Cairo seemed as complex, unpredictable, familiar, and as real as where she had just come from, but in a way, she could not easily decipher. The frustration of sensing that the unfamiliar was nothing but a well-known story written with a different alphabet, halftones, and an incomprehensible grammar, made her feel stupid.
“The villa, which from the outside, with its carnaps, leaded windows, turrets, and tall roofs, looked enchanted, had its own static moods. Ignat and Yousra used the exterior wooden stairs, that edged up through an octagonal turret. The first thing one noticed, when one opened the door from the darkness of the turret, and peered towards the end of the wide hallway, was the upper end of the large glass mosaic. The light was filtered by the colourful patterns, before it placed itself darkly over a large furnished landing, from where the wide main stairs coiled down through the house to terminate in the gloomy high-ceilinged hall with the main door.”
In this Novel, called Like Two Rivers, locations have a magic quality. It can be the personality of a house, the atmosphere of an apartment or the mood of a city. Here, settings shape and frame the experiences of the people inhabiting the story. At the same time places are extensions or projections of the people who live in them.
A location might be a magic desert refuge, an oppressive sterile flat in suburban Paris, an old haunted apartment in Downtown Cairo or a coal fire smelling triangular hotel in Aleppo where love was lost.
And at the corner coffee shop in Istanbul people meet old friends by accident. In a Delhi post office, someone is hiding from riots. Perhaps a woman falls hopelessly in love on a veranda in Cairo or, with one word, two people change the cause of each other’s lives in Copenhagen. Meanwhile in a forgotten desert village, a boy waits in vain.
For this story is like the human mind; always moving and looking for something; fleeing from war; longing for love or driven by restlessness.
Ultimately everyone is searching for that mythical place where they hope peace will last forever… but will it?