Omar Taher’s ‘The Last Cassette Tape in Egypt’

The Last Cassette Tape in Egypt

By Omar Taher

Translated by Ali Layth Azeez

 

After his father died, they found an old English biscuit tin at the bottom of the wardrobe.

What lay inside it puzzled him greatly.

An old woman’s hair clip, its shiny coating worn away to reveal the grey metal beneath, now covered in a layer of rust; a tiny Qur’an no larger than a fingertip; a 100-shilling Somali banknote; and a cassette tape.

His mother explained some of what he had found.

“The hair clip belonged to your grandmother. She was cooking lunch when suddenly, she collapsed in the kitchen. Your father carried her to the hospital. They told him they suspected a brain hemorrhage and needed to do a scan. Before putting her into the machine, the nurse checked for anything metal, then removed the clip from your grandmother’s hair and handed it to your father. It was the last time they ever saw each other.

“Your father’s grandmother brought him the little Qur’an from Medina. I had been slow to conceive, she told him. Put it under your pillow and make sure you perform your ablutions before going to sleep. A month later, I became pregnant with you.

“Your father used to joke that the hundred Somali shillings were all he managed to bring back from his teaching assignment. Teachers usually went to the Gulf, but fate chose Somalia for your father, where he taught physics. I never heard him speak of his time there with anything but fondness. The catch was the country’s laws, which prohibited foreign currency transfers and barred anyone from leaving through the ports or airports with more than 5,000 Somali shillings. After a year, your father returned carrying a load of hides, wool, and dried fruit, which he handed out as gifts, keeping the hundred shillings for himself as a keepsake.”

His mother fell silent for a moment as she studied the cassette tape. “But I don’t know anything about this.”

While searching for the old double-deck cassette player, his teenage companion, he remembered the night his father stayed up late making a brightly colored lampshade from old cassette tapes that had been lying around, the kind that always made visitors smile. His mother told him to look in the attic.

The cassette player did not work. He took it apart and cleaned away the dust that coated the inside, but it was no use. He called on a friend for help. The friend examined the player but could find no solution. He told him about a cousin of his, a journalist, who had a Walkman he always saw in his study whenever he visited. They stopped by to see him, but the Walkman did not work either.

The café friends suggested heading down to Attaba Square, the place where everyone somehow manages to find the impossible thing they have been looking for.

In one of the shops, a man in his seventies sitting amid piles of scrap told him to forget about it. He pointed toward dozens of cassette players of every kind and size stacked in one corner of the shop. The problem, he said, was the belts. A cassette player means a belt, and making them or importing them—he was not sure which—had stopped some time ago.

A friend said, “Cassette players have staged a rebellion. They have killed themselves out of grief over what became of them. That cassette tape you have been carrying around the streets for a week is the last cassette tape in Egypt.”

His mother asked whether he thought his father might have recorded a will in his own voice and left it for them. He said that, if so, he should have left behind the machine he used to record it as well.

He posted on Facebook, appealing to his contacts for help finding a solution.

Someone suggested an old trick he used whenever the cassette player in his father’s car broke down. He would replace the cassette belt with a thick rubber band.

He bought a packet of rubber bands from a women’s accessories shop and tried his friend’s trick. The cassette player did indeed start turning, but within seconds it swallowed the tape. The magnetic tape slid into the machine, and it took delicate surgery to remove it intact.

Another friend suggested trying one of the old well-known recording studios.

At a studio in an old building on one of Garden City’s older streets, the sound engineer told him he knew a technical services company that transferred the contents of cassette tapes and videotapes into digital format. He gave him the address and said, “They charge by the hour.”

At the company, the employee quoted him a price that made his jaw drop. He left the tape and a deposit, then returned the next day with the rest of the money and collected the cassette along with its contents, transferred onto a CD.

It was a song.

Just one song, its music unmistakably a child of the eighties.

The singer’s voice was unfamiliar to him, but pleasant, and the melody was gentle. He fell in love with the words.

You and I were much the same
Much the same
A thousand things bound us together
And we were alike

We came from the same home
We stood and watched from the same balconies
The same warmth and family gatherings
The same endless chatter with our aunt
The same fear of exams

We climbed the same staircase
And made the same mistakes counting the steps
You were the older sister
I was the boy, your brother.

Everyone he played the song for said they were hearing it for the first time. They all fell in love with it, and none of them could identify the singer.

One day, his mother asked what had become of the cassette tape and whether he had managed to find anything out. He told her what had happened and wondered whether she might have known the singer, or perhaps heard the song in her youth, so she could recognize one or the other.

He played the song. At first, his mother listened only half-attentively as she gathered his scattered clothes from around the room. Then she turned and asked him to turn up the volume a little. She sat on the edge of the bed, and it was clear she had something to say.

“Do you know who wrote this song?” she asked.

He shook his head no.

“Your father,” she said.

“He used to write songs, and it meant a great deal to him when we first got to know each other. He kept it hidden from his family because he knew his father would not approve. I watched him worry over finding someone to sing his lyrics. He used to tell me, ‘Just one song, then I’ll stop.’ One day, I left home early on my way to the institute and found him standing outside the entrance waiting for me. He looked exhausted, but he was happy. He told me he had been at the studio and had recorded his first song with a new singer, and that he had been paid one hundred pounds. He put the money in my hand and said it was a gift. I asked him about the lyrics. I have never forgotten them to this day. But the project never went any further, for reasons he never told me. I once heard him say that he would get a copy of the song from the singer to keep as a memento. Today is the first time I have ever heard it.”

His father had kept something that proved, if only to himself, that he had tried. Perhaps, in moments of disappointment, he would return to that attempt and to the song, taking pleasure in hearing his words drift across a sea of gentle music.

But why had he kept the secret entirely to himself?

He thought the song deserved to reach people. He asked for help finding someone who could clean up the recording and improve its quality. As soon as the new version was in his hands, he stayed up late gathering old photographs of his father as a young man, made a video for the song, and posted it across all his accounts.

He watched the song spread and the conversations it sparked. He watched lines written by his father break away from the song and find their way onto the accounts of people who had never known him. The number of views rose every day. He wished his father could have been there to witness a success he had been denied. Perhaps, he told himself, he could see it now from somewhere far away. Yet there remained a heaviness in his heart, the ache of success knocking at a door no one would ever open.

Omar Taher is a novelist, scriptwriter, songwriter, poet, and columnist, born in 1975 in Sohag, Upper Egypt. He is immersed in Egyptian culture, and his work spotlights Egyptian society and the ordinary life of Egyptians in all its details. He is very popular among young readers thanks to his straightforward writing style. His best-known books include Egyptian Makers parts 1 & part 2 (صنايعية مصر), Songs on the Radio (إذاعة الأغاني ) and a number of satirical books and poetry collections. He won the Best Author prize in 2015 from Youth Magazine (مجلة الشباب), one of Egypt’s most popular magazines for young readers. Kohl and Cardamom was shortlisted for the 2021 Naguib Mahfouz Medal.

Ali Layth Azeez is an Iraqi literary translator and academic. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Baghdad and teaches at the American University of Iraq–Baghdad. He also serves as Head of Translation and Rights at Beldash Publishing House. His translations include Sandra Newman’s Julia, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and works of contemporary Iraqi fiction and poetry.

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From Omar Taher’s ‘Kohl and Cardamom’