There was once a perfumery on Hamra Street called Reeha.

Every morning, the owner of the perfumery, a middle-aged man with broad shoulders named Mahmoud El Rashed, and his employee, a middle-aged woman who had long lost her femininity named Tania Boutros, drank coffee in paper cups and smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

Other shop owners and salespeople occasionally joined them for small talk; most of the time, however, there would be just the two of them, Mahmoud and Tania, enjoying a form of silence disguised as a conversation.

If a passerby ever chose to listen in, he would think that the two were dynamically engaged in the conversation they were having. What wouldn’t cross his mind, however, is this: Mahmoud and Tania had the exact same conversation every morning for over twenty years. They spoke without thinking and with little awareness of what really came out of their mouths. They were like two actors rehearsing a boring dialogue after a night of heavy drinking. They performed it quite well, but the meaning of their dialogue was overworked and long exhausted. It meant absolutely nothing to them. Their words had become nothing but sound, mantras that were part of the noise of the city, no different than the chirping of the birds and the begging of the beggars. As they spoke mechanically, they traveled freely in their own minds. They were there, but they weren’t there.

“The weather’s not so bad today,” one of them would always say.

“Yes,” the other would agree, “and let’s hope it will get even better tomorrow.”

“Did you see the news last night?” Tania would always ask when she was halfway through her coffee.

“Why would I watch the news?” Mahmoud would answer. “The news has been the same since 1991. Only the reporters have changed.”

Lighting his third and last cigarette before the start of his workday, Mahmoud would ask, “Remind me, Tania, how many perfume bottles did we sell yesterday?”

And Tania would smile and say something like, “Ya Mahmoud. Wallah, the number’s so small that it’s not worth mentioning.”

But this morning was a little different than all preceding mornings. Just a little different. Before they went in, Tania delivered – or, rather, tried her best to deliver –  several jokes she had come across online the night before. This was new. But unfortunately for her, none of the jokes made Mahmoud laugh. In fact, it was so out of their morning routine script that Mahmoud did not know how to react.

“Hamra is dying,” Mahmoud said after a pause. “It has been dying for more than a decade now.”

“Da,” Tania responded.

“What’s that?” Mahmoud asked.

“Da means yes in Russian,” Tania said.

“Do you speak Russian now?” Mahmoud asked.

“No, I only know this word,” Tania said. “Da.”