Blue Lorries (27 page)

‘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.