Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  And Shazli? An odd coincidence. An unexpected encounter in Prague. He said he was working in tourism. ‘What are you doing in the tourist business?’ He was pleased with himself, driving a fancy car, smartly dressed. Perhaps he wanted to dazzle me with his newfound wealth, or perhaps he imagined that I would regret not having accompanied him in his triumphal march. I had escaped – my God, but I had escaped! Why is it that we credit Lady Fortuna only with the catastrophes? Why not give her her due, when at a stroke she saves us from breaking our necks?

  But there’s no place for Fortuna here: it was something of reason, common sense, intuition, the intelligence of the heart. I took to my heels and ran. Arwa could have run – why didn’t she? Her legs betrayed her. She was ill, so how could she run? Perhaps she was influenced by the words of that French thinker who saw, in suicide, the attainment of a great person’s victory, an event rather like a grand play without an audience.

  And Siham? She withdrew to her room, a small room, two-and-a-half metres square, a solitary confinement in which she spent twenty years. Meditating. In torment. Reconsidering. Looking for a way out, at one time thinking, ‘I will assemble that book in which, without a doubt, there will be a path for the godly’; at another time beseeching, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’ Back and forth, back and forth, until the search exhausted her and she surrendered to fatigue and quietly passed away. I often find upon my lips the words, ‘Forgive us, Siham.’ I said to my mother as I stood upon her grave, ‘Forgive me.’ I had left her to die alone, far away. I close my eyes and I see her at the great demonstration on the thirteenth of May 1968, walking amidst men and women with their hands joined, advancing in a row as wide as the street, with lines of marchers extending all the way from the Place de la République to the Latin Quarter. I still don’t understand why my father said she was an anarchist, or why they separated, she a beautiful woman and he a fine man. I see a three-year-old girl insisting that they swing her, her mother taking her by the feet and her father grasping her under the arm so that she stretches like a bridge between them, and they swing her. The girl laughs, laughs loudly and long, and when they stop and put her back down on the ground she says, ‘Again!’

  A girl coming home from school goes in and joins her parents – a big girl now, in middle school, she shows them her composition book and the final grade she has received for it. The important part is the teacher’s comment: ‘I have never given a final grade for expression – this is the first time, and Nada has achieved it.’ One ought to be delighted, to laugh, but modesty calls for something else. The girl settles for a smile.

  I look at the two women sitting across the aisle, who are exchanging whispered conversation – I wonder what they are saying? I go back to stealing glances at them and notice that each of them has, at the same moment, drawn from her bag a ball of wool yarn. The severe woman’s is dark grey, while the genial woman’s is blue, somewhere between sky-blue and sea-blue. Next appear two pairs of knitting needles, to each of which is attached a swatch of worked wool already done and settled in the women’s laps. Rapidly and mechanically they begin moving their hands and arms, each pair of knitting needles likewise active as they work.

  I look at my watch. I look out of the window. I draw from my bag a book in French I had begun to read two days earlier, in which the author recorded his experience at Tazmamart Prison, in the southern desert of Morocco. There were fifty-eight men from the officer corps and the rank and file of the Moroccan military who had been imprisoned on a charge of attempted coup d’état against the king. Upon their release, after the eighteen years of solitary confinement imposed on each man, only twenty-eight of them had emerged from the prison. Thirty detainees at Tazmamart died. They died from torture, hunger, illness, and madness. Some of them died of disabling diseases in their solitary cells where there was no one to help them eat or go to the toilet or wash. I had stood in the classroom where Ahmad Marzouki, author of the book and former inmate at Tazmamart, told of Lieutenant Shamsi, who, after years of incarceration, took to beating his head against the bars, calling the names of his daughter and his mother, and he kept calling them until he died. I open the book to the page where I left off. I can’t find it in myself to read. I think, ‘I’m going to see my aunt.’ I close the book and put it back in my bag.

  I see my aunt spreading her arms wide and enfolding me. I kiss her head. I say, ‘I’ll be staying with you for two weeks, Aunt.’ I look at my watch. I steal a glance at the two women, now completely absorbed in their knitting, not exchanging a word, not looking at the wool in their hands, just continuing to work on it. The severe woman’s face is rigid and harsh, like a face without eyes or ears, while the plump woman’s face is cheerful, overflowing with tenderness, as if she were listening attentively to someone telling her a moving story.

  I look again at my watch. ‘Almost there,’ I murmur.

  Epilogue

  Farag

  The occupant of cell number ten at Tazmamart Prison tells us of a memorable day that the inmates of cellblock number two witnessed – it turned their lives upside-down.

  A few months before that day, a flock of wild doves had alighted on the prison, on the roof of which a dovecote had been constructed. The inmates greeted this news with mixed reactions. Some were fearful of ill omen, certain that wild doves lived only on grave-sites, among ruins, and in desolate places – they referred to popularly held belief to the effect that doves bring death in their wake. Others were fearful that the doves’ chicks would attract snakes. Still others were hopeful, and reminded their cohorts of Noah’s dove, the olive branch, and the good tidings it brought.

  Then on the second of August the inmates heard the sound of something falling from the roof. Those who were still able to move about and walk approached the doors of their cells and looked out through the slit. They saw a spot of white on the floor of the corridor, which they surmised was a bit of cement dropped by the guard, or it might be a snake – was there such a thing as a white snake? When the guard opened the cell doors to distribute the daily ration of water, Marzouki reached out quickly and seized the white object before the guard could catch him at it.

  The guard locked the cell and left.

  Marzouki cried, ‘It’s a dove chick!’

  The news flew to each man in his cell – from cell to cell, and then came the details: It was nearly naked apart from its downy fluff. Its feathers were new and tiny, and only on its back. It was trembling. Its leg was bent and its head drooped on its breast. Its heart was beating, beating intensely. There was a swelling on its side. It had fallen a long way – it was about four metres from the prison roof to the floor.

  Marzouki called out, ‘I’m naming him “Farag!” ’

  Marzouki poured a little water for it into a plastic dish and watched it drink. Then he crumbled a bit of bread for it, which its tiny beak couldn’t pick up.

  As Marzouki tells it, ‘From that day forward, everything I set out to do was altered. There was no longer anything that so preoccupied me as the dove chick’s well being. In this regard the most delicate and fragile of all concerns was its nourishment. I would take a piece of bread, moisten it with a few drops of water, break it into bits and knead them into something resembling grains of wheat, then leave them to dry for several hours. So that the chick might eat, I would grasp its back carefully, open its beak with my right thumb and index finger, and introduce two or three pellets of that artificial grain. It would readily swallow the stuff, beating its wings and cheeping, asking for more. Its shrill chirping could be heard by inmates of the most distant cells, who all called out, “Bon appétit, Farag!” ’

  Marzouki took to subtracting from his own scant meals whatever was necessary: peas, lentils, fava beans, and tea – which Farag especially loved and accepted with alacrity. Inmates of the other cells sent along whatever they could. It was good food; Marzouki contented himself with intensely savouring its aroma, but did not permit himself to eat any of it. Farag cam
e to have three meals a day, then four, then five.

  Marzouki writes, ‘Days passed in this way, and Farag grew marvellously: his beak got stronger, and in place of down grew beautiful grey feathers; a white patch took shape distinctly on his back and his leg healed completely. Then one day he turned toward his food and ate on his own. After that he was able to climb up onto the cement bench. I felt like a father – I took to spending my time contemplating him in wonder. On another day, in one go, he flapped his wings and alighted on my shoulder. I let the other inmates know, and they whooped with joy – even those who were semi-paralysed – and called out to him, each from the other side of his cell wall, congratulating him.’

  They all began discussing Farag’s future. Should they release him in the corridor dividing the cells? What if the guards caught him and killed him?

  The majority decided that this was a risk worth taking.

  The inmates assembled, each taking a position behind the opening in his cell door, and they observed as Marzouki attempted to release Farag from the narrow slit in his own door. When he had successfully accomplished his mission, they saw that Farag was frightened for some moments, beating his wings tremulously in alarm, before he took off in flight; the men cheered and applauded him, raising up their mingled shouts of encouragement. It seemed then that their fervour touched Farag himself, for he took flight in the corridor, swooping back and forth, all eyes upon him – they had even stuck their hands out through the openings in the cell doors, and eventually Farag landed upon one of those hands outstretched toward him. The inmates cried out in exultation. Farag looked at Marzouki, then flew toward him, alighting on his hand. Marzouki drew him inside carefully, an hour before the guards were to make their rounds. After the guards left, the inmates called for Farag.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Let him out!’

  Once again their hands reached out. Shouts of enthusiasm and delight were intermingled with exhortations, ‘Come here, Farag – here, over here, come to me!’

  Because Farag was important to all of them, the inmates decided that he would have his own special account, and so each of them paid into it what he could; through the agency of a co-operative guard they were able to purchase grain necessary to feed him. When he became ill, for him they dissolved in water those tablets that came so dear in prison: lozenges of aspirin and vitamin-C.

  On a Tuesday, Marzouki recalls, with the help of a friend of his, he undertook, by means of a complicated procedure, to release Farag altogether from the prison building.

  When he announced the news the other inmates were furious. ‘You had no right to do that,’ said one of them. ‘You should have told us first. I won’t ever forgive you for what you’ve done – you’ve broken my heart!’

  The day passed in silence, and the night likewise.

  Then in the morning someone cried out, ‘Farag’s not gone! It seems he spent his night under the roof of Building One, and that he’s looking for your cell!’

  The bird enjoyed a hero’s reception.

  Farag began coming and going. The prisoners kept tabs on what they took to be his battles with other doves. They saw his feathers scattering and falling before their eyes. ‘Persevere!’ they shouted, ‘Keep at it!’ ‘He’s dead,’ they declared, then, ‘No, he’s fine,’ they said. He came back to them exhausted, feathers plucked out, after his first attempts at life on his own. The third time Farag went out he was gone for a week; then he returned and tried to get back inside. The inmates addressed themselves to him: ‘Take heart, Farag. Get your head in through the bars, then your body, and there’s an end of it.’ On the final occasion, with the help of a broom handle, an inmate succeeded in getting Farag outside the building’s bars. Again he came back, and this time he wasn’t alone. Accompanying him was a mate, an elegant she-dove, as Marzouki saw her. He wrote, ‘She was slender, with a small head and gleaming feathers – a beautiful female.’ This time Farag didn’t try to get in. He was puffed up with pride and self-confidence. His mate took fright from the shouting, and flew off. Farag stayed behind a little while, then caught up with her.

  Marzouki says at the end of this chapter of his book, Tazmamart, Cell 10:

  Farag built himself a nest beneath the roof, opposite cell number ten, and produced three broods of chicks.

  On the day of our departure, the fifteenth of September 1995, though it was difficult for me to move, and despite my tremendous excitement as they removed me from the cell I had entered eighteen years earlier, I paused to look toward the roof. ‘Farewell,’ I murmured, ‘and thank you.’

  A Note on the Author

  Radwa Ashour is an Egyptian writer and scholar born in 1946. She is the author of numerous novels, short story collections and academic works and contributed to the essay collection Reflections on Islamic Art. A long-time professor of English literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, she holds a PhD in African-American literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She lives in Cairo and is married to Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti.

  A Note on the Translator

  Barbara Romaine has previously translated three novels, including two by Radwa Ashour, as well as Bahaa Taher’s Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery. She has also published shorter pieces by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed Qandil, and translated some selections from classical Arabic poetry, which are forthcoming in literary journals. In 2011 her translation of Ashour’s novel Spectres was runner-up in the competition for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

  First published in English in 2014 by

  Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing

  Qatar Foundation

  PO Box 5825

  Doha

  Qatar

  www.bqfp.com.qa

  First published in Arabic in 2008 as Farag by Dar el Shorouk

  Copyright © Radwa Ashour, 2008

  Translation © Barbara Romaine, 2014

  Paul Fort, « Complainte du petit cheval blanc »,

  Ballades françaises © Flammarion

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN 9789927101250

  Blue Lorries is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.