by Radwa Ashour
How dare she appoint herself as my agent? If she hadn’t said what she said, maybe Gérard would have told me he cared for me, that he considered me beautiful, that he was wretched at the prospect of my departure. Maybe he would have liked to take my hand and squeeze it, maybe he would have liked to kiss me. He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the forehead. No doubt this madwoman had told him our customs didn’t allow it!
My anger imposed itself on our parting the following morning. I said goodbye to my mother coldly, and when she tried to hug me I ducked out of her embrace. I said a curt, dry ‘Au revoir’ and I didn’t smile. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.
Chapter seven
Back to Cairo
My anger with my mother didn’t last long, perhaps because I received from Gérard a long letter, very kind and sweet, and from my mother I got a letter in which she apologised to me, saying that she hadn’t meant to hurt me, or to interfere in my business, and that she knew I was now a young woman who ‘understood something of politics’, and could make her own decisions. She repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Sweetheart.’
The two letters imparted to me a calm that allowed me to contemplate the spoils with which I had returned from my trip to Paris for their own sake, despite the unfortunate incident of the night before my departure: the discovery of the concern I felt for my mother, and my intense need of her. Then, too, I was preoccupied with parading my new knowledge before my friends and – more to the point – my father. I would talk at length about how the students raised their red and black banners over the Arc de Triomphe at the heart of Paris; how they took over the university, the College of Fine Arts, and the Odeon Theatre; how they connected with the workers; how the workers went on strike and work came to a stop at the plants and factories; how the transport workers, by striking, were able to bring to a halt Paris’s ground transportation system, and then the trains that connected Paris to other cities. I repeated, ‘Nine million went on strike – can you imagine?’ I would say this with pride, as if I myself had taken part in organising the strike, or even as if I had been one of its leaders. Carried away by my own enthusiasm, I would move on from there to an attack on the enemy: ‘Paul de Roche, he’s the one who . . .’ And, ‘Fouché declared . . .’ And ‘Gremeau said . . .’
He interrupted me. ‘Hold on, Hazelnut, hold on! Who is this de Roche? And who’s Fouché? And the other one, the third name you mentioned – who’s that?’
I puffed up like a turkey. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you keep up with the news, Abu Nada?’
One evening after dinner, a week after I received my mother’s letter, I said to my father, ‘Papa, I think Mama’s not well. She’s pale, and seems exhausted.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘She told me she wasn’t.’
Then I went on, ‘Papa, do you know, Mama participated in the May 13th demonstrations!’
‘I’m not surprised. She has anarchist leanings.’
I passed over what he’d just said, because I didn’t understand it. ‘Papa, why not have Mama come back? Couldn’t you reverse the divorce?’
He didn’t answer. I went on. ‘A divorce can be reversed, can’t it? If you’re with me, let’s write to her about it, or ring her up – she’ll agree. Or, if she doesn’t agree at first, we can just ring her again, maybe a couple of times, and she’ll come round.’
‘Nada,’ he said, ‘it’s over. We had our differences, and we split up, unfortunately.’
‘But since you say it’s “unfortunate”, can’t we still repair the relationship?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it ended.’
‘Nothing ends!’ (Where did I come by this bit of wisdom?)
‘I’ve got involved with another woman, and I’m seriously considering marrying her.’
I shouted, ‘Don’t tell me it’s that second-rate actress!’
‘I told you, she is a respectable woman – stop acting like a child!’
The only answer I could come up with was, ‘By the way, Papa, the position the French Communist Party took on the student revolution was rubbish. Even the poet Aragon – you know how well-loved he is – when he got up on stage to address the students, they made fun of him, jeering at him, “Long live Stalinism!” And at the May 13th demonstration the position of the workers’ union controlled by the Communists was a scandal. They played a suspicious part in the breaking up of the demonstration, and . . .’
He interrupted me. ‘The whole movement was nothing but a tempest in a teapot, stirred up with no thought for the consequences. All too often this kind of thing is fomented by the adventurers of a parasitic leftist movement: Maoists, Trotskyites, anarchists.’
I was caught off-guard by the list of technical terms he deployed. What did ‘parasitic leftist movement’ mean? What was wrong with some of them being Trotskyites? What did ‘Trotskyite’ mean, anyway? And did the word ‘anarchist’ have a political meaning, or only its literal one? Was it connected in any way with Gérard’s messy hair? And how could my mother be an anarchist, when she was so scrupulously careful about the arrangement of her clothes and her house? She had used to scold us for the disorder we created in the house. What did ‘anarchist’ mean?
I seized upon the word I knew. ‘It’s not true – they weren’t adventurers!’
‘Oh, yes they were.’
‘That’s what the French Communist Party said, and it was a poor position. The young people in the movement in France are contemptuous of it, and don’t have confidence in the trade-union leadership that subscribes to it. And here I don’t think anyone even knows anything about the Communists – or cares about them!’
Thrust and parry.
The round was over. I calmed down. Or it seemed to me that I was calmer. As soon as I was by myself, I confronted the question: What was I to do if my father married that woman?
Move to Paris and live with my mother?
Move to Upper Egypt and live with my aunt?
What about school?
There was no French school in the village.
I could switch to an Arabic school.
I could stay in Cairo, enrol in a boarding school, and never have to see that woman’s face, slathered with makeup.
The following morning, instead of ‘Good morning’, I announced, ‘I won’t stay in this house if that bit-player comes to live with us here.’
He shouted at me, ‘You spoiled brat, you think of nothing but yourself! On top of it you’re insolent, you don’t know when to give it a rest – no manners, no respect for your elders! I will marry Hamdiya!’ (Oh, my God, and her name’s Hamdiya! I’d forgotten she had a name. Where did her family come up with a name like that?) He said, ‘I’ll marry her and you’ll live with her and you’ll treat her with all possible respect. I absolutely will not put up with any of your cheek.’
I shouted at him, ‘My mother waits five years for you, while you’re in prison, and when you get out you leave her and marry a monkey named Hamdiya!’
He slapped me.
I didn’t go to school. I spent the whole day crying. If my mother had been with me she would have known that this crying jag was the longest (longer than the bout of tears over the baby’s spitting up on the new red dress I had wanted to dazzle my father with the first time we visited him in prison).
That evening he tried to make up with me, but I refused. For two weeks I didn’t say a word to him.
This was the beginning of the most difficult phase of my life. A woman I couldn’t stand came to our home to live with us, leaving me nothing of my familiar abode except my bedroom, the only place in the house that was off-limits to her. Her presence in the house made me feel stifled, as if she were not merely treading upon one of my limbs, but actually standing on my chest with all her considerable weight. I wished she would die. Every day, every hour, every moment I wished she would die. The resentment I felt for my father was limitless. He didn’
t care, paid no attention. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Meanwhile, I crouched with my head in my arms, in a futile attempt to protect it from the debris from the house, some of whose rubble was still coming down on me, wood, glass, and stone, wounding me and causing me to bleed.
It seemed to me that I hated him. It seemed to me that I pitied him, my pity mixed with contempt. I felt my father was stupid – foolish and selfish, that his selfishness was tragic.
I began writing long letters to my mother, and counting the days until hers arrived. I distanced myself from my friends, since it seemed to me that intimacy was not possible unless I talked about my troubles, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about my father in the unfavourable terms in which I had come to view him.
Chapter eight
Ticket to France
When I started attending secondary school, I read a great deal, but after the bit-player came to live with us I began to read ravenously, ceaselessly. I read novels, books on history, sociology, and politics. (My mother sent me a book on the revolution of ’68, which I started reading the moment I received it on my arrival home from school, and I finished it half an hour before school began the next morning; I fell asleep twice in class that day.) I read everything I could get my hands on. Novels were my genre of choice – the use of language enchanted me, its magical power to transport me from here to there, into other times and places, into the lives and destinies of different characters. I laughed and cried, my heartbeat would quicken or seem about to stop altogether, from fear or anticipation of some exciting turn of the plot. I was living a parallel life that absorbed me entirely, far away from Hamdiya and her husband, a life whose settings and casts of characters changed with each new literary work. I would finish one novel and start another, and, as soon as I was done with that one, take up a third. I polished off all the novels in the house that my mother had left behind, or that my father had acquired. Nineteenth-century French novels, whether romantic or realist: works by Hugo, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola; Arabic novels by Tawfik al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, and Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi; Algerian novels written in French by Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib; and English novels translated into French or Arabic, by Dickens and the Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Television was of no interest to me, nor did I play any sports, other than in physical education classes and the required activities in which we had to participate two days a week at the end of the school day.
By the time I was sixteen, my accumulated knowledge was a startling mixture, in which Balzac’s peasants mingled with Al-Sharqawi’s; the back streets of Cairo crisscrossed with the alleyways of London; to get from Madame Bovary to Amina, the wife of Ahmed al-Sayyed Abdel Gawwad in Mahfouz’s trilogy, required no more than a slight turn of the head; and lovesick Heathcliff and Rochester’s mad wife, whom he imprisoned in his attic, seemed more real and present to me than the actual human beings with whom I interacted every day. Moreover, all this reading gave me power over my peers. I knew more than they did, so I spoke with ease and confidence – who, after all, at the age of sixteen, could have lived through a protracted, tempestuous love such as Heathcliff’s, in which love combined with hatred and evil? To whom was granted the singular experience of transforming in the blink of an eye from the denizen of a thieves’ lair in a gloomy city to a splendid young man taking part in a rally in joyful celebration of Saad Zaghloul’s return, only to be shot by one of the occupying soldiers? And who, in dreams at night, merged the image of this youth with that of another, his hair unkempt, talking of how he participated in the takeover of the Sorbonne?
In the third year of secondary school my teacher said to me, ‘Nada, you have a distinctive style – a subtle, literary style. Will you enrol in the College of Humanities?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I intend to join the College of Engineering.’
In the autumn of 1971 I enrolled at the College of Engineering, and by the end of that school year I had failed. It wasn’t because I had discovered that the curriculum was dull and I didn’t like it or want to continue specialising in it, although in fact I did make this discovery. And it wasn’t because of the stress of Hamdiya’s being with us at home, for I ignored her completely. I had been preoccupied with student activism. It wasn’t merely a matter of participation, but of active involvement in innumerable details and new ideas, and unexpected new horizons that had opened up before me. A new feverishness swept me up entirely, and entwined with it was an attachment to one of my comrades – an attachment that was rather like the roller coaster at an amusement park, carrying me up to dizzying heights and dropping down all at once, only to scale the heights once again.
At the university I buzzed around like a honeybee. I flew from the Engineering School to the Humanities, from Humanities to Economics, then dashed back to Engineering, and finally to the main campus. I attended conferences and council meetings and discussion groups, acceding and dissenting, agreeing and disagreeing, and saying, ‘Point of order.’ Surprisingly quickly, I became conversant with history and politics, and acquired a lexicon of terms that, a year earlier, I would have thought arcane and inaccessible. At home I copied out communiqués on the typewriter and edited a wall newspaper in which I transcribed articles given to me by my comrades, and then filled any remaining spaces with satirical cartoons, decorations, and lines of poetry both colloquial and formal.
Three months after I started at university, Hamdiya, startled, observed that I was securing the waistband of my trousers with a rope. I explained, ‘I seem to have lost a lot of weight. I tried Papa’s belt, but found that it was too big.’
‘Take off the trousers and put on a dress.’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have a clean dress. I pulled my shirt-tail out of my trousers and let it hang down so as to cover my waist and the rope tied around it.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Hamdiya. Then, ‘Wait a moment.’
She brought a measuring tape and put it round my waist. ‘Leave your trousers with me – I’ll take them in for you.’ By the evening of the following day, I found the three pairs of trousers I’d given her on a hanger suspended from my bedroom door. They’d been washed and pressed. I tried one of them on, and it fitted just right.
The episode of the trousers was nicer than that of Shazli’s appearance on the scene.
An amazing paradox: Hamdiya didn’t enter my room that day (nor had she ever done so before, of course, since for her it had been a restricted area from the time she moved in). She left the trousers hanging on the doorknob; the door was closed. But that tentative step she took marked a turning point between two phases. Afterwards the door would be opened to her and she would enter quietly, by degrees. I didn’t take note of exactly when I first said ‘Come in’, but I did say it.
Shazli, on the other hand, arrived with an uproar and departed with an even bigger one, leaving behind him a state of chaos, despair, confusion, and a period of years dedicated to my attempt to reassemble the fragments of my life and put it back in order.
Yes, there were two paradoxes; or you might say it was one that consisted, as is usual with a paradox, of two parts.
Shazli came on the scene just the way Hamdiya had, unexpected and unwelcome.
‘Is it true you’re the daughter of Dr Abdel Qadir Selim?’
‘I’d love to meet your father!’
‘I want to ask him his opinion on the dissolution of the party, and what his position is on two of his colleagues’ having agreed to serve in the ministry, and . . .’
‘Your mother is French, isn’t she?’
‘I heard she knows Aragon, and that she introduced your father to him. I read the interview your father conducted with him in the early 1950s.’
‘Could I have a talk with your mother about her memories of Aragon?’
I surprised myself with my answer.
‘She wouldn’t agree. She’s writing her memoir, and it’s certain she’ll include in it the story of her acquaintance
with Aragon.’
His brashness annoyed me – it seemed to me there was more than a little arrogance in his self-assertion. I concocted the notion of a memoir in order to put an end to the discussion.
What can have happened after that, to make me warm up to him and befriend him? A few days later he told me he cared for me, and that maybe I didn’t reciprocate the feeling because he was of peasant stock, or because he was dark-skinned with coarse hair – maybe also because his name was Shazli. I laughed at that fourth reason he cited; the remainder of the list was as provocative as the first part: ‘And of course you’re half French, with smooth hair, the daughter of well-known people, and your name is Nada!’ I didn’t laugh at his reference to my name; his words felt hurtful. Was he blackmailing me?
At any rate, Shazli succeeded. It was as if he had in some way held out his hand to me, and after I rejected it I became confused, wondering whether he saw in me things I didn’t see in myself.
We started seeing each other.
When at last I invited him to come visit us, my father commented on him unfavourably: ‘The boy looks like a fish – what do you see in him?’
‘He’s courageous, shrewd, perceptive, and easygoing, and he understands the common cause.’
‘ “Shrewd” – do you know the meaning of the word? Look it up in the dictionary!’
‘I’ll do no such thing! You don’t know him. He’s my good friend and I know him well!’
I repeated angrily to my father what Shazli had said to me when we were first getting acquainted – repeated it exactly: ‘You snub him because he comes from peasant stock, he’s dark-skinned, and his name is . . .’ And so forth.
‘Right,’ my father replied sardonically, ‘like I’m the Prince of Wales.’
My friendship with Shazli grew stronger during the sit-in. We stuck together in the hall, with thousands of other students, for seven whole days. We discussed economic, political, and social conditions. We criticised authority and its trappings, along with repression, America, and Israel. We raised our hand to vote for or against, or to call, ‘Point of order.’ We agreed and disagreed, we helped with the drafting of statements, shared in discourse and sandwiches, in anger, anxiety, and the glory of our affiliation with a student body with a high committee of its own choosing, whose communiqués bore the legend, ‘Democracy all for the people, and self-sacrifice all for the nation’. We sent a delegation to the People’s Assembly and the unions, and received a delegation from them; we got telegrams of affirmation and support, and we requested that the President of the Republic come and answer our questions.