Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  I’ll jump now to the case file – I mean two national security cases: felony case number one, 1973, the high court for national security, District of Wayli 131; and felony case number 113 for the year 1973, national security, Giza. I say ‘the file’ for short, because the papers that were filed exceeded two thousand pages and comprised numerous dossiers, including charges filed by the secret service police, information obtained by the secret service on the detainees. There was a complete dossier on each girl or boy, starting with full name – consisting of several parts: personal name, surname, and sometimes two middle names that identified the individual’s father and grandfather – place of residence, college, and class-year. This was followed by a catalogue of the individual’s activities, a summary of his or her ideas, the wall-journals he or she had helped to edit, and sometimes a transcript of things he or she had said, whether at a conference, in a meeting, or in a private conversation. There was a file consisting of statements by witnesses for the prosecution (secret service officers, workers at the university, sometimes even professors and students), and still another file, a longer one, containing the interrogation of the suspects. Finally there would be the order to transfer the case to the high court for national security. In the first of these two cases the transfer order comprised a list of 56 suspects (students, male and female, from Cairo, Ain Shams and Alexandria Universities, as well as one male student from Al-Azhar and a male and a female student from the American University, in addition to a journalist, a poet, and two workers). The second case included 46 suspects (the accusation fundamentally revolved around the formation of a group of supporters of the Palestinian revolution. More than a third of the suspects were students from the College of Engineering at Cairo University).

  There were other files, of course, for similar cases from years before and after (1972, 1975, 1977 and so on), but I’m confining myself to the files from 1973 for the simple and practical reason that I got a photocopy of them from one of my comrades; the other reason is practical as well, namely that what I read in these files is a part of my own firsthand experience: the name Nada Abdel Qadir appears on three pages of the information gathered on her by the secret service in the dossier for the first case, and then the name recurs once again in the suspects’ statements, at the top of 25 pages recording statements she made thirty years ago in response to questions during the interrogations.

  I leaf through the files, read parts of my comrades’ testi­monies, skipping over other parts. I go back to what I’ve read before, read the dossier on Siham’s interrogation, and then read it yet a second time – or a third, or a seventh – the same week, or a month or a year later, or years later.

  ‘She was arrested, on the basis of a tip from the secret service, on 3 January 1973, after she left the University Dormitories, Cairo University. She was interrogated by the office of public prosecution for national security through the public prosecutor, Mr. Suhaib Hafez, on Thursday at one-thirty in the secret service headquarters, and the interrogation lasted until eight o’clock in the evening. The interrogator asked her . . .’

  Then, ‘On the morning of Saturday 6 January 1973 the public prosecutor – the interrogator – returned to the secret service headquarters to continue the interrogation of the student Siham Saadeddin Sabri . . .’

  And again, ‘On Monday morning, 8 January 1973, at the secret service headquarters, Mr. Suhaib Hafez continued interrogating the student . . .’

  The papers for the case consisted of dozens of pages documenting Siham’s statements in a period of twenty hours spread over three days, on each of which she was transported in one of the secret service cars, from Qanatir Prison to the site of the interrogation at Lazoughli. She sat before the interrogator and talked, after which they would shackle her wrists once more, and she would leave the building and the car would bring her back to the prison. She went and returned, went and returned, went and returned.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I took part in the resistance to oppression and to the role of the university administration and the student unions in terrorising the students rather than representing and protecting them.’

  ‘Yes, I participated in the sit-in. I participated in the march. I participated in the conference. I participated in the activities of the supporters of the Palestinian revolution. I participated in the call for establishing committees for the defence of democracy.’

  ‘Yes, in my articles I criticised the authorities for their repressive actions and unjust policy in addressing national concerns.’

  She says, ‘On 26 December 1972, while I was at the College of Engineering, some students from the Law School came and told me that the student union was holding a conference there, and that any student expressing a dissenting opinion was accused of communism, and was at risk of being attacked with knives. And in fact four students were wounded and taken to hospital. No one was interrogated about that.’

  She says, ‘On 27 December 1972 the student union and the organisation for Islamic youth in support of the government tore down the wall-journals in the Law School and threatened the students with knives. In response to this provocation the students gathered for a rally, and it was my responsibility to move the rally out of the College of Engineering quickly, to avoid a dangerous riot. I stood in front of the crowd of students and started shouting, “To the courtyard, to Gamal Abdel Nasser Hall!” As the group was leaving the College of Engineering, the group hostile to us was calling out slogans against us and breaking the wooden rods used for hanging the magazines in order to use them against us as clubs. I decided to stay at my college to confront them. They surrounded me and said, “Get out of here, you Communist! If you don’t get out, we’ll pick you up and carry you out and beat you up. We don’t want you to open your mouth at this college, ever.” I sat down on the ground and said, ‘This is my college, and I’m not leaving it, and I will speak. You want to beat me up, carry on.” ’

  The students had begun heading down the stairs, and they found a girl, by herself, sitting on the ground surrounded by youths threatening her with clubs; they found themselves in an embarrassing position, and began to disperse. No one was interrogated about that.

  The prosecutor general’s office made no investigation into the perpetration of various types of brutality, such as the beating of students with truncheons and chains, on the day of the 3 January demonstration.

  No investigation was made into the matter of the knife one of them was carrying and using to threaten the students.

  There was no investigation into the injuries suffered by dozens of students, who were carried by their classmates on to the main campus of the university. Some of them had head injuries, and some were bleeding; others were choking from the effects of the tear-gas bombs, and still others were unconscious.

  The prosecutor’s office made no investigation into what the security officers did when they smashed cars and shattered their windows with huge clubs, so that afterwards they could accuse the students of causing unrest.

  There was no investigation of what one of the security men did when he dragged a handicapped student behind him, yanking him sharply along; the student, unable to keep up with his rapid pace, tripped, stumbled, and fell on the ground, while, from behind, soldiers beat and kicked him, shoving him and trying to force him to stand up and run – he would get up and make the attempt, but, hampered by his condition, would fall down again, and the kicking would resume.

  The prosecutor general’s office never made any investigation.

  I read Siham’s testimony as if I were back in the 1970s, following in her footsteps. Having heard her once I had wanted to hear more from her. There were only three years’ difference in age between us. What? I said, ‘So it’s possible.’ If I hurried, I thought, maybe in three years I could be like her. A flood-tide of feelings; images, scenes, sounds, questions, all rise to the surface. A lump in the throat wells up, then goes away: pride, self-assurance. I know what it means to be innocent; the thought brings a smile to my
lips. I’m no longer the girl I once was, but a mother trying to protect her little girl from a devouring world. ‘It did devour her,’ I murmur. What’s done is done. ‘It devoured her,’ I say again, ‘many times.’ A shudder overtakes me. My eye catches the words, ‘the aforementioned’, and I laugh. The phrase is conspicuously repeated in the procès-verbal, and in the reports of the secret service, as it is in the charges brought against Siham: a comment in a wall-journal, the composition of an article or communiqué, participation in a conference or a sit-in or a demonstration.

  In imagination and in principle it seems that the references of the secret service and the public prosecutor to those quite ordinary student activities as suspicious behaviour – necessitating secret reports and denouncers and witnesses for the prosecution; the knock on the door at dawn, the police on duty all night; prisons with budgets, administrations, officers and guards; vast blue lorries transporting people from here to there and from there to here; prosecuting attorneys opening investigations and closing them, applying themselves minutely to their signatures, followed by the date (day-month-year), after long hours of interrogation – this is what is laughable. But I laugh only at the words, ‘the aforementioned.’ No sooner does my eye fall upon the words than I start laughing – laughter I am at pains to keep in check, but I quickly discover, as it escapes from me and rises to a raucous crescendo that I’m incapable of restraining it.

  Siham is not the only ‘aforementioned’. All of them are referred to as ‘the aforementioned’ – my close friends, all of whose height and girth I know well; I know the lineaments of their faces in joy, anger, despair; I know the nuances of each one’s voice and intonation; I know their gait; I know whom they loved, went about with, married; I know when it all came down on their heads, with or without their children looking on. Likewise I know a thousand details of their lives, of episodes both meaningful (the great, the earthshaking) and meaningless, or seemingly so.

  I go back to the files, and all those facts slip out from their hiding places in the memory, to reclaim their body, their presence, their role in the creation of what I find written in the dossiers. And every time the same question surfaces: Does death constitute a barrier or does it, on the contrary, draw aside a curtain? For example, I read the words of my comrade who committed suicide by throwing herself, in a highly dramatic scene, from a twelfth-storey balcony. I read about the suicide after the fact and I wonder: am I seeing it more clearly, or less? Does reading across the line between life and death, across more than thirty years, with all that happened in the course of those years, form a thick lens, like prescription glasses, that improves vision, or blinders that shield the eyes from the sun’s glare? Or is the whole premise inadequate? Should we consider each case on its own merits?

  Be that as it may, the fact remains that the files are much like a mirror, in which I stare at my own face, which is not mine alone, but is rather the face that belongs to us all together, as a collective of young men and women who took part in a dream, a movement, a pulse; in terror and confusion and disappointment – a face some strip bare and then call history; others feel in it the throb of life and the structure of the consciousness it created, so difficult to annul, however rigorous the attempt . . . a mirror, or a group picture taken of us one morning thirty years ago in a sunny square. I look more closely, and cry, ‘This is me, and this . . . Good Lord, look how thin he was, and that one . . . as if it were someone else, and here’s so-and-so, may she rest in peace, and there – my God, how she’s changed. And that one . . . incredible, he was so handsome – he still is, so why does he look so grubby and dishevelled in the picture, like a student’s dormitory room that for a month no one has lifted a finger to clean or tidy? And here’s Siham . . .’ I gaze at her image for a long time, and see us together in Qanatir Prison, reciting a French poem we’d both memorised in primary school:

  Le petit cheval dans le mauvais temps, qu’il avait donc du courage!

  C’était un petit cheval blanc

  Il n’y avait jamais de beau temps dans ce pauvre paysage

  Il n’y avait jamais de printemps, ni derrière ni devant.

  We take turns reciting the lines of the poem. One of the women on our cellblock objects, ‘We don’t understand!’ Siham translates: ‘A little white horse.’ ‘A colt,’ I put in. She says, ‘A brave white colt, they’re behind him and he’s in front.’ I say, ‘All of them are behind, and he’s in the vanguard.’ Together we finish translating the poem, or interpreting the lines when they’re too hard to translate.

  Chapter eleven

  Incongruities

  No one tortured us in prison. We were beaten, we girls, one time: on the day we decided we would refuse to go back to our cells, after a rally protesting the placement of one of our mates with the criminal prisoners. They descended on us with truncheons; some of us suffered bruises or minor wounds. But the era of Abdel Latif Rushdie had passed, or so it seemed to me – this was one of my many naïve notions. (Here is where Foucault’s argument concerning the transition from securing power by means of extreme torture to control by means of the Panopticon represents a European reality, applicable only in part to our own situation, in that for us power is like a thrifty, scrimping housewife, who never gets rid of anything, even if it’s worn out – she keeps her old, used-up things along with whatever new things she has managed to procure, usually in the same drawer, or at best in two adjoining drawers, opening sometimes one, sometimes the other, according to circumstance and need.)

  We were not tortured, because we were students, and the authorities knew how little threat we represented, or because the new president had risen to power only recently, holding the card of democracy: a democracy with teeth, as he once declared, or one whose teeth had been pulled – it hardly matters; what matters is that it was a democracy that permitted the arrest of thousands of students, and occasionally non-students, in the course of a single night, and either punished dissenters with modern batons, different from Abdel Latif Rushdie’s, or brought them baskets full of carrots, and patted them sweetly on the head, so that they took one look and turned into tame rabbits. (And as long as we’re back on the subject of Abdel Latif Rushdie, that ‘Abul Fawares’, the ultimate cavalier, we must mention – though it’s a digression – that he was transferred to Upper Egypt, where he pursued some of his usual methods, ordering his men to beat the soles of a suspect’s feet in front of a crowd of spectators. But the victim was a man of position and good family, and no sooner was the family informed than – before daybreak – they had bombarded the cavalier’s house. The government couldn’t lay hands on those who had perpetrated the killing of its personal cavalier, whom it had mounted upon its own horse. My paternal aunt recounted this incident to me, and then later I confirmed the accuracy of the details she had related, when a former detainee, one of my father’s colleagues, offered them up in a book he wrote.)

  Abdel Latif Rushdie did not break us – he was off the set. Nor did the milder versions, those who took his place in the seventies, break us. What, then, broke us? And how?

  The question that preoccupies Arwa – between two suicide attempts (the one that failed, when she threw herself into the Nile but was rescued, and the second, when she jumped from the twelfth floor) – is a similar one she takes up in the context of what she calls the attempt to identify both our ‘true image’ and the reasons for the ‘aborted dream’. She talks about the defiance of that group of boys and girls who set out on their noble mission one morning, answering ‘history’s summons’, wishing to ‘adjust the scales’, raising the banner of the ‘dream of collective liberation’, convinced they were a collective who were partaking together of the grand march that ‘traversed the ages’, ‘toward fraternity, equality, justice, and fulfilment’. What happened to them, then, that in the end they were merely a generation come ‘before their time’ (that’s the title of her book), living lives of isolation, despair, impotence and flaccidity, or else of nihilism, stripped of all morality
? What happened between that exuberant moment of setting off to realise the noble dream, and the final moment of abandoning the dream to a life of ‘wholesale destruction’, where they became ‘like mummies that, suddenly exposed to the sun, crumbled into dust’?

  Arwa talks about the moment that empowered the students to announce their defiance, seeing it as a tragic moment, in spite of everything, because the establishment – armed with ‘a long history of autocracy and the prerogative of word, deed, and thought’ – had been on the point of taking the populace altogether on a different path, reducing it to a state of murderous mayhem, with society following submissively, disempowered and helpless, for ‘it had no foot free, with which to keep its balance’. During the collapse, the situation and its rules changed, and ‘the struggle reached a new level too fierce to be led by students’.

  I don’t know how comprehensive this answer is, as for the most part I am afraid of broad generalisations – that is, of absolute judgements or conclusive answers in matters relating to the history of an epoch or the exertions of a generation. All I have to go by is what I saw with my own eyes: a wave that swelled and receded. And because we were young, we saw in the wave only what the young see. We started out laughing, roused by the unexpected sport. Then we held our breath and plunged into the depths; one moment the waters closed over us and the next we raised our heads and took a deep breath, confident, declaring that we were the most capable of winning the contest. Then we would swim on, laughing, jumping, diving, surfacing, playing in the water. As the sun tanned our skin, we found ourselves and each other that much more robust and beautiful.

  Hazem is irritated by what I say, finds my words provoking; he remarks acidly, ‘Fill in the picture, Sitt Nada: the young people on the beach at night, alone, naked, and frightened, the whirlpools that can drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, the sinking ships! I can’t take your overwrought fantasies. It’s not about a bunch of children, the ocean, people feeling sad. The reality is more complex and more cruel – besides, we were never that innocent. The difficulty and guile of the surrounding circumstances were more than we could handle, it’s true, but we, despite all the good intentions and the splendour of our collective efforts, were corrupted by a thousand things: from the little shops that treated the street like a puppet show whose strings they could pull, to the deep-rooted ignorance and stupidity, the miscalculations, and the high-handedness of mini-generals.’