discs. He picks the reel "Summer 1961", puts on the band and presses play. Suddenly he is Fouad, a young man of 23, and a girl on a balcony above the shop calls out: "Abu Lamba, our radio has gone quiet!" When he opens his eyes, the shop is dark, and in his mouth is the taste of sugarcane juice he never drank.

In his grandfather's notebook Mazen finds the rule of the machine: each reel works only 7 times, then it is just a voice. At the bottom of the box is a last reel with no date, a small bird drawn on it, and a note: "For Samira, if you find her." It has only one play left. The shop will be handed to a chain of phone stores on 1 July. So Mazen sets out on a search that leads from Shubra and Kholousy Street to Camp Caesar and the Raml tram in Alexandria. But the price shows up fast: his memory of the first day he saw Reem now has a balcony and jasmine in it, and things he knows slip away one by one. Between a father who wants to sell and a woman who does not want to open the past, he must find out what is left of himself.

The science behind the story is real. A memory is not a photo kept in a drawer; it is a dish cooked again each time. Every time we remember, the brain opens the memory and stores it again, and something can slip in or slip out. Karim Nader and Joseph LeDoux showed this in 2000. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus showed that one word in a question can plant something that never happened. And the surgeon Wilder Penfield touched his patients' brains with a small current, and they lived an old moment as if it were now. The novel takes one leap: a machine that records a memory and gives it to someone else. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section, "What is real and what is imagined", tells you clearly where science ends and fiction begins.

The book is written in Arabic.