I Think of You

by Ahdaf Soueif

  By now my parents had decided that the best thing to do with me was send me to school. I was meant to be studying at home for my Egyptian preparatory certificate at the end of the year, but at school I would use all my time constructively. I would also meet people my own age and make friends. I looked forward to it. I had always been happy at my school in Cairo and had no misgivings about this one. Besides, schools in books like The Girls’ Annual all seemed jolly good fun. Because of their liberal, enlightened ideology and that of their friends and advisers, my parents decided to put me in a comprehensive—in Putney.

  So here I was. It was early ’64. The Beatles yelled “I wanna hold your hand” and shook their long shiny black hair and their hips; the mods and rockers zoomed through the streets in their fancy gear; and I stood in the snow at the No. 37bus stop, on the outside looking in.

  My first contact with school was with the dark cloakroom lined with rained-on navy blue coats, berets, and boots.

  My second was with the long, windy corridor you had to walk through without your coat to get to the main body of the school.

  My third was with thousands of uniformed girls in a huge hall singing about fishermen.

  No one had warned me it was a girls’ school. I had always been in a mixed school at home and found boys easier to get along with than girls. Suddenly school didn’t seem like such a good idea; a vast, cold place with thousands of large girls in navy blue skirts.

  “You can be excused from assembly on grounds of being Mohammedan,” whispered the teacher who had brought me there. No fear. I wanted nothing more than to merge, to blend in silently and belong to the crowd and I wasn’t about to declare myself a Mohammedan or even a Muslim and sit in the hallway looking bored and out of it with the Pakistani girls wearing their white trousers underneath their skirts. “It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  My attempts at fading into the masses were unsuccessful. During the first break I was taken to Susan, the third-form leader.

  “Where you from?” She was slight and pale with freckles and red hair.

  “From Egypt.”

  “That’s where they have those pharaohs and crocodiles and things,” she explained to the others. “D’you go to school on a camel?” This was accompanied by a snicker, but I answered seriously.

  “No.”

  “How d’you go to school, then?”

  “Actually, my school is very near where I live. So I simply walk.” As I said this I was conscious of ambiguity (I even knew the word for it): I had not made it clear that even if school were far away I still wouldn’t go on a camel. I started again: “Actually, we only see camels—”

  “D’you live in a tent?”

  “No, we live in a Belgian apartment block.”

  “A what?”

  “An apartment block owned by a Belgian corporation.”

  “Why d’you talk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a teacher, you know.”

  I did know. I knew they were speaking Cockney and I was speaking proper English. But surely I was the one who was right. My instincts, however, warned me not to tell them that.

  “How many wives does your father have?”

  I bridled. “One.”

  “Oh, he don’t have ten, then? What does he do anyway?”

  “Both my parents teach in the university.” A mistake this, one I would live to regret; I was affiliated with the enemy profession.

  “Oh, teachers, are they?”

  “In the university,” I supplied.

  “Sarah’s dad’s an engineer. He makes a hundred pounds a week. How much does yours make?”

  Sarah’s dad was obviously the financial top dog in the third form. But what was I supposed to say? Nothing, actually, he lives on a grant? But don’t you see, we’re intellectuals, we’re classless? Yo u can’t ask me such a vulgar question?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, d’you have bags of money?”

  I heard my mother’s voice. “We spend our money on travel, books, records, on culture …”

  This was met with silence. Then: “D’you have a boyfriend?”

  Again I heard my mother’s voice: “I know boys who are friends.”

  “D’you have a special boyfriend?”

  I thought quickly. David hardly qualified as my boyfriend. But for status, I lied. “Yes.”

  “D’you kiss him?”

  “Do I what?” I stalled. I didn’t really want to share that. And something told me it would unleash other questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.

  “D’you kiss him?”

  “No.”

  “D’you sit on his knee?”

  “No.”

  “Well, how far have you got, then?”

  “ We went to the theater,” I said. They lost interest at that point. Just moved on and never paid me much attention again. There was a girl there with blue eyes and straight black hair and her second name was Shakespear. I could have made friends with her, I thought. But she was Susan’s best friend and I would not compete.

  School was a disaster. The white girls lived in a world of glamour and boyfriends to which I had no passport. The black girls lived in a ghetto world of whispers and regarded me with suspicious dislike. I was too middle of the road for them. There was one girl of Greek parentage, Andrea. She came home with me one day. She came into our kitchen as my mother was preparing dinner. “Cor blimey!” she cried. “Olives. Can I have one?” Smiling kindly, my mother pressed her to take several. But to me she seemed unmitigatedly gross, and although I was polite to her, I could not make myself be her friend.

  Academically, it wasn’t much better. I only scraped through most subjects and was terrible at math. I couldn’t understand why at the time because I was doing fine with the math I was studying at home on my own. Looking back, I realize it was because I didn’t know the terminology in English. The teacher was a harassed, birdlike man in white shirtsleeves, with huge eyes swimming behind his rimless spectacles, and he looked so helpless that it never occurred to me to ask him for help.

  As for brilliance, I could not have chosen an unluckier subject to excel in: English. The class would have forgiven me outstanding performance in science or sports, but English? And Mrs. Braithwaite, with her gray bun, her glasses over sharp blue eyes, her tweed suit hanging lower at the front than it did at the back, booming out, “The Egyptian gets it every time. It takes someone from Africa, a foreigner, to teach you about your native language. You should be ashamed.” At first I was proud and thought how dumb they were not to know that birds of a feather “flocked together,” that worms “turned,” and that Shy-lock wanted his “pound of flesh.” But as the hostility grew I realized I had made another mistake. I tried to fade into silence, but it was no use. Those sharp blue eyes would seek me out and

  she would call me by name, and I was not humble enough to give a wrong answer or say I didn’t know.

  Meanwhile, at break, I wandered around the cold playground, yearning for my sunny school in Cairo, and soon I learned to smuggle myself into first lunch, where I would quickly bolt down shepherd’s pie and prunes and custard, then slink off to the library. There, hidden in a corner, holding on to a hot radiator uninterrupted by cold blasts of air or reality, I communed with Catherine Earnshaw or pursued prophetic visions of myself emerging, age thirty, a seductress complete with slinky black dress and long cigarette holder, a score of tall, square-jawed men at my feet.

  At sports time, however, I was not so lucky. I clambered nimbly enough up and down ladders in the gym but we often had to go out onto the playing fields for games of hockey. Why hockey? I asked. Why not tennis or handball? No. Hockey was the school game and that was what we played. The weather was cold and gray and damp. The cold made my bones chatter, the gray depressed me, and the damp made my hair curl. The hockey sticks terrorized me. I had visions of them striking my ankles, my legs, bare and goosefleshed in my gym slip. I lurked on the sidelines, shiverin
g and protecting my legs with my hockey stick. There was no escape. And it was too cold to dream.

  My parents were satisfied. I could not admit failure or disappoint them by telling them I was miserable at school, so I dwelled on the treasures in the library and my achievements in the English lessons with a smattering of information on films we watched in history and geography. The rest, when questioned, came under the broad heading “Okay.”

  As a mark of approval, I was given a tiny Phonotrix tape recorder with which I taped songs from Top of the Pops and Juke Box Jury. I taped them through the microphone and the sound I got was terrible, but I could hear through the distortion and I played “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “As Tears Go By” incessantly.

  Music was magic to me, and every day as I walked home from the bus stop I would peer through the net curtains at the jukebox gleaming against the wall in the corner café. It was a dark, different world in there; there were square tables with plastic covers checkered in green and white. On each table were plastic pots of salt, pepper, mustard, and tomato ketchup. At the tables sat silent old men in cloth caps and jackets and shirts with no ties. One day I pushed open the door. There was a single chime and I walked in.

  My heart was pounding and I couldn’t see very clearly at first. The counter at the far end floated in a haze. I walked up. A large man in a striped apron stood behind it. I put a shilling on the counter and asked for a cup of tea. He pushed sixpence and a cup of tea back at me. I carried them over to a table in the corner and sat down. When I had got my breath back I stood up again and walked over to the jukebox and studied the titles. Here I was on familiar ground. I put in my other shilling and selected three records. I didn’t drink my tea. It was strong and white and not like the tea I was used to at home. But I was happy. When the songs were over I walked out and went

  home. I never told anyone about my adventure. But every three days, when I had saved one and six from my pocket money, I stopped on the way home at the corner café, bought tea I never drank, and played the jukebox. The Beatles, the Stones, the Animals, Peter and Gordon, Cilla Black, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Dave Clark Five. I played them all. And for the duration of three songs I was happy and brilliantly alive.

  My secret bursts of life at the corner café sustained me, but at school things got steadily worse. The atmosphere in English was becoming intolerable and I could hardly believe my own stupidity at math and science. My hiding place in the library was discovered and I was often yanked out and deposited in the middle of the playground. My legs got knocked with the hockey sticks. The white girls lived their lives and the colored girls lived theirs and I hovered on the outskirts of both. Then one day the St. Valentine Dance was announced.

  I was terror-struck and elated. All these girls would turn up in their designer clothes with their sophisticated boyfriends. They would glide with ease onto the dance floor and do the Shake. Would I be a wallflower? Unwanted? Again the odd one out? I never dreamed of not going. The world of glamour, passion, excitement, and adventure was going to be revealed for an evening. It was going to come within my reach and I would certainly be there to grasp it.

  I got permission to go to the dance, and very special permission to stay out until eleven o’clock. I asked David, the only boy I knew in London, to come with me. My mother bought me my first pair of high-heeled shoes: le talon bébé, the style was called, and the heels were just one and a half inches high.

  February 14th finally arrived. My hair was shining, my turquoise silk dress with the high Chinese collar was enchanting, and I had nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes. David came to fetch me in a dark suit and had a Pepsi with my mother before we left. He had borrowed his father’s car, so we drove to Putney in style. I played it cool, as though, for me, every night was St.Valentine’s night, but in my head was a starry, starry sky.

  We got to school and made our way to the assembly hall. School was transformed. It was no longer dull and cold and hostile. It was vibrant, throbbing, every door, every corridor leading to the magical place where the dance was to be held.

  It was eight o’clock as we walked into the hall. The lights had been dimmed and the loudspeaker was beating out “Come right back, I just can’t bear it, I got some love and I long to share it,” and nobody was on the dance floor. All the girls were there. They were in party clothes and stood grouped together at one end of the hall. At the other end, huddled in tight, nonchalant groups in dark suits, were the boys from Wandsworth Comprehensive, our sister school.

  The situation slowly sank in. None of the girls had brought a boy with her. After all the brave talk about kissing and sitting on knees, no one had actually brought a boy with her. They were all standing there, tapping their feet and hoping that the boys from Wandsworth would ask them to dance.

  And the boys were nervous, pretending they didn’t know what they were there for and chatting to their mates.

  We joined some girls from my class for a while, but conversation was awkward and we ended up standing alone by the wall. I tried to enjoy the music, but it felt dead and flat. David asked me to dance, but I knew he was being dutiful, and besides I was too shy to be alone with him on the floor.

  Time passed as I hung on, waiting for something to happen while the evening slowly crumbled away and the stars went out one by one. I knew now there was no hidden world, no secret society from which I was barred. There was just—nothing.

  A week later I stood as usual at the bus stop in the cold morning. I waited a few moments for the No. 37then turned back and walked home. When my mother woke up she found me sitting in my school clothes in the kitchen with a fresh bowl of sugared cornflakes in front of me.

  “Aisha! What’s the matter? Are you ill?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, what’s the matter? Why aren’t you at school?”

  “I’m not going to school anymore.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to school anymore.”

  “Have you gone crazy? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m studying for my Egyptian prep, aren’t I? I’ll concentrate on that.”

  “But why won’t you go to school?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s just not worth it.”

  “But you liked it so much—”

  “I hated it.”

  “What on earth will your father say?”

  “…”

  “He’ll be very angry.”

  “I’m not going to school anymore.”

  She told my father. She carried back protests, even threats: “Daddy is terribly displeased with you,” then, “Daddy won’t speak to you for weeks.” Withdraw all your love, I thought. I won’t go back. They went against their principles: “You won’t get any more pocket money.” It was still no good.

  Every morning my parents went to the university and my sister and brother to school. I would draw up my father’s large armchair in front of the television, carry up some toast and butter, and watch the races. Or I would switch on my Phonotrix and dream. Or read. The whole house was my territory from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon and I lived my private life and was impervious to the cold, disapproving atmosphere that pervaded the evenings. After a couple of weeks they gave up.

  One day I discovered a secret cache of books hidden in my parents’ bedroom. Fanny Hill, The Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzawi, and the Kama Sutra. My rebellion had paid off in grand style. I spent my fifteenth year in a lotus dream, sunk in an armchair, throbbing to the beat of the Stones, reading erotica.

  And I passed my exams.

  Returning

  The little red car came speeding along the road and turned abruptly to park under a tree in front of a three-story house. Nobody got out. The engine did not die. Then the car moved again; it backed out of the parking place, made a sharp U-turn, and headed back the way it had come.

  “I need those books,” Aisha told herself. “I’m
teaching a course and I need those books.” She drove to the main street, then took a right turn. She drove straight on until she came to the roundabout. She circled the roundabout and came to a vast square. She knew she had come the right way, but she did not recognize this square. She remembered a green garden with spreading trees and flower-beds and paths of red sand. She saw instead a construction site. In the foreground was a large, squat yellow mosque. On it was a placard, and on that in big green letters were written the words THE MOSQUE OF ISMAIL. She wondered who Ismail was and what degree of importance or wealth had got for him the planning permission to set up his mosque right here, in the middle of an area obviously designed as a recreation ground for the houses around it.

  The red car went slowly up the east side of the square. Behind the mosque another building was coming up. The floors that had been completed were already graying as the rest were piled on top of them. A placard proclaimed the project: THE FIRST ISLAMIC INSTITUTE IN THE GOVERNORATE OF GIZA.

  Between them, the Mosque of Ismail and the Islamic Institute took up five-sixths of the garden. Aisha looked at the strip that was left. The few trees were dusty and the grass was sparse and yellow. The whole place was strewn with bricks, cement, steel rods of varying lengths, and mounds of sand. There was no one about. It felt more like a demolition than a construction site. She wondered about the frogs they used to hear at night. And the crickets. Where had they gone? Had they all moved into the sixth of semi-garden that was left? And what did they do about territorial rights? How could they coexist in such a drastically reduced space? But then, maybe they didn’t. Maybe the strong had overcome the weak and a race of superfrogs was now living in the remains of the garden. The builders of the Mosque of Ismail and the First Islamic Institute in the Governorate of Giza were helping evolution along.