I promised you a golden egg one day!!

  Makkawi Saeed continues to bury his secrets!!

✍️Abdul Hakim Haider

He sees him as if he shook his hands from the dust of the whole world in preparation for sitting at the cafe to drink coffee or laughter, and he deliberately removed himself from the tent of the intellectual and his tools and his impossible waiting.”

 Makkawi was happy, as if he was only waiting for that golden rooster that calls for the noon prayer on a chair in the cafe, then he comes to him specially to say to him: I promised you a golden egg one day.

 Saeed used to take this golden rooster to his home from the café at the end of the night, and there the rooster would lavish gold on it, then Makkawi would keep the secrets of the rooster from friends and those eggs that he had obtained from him.

 According to the state of gold prices, which he sold in the markets after the rooster was serious about him, once he works in a documentary film and once he finishes a collection of stories or a novel

 and once he gets a prize from here or there, but his favorite rooster, which we never see, remained in his favorite place, which is the cafe Only, despite the vastness of all Cairo’s festivals, seminars, forums, companions, 

and paths that Makkawi knows shobra by span, in which he wrote a wonderful book about his personalities that he tried hard to deliberately obliterate their features, in the form of portraits of the most

 interesting of what was written about Cairo, and unfortunately, the book was not followed critically In a way it deserves,

 and the portrait was not literature that deserves a look of sympathy from the critic, or Cairo was envious of Makkawi for the gold that he secretly obtained from that rooster.

 A state of indifference awaiting secrets with also indifference to the results, as if he is living a futile project that has been delayed with the help of the café and laughter

 and writing his belongings “Downtown Collections”, which is his beautiful book, from which I knew two personalities with certain knowledge and how perplexed Makkawi were, who deliberately tried to clarify the names of his belongings in order to The reader is puzzled about his sources, i.e.

 the well of his belongings, and one of them was a woman who madly disposed of all her household possessions, no matter how expensive, and intended or planned to travel. 

One day she invited friends to carry all the things of the house, then she left for Europe thirty years ago, and she was a talented story writer, but her madness focused on traveling and dispensing, even about the home and the homeland, his word about her,

 so he was very surprised to reveal the secrets of her holdings, so I told him her name, He looked at me very carefully, and then I moved on to another character in the book, that quiet man who sits in silence with a pencil

 and a stick in the “Freedom Café.” He drinks tea or coffee in constant silence and writes with great interest, and Makkawi was surprised by me after he told me the journey of this man in his youth to Iraq,

 and he was in his seventies, director of a large folk arts group there, and finally returned to Egypt, 

and here he puts his professional fingers In movie and series scenarios in silence, his name is never written on it, but he silently takes his wages from the producer and leaves.

 Makkawi was a strange story that turns its anonymous pages in laughter at the café and the loneliness surrounded by secrets without revealing anyone’s secret or bragging about false heroism in the path of love, as does the intellectual who has scandals, arrogance and invasions that reverberate in the center of the country. 

A Buddhist came from there, and did not leave the cafe, sitting at the cafe on a daily basis, following the world with sober eyes, and books issued frequently from here or there and the man as he is, does not fidget, does not ache, does not complain,

 does not tease onions, does not flirt with any authority, and does not fight it either.

 Only the authority of himself is always present without ostentation or interruption, interspersed with his laughter, 

and a simple companionship around him, which sometimes changes with the separation of his possessions, but his table always changes flowers

 and laughter as well, without leaving the café, literature

 and downtown, as if he was created to guard the center of Cairo walking or in its sessions leaving To his house when the sun tends to the west, eat two hours in the afternoon, 

and he returns to the café while she drags her last tails to the river without leaving him with a smile and the brilliance of the audience, until it was suddenly said that

 Makkawi was late for his appointment, he had moved to a place Another, leaving for the first time the entire café for friends and consolation in it, was a sad state without (Makkawi) for the first time.