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Adel Esmat, born in the Gharbiya Governorate of Egypt in 1959, graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1984. He lives in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, and works as a library specialist in the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
Mandy McClure is the translator of Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide (AUC Press, 2008) and co-translator of The Traditional Crafts of Egypt (AUC Press, 2016). She lives in Cairo.
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The afternoon of that Friday metamorphosed into dusk. Needling him later, they would ask him about Yusuf’s boyhood accident—did it happen during the afternoon or at dusk? He would insist that it was dusk and they’d laugh, and he would curse them and say they were cattle who couldn’t tell broad daylight from dusk. He wasn’t joking. He had absolutely no doubt that the accident occurred at dusk, though it actually happened on a Friday afternoon. He would curse them, saying he saw better than they did, that they were the blind ones.
The fog that settled over my father’s eyes was, in his view, fleeting—a brief muddle that would resolve itself soon enough. He waited a long time for the fog to lift, for shapes to be revealed and some of their clarity to return. But it did not happen. To prove to himself and those around him that his eyesight was fine, he would leave the house every morning for the exchange, walking in the fog and stubbornly refusing to rely on anyone, convinced the fog would clear. But one day he felt unsettled. The streets seemed to be shaking and he realized he wouldn’t be able to make it alone.
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