A young boy named Nuri grows up in Cairo after his parents, former Libyan aristocracy, fed the country to France, where he was born, and then to Egypt following the 1969 coup d'état. The boy learns of this through books that describe his father as "an aristocrat who, having been forced into exile by the revolution, had moved 'gradually but with radical effect' to the left."

Their maid, Naima, is from Cairo and has worked for the family since before the narrator was born. The narrator has memories of his mother, a distant and mysterious woman who liked to vacation to places like Norway and the Swiss Alps. After his mother died, his father always liked to spend vacation at the beach.

The narrator recalls his mother's death. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where her father continued to visit her until she died. The father tried to hide her dying from the narrator, promising she would come home and reluctantly letting him visit her once. In the car, the father bought jasmine necklaces from a boy wearing a shirt they had donated to an orphanage, distressed to see him working so young.

When she died, the entire family, including Naima to whom the boy's mother was also like a mother, was devastated. They held a memorial service in the gathering area of their apartment building, playing music so all their neighbors came. The boy's aunts and uncle came from Libya for a few days then returned so as to not arouse suspicion with the Libyan government. The boy missed them when they left.

The boy remembers going with his father to see Naima in her home when she was severely sick. It was small and clearly her family was poor. Her father kept saying she was just sick for attention and seemed scared of them and their presence.

Hydar and Taleb, two of the boy's father's friends come to visit. The boy's father insists that they give up their rooms for them; the boy sleeps on his floor, where Naima used to sleep sometimes. Now, Naima sleeps in the kitchen. The boy remembers his mother always disliked these friends. His parents were around them when they lived in Paris, a period of their life his mother doesn't like to talk about.

Taleb becomes uneasy when the boy begins to question him about what his mother was like in Paris and doesn't answer when the boy asks what his mother died of. Later, he tells the boy, "Some things are hard to swallow," and adds, regarding his father, “You have no idea what he was back home. It’s difficult, looking at him now, to believe that he is the same person and that the world is the same world. And he wanted someone to inherit it all.”

The following day, his father's friends fly back to Paris and the boy asks Naima to change the pillow Taleb slept on on his bed even though, as she says, it's clean.