CAIRO IS NOT FOR SISSIES. BUT THEY GO, wearing short shorts and sunscreen, swarming the Pyramids and haggling with the taxi drivers, insisting they pay only the “Egyptian price.” But believe me, they don’t want to pay the “Egyptian price.” Those who do, regret it.

They drift up like sand from sub-Saharan conflicts. When Genevieve, a Canadian student at the American University, meets Alpha, a migrant from Sierra Leone, relationships are set in motion that neither of them is ready for. He introduces her to Brigit, a Norwegian human rights worker who is looking for a flatmate. Soon enough Genevieve is called upon to help collect refugee stories for Brigit’s agency.
She accompanies Nussaibah to overcrowded apartments where they gather reluctant testimonies of war and displacement: Age: 32, 24, 12. Raped: 4 times, 14 times, countless times. Children, living: 2. Children, dead: 3. Children, missing: 2. When displaced: 2001, 2003, last month. Needs: housing. The refugees, from Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone and wherever else war and poverty have engulfed the population, have come to Cairo looking for work, looking for rest, or looking for papers so they can keep going. Paulina Wyrzykowski’s The Year of Numbers is a bold enumeration of tragedies both banal and horrific.

Genevieve and Alpha embark on a relationship, equal parts tenderness and secrecy, never quite piercing each other’s armour. Trust is a luxury, given their respective trajectories – she back to Canada, he to a statistically probable fate of prison, torture, or death. Things don’t tend to go well for young African men with no obvious means of support in Cairo. Genevieve uses her status as a Canadian to do what she can to free Alpha’s friends from detention, but when Alpha disappears for the second time, both influence and charm desert her.

Written in a style almost as peripatetic as its characters,The Year of Numbers wanders in time and points of view. There is much we don’t know about Genevieve. Why is she in Egypt, what are her political views, her motivations, her previous experiences? She seems a stand-in for the author, a lawyer who has worked with refugees in Egypt and Uganda. Equally mysterious is Egypt itself. While Wyrzykowski gets credit for illuminating the mercilessness of Egyptian multiculturalism, she doesn’t seem to have been moved by its charm. Where are the smells, the sounds, the tastes?

But if there is more to the place than postcard details, Wyrzykowski has found it. Writing clear, piercing prose, she encapsulates complex histories: “Information is currency, and it’s an instinct with Alpha to pick up stories like loose change from the sidewalk.” Or, regarding the usefulness of Westerners: “They believe in law and can be shamed into doing things.” Her characters, all asylum-seekers in one way or another, are lost in narrow streets of memory and pain. What doesn’t kill them, scars.

The past ten years have done little for the Middle East. The new American administration promises to build a few bridges of understanding, even support. The Year of Numbers, while not exactly flattering, adds needed nuance, humanity and intelligence to a too-easily stereotyped region. Buy the book.

Go ahead, ask for the Egyptian price.

Leila Marshy has been published in a number of literary journals such as Descant, Grain, Fireweed, as well as anthologies including Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press). She works and plays in Montreal. She’s also lived in Egypt and travelled extensively throughout the Middle East.