Half a Life

The watchmakers' lane in Mousky, Cairo, January 2018. Narrow shops pressed together like the teeth of a comb, every window full of clocks that strike the hour one shop after another. In the shop called "Al-Amana Watches", Tawfik Abdel Moati stands with the black loupe in his eye and listens to Moallem Shaker's calculator beep with every number: 400,000 pounds, due on 15 March 2019. Then an old customer brings a silver pocket watch that belonged to his father, and wants it running for his grandson's wedding. The missing part exists only in Am Bahgat's box, in the back room that nobody enters. So Tawfik takes the key from the drawer and goes in.

In the room he works for 3 hours. His tea goes cold fast, and the light from the door turns slightly red, like a sunset. When his daughter Yasmine calls him, her voice reaches him slow and deep, like a stretched tape. He comes out to find that only 18 minutes have passed. So he writes "Repairs in one hour" on the glass, customers come from Ataba and Bab El-Khalq, and then a big contract arrives: 300 wall clocks to fix at the Al-Yaqout Hotel before it opens. But Am Bahgat, the man who wears two watches, warns him: the room gives you time, and takes your life. The first white hair appears, his wife Soha asks where he really lives, and Yasmine waits for him to fix her stopped pink watch. How many years of his life will Tawfik pay? And will he reach his family in time?

The idea behind the novel is real: time does not pass at the same speed everywhere. The Earth's weight slows time a little close to it, and the higher you go, the faster time runs. Scientists measured this in a tower at Harvard University in 1959, then between two clocks only 33 centimeters apart in 2010, then on the Tokyo Skytree in 2020. The map in your phone needs this correction every day. No equations and no hard terms. A final section, "What is real and what is imagined", tells you clearly where the science ends and the imagination begins.

The book is written in Arabic.