And so I walk into the living room and the furniture is already covered with the sheets Safiya arranged last night before leaving for Shubra, white sheets with the red selvage my mother had bought at the Attaba market in nineteen ninety-two, and I look at the covered table and remember that my mother in that same spot used to pour me black tea on Sunday mornings, and I look at the covered sofa and remember that my father would read *Al-Ahram* sitting on that sofa, which back then was in bottle-green velvet and today is in a dark fabric I have never understood, and I think that Monday at eight the bulldozer arrives and I have to have finished quickly.

Today is Friday, April twenty-fourth. I say it to myself as if it were an important date, and in a sense it is an important date: Monday at eight the bulldozer arrives and I have to be done by Sunday evening. By Tuesday this house will be a pile of bricks with an echo of my childhood inside that nobody will ever hear again. I am sixty-four years old and I was born in this house, Galaa twenty-four, third floor, on July sixth, nineteen sixty-two. My father had bought the apartment three years earlier, in fifty-nine, from an Armenian merchant who was emigrating to Canada; the price was three hundred Egyptian pounds and my father had taken seven years to pay. When he died in two thousand three he left me the house and a Tissot pocket watch that is now in the shoebox on the living room table.

The box. The box is cardboard, it was the box of a pair of Bata shoes, size forty-two, that I had bought in Zamalek in ninety-five. Inside I have put five objects. My father's watch, the Tissot with the copper chain that has not worked since two thousand fifteen. *Tartarin de Tarascon* by Alphonse Daudet, Flammarion edition, nineteen thirty-two, which my father used to read in French and which I have started three times without finishing. *Les Misérables* volume one, same edition. *L'Étranger* in the paperback edition of seventy-eight. And the wedding photo of me and Safiya, tenth of June ninety-one, in the center is Safiya in the white dress her sister had sewn for her, on either side are the relatives I can count today on the fingers of one hand.

Five objects. The box is almost full. There is still room for one, perhaps two. In Shubra the apartment we have rented is thirty-two square meters on the seventh floor of a building without an elevator; we negotiated for three months, the price is eight thousand pounds a month, half of what the municipality gave us for Galaa twenty-four, two thousand four hundred pounds per square meter for one hundred and sixteen meters. Even a child can do the math. Safiya said: *Mohamed, don't take too many old things, there is no room.* I said all right, Safiya.

I go to the kitchen. Opening the cupboard I see my father's toolbox, the green iron one with the lid that no longer closes, which papa used to keep on top of the fridge from the sixties. I take it. I find the flat-head screwdriver, red wooden handle, which I remember in his hands. I go back to the front door.

The doorknob is brass and papa had it put in in sixty-three because the original had come off on the day of the inauguration, and he had paid a local craftsman, and he had chosen brass and not iron because brass does not rust. I had never unscrewed a doorknob in my life; my hands did not know what to do. I slip the screwdriver into the slot. The screw is rusted, the head strips on the second try. So I take a kitchen knife, a steel knife Safiya uses for bread, and I pry between the knob and the door. After four attempts the knob comes loose with a small jolt that stays in my wrist.

I hold it in my right hand. It is cold, it weighs half of what I thought it weighed. The door now has a square hole where the screw and the cylinder used to go. I do not look at the hole. I look at the knob.

I go back to the living room. I open the box. Five objects. I look at *Tartarin*. The book I never finished. I pull it out of the box. I put it on the floor. I put the knob in its place. I close the box.

I stay a minute looking at the book on the floor. Then I pick it up. I go down the stairs with the box under my right arm and *Tartarin* under my left. Four flights. At the entrance on the ground floor there are the piles of things the residents leave for the recyclers: paper, rags, warped pots. I put *Tartarin* on top of the paper pile. I look at it for a second. Then I step out into the street.

Ramses Avenue, station, train to Shubra. I sit by the window with the box on my knees. The train leaves. I look out. I think: *Tartarin* was a book I had never finished, and papa had never known that I would never finish *Tartarin*.

The box now weighs more. The doorknob.