Story: ‘The Water-Heater’
Ahdaf Soueif, 19 August 1982
The flat was silent except for the steady hiss of the water-heater. It was a sound he was not completely used to yet. Until two months ago, whenever he had wanted to have a bath the primus had had to be lit. Faten had always lit it for him. Every afternoon, after he had woken from his siesta, he would knock at the door of his mother’s room. Her voice, faint, would float out from within: ‘Come in, my son.’ He would enter the darkened room to find her sitting up in her big brass bed, her head bound up in a white kerchief, a braid of still-black hair falling over one shoulder. ‘Sit down, my son,’ the feeble voice would say and he would seat himself on one of the two austere, wooden armchairs under the window to the right of the bed. ‘How are you today, Mother?’ he asked. She always sighed before she answered: ‘Thanks be to God… What can we say?’ In a while, she would ask: ‘How is University, my son?’ And he always answered: ‘Thanks be to God, it is well.’ Some minutes would pass in silence, then the weak voice would call out: ‘Faten, make some tea for Salah.’ Faten would bring the tea in small, gold-rimmed glasses on a round silver tray, engraved with an image of the Holy House in Makkah. She would offer it first to her mother then to her brother. She would place the tray on the little round table by the bed and turn to him: ‘Shall I heat the water for your bath now?’ He would nod. He would hear her lighting the primus, filling the large aluminium urn, and balancing it on the fire. She would check it every once in a while till at last she would come to the door: ‘The water’s ready for your bath.’ Then she would turn away. She always spoke softly, and she always turned away.