by Radwa Ashour
In short, Nada, the trip was a disaster because I knew for certain then that my alienation was total, whether in Yvoire, in Paris, or in Cairo. It was clear that, unwittingly – in a way it was sheer madness – I had made up my mind and decided to go with you to Yvoire, fortified by your presence, as if your being with me would dissipate some of the sense of alienation, and relieve me of it. But I saw my daughter as a tourist in my own birthplace, and I lost my reason.
I’ll leave this letter now and finish it tomorrow, or the day after.
My mother didn’t finish the letter the following day or on any subsequent day. She left it incomplete, and thus I would never have an opportunity to read it except after her death.
I folded the letter, and left the house.
Chapter eighteen
The twins
When the twins were small, Hamdiya tended to buy matching garments for them, but I pointed out to her that it would be better to buy them each different clothes. They became accustomed to this, and, as they grew older, each of them would choose according to his own taste and inclination. They looked similar, although they were not identical: brothers joined by blood and genetic background and by whatever stimuli they were both exposed to every day – the same kindergarten, school, classroom, teachers, classmates, friends, and daily routine. And because human beings are like mirrors, the features of one person reflected to a considerable degree in those of the next, Nadir and Nadeem looked more alike than they actually were. Nadir was not as tall as his brother, his complexion and his eyes were darker, and his hair was coarser. It was easy to tell that they were twins until they got to high school. Thereafter they differed more, for Nadir chose to grow a moustache and a close-trimmed beard, which covered his whole chin and made him look rather like a young French writer of the late nineteenth century. His brother’s moustache, on the other hand, stayed downy until he went to university. When his facial hair began to grow thicker after that he would shave every day. Their voices were very similar, identical in timbre, so that neither Hamdiya nor I could distinguish between them at the start of a telephone conversation, or when one of them called from the bathroom to ask for a towel. Beyond that it was possible to tell the difference, because each had a particular rhythm to his speech.
It is my conviction that seeds sprout by their own inscrutable law, their own particular logic as regards both nature and nurture. From me the twins got their sense of irony and their scepticism, which I resolutely insist are characteristics of intelligence. Nadir, though – the elder by twenty minutes – was more bitingly ironic than the source of his instruction. Perhaps it was the era he grew up in that induced him to look at the world with a cynical and unforgiving eye. And yet his era was also his brother’s – what about that? Nadir would startle me with his ideas:
‘I’m going to study computer engineering. There’s a demand for it in the labour market. If I do well, I can work for Microsoft, and go and live abroad.’
Troubled, I refrained from comment. I turned to Nadeem, who said, ‘I’m going to study architecture.’
The boys graduated from high school. I had promised to take them to Paris if they did well. I didn’t say that I would have taken them regardless of their performance, superior or not. I had a pressing desire to visit my mother’s grave, and I didn’t want to go alone.
Life is so strange, so bizarre – is it by strength or by selfishness that one prevails? As soon as we arrived in Paris we went together to visit the cemetery. I regretted bringing Nadir and Nadeem with me. I tried to hold myself back, but my resistance was in vain – I began to weep. I wept until Nadeem turned his face away to hide his own tears from me and from Nadir.
Nadir played the clown on our way back, telling comical anecdotes – the story of a fellow who said this, and a girl who did that, and a day when such-and-such happened, and another day when – scarcely stopping for breath as he leapt from one story to another, until he managed to get the result he was looking for: by the time we stopped for dinner before arriving back home, we were chatting as usual.
Before we left, I went back to visit my mother. I didn’t cry. I engaged her in a long conversation – any passerby who saw me would have concluded that here was a woman who had lost her mind. I talked at length about her, myself, and my father. Also about Hamdiya and the boys. I said, ‘You didn’t accept them, but they are your grandsons – they know your name, what you look like, and the things you’ve said. They know about the fat woman you were talking with on the train, the quarrel that arose between you and my aunt and ended with a severing of relations. They know how you respond when you are possessed by anger, what you do when you give way to sweetness and your good nature wins out against whatever caused the tension. They came to visit you, just as they go every year to visit their father’s grave in Upper Egypt, and one day they may come when I’m gone, and ease your loneliness by talking to you about me and about my father, gathering our three graves together into one, dispersed though they may be.’
I told her, ‘I forgave you for moving to Paris. I didn’t realise at first how angry and upset I was about that move. When I did acknowledge it, I was past being angry, and I forgave you.’
I made no allusion to her unfinished letter. ‘If I do that,’ I said to myself, ‘it will open up an expanse of pain she doesn’t need.’ I thought, ‘I’ll entertain her by talking instead.’
I told her about all the new things that had happened since she died.
I thought I would amuse her. I told her the story of the odd passion that had burned for three days.
‘I descended on him as if by parachute. So, without any previous introduction, he found a woman, younger than he by no fewer than twenty years, standing before him and inviting him to dinner. He suppressed his surprise and embarrassment with a smile that robbed me of whatever good sense I had left. When he said, “Well then, shall we meet at such-and-such a time?” I stood on tiptoe and planted a swift kiss on his right cheek. I left him standing there rooted to the spot, and dashed to the shops. I bought a maroon silk dress. I scurried from there to a shoe shop and made my purchase: a pair of shiny black spike-heeled pumps such as you might have seen on the feet of Claudia Cardinale when she went to dinner with Marcello Mastroianni. From there I hurried to the hairdresser’s salon and had my ponytail replaced with a luxuriant, shoulder-length wave. You wouldn’t have recognised me! Nor did I recognise myself, for, having taken off my trousers, blouse, and trainers and put on the dress, which was sleeveless and low-cut, while my newly-styled hair covered my shoulders. I looked in the mirror, gasped, and then burst into laughter, exclaiming, “All this because of a voice?”
‘I haven’t told you that the seduction had been in his voice, entirely. I was sitting, just as I had sat a thousand times before, in the translation booth assigned to me. I was to translate his presentation, and I knew nothing about him but his name.
‘I jumped when I heard his voice. At first it seemed to be my father’s voice, but then I observed the difference between the two. This man’s voice was more mellifluous – finer or stronger or deeper, or maybe it was his way of speaking that made his voice more beautiful: the rhythm of his speech, or the words themselves. I had to stay with him, doing simultaneous translation. This was quite a predicament, one I had never found myself in before. My heart beat rapidly, my palms were sweaty, and I struggled terribly to carry on translating as if nothing had happened.
‘In Arabic, Mama, when we say that it was as if a bird had landed on someone’s head, we are describing a person in a state of mute astonishment, caught by surprise. When I encountered him, a strange bird landed on my head, one that silenced me in his presence; I would listen, studying his face and his physiognomy. No sooner did I part company with him, though, than my strange bird stepped off my head and inhabited me, and I would fly, fly like the bird, whether I was eating, moving from one place to another, or sitting in the translation booth and doing the job I was there for.
‘Three days
, and then we went our separate ways. If it had been other than a fleeting encounter, there would have been an explosion.’ I laughed. ‘The butane gas tanks in the building might have exploded and set fire to the entire street – maybe the whole neighbourhood!’ Still laughing, I added, ‘I sealed off the tanks and opened the windows, and, just in case, I called the fire department and kept the number for the ambulance next to the telephone!’
I told her about how I had turned down a proposal of marriage. Having sprung this on her, I clarified that I was now talking about a different man. I explained the reasons for my refusal. ‘It seems you’re not convinced,’ I said, and proceeded to elaborate on my explanation.’
I said, ‘I’m still gathering material for my book about prison. Someday I’ll write it.’
I said, ‘I miss you – it’s strange how I miss you, because I keep thinking, as I come and go from Cairo, that here it is five years since you left and I must have got used to it. But then here I am now, next to you, and fully cognisant of my need to hold your hand – to take it and hold on as tightly as a child fearful of getting lost, utterly lost, if her hand should slip from yours.’
‘Do you forgive me?’ I said.
‘Good night,’ I said.
On the train going back, I kept blowing my nose. I was perplexed that I had told her ‘Good night,’ when I hadn’t even noticed that the sun had gone down and dusk had fallen.
‘Life is so strange,’ I thought. For during this trip, which I had begun and ended by visiting my mother’s grave, I had laughed with the twins, as I had never laughed in all my life.
Our sojourn in the hotel room seemed rather like a comic play, since, in order to economise, we had stayed all together in one room in a hotel in the rue des Ecoles. With regard to the space it afforded, it wasn’t a bad room, but the en suite bathroom was ridiculously cramped. The toilet was right in front of the door, with no more than two or three feet of space dividing them; also, after relieving oneself, it was necessary to stand up cautiously and bend over slightly, so as not to bump one’s head on the ceiling, and then to contort oneself and incline to the left before opening the door and proceeding carefully so as to avoid colliding with the sink on the right, the bathtub on the left, the toilet behind, or the half-open door in front. Then there was the matter of bathing, which called for still more advanced tactics and strategy. The bathtub was square, with space for one person to stand under the spigot, enclosed on two sides by walls and on the other two by glass panels, one of which was a door that opened only halfway (because of the position of the toilet), such that a person – provided he was not overweight, was humble before God, bowed his head, and raised and lowered his foot cautiously while getting into this square – might accomplish a bath without some frightful accident. There was no such assurance as to the next stage of the process, the business of getting out of the tub: for a section of the towel might fall into the face of the person making the attempt and obstruct his vision, or he might get water in his eyes and have trouble seeing properly. Then the unthinkable might come to pass, and the person would be lucky to do no more than stumble against the toilet, but if he wasn’t so lucky he would collide with the toilet, lose his balance and bump into the glass door, which would send him careening in the direction of the washbasin.
Even with caution and practice, we couldn’t help banging our heads or some part of our bodies as if it was some sort of daily toll, although the payment of it was accompanied by hilarity, laughter, and jokes. ‘Everything okay?’ one of us would ask another, on hearing the other’s sudden exclamation. A voice, pained at first, would reply, ‘Okay!’ And the three of us would laugh, and then laugh some more when we tallied up the bumps and bruises. I announced, ‘I’m more careful than you two – I only bumped my head three times: twice on the first day, and then the third time I was so busy singing I didn’t pay attention.’
‘That’s a skewed analysis!’ Nadeem exclaimed. ‘You’re the shortest and smallest of us, so you’re at less risk of banging into things!’
‘Every time I’ve gone into the bathroom,’ Nadir put in, ‘I’ve felt as though I was in a box and had to adapt myself to its shape! Yesterday, when I left you in the breakfast room and went up to use the toilet, I opened the door and stood there for five minutes calculating the space and considering my own bulk, in an attempt to come up with an idea of the ideal posture for sitting, getting up, going in, and going out. “Moving the shoulders this way,” I thought, “is inadvisable, as is taking a step exceeding such-and-such a length, and when you open the door you should bend your torso to such-and-such an extent!” I told myself, “You’ll make an engineer yet, my boy, unless your calculations are ‘way off!” ’
‘And were they off?’
‘Of course not. I figured it all out, and I haven’t bumped into a single thing since yesterday morning! Now you two can wait and see how it goes!’ Nadir went into the bathroom, and then we heard him yell, even though he made haste to flush the toilet at the same time, so as to disguise his ‘Ouch!’ with the sound of water gushing into the bowl.
We laughed still more when Nadir put the question to us: ‘If Mama were with us, how would she sort herself out in there?’
We were rapt, picturing the situation, and designing strategies whereby Hamdiya – with her height and her substantial girth – might manage to get in and out of the bathroom.
‘She’d have to leave the door open.’
‘No way. She wouldn’t even be able to get past it.’
‘With a bit of effort she could manage it.’
‘And the tub?’
‘She’d have to strike that one from the agenda and settle for washing her face in the washbasin.’
‘How would she do her ablutions at prayer-time? There’s no space for her to raise her leg.’
‘As long as she intended to perform the correct ablution it would be all right. Our religion is meant to enable worship, not impede it!’
This exchange was conducted with all seriousness, not even the ghost of a smile, as if we were gathering and storing our laughter, until the three of us all at once burst into manic guffaws that got us leaping to our feet and clapping hands, our own or each others’.
We laughed in that cramped room, in the glass-fronted breakfast salon that overlooked the rue des Ecoles; we laughed at the offerings of the ‘Continental’ breakfast which, no sooner had we finished it than Nadir demanded, ‘So when can we have breakfast?’ We laughed in the restaurant across from the hotel when we crossed the street to have dinner there. We laughed in the Metro, at the museums, in the street; we laughed when I told them how angry I got with my mother because of what she said to Gérard; we laughed when I said, ‘And what was I hoping for, anyway? That the boy would hold my hand or kiss me on the forehead when he told me goodbye?’
The twins were racing at full speed, as befits eighteen-year-old boys, and I was flying, as a matter of temperament and habit.
Chapter nineteen
An episode
Nadir and Nadeem enrolled in the College of Engineering at Cairo University. Nadir took on extra work and thus earned some money. Sometimes he tutored classmates, and other times he worked at a computer repair shop; during the summer he contracted with a private company and worked throughout the months of his holiday from nine in the morning until nine at night. He seemed happy, so I didn’t interfere. Hamdiya objected that sitting in front of the computer so much was bad for his eyes – it distressed her that he had gone to an eye doctor and discovered that he needed eyeglasses. ‘No one in our family,’ she said anxiously, ‘has had glasses: neither your father nor I, nor Nada nor Nadeem. It’s because of the computer!’
Pretending to be in earnest, Nadir replied, ‘I got my bad eyesight from my French grandmother!’
Nadeem enrolled in the school of architecture, as planned. He threw himself into his studies, which he loved. He did a great deal of reading in the history of art and architecture. During the summer holiday he coul
dn’t find work, but during the summer after his third year his brother recommended that he work with him at the computer company where he himself was employed, and Nadeem agreed to this.
My relations with the twins were smooth and pleasant, and there were no problems in my relationship with Hamdiya. When we disagreed and I lost my temper with her or she talked irrationally, we would quarrel, but in general the row would be a passing thing, lasting no more than a few hours and leaving neither of us with hurt feelings.
Then came the event that broke all the rules.
I was sitting in front of the television. The programme was a talk show featuring a former prisoner I believed was a colleague of my father’s. I called Hamdiya and the boys to listen to the discussion with me. The man (who was close to eighty years old by then) was recalling his fifteen years of incarceration in the military prison, as well as the Citadel, Liman Tora, and Mahariq. He didn’t speak at length about torture, but rather went into detail about the improvements at Mahariq Prison: the theatre they had built, the technical workshop, the newsreels they produced, the educational sessions, the school they set up to teach literacy skills to prison guards who could not read or write, and the pictures that were drawn or engraved by artists upon the prison walls and doors.
The host asked him, ‘You alluded once to the incident when a prisoner bowed his head and licked the dust – do such things really take place inside a prison?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you experience this?’
‘Of course.’
His face registered a calm that was unimaginable to me. Was it old age and the remoteness of the past, or wisdom attained at last?
The announcer asked him, ‘Did your father cry when he saw you, a fine and promising doctor, with your hands in shackles?’