An Erased Name

Sayeda Zeinab, Cairo, a Thursday evening in mid November 2025. Gaber the barber has stood behind the same chair for 20 years, in a shop full of mirrors, writing the name of every customer in a blue notebook. His son Hamza, 12 years old, is counting his father's customers for a school project, and finds a strange name: Uncle Rizk. 170 times, every other Thursday, since March 2019. He asks his father: who is he? Gaber searches his mind and finds no face. At a quarter to 10 a man in a grey jacket walks in, asks for an old-fashioned haircut, leaves the boy a small wooden horse, and goes. At the door he says: write Uncle Rizk, as you do every time.

This is a science fiction thriller. Gaber and Hamza start looking for the man who comes back every other Thursday and then vanishes from memory after the first sleep. Under his bed Hamza finds a tin box with 14 small wooden animals, all given to him by the same man since kindergarten, and he cannot remember his face. Gaber goes to the neurology clinic at Ahmed Maher Hospital, then to the shop of Badawi the perfumer, then to Studio Al-Negma on Port Said Street, and in his mother Aziza's flat he sees black nails on the wall with no pictures. Every step takes him closer to an old secret in the family house, one he has not wanted to look at for years. The alley, the shop, the coffee house and the grocery are alive on every page, and the story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.

A perfume that erases a face is pure fiction, but its rules rest on real science, explained with pictures from daily life: smell is the sense closest to memory, so the scent of warm bread can take you back to your grandmother's kitchen in a second. The brain sorts its memories while we sleep. A memory is not a photo in a drawer but a file that opens each time we recall it and is saved again. And faces have their own place in the brain; people in whom it is damaged know others by their voices, not their faces. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section, "what is real and what is imagined", tells you clearly where the science ends and the fiction begins.

The book is written in Arabic.