Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  They revisited this tale, saying, ‘May she rest in peace.’ They said she was courageous, and had earned respect. It was clear from the expressions on their faces that they were genuinely affected by her death.

  Chapter twenty-four

  Siham

  Her picture is on the front page of the book. Most likely it is a picture of her when she was still in high school, her first year there. She is wearing a dress that looks more like a school uniform, with buttons in the front and a round collar, one of those types known as a ‘baby collar’, maybe because of its association with children’s clothing. Her hair is smooth, thick, and long, parted in the middle and falling to her shoulders, but not covering her forehead or her ears. Her complexion is white, her eyes light-coloured (the picture is black-and-white, and so doesn’t reveal the green of her eyes). A long face with a broad brow, a small nose, and somewhat full lips; her face has grace and a sweetness, or innocence, or gaiety hiding behind an apparent seriousness and visible placidity. There is perhaps also a touch of sadness in this face, betrayed by a slight cast to the right eye that you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look closely. In her ears are earrings, circular in shape – are they gold or silver? In a black-and-white photograph you can’t tell for sure. A child, a girl, and a woman in the making converge in the picture.

  Above the picture is her name, and next to it, ‘Flower of the student movement.’ A subtitle follows in the third line: ‘The seventies generation.’

  Beneath the picture are words in a fine, brittle script. (The confused scrawl of those who, like me, were educated at French schools, and didn’t have handwriting teachers or get that strict training in the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy.) The words read ‘Love cannot be blind, for it is love that causes us to see’ (a maxim she wrote in 1966, when she was in high school).

  The book includes recollections offered by her brother and some of the leaders of the student movement, and women friends of hers who had shared life in a prison cell with her. It concludes with an appendix comprising fragments of her early writings, when she was fifteen years old, as well as some later texts, and Qur’anic verses she had transcribed with care. This included, under the heading, ‘God’, a list of twenty-two of His attributes as laid down in the Qur’an, beginning with ‘the Merciful’, and ending with ‘Verily God is your Lord and greatest protector’. Following this, as a conclusion to the section: ‘And God knows that which is within your very hearts.’ Then there is a snippet in which she sees the world as a mountain that all people climb, each kicking those who are below, to prevent their ascending, and she concludes this thought with, ‘Where is mercy, where is kindness?’ Following this is a quotation from the words of Jesus: ‘Blessed be the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ In another snippet she writes, ‘Give love instead of hate, and you are a point of light.’ And, ‘Smile upon him who strikes you, and give him a rose – thus you will be a soldier in the only true war, and you will be victorious because he was victorious. Jesus said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And where did he say it!’

  There are two selections in the appendix written in 2002, exactly a year before her death, the first of them dated 14 March. In this one she acknowledges the twentieth anniversary of her decision to give up her graduate study in the Soviet Union, saying, ‘The step I took so courageously was to reach for the sky, and nothing but the sky would have done,’ and ‘It’s a decision I would take again if I could go back in time: a triumph of the spirit over the body, a triumph of light over darkness.’ And, ‘From that day on, despite all the hardships, I am still climbing the spiritual ladder . . . twenty years of genuine struggle, struggle in the name of God.’ And, ‘O Lord, guide my craft to the shore that lies distant.’

  In the second selection, the date – Tuesday 26 March – is written in French, followed by an English expression, which she translated, ‘The word “freedom” is merely an analogue, for man no longer has that which he has lost.’ After this, in Arabic, ‘The important thing is not for a person to be Marxist or Muslim or Buddhist or Christian – the important thing is to be an honourable Marxist, or an honourable Muslim, or a genuine Christian.’ Then she talks about the stairway ever rising that we seek day and night, ‘. . . at demonstrations in the daytime, at night in reading, and in contemplative inquiry at all times.’ She concludes, ‘From one stairway to another, God has led me to climb toward His unmediated image.’ On the next line, all by itself on the line, are the words, ‘His radiant image.’

  Her brother said, ‘She was doing a lot of reading and writing. All through the years she wrote incessantly. She wouldn’t leave the house. She read and wrote. All we have is scattered papers and notebooks whose pages generally aren’t in any logical order. She left only a few notebooks. It’s a strange thing, because she was writing all the time, and this went on for years. I don’t know what became of those papers. Did she get rid of them by burning them? Was she tearing them up? Or was she tossing them from the balcony, the way she used to do with other things?

  ‘Yes there was a period during which she used to throw her things from the balcony. She didn’t want to own anything, anything at all – she would throw away clothing, keepsakes, and jewellery, among other things, and it caused problems between her and our mother.

  ‘Sometimes she would overeat, or eat irregularly. She would gain weight noticeably. And sometimes she abstained from food, fasting for days at a time.’

  ‘What about the zoo episode?’

  ‘That wasn’t the low point, although our parents saw signs of sheer madness. She was still able to make beautiful things, and wanted to – she wrote lines of poetry on the walls of her room. She did embroidery. She was good at embroidery, at making toys for children out of cardboard, and other things. One time she decided to take some coloured balloons and stand at the gate of the zoo to distribute them to the children. She talked about the policemen who demanded a bribe in exchange for letting her stand with the vendors who set up their portable stalls near the zoo. She was still capable of telling a story, of offering criticism and ironic commentary.’

  Then came silence.

  ‘She didn’t want to talk. She was entirely silent for a whole year, barricading herself behind silence, refusing to talk to any of us.

  ‘Before this silent period, she had been talking in a way that suggested she was approaching a state like that of a Sufi, or sometimes the things she said leaned toward Christianity, and sometimes just the opposite of all this.

  ‘No, she didn’t go into a convent, as some said.

  ‘Yes, she attempted suicide more than once. She tried to jump from the balcony, but the neighbours saw her and she was rescued. In Paris, while she was staying with our mother, she swallowed a lot of pills, then went outside and fell down in the street, so she was taken to the hospital. Then she tried again, when she was in the hospital for a simple operation on her foot. She read in some magazine about spray guns. She sneaked out of the hospital, bought the gun, and tried to kill herself.

  ‘We took care not to tell her about Arwa’s suicide. We were afraid of the effect the news might have on her. Then she found out . . .

  ‘For years we kept taking her to the hospital. She would undergo treatment. The therapy would leave her with a glow that quickly faded, and she would go back into hospital. She would improve and the doctor would say, “There’s no need for her to stay.” We would go home – in a matter of days or weeks, she’d go back. Yes, she gained weight noticeably. She refused to take medication. She would get rid of it; give up speaking altogether; go on hunger strike, and write.

  ‘I don’t think she committed suicide. She was hit by a passing car. In all likelihood she was completely oblivious to what was around her – perhaps oblivious to the fact that she was walking on a busy thoroughfare.’

  Siham died on 13 March 2003. One week before the invasion of Iraq. Had she been following the news? Did she know anything about the approaching battleships, the massing o
f soldiers, the matériel? Did she decide to die so as not to witness what she saw was coming? Did she decide to die or was it a traffic accident? Did her brother say all that he knew?

  The last of her extant writings that I have goes back to the year before she died. Dated 26 March 2002: she wrote about a feeling that was drawing her to write a book in which she would tell the story of her life – she described it as ‘an import­ant book, containing a warning,’ but she stipulated that she wasn’t looking to publish it. ‘I don’t like publishing, ever.’ ‘But,’ Siham went on in her delicate, spidery script:

  It’s important to record the story of my struggle

  Should I set down snippets of it, or chapters, in my memoirs

  But it’s a long tale, and multi-faceted, and besides

  At any rate, I’ll see how it goes

  But I’ll definitely get started

  I won’t publish everything

  That’s not for me

  In another passage she writes:

  Lord, all I ask is to become a martyr

  So take my soul tomorrow morning

  Before my eyes open upon another day

  I’ve asked for martyrdom and even abstained from food and water for eight days.

  And fewer than that and more than that.

  A resistance whose cruelty only the honourable and pure know,

  I’ve asked for martyrdom for the sake of truth

  And now I can’t find it.

  Deliver me, O God

  For suffering has been emplaced upon suffering

  Upon suffering

  I weep so often, this you know.

  She was struck by a car on 13 March, corresponding to 10 Muharram. By accident or by design? I don’t know.

  Chapter twenty-five

  The prison of life, the splendour of life

  At Cairo Station the commotion, the disorder, the dirt, and the crowds take me by surprise. I stop by one of the stalls and look at the books on display. I reach out to an old edition of two of Tawfik al-Hakim’s books, with faded covers: The Prison of Life and The Splendour of Life. I leaf through them, then put them back where I found them and buy some newspapers and magazines, which I place in the outer pocket of my small, wheeled travelling case. Pulling it behind me, I go past the platforms of the trains for Alexandria and the cities of the Delta and eastward, proceeding to the platforms for trains to Upper Egypt. I wait for the train. I see an attractive, sweet-faced woman striding resolutely, a little girl with a ponytail clinging to her hand. Walking beside them is a heavy woman carrying an infant swaddled in blankets. A middle-aged man with a heavy moustache and white hair smiles at the girl, who waits until her mother’s attention is elsewhere to stick her tongue out at him. The train approaches. It stops. I board and look for my seat number – my seat is next to the window, and I settle into it. The train moves off slowly, then gathers speed and a monotonous rhythm. From the window I observe dilapidated buildings, heaps of rubbish, and the absence of any colours that are not faded or dusty or yellow. The train makes its way through a cloud of dust. Then we are past the villages of Giza and we enter the fields. Who was it that said to me once that the eye is also needy? The phrase consisted only of this ambiguous ellipse, and yet I understood. We were, as I recall, at the periphery of a city and approaching Dahshour, where we were met by palm groves, the colour of the palm fronds that uncertain shade between pure green and a subtle, mysterious silvery hue. The yellow of the laden branches of the fruit-bearing trees was liberally interspersed with a lovely red. Yes, the eye is needy. From my window now I see, not palms, but the expanse of long fields, divided into rectangles and squares, each containing such crops as its farmer cultivated. I laugh suddenly, and a server from the buffet stops by me, thinking my laughter is meant to summon him. I wasn’t thinking of ordering a cup of tea. I order a cup of tea. He pours the boiling water over the tea bag and stirs it with a spoon to dissolve the sugar, then presents the cup to me. I am smiling again, watching the little girl with her mother in the train. Between one sip and another from my cup, my thoughts turn to Nadir and Nadeem. Nadir laughed, and Nadeem cried. Nadeem had wet himself. He said, ‘I want to go to the toi –’ but he didn’t complete the sentence. He wet his seat and the moisture began to flow in a thin trickle down the leg of his trousers. Before Hamdiya could open her mouth to scold him, I grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. She understood. I admonished Nadeem good-humouredly and said to his brother, ‘This happens to everyone. Let’s go wash up and put on some new trousers.’ I carried him in my arms to the train lavatory. The residual odour of the child’s urine clung to my dress throughout the journey. I had washed my hands and my neck, but I couldn’t very well repeat history – take off my dress and exit the lavatory in my underwear. When my aunt greeted me with an embrace, I began to laugh out loud. I whispered to her, ‘Aunt, you’ll have to change your clothes and take a bath before you go to afternoon prayers. The front of my dress is soaked with Nadeem’s urine!’ I laugh again, and for the second time the buffet server pauses by me. I’ll have to tell him that, when I want to get someone’s attention, I call him, just like everyone else on God’s green earth. I shake my head and tell him, ‘No, thank you – I don’t want anything.’ I extract the newspapers from the pocket of my case. I swallow my daily dose of poison; I must admit I have a strong stomach – I can take it.

  I move rapidly from one newspaper to another, then open a magazine in which I read a quarter of an article here and a few lines of one there. I fold up the newspapers and magazines and put them under the seat. It’s not littering – they’ll collect them with the rubbish when they tidy the train – surely they must tidy the train from time to time! I close my eyes.

  The boys went to work in Dubai. Cairo or Dubai – what’s the difference? Besides, that is, the salary and the relative ease of day-to-day life? But the apparatus is what it is. Was it Foucault who said this, or is it a quotation he cited in his book, the one where he characterised prison as the deployment of a system’s power over a person’s behaviour, his freedom, and his time, every day, day in and day out, year after year. It decides for him when to wake up and when to sleep, when to work, when to eat, when to rest, when to talk and when to keep quiet. It defines the nature of his work and the required level of productivity. It dictates the movements of his body, and appropriates his physical and spiritual resources. Such is prison, albeit with variations. Here or there – it makes no difference. I close my eyes. I keep them closed, thinking maybe I’ll have a nap. Perhaps I do nap. I look at my watch: between the time I closed my eyes and when I opened them five minutes have elapsed. I have a long way to go. I observe two women sitting on the opposite side, to my left across the aisle. One of them is wearing a dark-coloured dress, which drapes a flat chest and a long torso. She is lean and stiff, with a hard face and her hair pulled tightly back and secured behind. The other is full-figured and looks amiable, her body generously curved, and she wears a multi-coloured dress. She has left her hair free to wreathe her face in ringlets. Are they sisters? I smile at this foolish notion, and then pursue it: maybe they’re twins. I steal furtive glances at them and establish the difficulty of determining either woman’s age – it is as if they were ageless. Something about the way they sit makes them seem rather like statues – it’s odd: two ordinary statues on adjoining seats in an express train. The skinny one looks straight ahead as if staring into space, or as if she were sightless, blind. As for the plump one, her gaze takes in everything. For a moment, they appear to be two strangers who just happen to be riding the train together, and then all at once they bend at the same moment, inclining their torsos just slightly and whispering for a good while, as though colluding in some affair. I look at the stern one and a shiver of fear pervades my body. I shift my gaze to the other, and relax at the sight of her kind face, her matronly curves.

  I gaze out of the window at a prospect of fields, which blurs things, and the women’s two images merge. I murmur the Qur’anic verse, ‘
“No fear, nor shall they grieve.” It’s just a couple of women I happen to have seen in the train.’ ‘The two of them,’ I think, ‘are going to dog me for the whole journey.’ I chide my heart for its forebodings: what ill omen can it find in the two women? I look away from the two of them and go back to Nadir and Nadeem. I miss them. The idea that they live so far away confounds me. Especially Nadeem. Will he never have the chance to become what he wishes? Hamdiya is a fool and a dolt, but she’s kind – she’ll come round, calm down, and the waters will resume their course; perhaps the boys will come home, get married, and then will come the grandchildren. I laugh, and steal a glance at the aisle. Thank God, the buffet-server isn’t in this car at the moment.

  A curious anecdote could amuse Hazem for an entire day. I was going to tell him about the two women, tell him they seemed like an apprehension of destiny split in two. He would make fun of me, just as he did the day I told him about the crow. He said, ‘I’m a student at Al-Saïdiyya School, but I skipped school to take part in the sit-in,’ and he didn’t laugh. Like an idiot I believed him, and all the while he was a pre-med student, looking after his mother and three brothers – he was five years older than I was. Shazli held it against him that he wanted to be a successful doctor – and what would Shazli have had him be? An incompetent surgeon at whose hands people would be transformed into the crippled or the dead? My heart skips a beat when I hear anyone mention Hazem, saying, ‘An exceptional surgeon,’ or ‘He taught me . . .’ or ‘He helped me . . .’ or . . . I will hear nothing but good spoken of him, and sincere prayers for his soul.