Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  These questions started me out on a path I had never before approached, or even conceived of, a dim awareness that began right away, but gradually, to form itself as an impression that she might need my care and protection. Perhaps I ought not to leave her alone. I had never really thought about how much I depended on her. A little girl depends on her mother without giving it a thought. I was surprised by my longing for her – a longing so strange I could scarcely believe it. How could there be such longing if I was insensible to it while I was far from her? She wrote me lengthy letters, to which I replied with two or three words, as if out of a sense of duty rather than genuine feeling. She pressed me to write to her, and I would chafe at her insistence, going weeks without writing at all. Why then, when I saw her – from the first moment I saw her – was I engulfed by this flood of yearning and tenderness, and the desire to cling to her and weep, and tell her it was all a mistake, a huge mistake? The word buzzed in my ear while we were at the airport, and I didn’t know what I meant by it: her breakup with my father? Her going back to France? My not having gone with her? I had no answer to any of this, and all that night I stayed awake turning the riddles over in my mind, but could come up with no satisfactory solutions; I might seem to find one, but none I could settle on for longer than a few minutes before returning once more to the inquiry.

  What happened in Paris is that I encountered the truth of my feelings toward my mother and from there I automatically followed – in a way I didn’t comprehend at the time – the trajectory of my perception that she was in need of protection. Now it was for me to learn, gradually, how to open my arms to embrace and protect, to relax my guard and show compassion, to undertake the role of mother to my own mother. Why then did I not follow through? I forgot, or pretended to forget. Or such is life, that it takes us out of our feelings, or it withdraws those feelings and sets them far from our intentions.

  Also in Paris that summer, I made my first step toward taking an interest in public events. In childhood, my father’s arrest was an entirely personal event, no more than that: a reasonless, incomprehensible removal to an obscure place. After my father’s release, politics were not, at home, a matter of daily discourse in which all three of us engaged at meals or in our evenings spent together as a family. Even the 1967 ‘setback’, which I followed to some extent, didn’t – as far as I can recall – penetrate the fabric of my emotional life until later, retrospectively. In June of 1967 I was beginning senior school, following the news of the war and the defeat in radio broadcasts, newspapers, and what I heard repeated, indirectly, allusively, on the tongues of others. But the event in all its tragic import did not permeate the inner life of a thirteen-year-old girl preoccupied with her relationship with her father, and his relationship with her mother, and with the upheavals of a family in a painful process of disintegration, the fear of a dissolution that seemed imminent.

  (It was the night Nasser revealed, in the course of his speech announcing the defeat, his intention to step aside – a dark night. My father was following the speech and brushing away tears with the back of his hand. He went on brushing them and brushing them. My consternation at tears shed by my father was greater than anything occasioned by the nation’s president reporting a rout whose impact I would not absorb until years afterward – that is, I would absorb it more fully with the passage of years, as a gradual process beginning that day, and perhaps continuing even up to this moment.

  The speech ends. My father weeps, wailing like a child. My mother all at once becomes hysterical, shouting, ‘I don’t understand! I absolutely do not understand! Why are you crying over him? Isn’t he the fascist officer, the brutal dictator who put the lot of you in prison for five years without the slightest grounds? Isn’t he . . . wasn’t he . . . didn’t you say . . .?’ Her words tumbled out in a rush, her voice pitched higher and higher. Suddenly my father said, ‘You must be blind!’ Then he walked out – left the house. After that she spoke not a word, and neither did I.)

  Chapter six

  Paris 1968

  When I got to Paris, I hadn’t the least idea what the country had witnessed in the previous weeks. But Paris that summer talked of nothing but those events. My mother, the neighbours, acquaintances – all were talking about them, while the newspapers revisited, analysed, and followed up on developments. As the boys and girls I got to know – who were of my own age, or older by a couple of years or so – strove to offer their own interpretations of what had happened, they found it entertaining to pass along the details of those weeks to a girl who had come from the faraway land of Egypt, ignorant of the fascinating things they knew.

  My mother introduced me to Gérard and his family, who lived in the same building. The first time we met, Gérard volunteered to accompany me on a visit to any of the city’s landmarks I might care to see. I said I wanted to visit Notre Dame (it wasn’t that I was interested in church architecture, but I wanted to see the cathedral and its great bell, which the hunchback Quasimodo had rung in the novel by Hugo that I had loved, and that had made me cry). We agreed that he would take me there in two days’ time.

  Gérard came by for me at ten in the morning; my mother had gone to work. We set off from the house toward Notre Dame. On the way to the Metro, and in the train, Gérard told me about the student demonstrations that had begun on 22 March in Nanterre. Eight students had stormed the dean’s office, to protest the arrest of six of their classmates for being active on a committee organised against the Vietnam War. It had been decided that these eight students would come before the disciplinary board a month later.

  Gérard said, ‘On Friday the third of May, in the forecourt of the university, a group of student activists made a circle around the eight students who were to stand before the disciplinary board the following Monday. The crowd got bigger, and just kept growing. At four o’clock in the afternoon, riot police surrounded the university and began arresting students. As the news spread, even more students began showing up, and a battle ensued between them and the police. The closure of the university was announced – it’s only the second time in seven hundred years that the Sorbonne has been closed down; the first time was in 1940, when Paris was occupied by the Nazis.

  ‘Less than ten days after the decision to close the university, the President of the Republic was forced to make the decision to withdraw the police and reopen it. But things were not about to go back to the way they’d been before. The students took over the university. They opened up the gates, so that anyone who wanted to could join them in brainstorming and discussion sessions.

  ‘Between the closure and reopening of the university, lots of battles were waged, and workers’ strikes mounted and spread throughout France.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to go to Notre Dame?’

  We changed direction.

  Gérard took me to the Sorbonne University courtyard. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘with us standing in the courtyard, is where the demonstrations of Friday the third of May took place. From here, on Monday the sixth of May, the eight students marched, singing the National Anthem; they passed through the ring of policemen encircling the campus on their way to the disciplinary hearing. The demonstration heated up and spread into other parts of Paris. While the procession was making its way back into the Latin Quarter, the police attacked it. So the demonstrators began throwing stones they picked up from the street, overturning cars and erecting barricades. Heated clashes ensued, and these were repeated in the days that followed. It wasn’t only the students who were setting up barricades, but the residents of the neighbourhood as well; workers, housewives, and passersby all pitched in, supplying stones, planks of wood, rubbish bins, and iron bars. The battles raged all through the night, and house-raids went on all night, too. The police would raid a house and set upon the person they were after with their cudgels and beat him, then carry him out by force and throw him into one of their cars, then move on to the next address.’

  We stood in front of the university buildings, which were
tranquil now, but in my imagination, and in Gérard’s words, they were crowded with demonstrators and police, vivid with slogans and banners.

  ‘I’ll show you where traces of the battles can still be seen.’

  We headed toward Rue Gay-Lussac.

  Gérard went on at length, as we walked along the boulevard, and in the succeeding days, telling me about the battles that had taken place in this street on ‘Bloody Monday’. He would talk about the violence of the police, the students’ resistance, how many were wounded on both sides, and how many arrested. I would see with my own eyes some of the slogans scrawled on the walls: ‘Let our comrades go!’ ‘Down with the police state!’ ‘Down with capitalist society!’ ‘Long live the workers’ assemblies!’ Out of the dozens of slogans, there were three, written in heavy black marker on the walls of one of the buildings, that would bring me to a halt. One of them said: ‘Be realistic – demand the impossible!’ The second: ‘Let us form committees for dreams!’ The third: ‘When they test you, answer with questions!’ (Later I would write them on the walls of my room in Cairo, and beside them I would hang the two posters Gérard gave me.) Also in rue Gay-Lussac I could see the shredded remains of posters, or spread-open pages from the newspapers, impossible to read because of the plethora of comments appended to them in red, green, and blue ink, in the margins and between the lines; I also noted that parts of the street had been picked clean of stones.

  Gérard continued his story, moving from Nanterre to Paris and from Paris to Nantes, then returning to Paris, and from there to the Renault factories at Billancourt. He told me, ‘The students said . . .’ ‘The workers said . . .’ ‘The students did this . . .’ ‘The workers did that . . .’ I paid close attention, but when the moment came for me to ask questions, I was so afraid of sounding stupid that I held back.

  I didn’t notice that we had been walking for hours on end until Gérard said, ‘It’s four o’clock – aren’t you hungry? I’m really thirsty.’

  We took a road that delivered us to a broad avenue called rue des Ecoles. (I liked the name, and years later, on subsequent visits to Paris, I would be intent on staying in one of the hotels on this street, because I liked the name and because the memory of that day had stayed with me, recalling that nice boy I liked so much, who had conducted me of his own accord to a realm of knowledge that would change many things in my life, at least for some years to come.)

  In the rue des Ecoles, we sat in a café and ordered juice and sandwiches.

  I went home to my mother flying high, full of stories and questions. I questioned her, and she filled me in on some of the details, telling me where she had been, what she had heard, and what she had done. (I was surprised to learn that she had taken part in the strike.) I asked her about all those points on which I had wanted to question Gérard, but refrained, for fear of appearing ignorant in his eyes: the locations of certain streets and squares, certain people, and letters I knew were initials standing for the names of organisations or guilds or societies, but I didn’t know what they meant or what they represented. I asked, she replied, and then she brought me a map of Paris and pointed out places. ‘This is the river,’ she said, ‘and here’s the Place de la République, where the main part of the demonstration started out, on Monday the thirteenth of May. And here, on the other side of the river, is the Latin Quarter. This is the Sorbonne’ – with her finger she pointed to the location of the university, to the west of the Latin Quarter. She moved her finger farther, then stopped and said, ‘Here at the southeastern edge is the Censier Centre, the new building of the University College of Humanities, where the pamphlets were prepared and printed. And this is rue des Ecoles, where you were.’

  When I told her ‘good night’, she kissed me with a smile that seemed somehow odd to me, saying, ‘You’ve grown up, Nada, and – lo and behold – you’re interested in politics!’ She didn’t say ‘like your father’, but I now believe that the way she smiled had something to do with the words that would have completed her sentence. I finished the sentence for myself years afterward, when she told me that, not quite two decades before the summer of 1968, she had accompanied my father, recently arrived in the city, through the streets of Paris, in order to show him places connected with the soldiers of the German occupation and with the French resistance; and that, some weeks before our reunion, she herself had taken part in the momentous events of Paris.

  At the time I didn’t understand my mother’s smile, and the only part of what she said that struck me was that I had become interested in politics, since it hadn’t occurred to me, as I listened to Gérard’s fascinating stories, that he was talking about politics. Despite what I heard that day, and over successive days, of battles, and of people injured and killed and arrested, of house raids, of truncheons, tear-gas, smoke bombs, stones, and barricades, the events seemed more like an exciting film than reality.

  Two months into my stay in Paris, I knew to the day and the hour the details of the events of May, the student demonstrations, the street battles, the strikes by the workers at the Renault factory and other industrial sites, the positions of the guilds and the workers’ unions, what was said and done by the president of the university, the Minister of Education, the Minister of the Interior, and the municipal chief of police. It was as if I was a diligent student registered in an intensive academic programme, deriving from it the utmost possible benefit.

  I had Gérard to thank for this, my first friend, and perhaps the first young man I became fond of, without realising that this fondness was known as ‘love’. Maybe after all it wasn’t love, but interest and admiration that came close to bedazzlement. I wanted to be with him, I looked forward to it, and I prepared for it; then when we were together I didn’t notice the time passing. He was a tall and slender young man, with rather coarse hair – or maybe it seemed coarse because he left it unkempt. He generally wore the same trousers and jacket, and a pair of athletic shoes. He was seventeen, or thereabouts. I said to him, ‘In two months I’ll be sixteen.’ (I lied, so that he wouldn’t think of me as much younger than he was.) I remember the places where he brought me, I remember the sound of his voice. I remember him telling his story, but I no longer remember his face in any detail, perhaps because I was too shy to look him in the eye or to keep gazing at him while he was talking. My glances at him were always furtive, as if stolen.

  Everything Gérard told me was exciting – it stimulated my imagination. The most inspiring scenario of all was his account of what happened at the university after the takeover. The university gates were wide open to whoever might wish to enter. There were heavily attended lectures reviewing consumer society, organised resistance, self-governance, repression, imperialism, ideology and the tactics of disinformation. And in the large auditorium every night, thousands gathered to assess the events of the day and their performance. The dimly-lit corridors of the ancient building were suddenly illuminated with colours and posters and slogans. A photographic exhibition on the night of the barricades. Groups like a beehive whose every cell was busy working on an assignment, gathering its materials and researching the details, one group working on police brutality, a second studying an alternative to the examination system, a third looking into academic freedom, and a fourth, a fifth, a sixth . . . In the university courtyard, where the banners flutter and the young people gather in a circle for discussion and to exchange the writings and pamphlets of their organisations, a piano suddenly appears, on which anyone who wishes and who knows how to play may take a turn.

  At our last meeting Gérard gave me a precious gift, which I would bring back with me to Cairo exulting in its value and in the awareness of what it had meant for Gérard to have given up, for my sake, not just one, but two of the posters in his collection. (It was clear when he showed them to me how much he prized them and how proud he felt of having acquired them.) The first poster showed the head of a youth drawn against a black background, with only his eyes visible – wide-open, anxious eyes in a face entirely swa
thed in bandages from the crown of his head to his neck. Where his mouth should have been a safety pin secured the bandages. The second poster had a white background, and at the top were the words ‘The System’, and at the bottom the rest of the sentence, ‘is safe and sound’; in the space between, halfway down, were two figures drawn in black ink at opposite edges of the poster, carrying between them a stretcher as long as the poster was wide, on which was a person covered by a sheet, dying or already dead.

  When we said goodbye, Gérard told me, ‘Nada, I’m very happy to have got to know you. If your mother hadn’t told me that the prevailing custom in your country is completely different from the way things are done here, maybe we could have been friends in another way.’ Then he laughed, ‘I’ve violated one of the basic tenets of the Movement: “Nothing is prohibited except prohibition itself!” But your mother assured me that could completely spoil the relationship, and do real damage.’

  I don’t know whether I took out on my mother how upset I was at saying goodbye to Gérard, or how intensely moved I was by his gift, or whether it was in order to make it easier to leave her that I picked a quarrel with her. The moment I walked in the house and saw her I said, ‘What right did you have to say what you said to Gérard? How dare you tell him anything on my account without consulting me? How dare you interfere in my relationships with my friends?’

  She replied with a strange calm, as if she was insensible to the magnitude of my anger and of the problem she had caused, ‘You’re only fourteen. That warning was necessary, because the way of life here is different, and especially with this generation of young people it’s totally different. He might have . . .’ I walked out on her before she could finish her sentence. I went into my bedroom and slammed the door.