by Radwa Ashour
Even though I spent a great deal of time sitting with my parents – staying up late with them, fighting sleep until it overcame me and my mother took me off to bed – nevertheless, contrary to both precedent and expectation, at the end of that school year and the next I got the highest marks in every subject we were taught. The day the certificates were distributed, the headmistress announced, ‘Nada has distinguished herself in every way; her academic performance is outstanding, likewise her behaviour with the teachers and with her classmates.’
I didn’t wait until my father came home. I rang him up at work and then, before he answered, I handed the receiver to my mother, saying, ‘You tell him – tell him what the headmistress said!’
What happened after that? Nothing! No earthquake surprised us, no cannon-fire brought the roof down upon the heads it sheltered. Merely foolish little disagreements. I watched, standing by in helpless confusion, as if seated before one of those jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of little pieces, needing to find the right place for every piece in order to complete the picture. Was my father, suffering from some obscure feelings of guilt, in a hurry to establish his position as head of the household? Had the years spent away from us, in oppressive conditions, destroyed his equilibrium, throwing all of us off-balance? Had my mother, after his years away and her own ordeal, expected him to return laden with the flowers of love, understanding and sympathy? Or was misinterpretation at the root of their differences, their mutual intentions lost in translation?
My father was smoking feverishly, and my mother wouldn’t stop reminding him that he had quit smoking when she was pregnant with me. She complained of the odour of smoke that pervaded the house (despite the fact that she herself smoked a cigarette or two occasionally). She threw the windows open wide, and he complained of the cold. She complained about some mates of his who would visit him without bringing their wives; he would sequester himself with them, shutting her out, and yet she was expected to provide for them as guests. ‘Why didn’t you make supper?’ ‘You didn’t say they were going to have supper with us!’ At first, with ‘please’, and a smile, then later ‘please’, but no smile; thereafter a reproachful frown, and at last matters devolved into a battle, in which other issues got mixed up: ‘I don’t understand. Your friends show up without any notice, your cousins come and linger forever, and everyone who comes from the village insists on staying with us. What about that thing known as a hotel, which is designed for people to stay in? What’s more, these relatives of yours, all the while you were gone, only came for brief visits: ten minutes at most, and off they went!’ Perhaps he explained, once or twice, but she didn’t understand, and he gave up the attempt. Was he simply exhausted, unequal to the constant translation, or was it that he wished to impose on her his own system, his authority, without endless discussion? He took to saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ curtly, with no opening for debate. He seemed hard and ungiving, as if we were a heavy weight, an additional burden upon him.
My relationship with him was not like the one I had with my mother, the pattern of which had been set by the life we’d shared on our own, in the absence of our third family member. She would shout, and I would shout back; she would issue orders I would fling back in her face, across the dividing wall. We would quarrel, but at the end of the day find no recourse except to each other in our mutual need – or perhaps we found only our despair, fear and loss, and thus we automatically drew closer to each other, quite as if we hadn’t, but a few hours earlier, been at each other’s throats like two murderous roosters ready to tear each other to pieces. When my father’s return changed everything else, my relationship with my mother remained unchanged. In my battles with my father, on the other hand, no matter how defiant and sure of my own position I was each time I confronted him, he would make me lose my bearings, exhausting me, reducing me to a heap of unrelieved wretchedness.
For five years my father had been an unattainable dream; when he came back, I wanted him to be a dream in whose sanctuary I might live. It may be for this reason that any conflict between us always loomed much larger than the actual problem that had occasioned it, escalating instantly into a crisis that threatened to topple my dream. This made me frantic with anxiety, driving me into a state of panic which the situation didn’t in the least call for.
Within two years of my father’s release, his troubles with my mother became an open conflict. Three years after our reunion, they had begun, in my presence, to talk about initiating divorce proceedings. I believe it was the issue of those hundred pounds that was the precipitating event – it was, as they say, the straw that broke the camel’s back: the ‘camel’, of course, was our little family, living in a flat comprised of three rooms not one of which was large enough to have accommodated an actual camel.
My mother asked my father about the money that had been kept in a drawer, and he told her he’d given it to his cousin. She didn’t understand, so he explained. ‘His mother-in-law died in hospital yesterday, and it was clear he was going to need the money.’
‘When will he pay you back?’
‘I don’t expect him to pay me back. In difficult times we help each other out.’
‘You should have told him the money was a loan, and specified when it was to be repaid.’
He turned away from her, sending an unmistakable message that he had no wish to continue the discussion. But she persisted, ‘You had no right to dispose of that money without consulting me. First of all because it was meant for our family, and secondly because most of it was money I earned from my job. You took money that belonged to me without my knowledge!’
He slapped her.
For a moment the three of us stood there, stunned, and then my father walked out and left the flat. My mother shouted at me, ‘Go to your room! What are you doing here, anyway?’ I went to my room and slammed the door, thinking, this madwoman can’t tell an enemy from a friend – I was on her side, and had been on the point of taking her part in an all-out assault on my father, spelling out all of his offences. But she, instead of striking back at him when he hit her, turned on me: ‘What are you doing here?’ I opened my door and shouted at her, ‘What did I do, materialise from Upper Egypt to interfere with your happy life with my father? No, I came because the entire building could hear the two of you fighting!’
But the next day I saw that her eyes were red with weeping, and I wanted to cheer her up. I sat beside her and kissed her. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘do you think Papa is acting strange?’
‘He behaves oddly sometimes. Not like himself.’
‘Do you think he lost his mind in prison?’
‘No, he hasn’t lost his mind. Even though he behaves badly sometimes. Maybe he hasn’t adjusted yet to normal life.’
‘You claim he’s highly intelligent. So how do you explain the stupid things he does?’
‘Your father isn’t stupid!’
‘I think he is!’
‘Well I think you’re an insolent girl!’
‘I’m not insolent – it’s just that I’m living with two lunatics! I reckon you’re as mad as he is!’
I left her and went into my room, slamming the door behind me. All through my adolescence, this was the registered trademark by which I advertised my wrath.
When they divorced, my mother asked for custody of me. I looked at my father. His face was suffused with a bluish pallor. He said nothing. I asked her, ‘Are you staying here or going to France?’ She said she would return to France. ‘I can’t leave my school and my classmates,’ I told her. ‘I’ll stay here with my father.’ But I had known to begin with that I wanted to stay with him, even though I wasn’t confident that he wanted me (already he didn’t want his wife, so did he want her daughter?). I said, ‘I’ll stay,’ even though a few months earlier, when matters between them were heating up, my motto had been, ‘They can both go to hell!’
It seems likely that during this period my father, despite all the trouble he had with me and our frequent clashes, put it all down
to the intransigence of a wilful child whose mother had never managed to curb her rebelliousness and bring her up properly. And until that memorable visit to Paris in the summer of ’68, he retained his ability to restrain my insubordination, never feeling as though I had injured his pride, or intentionally insulted him. Perhaps this was also partly – notwithstanding my slogan, ‘They can both go to hell’ – because I put up no resistance to the moments of affection and ease that smoothed over the bad feelings following a row: we would calm down and carry on as before; I would call him ‘Abu Nada’ and he would refer to me fondly as his ‘hazelnut’. We could laugh and joke together, and play word-games. I was happy, too, when he sat and helped me with my maths. I wasn’t especially good at maths, yet I was determined to get into the College of Engineering, like him. He said, ‘Humanities might be a better match for your abilities.’ I didn’t take his advice. He began teaching me maths. I understood his explanations, and by practising with them assiduously, I achieved outstanding marks. I was pleased, and so was he.
In those moments of ease we played games with poetry. He would recite a line, and I would have to follow it with a line that began with the same letter with which the previous one had ended. One evening he asked me, ‘How many lines of poetry do you know by heart?’
His question took me by surprise. As a matter of pride I said confidently, ‘I know lots and lots of lines, Papa – countless lines. Give me two days and I’ll have them all for you!’ With that ‘two days’ I was trying to buy myself some time, but I managed to wangle a full week out of the deal by claiming that I had too much homework. I was in fact spending my evenings bent over my desk, but I wasn’t doing a single one of my assignments – instead I was reviewing all the poetry I had ever memorised, and learning new poems besides, which I would recite out loud to myself as I lay in bed. I would doze off in the middle of a stanza by Imru al-Qays or Al-Mutanabbi or Shawqi or Al-Jawahiri, or Al-Shabi. It seemed to me that only with my answer could I ransom my image and my father’s respect.
At breakfast a week after my father’s startling question, I proudly announced, ‘I know three hundred lines of poetry by heart, Papa – besides all the French poetry I’ve memorised, of course!’
At night we would hold our contest. ‘Ready?’ he said.
‘On one condition,’ I replied. ‘I go first!’
‘Agreed!’
In the evening I prepared his tea and sat down opposite him at the square kitchen table. I began.
‘Should the people one day yearn for life, then fate to them must yield – d.
‘Destiny with grievous losses has assailed me, until its arrows do my heart engulf – f.
‘Forbid not that which you do yourself, for in so doing lies great shame – e.
‘Each man may not achieve what he hopes for, to the will of ships do winds contrary blow – w.
‘W . . . w . . . w . . .’
‘Hazelnut, your minute’s up – you lose one point!’
‘My minute’s not up!’
‘Yes, it is. W, if you please, Lady Hazelnut:
We make ready the sword and lance, but death slays us without a fight – t.’
‘The flanks of a gazelle has he, the legs of an ostrich . . .’
He interrupted me before I could finish the line. ‘Choose another line – that one begins and ends with a t. It won’t do.’
‘Why won’t it do?’
‘That’s one of the rules of the game. You’re not allowed to use a line that begins and ends with the same letter. Find another line.’
But my memory refused to come up with another line that started with t.
I stalled. ‘I need to go to the toilet.’
‘Say the line and then go.’
‘Papa, I can’t – I have to go to the toilet now!’
I went to the toilet, closed the door, and tried to think of a line that started with the letter t. Then I went back to the kitchen. ‘I can’t think of a line that starts with t! Papa, it’s not fair – I really did need to go to the toilet!’
He laughed uproariously. I joined in.
‘Two points,’ he said. Next:
‘Then he took refuge behind a rock on Radwa summit, among the soaring peaks of mountains high – h.’
I tried to remember a line that started with the letter h, but I couldn’t.
‘Three points – you’re out, Hazelnut!’ Then:
‘Heroic in magnanimity the branching limb, that bends as need requires but will not break.’
He usually won. All the same, though, I enjoyed it every time we competed, because I loved playing games with him, and I loved listening to him recite poetry – the timbre of his voice, his enunciation of the letters, his style of delivery all enchanted me. When he declaimed a line I had trouble understanding, I would say, ‘Explain,’ and he would explain, and I would take still more pleasure in the meanings of the passages as he elucidated them for me.
In the spring of 1968, when I was fourteen, my father introduced me to a woman I hated on sight. When he asked me what I thought of her, I launched straight in with my criticism of her looks, her height, her girth, the clothes she wore, her hairstyle, and the way she spoke. He tried to argue with me, to sway me by enumerating her virtues, which only increased my dislike for her. I said, ‘So why does she slather her face with loads of makeup, like some bit-player in a Farid al-Atrash film, all ready to dance in the background as soon as the music begins?
He didn’t laugh, and I was bewildered – I had assumed he would be as amused as I was by the impromptu comparison with which I had surprised even myself.
A few weeks later he started talking to me about her again. I said, ‘Who, the bit-player?’
He got angry then, and left the room. He didn’t speak of her again to me.
When examinations were over, I went to France to meet my mother in Paris, as I had promised her I would do, and to spend the summer holidays with her.
It would be the first time we saw each other since she had left Cairo nine months earlier. When she spread her arms wide to embrace me I was surprised to discover how much I had missed her, and I was the more puzzled that in Cairo I had been unaware of these feelings – of how attached to her I was and how much I needed her; it was as if I had decided all at once to fasten a belt, like in an aeroplane. Perhaps that surrender to my need for my mother was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Her departure had seemed a matter of course. I suffered under the strain of accepting that swift collapse of the status quo, although indifference was still the predominant attitude I affected in my behaviour and emotions (such emotions as I admitted to, that is).
When I saw her at the airport I was startled by the tumbling of those walls I hadn’t, to begin with, even realised I had erected and retreated behind. I held on to her for a long time, hugging her tightly, and on our way out of the airport I held her hand just the way I had used to do as a child, clinging so hard I was practically digging my nails into her palm. This time she didn’t object.
At the supper table at home, I was struck by something else. I had noticed it at the airport, but it hadn’t given me pause then, for I had been too taken up with the pleasure of seeing my mother, and too preoccupied with my own unexpected reactions and feelings. Or perhaps in that moment I had assumed it was simply that she was so moved by the sight of me after nine months of separation. Certainly I had noticed her pallor, even as I was walking toward her with my bag on the luggage trolley – I saw it from a distance, before I reached and embraced her. But now, as she sat opposite me while we had our supper, I looked at her more closely. Her face was still pale, and this wasn’t the only thing about her that was new. What else? Was it possible that old age could overtake someone who was only forty-five? And could this happen in just nine months?
‘Mama, are you ill?’ She said she was not. I asked her whether she had been ill in the preceding months. She assured me that she hadn’t.
‘Mama, your face is pale. It wasn’t like that in Cairo –
even on the day you left it wasn’t this pale!’
She laughed, and changed the subject. ‘Today it’s forbidden to talk about our troubles – we’re celebrating our reunion.’
Once I was alone in bed, I didn’t sleep – I didn’t drift off even for a few minutes. I was mulling over those two unexpected developments, trying to understand. wondering and wondering – what was happening?
I started with the second thing, which in reality was foremost: my mother’s condition. What was it about her that was new? It wasn’t merely that pallor – so what was it, then? Something different about the look in her eye? (A sadness mingled with a questioning expression – or something else, too difficult for me to read?) A slowness, unlike before, in the movement of her body and her hands? She was a beautiful woman. There was in her face a sweetness arising not only from the fineness and harmony of her features, but also from the spark in the honey-coloured eyes that were the first thing about her to catch your attention. Intelligence shone from them – reminding you of nothing so much as the gleam in a mischievous child’s eye – lending a certain vividness to her face the moment she opened her mouth to speak. She had a nervous energy that ebbed and flowed, imparting to her rather petite body an animation that expressed itself in the cadences of her speech and the rapidity of her movements. Did she seem changed because her hair was a different length? She had used to keep her hair short, barely even reaching her neck, with a fringe in front. Now it had grown long, extending down her back, and she had tied it in a ponytail. With the ponytail she looked more like me, for I have the same facial features as she, although I have my father’s dark eyes and his height. But this was not the time for sorting out the question of what traits I’d inherited from whom. Was she ill? She struck me as brittle, brittle in the way of someone defeated; or, to put it another way, it was as if liveliness had given way to something softer, as if something in her (that nervous energy, or animation) had receded, or been stilled or extinguished. Was it the loneliness of living by herself in a strange country? But she was French, so how could France be a strange country? Did she find herself a foreigner there after all those years in another country? Was she worn out by her daily toil? Did she miss my father? Did she want to go back to Cairo?