The Swindler's Graph

 "A Math Memoir- Series" 

In primary school, our math teacher was a handsome, dignified man in his fifties. He dressed well, wore sunglasses, and carried himself with the calm confidence of someone important.

He was also a swindler.

A Doctorate in Trickery

His face was always serious, as if he had been assigned a secret mission that no one else in the world could be trusted with.

He kept trying to convince us to attend his private lessons. Not because we were weak students. Not because we needed help. No. His offer was far more impressive than that.

He wanted us to believe that he knew the exam before anyone else did.

Sometimes he even hinted that he helped prepare it.

“I want you to get the highest marks,” he would say, with a grave and respectful expression, as if he were speaking to fellow professors and not a room full of children. “I will give you the questions, and I will show you how to answer them.”

Back then, in the mid-nineties, our final exams were prepared at the governorate level. So the venerable swindler made sure to suggest, without saying it too plainly, that he was one of the great math teachers of the governorate. A man close to the source. A man who knew things.

And because I hated math at the time, and because my grades were miserable, I kept attending his private lessons, hoping he might somehow rescue me from my long, humiliating struggle with numbers.

The Magic Mark

In our final year of primary school, he came to class one day with an announcement.

Anyone who attended his private lesson that afternoon, he said, would learn a secret that could guarantee success.

The secret was a mark.

A tiny mark we had to place on the exam paper, so that he—and his hidden tribe of exam watchers—would recognize us and reward us with better grades.

That afternoon, I was among the faithful.

I went to the lesson and listened with complete belief as he revealed the secret. The mark, he said, was the Arabic letter و. We had to place it exactly where the x-axis and y-axis met in our answer to the graph question.

“The graph question will definitely be the last question in the exam,” he said, cutting the air with his hand as if sealing a divine decree. “No discussion after that.”

We left that day happy and reassured.

The next morning, the exam had no graph question.

The Rank of Life and Coins

His name was Mr. Ibrahim Amer.

In his private lessons, he divided the students into two groups. Each group had its own price.

There was the “distinguished group,” which cost ten pounds. I cannot remember whether that was per month or per week. And then there was the “regular group,” for the sons and daughters of the poor, which cost five pounds.

I was in the regular group.

The five-pound group.

I still remember one day when I had a math problem I could not solve. After the private lesson ended, I went to him and asked, politely, “Sir, could you please help me with this question? I’ve tried many times, but I still don’t understand it.”

He looked at the question, then looked back at me.

“No, my dear,” he said, smiling as if he were doing me a favor. “This question belongs to the distinguished group. Join them, pay the difference, and then I will be able to help you.”

I still remember the confusion I felt at that moment.

Part of me felt he was trying to be kind, trying to bring me closer, as if joining the other group was the natural and proper thing to do. But another part of me understood the rejection immediately. I did not deserve his help yet. Not because I was lazy. Not because I had failed to try. But because I had not paid enough.

It was a strange lesson to learn as a child: that one specific act could make me worthy in his eyes.

I had to give him more money.

Only then would I be accepted among his favorite students.

Of course, during the normal school class, he would solve one problem quickly on the board, then spend the rest of the period joking with his favorite students or chatting with the other teachers.

Like any proper swindler, he had a soft voice, a respected place among the staff, and a small circle of followers.

His closest follower was Mr. Ahmed Bayoumi.

Mr. Bayoumi followed the same method almost perfectly, though he never announced a separate “distinguished group.” We, his private students, used to attend his lessons in a gloomy classroom inside an old, half-abandoned school.

He would gather all of us into one room, the way vegetables are thrown together into a huge burlap sack, and teach us all at once. No smaller groups. No real attention. One crowded lesson, one quick performance, and his schedule was done.

The strange thing is that almost all the students from our normal school class would move, later that day, to that distant, deserted school. We would sit in a dark classroom, facing the same teacher, to receive the same knowledge we were supposed to have received only a few hours earlier, in a brighter classroom, under better conditions, for free.

But somehow, the knowledge did not count until we paid for it.