by Radwa Ashour
I didn’t bring the subject up again. I settled for confirming with her that she was to take her annual holiday from her job during the same period that we would be there.
As far as she knew I had dropped the idea of visiting the village. I hadn’t, though.
It took months to get ready for the trip, since it wasn’t a matter only of obtaining visas and buying airline tickets, but also of a kind of research and investigation – it made me feel like Christopher Columbus, about to set off on a journey to change history and geography, as well as the fates of millions of human beings. I would laugh at myself while I conducted my research by letter and fax, making telephone calls to put questions to friends and acquaintances and tourist agents. My mother’s village was in Haute-Savoie, on the border of France and Switzerland, and before setting out I had to find out which would be the best, simplest, and most economical way to travel: to go by train from Paris to Douvaine, then by taxi to the village; or travel to Thonon – a neighbouring village, accessible by train, situated on Lac Léman – from which we could take a ferry to my mother’s village; or to travel from Paris to Geneva, and from there cross the border back into France on our approach to the village. I needed maps, as well as information on distances and train routes – and the Internet era had not yet made its appearance, with the answers to all my questions to be found among its vast offerings or by sending a number of e-mail messages to people I might or might not know. I spent days and nights inquiring, gathering information, comparing, calculating, and, setting up budgets, and then replacing one budget with another. At last I made a decision – which, in its turn, required further arrangements: to register in a driving school and then apply for an Egyptian driving licence, which would in turn enable me to acquire an international driving licence.
Appropriate arrangements were made for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. It was going to be a surprise, which would please her, just as visiting her village after so many years away from it would please her. She would see the house in which she had been born, the streets she had trodden in her girlhood, the lake she had swum in, the beach on which she had raced on her bicycle with a boy or girl her age. She would say, ‘Here . . . in this spot . . . in this corner . . . on this hill . . . your grandfather was sitting here when . . . and your grandmother was standing there on the day that . . .’ My imagination ran ahead of the visit, racing toward it, elated at the gift I was giving my mother, and longing for what I had not lived of my mother’s childhood and her personal history.
It was a fiasco from the start.
My mother, when I revealed to her my planned itinerary, said, ‘We can leave the twins in Paris – we’ll only be gone five days!’
At that moment the child I had been reared her head. She was ready to scream at my mother that she was heartless and mad. I scolded the child, ‘Shame on you, you little devil!’ and answered my mother calmly, ‘The twins are only nine years old and they don’t speak French. What you’re suggesting is impractical.’
She added insult to injury. ‘You’re doubling your expenses unnecessarily. It would have been better not to bring them with you to France, since you have this idea of going to Yvoire.’
I paid no attention to what she’d said. I began telling her all about the arrangements and the plan, but she wasn’t listening.
Then the express train to Geneva: four hours. One night in a Geneva hotel. In the morning, a rental car, which I drove over the border to Yvoire. Two nights in a hotel and a day in Annecy. Back to Geneva, and another night in a hotel. In the morning, the train back to Paris.
My mother spoiled the trip. She spoiled it deliberately and systematically. She ruined every aspect of it, every single day of it, wilfully, as if she had made an earnest decision to do so, then put it into action, exerting her efforts to the utmost degree in order to carry out her purpose. I bear witness that she succeeded magnificently in this. When we got back to Paris, she and I quarrelled bitterly. She said that, for me, the trip to Yvoire had been merely a sightseeing tour. She said, ‘You chose a tourist town that would amuse you and the twins to visit.’ Her words were inordinately cruel. She added, ‘I can’t put up with the twins any longer – it’s annoying to me, having them here!’
I took the twins and went to a hotel, and didn’t see her again until a few hours before we left France, to say goodbye.
I travelled for the last time from Cairo to France in haste, because my mother was in the hospital. I attended her for a week. I kissed her forehead and her hands and went on kissing them. I kept saying, ‘Don’t be angry with me!’ She smiled weakly and said, ‘C’est la vie.’ Then she added, ‘Life is strange!’ The following three days I visited her in the intensive care unit. I wasn’t allowed to go in. I would stand in the doorway, despite the amazement of the doctors and the hospital staff.
And then she died.
I spent a week in her flat, sleeping in her bed, bathing with her soap, drying myself with towels she had used, and eating from tins she had bought. For the first four days that was all I did. On the fifth day, although I hadn’t set an alarm clock, I was roused from sleep as if an alarm had woken me. I said to myself, ‘There are only two more days.’ I began organising her things: her clothes, her underwear, her towels and bed linen. I folded everything and put it in a large cardboard box. I put shoes and handbags into another, smaller box. I put books into a third box. Then I transferred them one by one to a huge receptacle, in a nearby street, bearing the name of a charity organisation. On the way back home I bought a sandwich, a bottle of juice, and an orange. I put them in the kitchen and began on the papers and photographs: my mother’s birth certificate and those of her parents; her marriage licence and divorce certificate, her identity card, her passport, her ATM card, and her health insurance card. I put all this into a folder and turned to the photographs: pictures of her, of us, of my father, and of her mother and father; pictures from Paris, from Yvoire – her birthplace – in Annecy, where she had taken trips with her classmates; pictures from Cairo and Alexandria and pictures from the village, with my grandmother and my aunt. I carefully wrapped the photographs in a handkerchief and consigned them to another folder. Then I turned to the letters: letters from her parents and from friends, papers in her handwriting and a medium-sized journal in which she had kept some notes – sporadic ones that she would begin writing and then stop. I placed the papers in a leather portfolio and put it with the two folders into the hand-luggage I had brought with me to carry on the aeroplane. To these things I added her two pairs of prescription glasses. In the bag with my clothing I put three of her dresses that I had always loved to see her wear, one of her bed sheets, a headscarf, and a shawl she had used during my previous visit to her. I added five of her books, and then packed my clothes. I ate the sandwich and the orange, and drank the juice. I sat in front of the television, where I drifted off to sleep lying fully-clothed on the sofa, and didn’t awaken until morning.
I made myself a cup of coffee, which I drank with what was left of some pieces of toast that I found in the kitchen. Then I started on her bedroom. I swept the room, washed the window and its wooden shutters; I polished the bed-frame, the wardrobe, and the dressing table; and I sprayed the mirror with glass-cleaner and scoured it. Then I resumed my assault on the sitting room. After that I moved on to the bathroom. I washed down the walls, the bathtub, the sink, and a glass shelf on which partially used bottles of liquid soap and various creams rested; having finished with that, I scrubbed the floor. Then the kitchen: the refrigerator, the wooden cupboard, the round table, the two windows, the floor, and the walls.
When I was finished, I looked around at the flat. ‘She’d be happy with these results,’ I murmured. I considered going out to get dinner, then thought better of it. The idea of going out and walking to a restaurant seemed more uncomfortable than going hungry. I went into her bedroom, got into bed, and slept.
In the morning, I left the flat. I turned over the key to the doorman, made my way to the Met
ro station, and from there to the airport.
Hamdiya chided me for coming home in brown trousers and a yellow blouse. ‘It won’t do,’ she said. She bought me some black clothes and insisted that we hold a night of mourning. She said, ‘You announce it in the paper, receive whoever attends, and Nadir and Nadeem stand with you to receive condolences on the death of their grandmother. (I was startled that she should come to this simple and spontaneous conclusion that my mother was their grandmother.) She said, ‘We’ll distribute alms for her soul – did she convert to Islam?’ I didn’t reply, because I didn’t know. My silence made Hamdiya uncomfortable. ‘I’m asking you,’ she explained, ‘so that I’ll know, if she did convert, to play a recording of the Qur’an during the mourning. I think it would be appropriate, even if she didn’t convert – we should recite from the Qur’an for her and pray for mercy on her soul.’
That year I was stricken by the first of my bouts of depression.
Chapter seventeen
The unfinished letter
I didn’t notice the letter was there until after I got back to Cairo. I was sorting the papers and filing them in folders, so as to preserve them, and it caught my attention. How odd: a letter from my mother, addressed to me, that she had never sent, or even finished, although it was exceptionally long. The date at the top indicated that she had written it about two months after that catastrophic trip I had dreamed would make her happy, but which instead became an ordeal for me and for her. I wondered, why didn’t she send it? Why didn’t she finish it?
My mother wrote:
Dear Nada,
No doubt you remember that extraordinary night when Gamal Abdel Nasser resigned in a speech that was broadcast live on television. You remember how your father wept, certainly, but I don’t know whether you remember what he said to me when I told him I didn’t understand why he was crying over a man who had sentenced him to five years in prison. He shouted at me that I was blind, and he stormed out. You may not remember his saying these words, but he did. To me, those words were the final and irreversible separation between us. The differences between us, and our continual rows, were, for me at least, open to negotiation and reconsideration – differences that didn’t mean the end of the world or of our relationship. But when he told me I was blind I knew immediately that our relationship was over, not because I was angry at some insult he’d flung in my face, but because I was convinced that I could never see what he saw: and I think when something like this happens it means that the break has come, and that any subsequent attempt to make it up will be merely redundant.
I left Cairo with so much heavy baggage, I don’t know how I was able to carry it. I was going alone, leaving behind me my only daughter, the man I had loved and a relationship upon which my world was founded – I left all these behind me like a house destroyed by an earthquake. Then, too, there was one other bag I carried that was perhaps heavier than all the others. I was wondering: Am I blind? And if I am blind, then is this blindness an inherent defect over which I have no control, or is that I didn’t know, or couldn’t find a way, to look and to see? It may seem like a silly or trivial question, but it continued to dog me for months, perhaps years. I don’t know Arabic. I lived for years in Egypt, and I was unable to speak the Arabic language, much less master it. I didn’t understand your grandmother or your aunt, I didn’t altogether understand the neighbours, and among Egyptian women I had no close friend. I was on amicable terms with many of them, but I lived in a state of peculiar disorientation, which no doubt I will describe to you in detail someday.
I’m a village girl, Nada, from a border town a long way from Paris. You know this. You also know that I come from a family of fishermen: my father and grandfathers were fishermen – which is to say, we were never wealthy, never noted for anything of consequence. (Perhaps it was a shared feeling of alienation that brought your father and me together – initially, I mean. My words may be imprecise; I was struck by the handsome figure he cut, and he said that he likewise found me pretty, but I feel sure that some sense of dislocation drew us to each other.) I fell in love with your father, and so we married and moved to Egypt.
Even now I don’t completely understand how people saw me, or the ways in which they dealt with me. I found myself all at once in an unfamiliar situation. I wasn’t Madeleine the village girl, a typist who lived in Paris among the marginalised; rather I was Madame Selim, the Frenchwoman, wife of the university professor – even if he was in prison – teacher of French at a school whose pupils were mostly daughters of the upper class. Suddenly I was possessed of a kind of authority – it was like a cloak that had been thrown over my body. I saw other Frenchwomen in Egypt, wearing the same cloak and proud of it as if it were an expensive fur coat. As far as I was concerned, the cloak was more like a coat of thorns – or let me call it, rather, a strange garment that made me uncomfortable because I didn’t recognise myself in it. All that remained to me was my relationship with your father. And when he told me I was blind, there was nothing left to induce me to persevere. I left, only to discover afterward that a world, whether here or there, no longer existed for me. I discovered that, even after years of separation from the man I loved, his marriage to another woman angered me, and his having children with her angered me still more. There he was, falling in love, getting married, and having children, while at the same time he still stood as an obstacle between me and everyone else. I had no luck forming any comparable relationship with another man. He ruined my life, but here’s the paradox: He ruined it after we separated, not before. This is a long story, at any rate, that I don’t want to go into. I got caught up in my reminiscences, and have written things I didn’t mean to write, entangled in my own words, on subjects I didn’t and don’t want to discuss.
Meaning to please me, you paid more than you could afford so that we might go to Yvoire. I should have told you candidly that I didn’t want to go. Yes, I was frightened of that journey. But I also wanted it – otherwise, how do you explain my having gone along with your insistence and submitted to the temptation of returning to Yvoire, even though I was apprehensive about it?
My previous visit to the village had been painful beyond imagining. I hadn’t yet recovered from that pain, or become reconciled to the reality that my village – that familiar realm minutely connected in a thousand ways to my childhood and youth – had metamorphosed into something resembling a railway station, or a marketplace well-trodden by the feet of people passing through, or a tourist resort accessible to anyone having the price of admission. The great big tourist buses were the first thing I saw when I came in sight of the village: a suitable prelude to what I would see moments later in the village itself. The place had changed, utterly changed. The narrow, cobblestone streets remained the same as they’d always been; the houses still stood, as ever at close quarters; the old fortress; the church; the lake – all attesting that this was Yvoire and not some other village, but it had become a different village, taken over by hordes of tourists who filled the streets and alleyways with their languages and loud voices and the flashes of the cameras slung around their necks, until it was time for them to move on to the next village on their holiday itinerary. Chic restaurants and cafés for an affluent clientele. And to top it all off, I couldn’t find the way to our house. How could that be? I passed the house twice without recognising it, and was disoriented for a moment, finding everything thrown into confusion. I went back to where the house should be. ‘Here is our house,’ I said. But where? Before me was one of those souvenir shops catering to the tourists. Then I caught sight of my mother: ample, smiling, doing a brisk trade with the tourists. I went in and hugged her, but we had no chance to exchange more than a few words, for the tourists were waiting, holding colourful postcards or clutching wooden dolls they wanted to buy, or looking to ask the price of some memento or other. I left her to carry on her business with the tourists, and went into the house to see my father. Where had the house gone? It had been eaten by a wolf. The façade
of the house, two of its rooms, and the little garden, once my father’s refuge after he retired from fishing, had been appropriated by the shop and its rose-bedecked entryway. The wolf had left only one gloomy room leading onto a small kitchen, and the toilet. ‘How does Papa spend his days, Mama?’ She said with a dismissive gesture, ‘He’s always complaining, but I’m busy with the shop.’
I foresaw that it would be painful to go back again, and yet I was unable to resist. I accepted your invitation, and so we went. It wasn’t my intention to give voice to my distress or pass it along to you. I said to myself, ‘Nada won’t notice anything.’ I made up my mind that my previous visit must have been tantamount to an immunisation, at least to some degree, and that this would enable me to contain my reactions. How did things get out of control? This whole letter, Nada, as I hope you have inferred, is an attempt to explain why the situation got away from me. No, it wasn’t because my father, and then after him my mother, had died, but because this time I went back to the village bringing tourists with me. I’m not criticising you – I swear that I’m not criticising you. That beautiful village on the shores of Lac Léman – I was paying it a fleeting visit. I read in the tourist literature about a magnificent garden called ‘The Garden of the Five Senses’. I said to myself, ‘My daughter is blind.’ Now, two months after the fact, I declare that anyone who is ignorant of a place is blind – no more, no less. And when I say ‘ignorant of a place’ I’m not talking about a road map or where the route begins and ends, but about a place that is specific to us, in which our own story resides, and which houses our five senses. I must admit, the presence of the twins exacerbated the difficulty. I couldn’t endure their noise and their demands; I hadn’t, in the first place, been able to accept that they were the children of another woman with whom my husband had been intimate.