A Temporary Absence

Tuesday evening, 14 October 2008. Hassan Ibrahim El-Desouky, a teacher of Arabic, argues with his wife Amal over their son Karim's maths test: 4 out of 20. He storms out to buy bread, then comes back and takes the old lift in their building on Baghdad Street in Heliopolis. Between the 3rd and 4th floors the power goes out. Total darkness. Then candlelight through the gap above him, and Amal's voice calling his name. Then the light comes back. A minute, maybe less. But when he opens the folding iron door, it is daytime, there is a strange chair by the lift, a neighbour he has never met tells him Amal is dead, and the phone in her hand shows a date: 20 November 2025.

This is a science fiction novel set in Heliopolis, Cairo. At the police station, Major Yasser Azmy finds an old file with a photo of the man in front of him, in the same shirt. On paper, Hassan has been dead for years. Karim, whom he left as a boy of 16, is now a man of 33 who looks like his brother and does not want him back in his life. In the flat stands a whole cupboard of Amal's notebooks, full of numbers, tables and dates. On the first floor lives Badir the electrician, who knows more about the lift than he says. The owner of the building wants to replace the lift. And Hassan wants one thing: to be a father, a teacher and a man with a name on paper again.

Behind the story is real science: time does not pass at the same rate for every clock. Einstein said time runs a little slower at very high speed and near strong gravity. In 1971 two scientists flew very precise clocks around the world, and they came back differing from the clocks on the ground by a tiny fraction of a second. The satellite clocks that guide your phone are corrected every day for the same reason. And astronaut Scott Kelly came back from space a tiny fraction of a second younger than his twin brother. The novel takes this idea and makes it much bigger. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined.

The book is written in Arabic.