In the Language of Miracles Read Online Free PDF

Egyptians.”
    â€œOh, so you’d love to live with fellow Egyptians, would you?” Ahmed asked.
    â€œYes!” Samir lied. He knew exactly what Ahmed meant, how people always warned to veer away from Egyptians and Arabs when you lived abroad, how they always said Egyptians would help you at home butstab you in the back the moment you set foot off Egyptian soil. One of his fellow medical students had sworn to him, only weeks earlier, that an Egyptian resident at a Florida hospital had assured him he need not apply there because they never took foreign graduates unless they achieved the highest scores in their medical equivalency tests. This same resident, he later found out, had scored in the seventy-sixth percentile and had still secured a spot. “He just didn’t want me there, competing with him,” his disgruntled friend had told him.
    Everyone said Egyptians abroad acted as if preserving their own little piece of success required they make sure no one else shared it. Samir secretly believed this to be true. (“They will snoop into your business all the time, too,” this same expert on expatriate Egyptians had whispered to him. “Come into your home unannounced and open your fridge just so they can see if you’re living at the same standards you had in Egypt or if you had to tighten the belt.”) Still, he hated to admit all this in front of Ahmed, and, even worse, hated to hear Ahmed criticize Egyptians and Arabs, as if he were not one of them. It was one thing to know the faults of your own people, he thought, but something completely different to speak so irreverently of them, as if you had somehow become better by virtue of a few years spent in the United States, in a large Connecticut house, with imported Cuban cigars that dripped ashes on the deck’s gray wood.
    â€œYes,” Samir repeated. “I would like to live close to other Arabs. But I’ve already signed the lease on the new apartment.”
    â€œOh well,” Ahmed said, his lips twisting in a sly grin. “I guess Flatbush it will be, then.”
    â€œYes. Flatbush it will be,” Samir said, gratified to have the last word.
    A few months later, Samir had realized that Ahmed might have had a point regarding Bay Ridge. Nagla, having to stay home with Hosaam as Samir worked eighty-hour weeks, had grown irritated with isolation. She knew no one, and even as he encouraged her to take Hosaam to thepark to meet other parents and make new friends, he knew she was too self-conscious about her limited English.
    Plus, the apartment itself proved to be small and dark, with only one bedroom and a windowless living room stuck between the kitchen and bedroom. Even though they had both been relieved finally to take possession of their own apartment, walking in for the first time, Nagla’s smile was not what Samir had hoped for. Her muffled comments and occasional “Oh, that’s nice,” as she walked from room to room felt more like polite replies directed at strangers. He knew she was comparing this space with the one they had left in Egypt, which his father had purchased for him years earlier, with three bedrooms and a large, airy living room, the full front of it made out of sliding glass doors that opened to an eighth-floor balcony with a view of the Mediterranean. The apartment in Egypt, he had felt like telling her, was better, yes, but what else was better? What else?
    Time, he had hoped, might help Nagla get used to the apartment that was to be her home for the next three years. He was wrong. Only three weeks after they had moved, he walked home from work late one afternoon and found a fire truck parked in front of the four-story brick building. At the foot of the front steps stood Mrs. Russell, the landlady, talking to one of the firefighters. When she saw him approach, she pointed at him and said something to the firefighter, who laughed softly and shook his head. Samir, curious but