Blue Lorries (15 page)

‘Auntie,’ I said, ‘Salem is six years younger than me.’

‘But he’s a doctor and he’s very good,’ she said. I can’t think of anyone but you who would suit him. What do you say? Shall I fix it?’

‘I’m six years older than he is!’ I repeated.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said. ‘My grandfather, may he rest in peace, at the age of sixty married a virgin forty years his junior – younger than his youngest daughter. She gave him three sons and he lived past the age of ninety. Her whole life, his wife had nothing but good things to say about him. If you like Salem, take him!’

I hugged her and drew her off on another conversational tack, to get away from the subject of marriage. I asked her her views on life, anticipating the pronouncement with which she usually professed a reluctance that did not succeed in hiding her readiness for a conversation she actually found interesting: ‘You ask strange questions, Niece!’ She held back for a few moments, then replied, ‘Life is both wide-open and narrow. When we spend it sowing and reaping, nurturing and raising, picking up and putting down, coming and going, going up and going down, loving and hating, enduring hardship and anticipating relief, it’s wide-open. And as long as we’re in the thick of it, with folks to the right and left of us, on top and underneath, everyone oppressed or overjoyed – everyone in it together – it stays wide-open. But if we stand back, we say it’s as narrow as the eye of a needle, we say, “Why do we live, only to die? Why build when building ends in demolition? Why cultivate what the wind will only take away? Why expand, only to open our hands and find them empty?” I say, when we’re living life, we find it wide-open even if it’s confining, and when we step back and look at it we find it narrow and suffocating, meaningless and pointless. For instance, when I buy chicks and look at them while they’re little with their pretty yellow fluff, and I get to know them, and each chick is delightful, and I feed and water them, clean their pens, and keep company with them every day, watching them grow, my heart leaps. Look, Nada, if you think I buy chicks in order to butcher them after they grow up – me and everyone else – it doesn’t change my pleasure in them or the fact that my heart leaps with tenderness toward them. Having children isn’t like having chicks, and yet it is. I mean, I carry them for nine months, and my soul hangs on the baby, and our Lord takes him. If life didn’t have its hold on me, I wouldn’t conceive, bear, nurture, and rear another child after that. But life takes me and pulls me onward, and I go along with it. It gives, and I’m happy with what it gives; it bestows a second child on me, and a third; a fourth comes and goes, but the fifth stays. Wide and narrow, child of my brother.

‘All my life, my body has given up before my brain. I go to bed because my legs are tired and my body is wrecked. In bed my mind keeps circling, it won’t slow down or settle. When they took your father to prison, I kept thinking – all night long I would lie there thinking. Then I’d get up in the morning feeling suffocated, anxious and miserable. I had no desire to cook, or wash, or say, “Good morning.” I asked him when he got out, “Did they beat you, dear heart?” He said, “They beat us, my sister, but we didn’t give up. We learned, we built, we expanded, and we lived.” Afterward I said to myself, “He was nearby, inside. I was outside, far away, standing on the shore and thinking, he’s drowning, and my heart was distraught, but he was there in the sea, a drowning man, swimming.” ’

Suddenly she smiled. ‘Did you know,’ she asked me, ‘that I wrote a letter to Abdel Nasser while your father was in prison?’

So my aunt, too, has surprises up her sleeve. ‘Did you save a copy of the letter?’ I said.

‘I sent it.’

‘Who wrote it for you?’

She laughed. ‘That’s a long story. I dictated it over and over again. Each time I asked the person who wrote the letter to read it back to me, and there’d be language from the newspapers and the radio. I don’t work for radio or newspapers. They were writing things I hadn’t said – one time it was “Immortal Leader”, another time it was “Commander of the Millions”, and a third time it was some big words I didn’t understand the meaning of. I said, “Look, fellows, that’s not what I said!” Then I called my youngest boy, who was in primary school, and I told him, “Copy what I say, and write it to the letter and the word – write it grammatically, and don’t add or subtract anything.

‘ “Write, my son,” I said to him.

‘ “President Abu Khaled, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of Beni Murr, and President of Egypt and Syria,

“I am sister to Dr Abdel Qadir Selim, who went first to the
kuttab
, then was educated at school, then went to university, then travelled abroad to France to work, in accordance with the word of the Blessed Prophet: ‘Seek ye out knowledge, though it be in China.’ When he brought back the required knowledge and began teaching at the university and doing his part for the good of the country, you put him in prison.

“We are honourable people, we don’t call a dog ‘master’ and we don’t bow our heads except to our Creator, nor do we ask for anything except what is right, and we ask that only of God and the righteous, for respectable persons ask nothing except from those who are also respectable. What I am asking is that the truth be established; I ask for an assurance of honesty from the officer who ordered the arrest of my brother, justice from the judge who ordered his imprisonment, and verification of the papers that were deemed a criminal act on his part, which merited putting him in prison.

“Abu Khaled, I approve you as arbiter, because I approve you as President of the country – how, then, should I not accept your judgement in the matter of my brother?

“The Prophet said, ‘Each of you is a shepherd, and every shepherd is responsible for his flock.’ I am helping you, Abu Khaled, to carry the burden of an unjust judge or an imperious officer. Furthermore, I am helping you because in my brother and all the young men imprisoned with him rests the good of the country – how then can you lock them up and prohibit them from offering their knowledge, for whose sake they exerted themselves, and lived abroad? And how, when you yourself reap the benefits, can you prevent all the world from profiting as well?

“Finally, I inform you that I cannot read or write. I dictated this letter to my youngest son, who has taken the substance of my words and made it grammatical, without adding or subtracting anything. I have asked him to read back to me what he wrote, so I can be sure that he rendered my words accurately.” ’

‘Did Abdel Nasser answer your letter, Aunt?’

‘I got a letter from his office, saying they would look into the matter. I waited. After I’d waited a long time, I said to myself that either he’d received the letter and he was just busy, or else they’d hidden the letter and he’d never received it.’ She laughed. ‘It’s a real friend who doesn’t find fault. “He who loves you will swallow pebbles for you.” Well, I worked out a pretext, because I wanted to forgive him.’

Perhaps my aunt enjoys talking with me because with my questions I give her the chance to talk about things no one around her allows her any opportunity to discuss. Sometimes she protests with a laugh, ‘What is this, a television interview, my brother’s daughter? You keep asking me, “What do you think of this, and what do you think of that?” But I have to say, you are clever and pleasant, not like the television interviewers, with their hair dyed blond and their eyelids painted purple, all dressed up like dolls at a fair, who talk as if they had a hard-boiled egg packed into their throats, and interrupt the person who’s talking to them and read off a paper as if, heaven forbid, they were deaf and never heard a word he was saying!’

I laughed, and told her her opinion mattered, that it mattered a great deal to me. ‘I want to know you, Aunt,’ I said. She found this statement odd.

‘What –’ she said, ‘– you don’t know me yet?’

Occasionally I am caught off-guard by the feeling that I didn’t know my father well enough. All at once I wonder, ‘What would my father have done in such and such a situation, and what would he have said about such and such an issue?’ When this feeling gets hold of me I am perplexed. ‘I don’t know him,’ I say, ‘I didn’t know him.’ Then I fall to wondering once more, is it ever given to a son or daughter to know his or her parents well enough, or does knowledge remain ever incomplete and deficient? Perhaps that was why I kept going back to visit my aunt – the second reason, not the first, for the first reason was that I missed her and it put me at ease to see her. I would visit her and have long conversations with her, asking her a lot of questions and listening to what she had to say. Sometimes I would see my behaviour as comical and foolish, as I sat beside her in my trousers and shirt and trainers, asking for her opinions as if I were a foreign correspondent or a social scientist who had parachuted down into the village. It was she who dispelled this feeling by her spontaneous and sincere manner, which decisively established the closeness between us. She had never felt, as she herself told me one night, any estrangement from her brother: he had gone and come back, been educated, and taken up residence in Cairo, married the Frenchwoman, gone to prison and got out, and their relationship was warm, communication flowing without being impeded by any new developments. Perhaps her relationship with my father extended itself to me; maybe there were other reasons for this warmth, having to do with the chemistry that attracts and repels, without reference to any discernible logic; maybe its source was the wealth of affection that was apparent even in my calling her ‘auntie’, and her calling me ‘my brother’s daughter’. Each time I left, she bade me farewell with the same words: ‘Don’t be gone long, Nada,’ by which she meant that I should not prolong my absence from her. I would go to visit her once or twice a year, and ring her up every week, to ask how she was getting along, and give her news of the twins and Hamdiya and myself.

On my first visit to her after Arwa killed herself, I told her the story. I expected her to open her comments by saying that suicide was a sin. I imagined the substance of her remarks: ‘Our Lord alone reclaims his own – it’s not right for any of us to take that upon himself.’ But she didn’t say this. She questioned me minutely about Arwa – was she married, and did she have children, siblings, a family? Then she fell silent. The following day, she brought the subject up again. ‘And where,’ she asked me, ‘were you all, when she killed herself?’ Her final comment: ‘My brother’s daughter, you either have to choose our way – marriage, children, kith and kin – or else you have to look after one another, each one being a mainstay to his friend. No one can live alone and unsheltered!’ She said no more than this, nor did she refer to the topic again.

I told my aunt about Arwa (omitting some of the details), but I didn’t tell her about Siham. Strange. A person talks about something painful in order to cover up the thing that hurts even more.

Chapter fifteen

Encounter

Real or imaginary? Did I miss her so much that I heard her voice without hearing it, or was it she, herself, and I just didn’t recognise her? How could I not recognise her? For weeks this question kept me awake at night. I would answer it with a decisive ‘no’, then contradict it just as decisively.

I didn’t see her, for I was standing a few steps away, examining bolts of cloth, in search of something Hamdiya had asked for in order to make some duvet covers. I was inspecting the fabrics closely for weave and colour, comparing before purchasing. I heard her voice and turned quickly, calling, ‘Siham!’

It wasn’t Siham. I offered a smile that must have looked imbecilic, because the woman I saw before me wasn’t smiling. She turned on her heel and walked off, heading for the shop door. For days afterward I was unable to overcome my conviction that the voice was her voice – for how could I mistake Siham’s voice? But the woman I saw when I turned had been quite overweight and some years older, much resembling a housewife who spends her days at home, going out only when necessary, preparing meals and cleaning house during the day, and surrendering to the television at night, plying her knitting needles smoothly and mechanically as she watches, making a jumper for one of her children or grandchildren. Definitely not Siham.

I kept recalling what I had seen of the woman’s face – a broad forehead, made more so by her thinning hair; a double chin; dark lines and bags under the eyes, in a puffy, round white face. The passing face of a grandmother, who had gone out contrary to habit on a quick errand. But grandmothers, when they leave their confinement, tend to interact even with strangers, returning smile for smile, a conversational opening. This woman’s face was stern, and she turned round abruptly, quickening her steps as if in a hurry to reach the door. Could it have been Siham? The whiteness of the complexion, the greenness of the eyes, and the light-chestnut hair were also Siham’s.

I knew Siham when I was a new student at the College of Engineering, groping my way around the place. During the first days, the departments, the halls, the corridors, and the names of the professors were a labyrinth through which I made my way with no small sense of alienation and uneasiness. From a distance I observed the upperclassmen gathering in clusters here and there, joining together in conversation and laughter, or commenting on a wall-journal, or settling differences on a contentious point in the discussion. I noticed her before she noticed me: a large girl, tall and of generous proportions, distinguished by her green eyes and soft chestnut hair. I seemed to see her just about everywhere around the college, with various students, as if she knew everyone and everyone knew her. She would speak, and listen, become engrossed in the response to a wall-journal, or she would be contributing her own commentary to the journal, or just standing next to it, or leading a dialogue concerning what had appeared in it.