by Radwa Ashour
‘No, he didn’t cry.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You don’t remember anything of this first meeting with your father?’
‘I remember that I tried to make things easier for him. I could imagine how difficult it was for him to see me with my legs in irons – there were iron shackles on both my legs. I didn’t want him to keep silent, with me silent as well – I wanted to break the silence, so I began speaking lightly of the shackles. I said, “I’ve got used to them.” I said, “And besides, we’ve hit on a trick that allows us to take them off when we’re on our own.” ’
‘And what did your father say?’
‘He didn’t say anything. Only I noticed as he was leaving . . .’
A slight tremor in his face.
‘I noticed . . .’
It was difficult for him to speak, so he stopped, then tried again.
‘I noticed, as he was leaving . . . I noticed that his shoulders were a bit stooped.’
The doctor hung his head. The camera moved off. I looked at the boys, unable to read their expressions. They were watching ancient history, you might say. Besides, they had no knowledge of the relationship between father and son.
I spent the night telling the boys about their father and his experience of prison. I talked at length about this, then expanded into a discussion of oppression in our country. Hamdiya did not take part in the conversation, but sat with us, listening in silence.
The following morning, as soon as the boys had left for school she said, ‘Why do you talk to the children about these things? It’s past and gone – why dig it up?’
Her words startled me. I said, ‘First of all, because it’s better that the boys know the story of their father. Second, because we talk about our country’s history, and I don’t want them to be like deaf people at a wedding, with no idea what’s going on around them.’
‘You’re opening their eyes to politics, and politics is the way to perdition. I don’t want them to go to prison like their father, I don’t want armed security officers knocking on our door at dawn and taking them off to prison, like what happened to you.’
I smiled and said, ‘Times have changed. We’re in the ’90s now. Don’t worry – the ones getting put in prison now are the Islamists, and the boys don’t have any Islamist leanings!’
What did I say to make her so angry? Her face was flushed, her voice high and shrill: ‘I want the boys to concentrate on their studies and finish school in God-given safety, and I want them to live a normal life! I don’t want their father’s life for them – or yours!’
‘Enough, Hamdiya!’
But she launched into a long, bizarre monologue on her own sacrifice and her patience with my interference in every matter large or small pertaining to the boys. ‘I said to myself, “Be patient, Hamdiya, keep an open mind, Hamdiya, let God guide you, Hamdiya . . .” ’ And on and on. Then she hurled her final thunderbolt: ‘In the end, I am their mother, and the mother has a stronger connection to the child than a sister does – especially one who’s not a full sister!’
I left the room, shouting, ‘From the first moment I met you I knew instinctively that you were stupid. But I didn’t know you had no manners!’ I left the house, slamming the door violently behind me.
I stayed away from the house the whole day, and only returned home when it was past midnight. She had gone to bed. I kept this up for a whole week. I didn’t say anything to the boys. On returning home late, I would find them studying in their room. They asked why I was out so much, and I said, ‘I have some extra work for a couple of weeks.’
One night I came home and found them waiting for me. Nadeem opened the conversation. ‘Mama said that you had a row, and that you’re angry with her.’
I didn’t respond.
‘What happened?’ Nadir asked.
I didn’t respond.
Sometimes it happens that families quarrel, but then the waters flow once more in their regular course.
The waters didn’t return to their usual course, not because we hadn’t got past the words we had exchanged – we appeared to have got past them and gone back to our accustomed ways of interacting – but because the rift interposed itself all over again when the boys came home from university and talked about the student demonstrations protesting the Hebron massacre. These were the first major demonstrations to take place during the period of their university studies. (They had been in high school at the time of the student protests against the first invasion of Iraq in 1991.) Over dinner, the two boys began to tell the story of the students’ rally.
‘We heard that there was a demonstration,’ said Nadir, ‘and students began to trickle out from the College of Engineering, individually and in groups, heading for the main campus. Nadeem said he was going to join in. I said that security forces would crack down on the demonstration and we’d get nothing out of it but abuse. He left me and went out of the building, while I went to my lecture. I couldn’t concentrate on what the teacher was saying, so I asked to be excused and went out to catch up with Nadeem.’
Hamdiya interrupted him. ‘Nadeem, what were you doing putting yourself and your brother at risk?’
Laughing and flexing his arms to show his muscles like Popeye, Nadir continued, ‘As his older brother, I wanted to protect him! The truth is, I didn’t set out to participate – I meant just to look for him, but I found myself in the middle of the demonstration. I went out through the gate of the college and saw hundreds of security men with their helmets and protective gear, forming a wall to close off the passage between the university and the road leading to the Egypt Awakening statue and the Israeli embassy. I saw demonstrators surrounding the monument outside the campus, and others – a great many more demonstrators – behind the gate, which was closed. I walked toward the College of Applied Arts, so as to go back in by one of the side gates, but I found all the gates locked, and security forces surrounding the whole university. I began retracing my steps parallel to the wall, but before turning right into University Street, I decided I would jump over the wall on to the campus. I looked to my left to make sure there were no officers, and then I climbed the wall. One of the soldiers from central security saw me – a dark-skinned little chap – and he shouted at me, “That’s forbidden, Effendi!”
‘I smiled at him and said, “I have lectures to attend – have a good day!” And I leapt over the top, fast.
‘I started looking for Nadeem among the students milling around behind the fence. The ones who were closest to the gate were trying to open it. I saw a female student climb the gate, holding on to the bars with both hands and chanting in a loud voice, while the other kids answered the chant. Then new chants rose up behind us, when a crowd from inside the campus – maybe they’d been making the rounds of the colleges – turned up and joined the students who were massing at the gate.
‘The area extending inward, from the gate to the Central Celebration Hall, and lengthwise, from the College of Humanities to the Law School, was packed with demonstrators. I was searching all over for Nadeem, when the police started firing canisters of tear gas, and I found myself running with others who were fleeing. I didn’t see when the students succeeded in opening the gate, or how I got to the university dormitories across the street, or how I came to be holding stones and lobbing them at the soldiers, who were pursuing us with truncheons, even though we were choking on the tear gas they had fired at us. I called out “Palestine for Arabs!” and ran; I said, “Call off the government dogs!” and threw stones; I said, “You sons of bitches!” and started to cough.’
Nadir was laughing; so was Nadeem. I was laughing (and laughter released the tears I’d been holding in ever since Nadir had begun to talk).
Nadeem spoke up. ‘Nadir was under attack in University City, and I was under attack over by the Egypt Awakening statue.’
‘No,’ Nadir interrupted him, ‘you’ve got that wrong, Nadeem, sir! I was under attack, but I was fighting back. I was at
the head of the most powerful fighting force in the Middle East!’
Hamdiya didn’t laugh. Her face was pale and drawn, with a faint, bluish tinge.
It was the predicament of a mother sharing the responsibilities of motherhood. I disagreed with Hamdiya, but the split that would drive her to move out and go to live with her sister was still to come.
Chapter twenty
Hazem
At the outset, I didn’t notice whether I was optimistic or pessimistic. When I heard that crow rasping in the street leading to the university, I didn’t think anything, except that it was a crow. Its croak was a signal that drew my gaze upward, where I saw it sitting on a branch of one of the acacia trees lining the pavement alongside Orman Garden. Then the crow spread its wings and flew off across the street, toward the buildings of the College of Engineering, to my left. I continued on my way to the university. When my father died a few days later, I remembered the crow, and decided that it had been a sign.
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘Believe it or don’t believe it.’
‘But how? Explain to me!’
‘I take some things as good omens and others as evil omens; every morning I like to take a quick look at “Your fortune today” in the newspaper. I don’t spend long on it, but if what it says is disturbing then I may be a bit bothered by anxiety – just a touch – until the day concludes without mishap. Anyway, we all have our quirks!’
‘I’ve known you more than twenty-five years, and it’s the first I’ve heard of this!’
‘There was no occasion to tell you. And maybe I don’t take things seriously except when I see a sign that’s followed by misfortune.’
‘And maybe – quite frankly, my dear Madame Nada, you’re an idiot, and too embarrassed to admit that you’re an idiot!’
‘And maybe – quite frankly, my lord Hazem, sir – you take it for granted that everyone functions the same way, like the trains on the rails, so you think classification is easy: dividing people into columns, putting them on shelves and in drawers, with an original and back-up copies, and all of it identically formatted!’
He got angry, so I let him off the hook. ‘I’m joking with you,’ I told him. ‘Weren’t you joking with me, or do you actually think I’m an idiot?’
I had offered this unwarranted description of him to tease him, but I had also deceived him when I said I didn’t take things seriously unless I saw a sign that was followed by misfortune. The truth was that I was always sensing ill omens. Even with things that called for rejoicing, I was fearful and driven to forebodings: that something would arise to disable or destroy or cancel whatever good thing had happened. After Arwa killed herself, I took to making daily telephone calls to a number of my friends, to see that they were all right, or ask after their close friends:
‘How is so-and-so?’
‘Fine.’
‘Have you seen him recently?’
‘Just yesterday.’
‘Was he in good health?’
They made fun of me.
Or I would drop in suddenly on a friend I hadn’t seen in years. I would knock on the door, and he or she would open up and cry, ‘Nada!’
‘I came to see if you were all right,’ I would say. Hazem announced that Nada had become mother to the Egyptians, that she had decided to extend her authority in the care of her brothers to the generation as a whole!
I rang Hazem on the morning of the last day of December. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘is the start of a new millennium. Let’s spend New Year’s Eve together. Who do you suggest should join us?’
‘I’m not going out,’ he replied.
I tried to entice him with food. ‘I’ll create a wonderful dish for you.’
But he wasn’t interested. I didn’t sense anything amiss, nor did it seem to me that there was anything worrisome in his voice. I stayed home as well. At midnight, when the new year began, I told Hamdiya good night. ‘Don’t stay up waiting for the boys as you usually do,’ I said. ‘They won’t be home before morning.’ And with that I went to bed.
When I learned of his death, I said, ‘Oh, my God. Where am I to go now?’ I put on mourning clothes and went to his house. I didn’t say, nor did his mother, his brothers, or any of our comrades who had assembled at the house before the funeral, that he was a father and a companion to us, a fact which we all acknowledged yet kept to ourselves. For what was the use of saying it – what would be the point?
At the funeral, on the following day, my grief mingled with a fear such as I had never before known. I was trembling and having difficulty walking without losing my balance. Someone put his coat over my shoulders and held on to my arm throughout the funeral. At the ceremony in the great mosque two days later, Nadir and Nadeem accompanied me, and didn’t leave me at the point were the men and women separate, but went with me to the section designated for the women, waiting until I was seated and a friend whom they knew had sat next to me. They went to the section reserved for the men, but Nadir came to check on me, then went back. After that Nadeem came to ask whether I needed anything. They kept on taking turns until the sheikh finished reading the verses from the Qur’an and the mourners began to disperse. They escorted me out of the mosque, and back home.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I understood the grief over Hazem’s death, but not the terror. Later, perhaps, I realised that, by some strange rationalisation, I was telling myself that it was Hazem’s departure that was the portent, that the sign was not a mere crow that opened its beak to croak on a tree-branch and then flew off; rather it was the loss of Hazem, at the beginning of the year and of the century and of the millennium. ‘What’s to come is horrifying – what am I to do now, what will we do?’ Then, too, the crow had flown off to the left, towards the College of Engineering.
I related this to Nadir and Nadeem, and began enumerating for them the names of those who had been students at the college and who had died, including founders of the organisation of supporters of the Palestinian revolution. But I didn’t tell them I was frightened half to death, that I saw the grave yawning wide-open and grim. They tried to put me at ease. Nadir said I was submitting to wrongheaded nonsense: ‘I understand grieving for Hazem. His death is very painful to us as well, but you shouldn’t compound his loss with these ghoulish speculations – absolutely not!’ He looked at me with a smile, as if he was about to tease me, but then he changed tack and gave a signal to his brother. They picked me up from the bed and carried me around the house, me shouting at them to put me down while they continued with their antics. When at last they put me down, they laughed, and I laughed with them.
Normally I feel lighthearted, as if I could fly, and I do fly – really, no exaggeration. I was flying when I used to romp with the boys at home, until the neighbours complained of our commotion. I flew when we ran around at the zoo or the aquarium, the boys trying in vain to catch up with me. I would fly – however strange this may seem – while settled in a chair reading a good novel, or translating a beautiful passage, or inventing a dish no one had ever thought of or put in a cookbook, or when I would roar out a song in the shower, noisily destroying the melody, accompanied by the sound of rushing water as it sprayed my head and body. I recall now, too, that throughout the two years during which I participated in the student movement, I would fly to the university, fly to the sit-in, fly to the demonstration.
When I find myself feeling heavy, I know I’m on the brink of a new bout of depression. I told the doctor who was treating me, ‘I have guilt feelings I can’t get rid of. I feel guilty toward my father and toward my mother – guilty feelings there’s no cure for, because they’ve died. And I feel guilty every time one of my comrades dies, as if I had left him or her to bear a burden I didn’t share. I’m aware of the contradiction in what I’m saying, but this is how I feel. Or maybe my words are an illusion I spin because the truth is that I feel guilty every time I look around and realise we’re leaving a mess for the younger generation and expe
cting them to live in it.’
‘I’m afraid,’ I tell the doctor, ‘awake or asleep. Maybe I rush around because I’m afraid, and rushing around alleviates my fear – I’m no longer aware of it. When fear takes over I find myself unable to get up or to walk. I huddle in bed. Going to work or leaving the house seems an impossible task. I am as afraid as I can be of going out. I’m afraid of people, and at the same time I feel desolate because I’m removed from them. The moment when I wake up is the hardest. It takes me two hours to get ready to leave for work, not because I’m preening and grooming myself, but because I’m incapable of going out to the street, going to my job, and meeting whoever it is I may meet. When I do go to work, and absorb myself in it, the fear recedes as if it had been a dream, or as if the state I was in in the morning had been nothing but phantasms and illusions. I’ve called my feelings “fear”, but I’m not sure whether that’s an accurate description. Maybe it’s something else – weariness, or anxiety, or a mixture of feelings of which fear is only one component. I don’t know.’
He listens without interrupting, except with brief interjections. When I stop talking, he asks me whether I am able to get my work done. ‘Sometimes I have trouble concentrating,’ I say ‘but on the whole I have no difficulty at work. Translation isn’t a problem for me. I can do simple translation quickly and automatically; it is the more difficult type of translation, of literary and theoretical texts – the kind I usually enjoy and in which I find a kind of challenge or stimulating entertainment – that I don’t go near. If I’m tired, I don’t sign on for that kind of translating – or if I’ve already made a commitment, I set it aside and don’t honour my commitment.’
The doctor asserts that I am stronger than I think. He says my defences are strong. I don’t believe him, and am sceptical about the usefulness of these long, costly sessions. I leave his clinic and walk in the street, weeping. I dry my tears and go into the chemist’s to pick up my prescription. I take the medication conscientiously for two or three days, then toss it in the bin. I don’t need medication!
