Rent Control in Cairo

In the meantime, old Kevork Hagopian, the original Armenian tenant, was still unassumingly wasting away in the darkness of his first-floor apartment. He rarely went out, rarely bought food, rarely ate, it seemed. He was small, pale and perpetually wore a pointy hat on his head. He occasionally could be seen peering out through the slats of his window shades. He took to spitting on passers-by when he could get a decent shot as they entered the building. Once in a while, my aunt got him to talk to her, but she was the only one. I was terrified of him.

When he died in 2007, his death had the gnawing heaviness of any death that almost goes unnoticed. The only one who came to Hagopian’s side after his death was his nephew—who happened to share the exact same name as his uncle; Kevork Hagopian.

No one is sure where he swooped in from to clear his uncle’s belongings, but we presume he lived in Cairo his entire life. It was one of the gray, unknown areas of the nephew’s life that remain obscure. He spoke with my relatives. He insisted that he needed some time to gather all of his uncle’s things, receive grieving visitors, and then he would be off. My relatives agreed that he could stay 40 days, to mourn and collect the leftovers of his uncle’s existence.

He stayed a week. Then two. Then three weeks, which turned into a month, then two months, then several months. Before we knew it, the 40 days had passed without a peep from him.

He refused to return the apartment keys. My relatives, frustrated with attempts to negotiate and get him out, finally filed a lawsuit against him. In response, the nephew took refuge in what everyone knew was an ingenious lie.

He stood up in court, in front of the judge and everyone, and exclaimed, “What are you talking about? I’m not dead. No one has died. I’m Kevork Hagopian. I defy you to find any piece of paperwork that proves that this man, whom they claim to be dead, is dead.”

Since that moment more attention has been paid to Kevork Hagopian than in his entire life. What was his middle name? Where was he born? Where was he buried? Was he buried in an unmarked grave or an Orthodox Armenian cemetery?
In December 2008, while visiting my parents in Egypt, I witnessed a macabre chase to salvage any information about Hagopian’s life. My relatives were completely flummoxed, totally frustrated with the lack of viable paperwork, and everyone was running out of ideas.

The entire affair spun even further out of control when the apparent imposter turned the tables. He decided to sue the family for perjury. He claimed that we lied in court about him being “dead.”

The only way my family could retaliate was by finding any documentation of his uncle’s death to prove to the court we weren’t lying. Oddly enough, the certificate of death was nowhere to be found.

I should explain here something about Egyptian rent laws. The law is traditionally on the side of the renter and not the landlord, probably because of the socialist strain in Egyptian law that started when President Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1952.

Because so many “contracts” were made with a handshake, it’s practically impossible to kick out a tenant if they are not paying rent, because there is no paper contract. To add to that, rent control is considered hereditary. Hagopian’s rent had risen from seven Egyptian pounds to 15, but due to President Nasser’s rent control changes the 1960s, it has remained 15 pounds –about two and a half U.S. dollars per month — till this day.

Recently, the law was changed to apply only to the first generation of children, and to children who had lived in the residence with their parents. But until recently, you could pass down an obscenely low rent from generation to generation.
My mother’s cousin, who had lived in that apartment building practically all her life, one floor up from my grandparent’s apartment, had noticed some changes. From below, from that first floor apartment, she could hear the hollow thud and crash of breaking concrete. It was coming from Hagopian’s. The nephew, a photographer, was knocking down the walls of the place, attempting to build what we presumed was his very own photo studio.

None of us could approach him about this business of breaking down walls. That would be “acknowledging his presence,” the lawyer said.

On my last day in Egypt, my parents took a trip to the Armenian Orthodox cemetery, a bouquet of roses in hand, to find out where the mysterious uncle had been buried. After an afternoon of trying to decipher gravestones covered in Armenian script, and interrogating the graveyard guard, they returned home, defeated and empty handed. No corpse. No grave.

“The guard said he could have been buried in a mass grave,” my mother said. I shuddered at the idea of a faceless, lifeless mass of people pressed against each other, robbed of their place in collective memory.

And that’s where we stand.

This evident imposter had swept in, picked up the neglected pieces of his uncle’s life, and erased any trace of his uncles’ existence. He’d stolen almost seventy years of someone’s life for a rent-controlled apartment.

It kind of begs the question—what won’t people do for a three-bedroom apartment with kitchen and washer/dryer?