Seven Minutes

Downtown Cairo, Sunday evening, 14 January 2024. Abdel Sattar Mahmoud has been the doorman of building number 26 on Sherif Street for 31 years, and he knows the building by its sound. He taps the pipes with an old silver ring and can tell where there is air and where there is rust. Tonight the pump in the stairwell is whistling, so he goes down to it with a lamp in the cold. He feels a weight in his left arm and tells himself it is the cold. He kneels and puts his ear to the big pipe. It is 9:12. Then he falls, his cheek on the iron, and the voices come all at once: water boiling, a television, a woman crying, a man saying "the bank".

His heart stops for 7 minutes, then starts again. And he comes back with what he heard from 14 flats: secrets he has no right to know. When he repeats lines from the residents' homes in the hospital, they grow afraid of him, and the residents' union wants him gone. Among all the voices is a young man telling his mother: Thursday, after the results, from up there. A voice with no face, bent out of shape by the pipes. So Abdel Sattar draws a map of the pipes on a cardboard box and knocks on the doors one by one, with a weak heart and a small device in his chest, and every door opens on a new secret. The story is imagined, but the places are real: Sherif Street, Azbakeya Garden and Demerdash Hospital.

The science is explained with pictures from everyday life: the heart is a pump that runs on a tiny current, and pressing on the chest works like a hand pump in a village courtyard. An ear on a railway track hears the train before you see it, because sound travels through iron about 15 times faster than through air. Hearing seems to be the last sense to go out. And survivors of cardiac arrest have spoken of distant voices and time stretching. 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 fiction begins.

The book is written in Arabic.