It was one of the children who threw the banana, the tangerine peels, or the seed shells in the light well. The culprit was always a child, as if no one else but children lived there. Despite that, many of them, in fact, were innocent of dumping trash in the shaft of the building—and the heap of shells proved it, because it could not possibly be the result of a child cracking seeds by himself, unless, of course, the kid was a true seeds-eating monster. But they were always in the line of fire and one of them was usually sacrificed whenever Yehia stood in the light well, yelling, incensed about the trash being dumped on him from above. One of the adults would lean out the window apologetically, with a promise to prevent the little one from doing it again.
No child would dare say that his father or mother or older brother was the culprit. Oftentimes, they were forced to stand in front of Mr. Yehia silently, unable to rush to the street until he had finished his dressing-down session, plucking “Yes Sirs” aplenty from them. Later, he demanded: “Don’t you dare throw anything again.” Through his blistering lecture he wanted to send a message to everyone, announcing that the light well had a guard. When one of the children was angry at his older brother, he’d rat on him for throwing the peels. So Yehia would start rebuking the older brother, while he clutched the kid’s arm. He could not confront adults about what they had done because they would deny the confessions of the little ones, or lie about them, and they would tell him things he didn’t want to hear. Sometimes, none of them would bother to look out from the light well windows, knowing he would have to shut up in the end. Since no one cared to answer him, he was driven to blast whoever lived above. He kept emphasizing that the light well was not a garbage dump and living on the ground floor was not his cross to bear.
If it wasn’t possible to identify the flat from which something had been thrown, it was, conversely, easy to identify the source of the odor that ascended from below to above. The source was no mystery, especially in the summer when the droppings of the chickens, which Yehia’s wife was raising in the shaft, reeked. The problem would usually be resolved when one of her female neighbors called her to complain about the odoriferous smell, asking her to clean up the light well. His wife agreed to this request, acknowledging that she intended to do this anyway once she finished cooking lunch, but only after a little more wrangling about the stench. If the odor were unbearable, she would be the first to complain. Maybe what the neighbors were smelling was not the odor from the light well, but the odor from light wells in nearby buildings, she thinks.
This squabble about the stench was stopped when the landlord’s daughter lived on the first floor. From the early days she had expressed her disapproval about raising birds in the light well. She was enraged about living above a chicken coop. Her yelling about the odor reached a pitch that the building had never witnessed before. Whenever Yehia tried to remind her that he was as old as her dead father, her yelling would increase and she would doubt his ability to smell, because if he had the smelling powers of herself and her deceased father, God bless his soul, Yehia wouldn’t allow anything to be raised in the light well. She kept mentioning her father, as if he had never done anything else in his life, but smell. She busied herself with the issue of the odor as if it were her only worry in life, and wove it into conversations with her female neighbors, wondering how they had survived it for all these years. She would claim that they couldn’t acknowledge the severity of the odor and its gravity because they had gotten used to it. She emphasized that her hygiene was better when she was away from this house for days, and used all kinds of deodorizers to erase the smell in her flat in vain, as if the smell dwelled in the walls and in her new furniture. The female neighbors agreed she was exaggerating—but, in spite of that, they were all ears. One of them even matched her exaggeration, saying that she was once about to suffocate from the stench.
Her yelling wasn’t just tied to the odor, but was in response to Yehia’s yelling the first time she was around when a banana peel got thrown in the light well. The peel was not thrown from her window, yet she rushed to respond and to remind him that the odor “coming from his side” was a thousand times worse “than the peel he was fussing about.” A lady neighbor tried to defuse the situation by accusing her little one of throwing the peel, but the landlord’s daughter kept yelling, confirming that this matter was bigger than a peel, that, in truth, the light well belonged to everyone in the building, “not only the people downstairs.” Yehia responded by saying that he was the one in charge of the light well since his wife was the one who cleaned it. When he said that, the neighbor threw a garbage bag from her window, and had he not ducked, it would have splattered on his head.
It was a day of epochal proportions when the neighbors gathered in Yehia’s flat. His screaming had reached an unprecedented level, yet the yelling of the landlord’s daughter was greater. She insisted that no creatures be raised in the light well, in exchange for taking charge of the cleaning. The tenants agreed to her suggestion, ignoring Yehia’s shouting in their faces, that they had let him down and had never stood by him. He, also ridiculed the fact that their sense of smell had suddenly gotten more powerful.
The landlord’s daughter held to the agreement for only a short time. She sent her maid to clean the light well. She did not care anymore about answering Yehia when he yelled angrily about the filthy floor. He did not direct his yelling to her, but “to others living above”—those who were apparently content with living in this dumpster. Honestly, the trash just consisted of shells that had been there for years, but this time, nobody looked out of his window to attach the blame to his little one.
The neighbors started to compare the odoriferous state of the light well in the past with what it had become after Yehia’s wife had her relinquished her cleaning duties—it had now become a dumpster for peels and shelled seeds. No one would talk about whoever threw these things, because there would always be somebody dumping something in the light well. In all of the conversations about the light well, they acted as if they were talking about a room in Yehia’s flat that his wife had abandoned temporarily, and which she would reclaim, after she and her husband had forgotten the conspiracy by everyone against them to destroy their fowl.
For a long time, there was no one to take care of the light well and things were still dumped there. The lady neighbors were forced to strike another deal, where they committed to pay extra to the maid, who would clean the shaft once a week. Despite their commitment to this deal, Yehia’s yelling continued whenever the maid was absent every week or two, as if he were expecting the neighbors to bring her to clean by force. Then the girl got married, and she wouldn’t be replaced for a few months. His continuous haranguing caused the neighbors to ostracize him. They agreed that he was “old and gaga.” That also encouraged the landlord’s daughter to throw the seed shells that she never stopped cracking all day in the light well. Not to mention the shells that the children kept throwing without one iota of fear.
