by Radwa Ashour
‘Like the lion at the zoo.’
‘What happens next?’
‘I’m not telling you a story. I’m explaining why Papa doesn’t live with us right now. He hasn’t died – he’ll stay there for a little while, and then they’ll let him come home.’
I found it all quite perplexing; yet it was the beginning of awareness, and of a need to compare my own situation with that of others. These comparisons would preoccupy me in the years that followed, often placing me in uncomfortable positions. I wasn’t alone in this, for I recall that Mona Anis – whose father, Dr Abdel Azim Anis, was my father’s colleague, both of them university professors and both incarcerated in the same prison – confided to me that one of Abdel Nasser’s sons was her classmate. I told her I wanted to meet him, so that I could ask him why his father had put our fathers in prison, and if he didn’t know we could ask him to find out. Mona never got the chance to introduce me to the boy, for her school was in Manshiyat al-Bakri, while mine was in Garden City. But she did relate to me a detailed account of what passed between her and the classroom teacher. Mona said, ‘I asked the teacher in front of the whole class, “Whose father is better, his or mine?”’ When the teacher didn’t answer, Mona said, ‘Papa’s a university professor, he has a doctoral degree, and he used to teach at London University. When Britain attacked Egypt, he organised a demonstration in England. He left his job there and said, “I’m going back home to help my country.” His father’s an officer, and it’s true he fought in the war for Palestine and staged the revolution, but he doesn’t have a doctorate, and he’s never taught at London University! My father is better educated, and he’s more knowledgeable!’ Mona insisted that the teacher acknowledge before all the pupils that her father was the better man. The teacher, however, said, ‘This won’t do. All of you here are my children, and it wouldn’t be right for me to say that one person is better than another, or that one person’s father is better than another’s.’
I asked her in astonishment, and with a good deal of admiration, ‘You said that in class, in front of all the boys and girls?’ Mona crossed her legs, spoke more loudly and said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she repeated the story in all its particulars. Now I admired her even more. She was three years older than I was and several inches taller, and whenever I declared that she was my friend I felt an access of pride, as if this friendship lent some of her height to my childish body, and conferred upon me a part of her authoritative mien. She knew lots of things, which she discussed in detail, while I looked on in wonder, confident that she was my superior in her wisdom and her understanding of the world, and, between us, the more capable of interpreting and unravelling its mysteries.
One day Mona visited us with her mother, and she read me a poem her father had written for her. The poem so unsettled me that I stopped listening to it, distracted by the question: Why didn’t my own father send me a poem? Did her father love her more than mine loved me? I couldn’t keep the question to myself – I confided it to my mother. She laughed, and said, ‘Her father knows how to write poetry; your father doesn’t!’
How was I to apply this new piece of information to the comparison between my father and Gamal Abdel Nasser? What reasoning could I bring to bear? I found myself thinking, ‘He doesn’t know how to write poetry to his daughter – maybe he’s no better or smarter than Nasser.’ But then the scales would tip the other way, and I would think, ‘But my father has a doctorate from the Sorbonne, he was a university professor, so surely he knows and understands more than officers do, and his political goals are superior to theirs.’
My father wasn’t there, though, while Nasser’s name, his voice, and his picture cropped up everywhere, on a daily, even an hourly, basis. He was celebrated in songs that I loved, whose lyrics I could recall, and I would sing them, whether I got the melody right or not. He wasn’t merely a leader, merely a president. He was a topic of conversation in every household and on every street and in every school – quite simply he pervaded the very space in which we grew and took shape, as if he were water or air or earth or sunbeams that we absorbed as a matter of course, becoming what we became. It was Nasser who brought us up, proud though I was of my kinship to my father. When I pronounced my own name, my voice would be normal, or perhaps softer than normal, on ‘Nada,’ but then it would grow louder as I went on to say, ‘Abdel Qadir Selim,’ as if ‘Nada’ were no more than a prop, or a point of entry, or a stepping-stone for the name that should be prominent and unmistakable. I don’t think any of these ideas ever occurred to me when I was that age, but I remember clearly what happened when I watched Nasser deliver a speech, following his words and staring intently at his posture and his facial expressions; suddenly I said to my mother, ‘Mama, doesn’t he look like Papa?’
‘No,’ my mother replied.
Then, ‘Well, maybe he looks like him.’
When I went to bed. I tried to call to mind an image of my father, the better to make a comparison, but my imagination ran up against a blank wall. I tried a second time, and a third. I didn’t realise what had happened until I found my mother kneeling by the bed, pale-faced, asking me, ‘What’s the matter, why are you screaming?’
This incident may have been a repetition of a previous one that occurred some years earlier, maybe a few months after my father’s arrest. I remember my mother kneeling by the bed, then carrying me to her big bed. She fetched a red metal box, opened it up and took out pictures of my father to show me. As she picked up each one, she would say, ‘Here’s Papa on such-and-such a day . . .’ Presently I calmed down and chose one of the pictures, a large one in which my father’s features were clear, and then I went back to bed. Instead of lying face-down the way I normally did, I lay on my back and held the picture up before my face. I drifted off, still holding the picture, and when I awoke in the morning I found it bent at the edges, perhaps because I had been lying on it. This started me off on another bout of crying and irritability.
Whether or not they resembled each other wasn’t the question, even if they were of the same generation, sharing Upper Egyptian origins, and both embodying the idea of ‘father’. The first was a generic father, held in common by all, while the second was the individual, actual father – with a hop, skip, and a jump I could be in his bedroom, open up his wardrobe, and run my hands over the neatly folded shirts in one of its drawers.
I was nine years old when a classmate of mine – having suddenly found it necessary to express her nationalist zeal – said, ‘Your mother’s French. The French attacked Egypt as part of the Tripartite Aggression. From now on we’re not friends.’ Although she had caught me off-guard, without a moment’s thought I heard myself say to her, ‘I’m the one who doesn’t want to be friends with you. You have bad breath, and it’s not as if you were poor and couldn’t afford toothpaste – you go to an expensive French school. And by the way, our bawaab’s wife, who comes sometimes to clean our house, doesn’t use toothpaste, but she rinses her mouth regularly and her breath smells lovely. Her clothes are clean as well. You’re horrid – I don’t want to talk to you.’
Quick though I was with an answer, her words took me aback. (The comment ‘it’s not as if you were poor’, and the allusion to a preference for the wife of our bawaab, were like a goal scored in her net, proving that I had learned the lesson my mother taught me. She was careful of my upbringing in matters like these, admonishing me, ‘A certain little girl – the bawaab’s daughter, let’s say – is the same age as you, and by chance – purely by chance – you’re privileged to wear the dress you wear, while it’s not given to her to wear one like it. It may be that she’s better than you. We’ll have to wait and see what you do with what you have, and what she may do in spite of the hardship she faces. And that boy’ – she was referring to a child my age, clothed in rags, who stood at the traffic light selling packets of tissues – ‘is an innocent victim. You get more, he gets less.’ She had an endless supply of these sermons, adducing as evidence my clothes, food, and
– the thing she harped on most insistently and distressingly – chocolate. I would grow fidgety with all her instruction, or I might become anxious in the expectation that she would forbid me to buy chocolate. My mother was like a machine, incessantly, tirelessly producing her educational directives, and at that age I could not know anything of the ideological basis for such directives.)
But what the girl had said unsettled me. At lunch I asked, ‘Mama, why did France attack Egypt in 1956?’
‘Because France is an imperialist state, and it had begun to lose the countries it occupied, so it became more aggressive. It had been defeated in Indochina and . . .’
‘What’s Indochina?’
‘A country called Vietnam, in Asia – I’ll show it to you on the map.’
She was about to get up to go fetch the book, but I persuaded her to put off fussing with the atlas (another of the pedagogical tools to which she frequently had recourse).
‘No, carry on.’
‘Well, France was confronting a revolution in Algeria, and Nasser was supporting this revolution, and moreover he had nationalised the canal. He was a threat to France’s interests, and they wanted to get rid of him.’
‘Were you on the side of the French when they attacked Egypt?’
She laughed. ‘How could I have been on their side?’
‘But you’re French!’
‘Are you in favour of your father’s detention?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So you don’t agree with everything your country’s government does!’
I understood, and I laughed. Then I told her about the horrid girl. She said, ‘There’s no need to cut her off. You could have explained things to her.’
‘I want nothing to do with her,’ I announced firmly. ‘She has bad breath, and besides, I don’t care to keep company with fools – if people saw me with her they might think I’m as stupid as she is. That would be bad for my reputation!’
I particularly emphasised the part about my reputation, and my mother laughed, just as I had intended her to do. And when she laughed, so did I.
My mother did get up to fetch the atlas, and began to instruct me purposefully on the map of Asia and the location of Indochina, reinforcing geography with history. She told me in which years France entered and departed from Indochina, and how . . . and now it was America’s turn . . . and all the while I nodded my head, saying, ‘Yes, it’s very clear,’ although in fact nothing was clear, for the simple reason that my head was full of a new question: My mother had said, ‘Nasser constituted a threat to the French, and therefore they attacked him.’ This bit of information assumed a powerful significance in the debate that preoccupied me, as to which man was right – the president who had arrested and detained my father, or my father, whose opinions had led to his incarceration and his being exiled from his family for all these years.
Chapter three
Translation problems I
Joking with my friends, I said, ‘I was a translation “gofer” – I learned the craft by the time I could walk!’
I left it at that, for to go into detail would have required that I tell them the story of my life. They knew my mother was French, and that I was born and raised in a bilingual household, but none of them knew that, from as far back as I can remember, I assumed the role of interpreter. ‘What are they saying?’ my mother would ask suddenly. ‘What does the man mean?’ ‘What is the lady trying to say?’ So I would translate. ‘What’s so funny about that?’ she might demand. And I would explain.
Or someone would ask me, ‘What’s your mother saying? What does she want?’ And I would translate. My paternal aunt might come to visit us, and I would be the linguistic intermediary between her and my mother. But I faced the most difficult trials in the many encounters between my mother and my paternal grandmother. My grandmother never left her village until she was past the age of seventy, and she spoke in a rural idiom that was difficult to understand – in retrospect I think it was eloquent – studded with proverbs, parables, and quotations from the Qur’an. In my childhood, translating what she said was a real challenge, like decoding a cipher. I had to think about it first, then pass along the easier bits, pouncing on the parts I could manage and summarising the rest in order to fill in the blanks. I settled for the gist, or I improvised something that would fit well enough into the general context. But sometimes she defied such devices. My grandmother might produce one little phrase that I could not understand, even though the words themselves were clear enough. For example, ‘When we visited you after they took away your father, a twelvemonth ago, in Toba . . .’ and I would stop short, perplexed, my mind casting about in a vain attempt to solve the riddle. I knew that ‘a twelvemonth ago’, in my grandmother’s parlance, simply meant ‘last year’, but what on earth was ‘toba’, and what could ‘in toba’ signify? Was it the name of a place where they’d taken my father? Did they make him sit on some kind of brick? But she had said ‘in’ and not ‘on’! I decided it was too much trouble to ask the meaning of ‘toba’, since even a witless three-year-old knew that ‘toba’ meant ‘brick’; nor did I see fit to translate the sentence verbatim for my mother, lest she tell me I was stupid or that my grandmother had gone senile. At the time I knew nothing of the rural custom of using the Coptic names for the months. So I kept quiet. Then, when my mother wanted to know why I didn’t translate my grandmother’s words, imagination came to my rescue. ‘She said that your frock is very pretty. Also, she noticed that your new eyeglasses suit you better than the old ones.’
After the episode of the mourning period, I learned that aphorism about the sieve – which is to say, I learned to strain out those contaminants that would certainly have fouled the waters flowing between the two sides, while at the same time I took care that neither of them should suspect my interference. So if my mother was glowering, I would hold back something my grandmother had said and abridge the rest. If my aunt went on the offensive and severely criticised my mother, the attack would be converted in the translated version into a mild rebuke. If my mother was the aggressor, I would whitewash her comments before passing them along, adding some details of my own: ‘My mother says this with good intentions – that is, affectionately.’ And so on.
Meanwhile, that episode of the mourning period culminated in a family catastrophe that, I realised only two or three years later, could have been avoided, had I not been slavishly exact in transmitting the messages.
The prelude to this episode was our being informed one night in Cairo that my grandfather had died; at dawn on the following day we boarded a train bound for Upper Egypt.
At my grandfather’s house the women wailed, my grandmother, my aunt, and some other women I didn’t know sitting on the floor despite the seats that lined the walls. I asked my aunt, who explained to me that such were the rites of mourning in our part of the world, and I passed this information along to my mother when she asked. She said, ‘But I don’t want to sit on the floor!’ And with that she seated herself on a chair, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette!
(I can’t omit these details, because they turned up later in the catalogue of my mother’s blunders.)
After the sunset prayer, my mother asked my grandmother, ‘When will supper be served? We haven’t eaten since this morning!’ The translation was no sooner out of my mouth than I realised how outrageous this remark was. I could read it in the face of my grandmother, who kept silent.
I turned to my mother and said, ‘Perhaps that’s the way things are done around here – just like sitting on the floor.’
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘No, I’m not hungry.’
‘But they aren’t poor – why don’t they serve supper to their guests? Aren’t we guests?’
‘We’re not guests, Mama – Granny always says to me, “This is your home, Nada, your father’s and grandfather’s house.”’
My grandmother likely told my aunt what the wife of her son had said – whether disapprovingly or
with the object of getting her daughter to feed the hungry lady, I don’t know. But my aunt leaned over toward my mother and whispered in her ear, so we got up with her, left the house, and set off to a different house.
‘It’s very odd,’ said my mother to my aunt. ‘You’re not poor, and there are so many guests – you ought to have prepared some food for them, even if it was only sandwiches!’
I translated. My aunt replied, ‘Ours is the largest clan in the whole region. At weddings and other big occasions we provide countless animals to be sacrificed for the feasts!’
I asked, ‘What does “clan” mean?’
‘It means all your kin.’
‘What does “kin” mean?’
‘Oh, pet, my little niece, you’re still a foreigner like your mother. A clan is a family that is thousands strong.’
I translated. But my mother insisted, ‘They should have served some food, since they’re not poor, or else they should have advised us to bring our own food with us!’
I translated, and my aunt replied, ‘Tell her she should be ashamed of herself. It’s unthinkable even to talk about food, and your grandfather not yet cold in his grave!’
I translated. My mother got angry, and my aunt changed her mind about taking us to the home of her mother’s brother for supper. ‘There’s no need to make a scene!’ she said. I translated.
My mother decided she was not going to stay for the three days of mourning after all, if it meant she and her daughter would have to starve to death. We left at dawn the following day.
My aunt swore that her tongue would never again address a word to her brother’s wife, and that she would never set foot in her house for the rest of her life (and she kept this vow). Nor was that the end of the matter, for the grievance was kept alive and it was the first thing my father heard about from his mother, his sister and his cousins when he went to the village after his release. And it was one of the sore points he brought up every time he and my mother quarrelled. During their last row, I told my father it had been my fault. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said sceptically.