Keiko heard drilling upstairs. She also heard banging early in the morning. The maid next door was beating carpets. When she asked the bawab, or the gatekeeper of the building about her neighbor's maid, he told her that the maid did not come every day. Besides the drilling, the beating of carpets, the knocking of the water in the pipes in the building, she could hear the man who lived between the buildings, clearing the mucous from his throat, and the wailing of his wife, when he beat her. The people upstairs also wore hard shoes, which made a clacking sound when they walked across the floor.

 

The gatekeeper insisted no one lived upstairs.

 

She was sure that she heard drilling and the clacking of shoes. How could she concentrate on Arabic grammar with so much noise? She had a difficult time, imagining herself teaching Arabic to Japanese businessmen in Tokyo. It seemed too late to quit the course now, though. The earplugs she bought at the pharmacy did not muffle the noise.

 

Late at night, she also heard cats meowing and raucous laughter from above. Did the people who clomped across the floor, own cats?

 

She called the Egyptian landlord, a doctor who was teaching at the University of Missouri at Columbia. No, he said, no one lived in the flat upstairs, although the flat belonged to his sister. It was the only flat in the building which was not rented.

 

"Aaah so, but does your sister let anyone else have the key?"

 

Like the gatekeeper, the landlord insisted that no one lived in the flat.

 

Keiko complained so much about the drilling that her American neighbors concluded that she must be crazy. Maybe she should go back to Japan. Maybe she had been in Egypt too long. Maybe she needed psychological help. Her American neighbor across the hall had even given her the number to the counseling service. For her kindness, Keiko had given the woman a Barbie doll, named Fulla, dressed in a black Saudi costume, an abaya.

 

She had not gone for counseling. She was sure she heard drilling. Anyway, the doctor would also tell her that she did not hear drilling, like the bawab, like the landlord, like her American neighbors.

 

Keiko was disturbed, but it was also true that the landlord's sister had given a spare key to a British belly dancer of Iranian descent named Lily, who lived in the building.

 

Lily had made a special arrangement with the bawab to keep it a secret. (Even though he was more honest than most and did not cheat the landlord on the rents he collected for him, he could not refuse Lily's generous offer. He had three unemployed sons in the village.)

 

Officially, no one was living in the flat upstairs.

 

The drilling that Keiko heard was the hum of a sewing machine. Keiko's hearing had been damaged from five years of living in downtown Cairo, next to ten mosques. Now that she lived in Garden City, which was quieter, some noise was amplified; other noise mutated into something else. When she spoke to the bawab, she banged her hands on the table and shouted because she knew he was lying about the flat upstairs. Did he think because she was Japanese, she was stupid? Could be fooled by his facile assurances? No one ever told the truth in Cairo.

If she had been bolder, she would have marched upstairs and banged on the door, when she heard the drilling. Found out about this never-ending construction project.

 

Lily had sworn to the landlord's sister, a writer of some renown who now lived in Idaho, she would not give the key to anyone else. Lily had intended to keep the promise. In a pinch, though, Lily had given the key to her American friend, Queenie from L.A., who made belly dancing costumes for a living. (Queenie had married an Egyptian doctor, who had absconded with her money and abandoned her as soon as he had obtained his American citizenship.) Queenie's neighbors out on the Giza road had complained that she had a business in her residence. Queenie had been tipped off that there would be a raid on her flat in Giza and she would have to pay taxes for having a business in a residential zone. If she made the costumes somewhere else, she could deny that she had a business. Queenie, who had streaks of white in her red hair, and a wandering eye, was a little like a pirate. She swore she hated Cairo and often recited litanies of how she had been rooked, but she loved niggling over the price of expensive beads for her costumes from shopkeepers at the Khan il-Khalili.

 

Naturally, Lily wanted to help out Queenie because she made costumes for her. Queenie also made costumes for other famous belly dancers in Cairo. (They rarely paid their bills and materials were expensive, but Queenie could not see herself back in L.A.)

 

When Queenie was not sewing, Lily used the landlord's sister's flat. Keiko heard other noises besides the drilling.

For example, Lily usually used her own flat for assignations with businessmen, belly dancing lessons, and for viewing videos of her belly dancing performances. However, in her flat there was now a hole in her bedroom ceiling. (An unrepaired plumbing leak and the constant jouncing of her bed had plunged her bed through the ceiling to the next floor onto her middle-aged neighbor, Clyde Honeydew, a professor of management at the American University.)

 

Lily had not really minded if Clyde heard what was happening in her flat, but recently he had started shouting up obscenities and paranoid things like:

 

"They hate us here."

 

"Go ahead, Fuck your brains out."

 

"Get ready for the Apocalypse."

 

Lily had decided to use the landlord's sister's flat for her assignations with businessman or even Big Boy, the black Caribbean bodyguard for the famous Saudi Arabian princess who lived in the Ramses Hilton. When Keiko heard the clacking of high heels, it was not her imagination. Lily wore red stilettos. The Egyptian businessmen were usually fat and wore expensive Italian leather shoes with heels.

 

Keiko complained to the bawab about the clacking and clomping of shoes overhead.

 

He said, "So now the drilling has stopped. You are hearing ghosts?"

 

"Do ghosts wear shoes?" Keiko asked.

 

The bawab twirled his Turkish-style moustache. He was a little afraid of losing his monthly supplement from Lily. What if this persistent Japanese woman discovered the truth?

 

He shrugged. "Maybe the noise is coming from the street or from somewhere else."

 

"No. Here are the noises from the street. Call to prayer at five-thirty. ALLAH AKBAR. Every morning some man starts his Volkswagon early in the morning to warm it up. The Egyptian lady in the building across from us has a bird that makes an ugly sound. The man who washes the cars, shouts Good Morning to the bawab in that building. Sometimes, they quarrel."

 

"Okay. Okay. Is Tokyo a quiet city?"

 

"Japanese don't love noise, like Egyptians. Stillness is a value in our culture."

 

"Maybe you need a holiday. You are tired."

 

"I just came back from Japan. One month ago," Keiko said.

 

Other times, Keiko heard loud meowing from the flat upstairs, as if hundreds of cats were having a wild bash. She knew this was impossible, but she heard the meowing. How could there be hundreds of cats in that flat if it were unoccupied?

 

Even shrewd Lily did not know that her cats used the spare flat as an escape pad on the nights when she was belly dancing at the Meridian. Her lead cat, Swink had discovered where she kept the key. Pout Face and Julia Childs were happy to come along. As a joke, Swink nicknamed the bar, "Lucy's Cat House," after the most docile of all the cats who lived in the building, a plump black cat with green eyes, who hardly moved from the sofa. If other cats could escape from their owners in the building, they joined the fun. They enjoyed themselves immensely. Fat Louie played the piano; Sasha played the drums, while neurotic Caesar, looked at himself in the mirror. Self-centered, diabetic King Farouk complained that he was tired of eating bland chicken breasts and bored everyone with details of his love affairs. Sacco and Vanzetti played ball.

 

The bawab said, "So not only do the ghosts wear shoes, they meow?"

 

Also unbeknownst to Lily, the landlord, and the landlord's sister, the landlord's sister's son had made a copy of his mother's key. He was an indifferent law student at Cairo University, who used the flat whenever he wanted to have sex with his girlfriend. He bragged so much about this flat, that his friends began to pester him for the key so that they, too could sleep with their girlfriends.

 

After Keiko turned on her rice cooker every day, she kept a log of which sound she heard from the empty flat upstairs: Drilling. Knocking of the bedposts. Meowing. The sound of the piano and the drums. Clacking and clomping of shoes. Hooting. The television. Arabic music. She needed to track the noises to see if certain noises happened at certain times of the day. Or on certain days. Then she could present her evidence to the landlord.

"Aaah, so. Hanky pank upstairs. I think many different people have the key to that flat. So much noise. So much activity for an empty flat, aaah so. Doesn't make sense."

 

The landlord called the bawab. "Is this true?"

 

"She is majnuna. Crazy. I told you. She hears things. Makes up stories. Thinks everyone is out to get her. She even thinks someone is drilling a hole in the ceiling upstairs to spy on her."

 

"It would be better if her flat was empty," the landlord said. He was half-serious when he said this, because he did not mind the rent money. "Is she bothering the other tenants?" he asked.

 

"I don't think so," the bawab said.

 

"Well, then. She will not stay in Cairo forever," the landlord said.

 

The noise from the flat upstairs continued to nag Keiko. She had to have some quiet so she could study for her Arabic Linguistics exam. The university library was not an alternative place to study because it was noisy there, too. The continual ring of mobile phones. Raucous laughter. Normal conversation among Egyptians was like the audience's roar at a circus.

 

This once, she dared herself to go upstairs and confront whoever was making noise.

 

To Keiko's surprise, Lily opened the door. She was wearing a silk robe; it was only loosely tied. Keiko could see her enormous breasts. Were they real? As if she is a Japanese courtesan, Keiko thought.

 

"Excuse me. So sorry," Keiko said, bowing. "The noise. I am trying to study."

 

"What is it, love? What can I do for you? Do you want to take belly dancing lessons? Looks like you could lighten up a bit," Lily said, not unkindly.

 

"Oh, no, I couldn't. Haai. Sorry to disturb you," she said, bowing, backing away from the door.

 

"We are watching my performance at last year's belly dancing festival. Don't you want to come in and see?"

 

"So sorry," Keiko said, backing further away.

 

"Don't be ridiculous. We would love to have your company, wouldn't we, Big Boy?"

 

Keiko was terribly embarrassed. The muscular black man was not wearing a shirt. He was wearing a pair of flimsy shorts. She could not tell whether they were shorts or underwear.

 

He was so black. Keiko could not imagine sleeping with a black man. She wondered what it would be like.

 

So the flat was not empty! Keiko decided not to show the bawab her hand, completely.

 

"I know that salacious, immoral things are happening in that flat," Keiko told the bawab. (This was a good chance to use the old-fashioned Arabic vocabulary she was learning in her Arabic Linguistics class.)

 

"So the ghosts are now taking off their clothes?" the bawab asked.

 

Keiko became embarrassed and backed away from him, with her hand over her mouth. Most improper! Was he making suggestive remarks that she . . . ? She turned and headed for the elevator. What kind of woman did he think she was?

 

If the bawab continued treated her with such sarcasm and disrespect, she might tell the landlord that he had forced his way into her apartment.

 

One week, Keiko realized she had not recorded any drilling in her log. (Queenie had gone back to L.A. to sell her costumes to Bianica Jagger. She no longer needed a place to do her sewing.)

 

Three days after, the clacking and clomping stopped. (The hole in Lily's ceiling was repaired.)

 

Soon after, the meowing tapered off. (The cats did not use the place for a bar anymore; instead, they use Nikos the Greek's balcony as a place to hang out. It was simply easier to get there. Another bonus: someone in the building had thrown hundreds of mackerel cans on his balcony. The cats could have a mackerel cocktail party, rather than drinking vinegary Egyptian white wine.)

 

The thumping of the bedposts stopped altogether. (The landlord's sister's son broke up with his girlfriend. She had taken the veil and refused to sleep with him anymore, unless he married her.)

 

Keiko told the bawab: "This is not a quiet building, like you say. Stories. Lies. There is something underneath. I know what I hear."

 

However, when Keiko went to record noises in her daily log, there was no longer anything to record. She was sure she had heard the drilling, the meowing, the clacking, the thumping of the bedposts, the piano music. Where had all the people gone?

 

He shrugged. The less he said, the better. But he shouldn't have worried. No one believed Keiko. The Americans in the building knew him to be a good, honest man.

 

When Keiko called the police in the neighborhood and complained that there was a prostitution ring in the building, they did not take her seriously. They knew the bawab. And they were not about to arrest Lily, a well-known belly dancer in Cairo.

 

They knew this Yabaniya, Japanese woman was crazy. Tired in her head.

 

Copyright©2006 Gretchen McCullough
Published Storyglossia, March 2006