Blue Lorries (3 page)

Quick though I was with an answer, her words took me aback. (The comment ‘it’s not as if you were poor’, and the allusion to a preference for the wife of our
bawaab
, were like a goal scored in her net, proving that I had learned the lesson my mother taught me. She was careful of my upbringing in matters like these, admonishing me, ‘A certain little girl – the
bawaab
’s daughter, let’s say – is the same age as you, and by chance – purely by chance – you’re privileged to wear the dress you wear, while it’s not given to her to wear one like it. It may be that she’s better than you. We’ll have to wait and see what you do with what you have, and what she may do in spite of the hardship she faces. And that boy’ – she was referring to a child my age, clothed in rags, who stood at the traffic light selling packets of tissues – ‘is an innocent victim. You get more, he gets less.’ She had an endless supply of these sermons, adducing as evidence my clothes, food, and – the thing she harped on most insistently and distressingly – chocolate. I would grow fidgety with all her instruction, or I might become anxious in the expectation that she would forbid me to buy chocolate. My mother was like a machine, incessantly, tirelessly producing her educational directives, and at that age I could not know anything of the ideological basis for such directives.)

But what the girl had said unsettled me. At lunch I asked, ‘Mama, why did France attack Egypt in 1956?’

‘Because France is an imperialist state, and it had begun to lose the countries it occupied, so it became more aggressive. It had been defeated in Indochina and . . .’

‘What’s Indochina?’

‘A country called Vietnam, in Asia – I’ll show it to you on the map.’

She was about to get up to go fetch the book, but I persuaded her to put off fussing with the atlas (another of the pedagogical tools to which she frequently had recourse).

‘No, carry on.’

‘Well, France was confronting a revolution in Algeria, and Nasser was supporting this revolution, and moreover he had nationalised the canal. He was a threat to France’s interests, and they wanted to get rid of him.’

‘Were you on the side of the French when they attacked Egypt?’

She laughed. ‘How could I have been on their side?’

‘But you’re French!’

‘Are you in favour of your father’s detention?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So you don’t agree with everything your country’s government does!’

I understood, and I laughed. Then I told her about the horrid girl. She said, ‘There’s no need to cut her off. You could have explained things to her.’

‘I want nothing to do with her,’ I announced firmly. ‘She has bad breath, and besides, I don’t care to keep company with fools – if people saw me with her they might think I’m as stupid as she is. That would be bad for my reputation!’

I particularly emphasised the part about my reputation, and my mother laughed, just as I had intended her to do. And when she laughed, so did I.

My mother did get up to fetch the atlas, and began to instruct me purposefully on the map of Asia and the location of Indochina, reinforcing geography with history. She told me in which years France entered and departed from Indochina, and how . . . and now it was America’s turn . . . and all the while I nodded my head, saying, ‘Yes, it’s very clear,’ although in fact nothing was clear, for the simple reason that my head was full of a new question: My mother had said, ‘Nasser constituted a threat to the French, and therefore they attacked him.’ This bit of information assumed a powerful significance in the debate that preoccupied me, as to which man was right – the president who had arrested and detained my father, or my father, whose opinions had led to his incarceration and his being exiled from his family for all these years.

Chapter three

Translation problems I

Joking with my friends, I said, ‘I was a translation “gofer” – I learned the craft by the time I could walk!’

I left it at that, for to go into detail would have required that I tell them the story of my life. They knew my mother was French, and that I was born and raised in a bilingual household, but none of them knew that, from as far back as I can remember, I assumed the role of interpreter. ‘What are they saying?’ my mother would ask suddenly. ‘What does the man mean?’ ‘What is the lady trying to say?’ So I would translate. ‘What’s so funny about that?’ she might demand. And I would explain.

Or someone would ask me, ‘What’s your mother saying? What does she want?’ And I would translate. My paternal aunt might come to visit us, and I would be the linguistic intermediary between her and my mother. But I faced the most difficult trials in the many encounters between my mother and my paternal grandmother. My grandmother never left her village until she was past the age of seventy, and she spoke in a rural idiom that was difficult to understand – in retrospect I think it was eloquent – studded with proverbs, parables, and quotations from the Qur’an. In my childhood, translating what she said was a real challenge, like decoding a cipher. I had to think about it first, then pass along the easier bits, pouncing on the parts I could manage and summarising the rest in order to fill in the blanks. I settled for the gist, or I improvised something that would fit well enough into the general context. But sometimes she defied such devices. My grandmother might produce one little phrase that I could not understand, even though the words themselves were clear enough. For example, ‘When we visited you after they took away your father, a twelvemonth ago, in
Toba . . .
’ and I would stop short, perplexed, my mind casting about in a vain attempt to solve the riddle. I knew that ‘a twelvemonth ago’, in my grandmother’s parlance, simply meant ‘last year’, but what on earth was ‘
toba
’, and what could ‘in
toba
’
signify? Was it the name of a place where they’d taken my father? Did they make him sit on some kind of brick? But she had said ‘in’ and not ‘on’! I decided it was too much trouble to ask the meaning of ‘
toba
’, since even a witless three-year-old knew that ‘
toba
’ meant ‘brick’; nor did I see fit to translate the sentence verbatim for my mother, lest she tell me I was stupid or that my grandmother had gone senile. At the time I knew nothing of the rural custom of using the Coptic names for the months. So I kept quiet. Then, when my mother wanted to know why I didn’t translate my grandmother’s words, imagination came to my rescue. ‘She said that your frock is very pretty. Also, she noticed that your new eyeglasses suit you better than the old ones.’

After the episode of the mourning period, I learned that aphorism about the sieve – which is to say, I learned to strain out those contaminants that would certainly have fouled the waters flowing between the two sides, while at the same time I took care that neither of them should suspect my interference. So if my mother was glowering, I would hold back something my grandmother had said and abridge the rest. If my aunt went on the offensive and severely criticised my mother, the attack would be converted in the translated version into a mild rebuke. If my mother was the aggressor, I would whitewash her comments before passing them along, adding some details of my own: ‘My mother says this with good intentions – that is, affectionately.’ And so on.

Meanwhile, that episode of the mourning period culminated in a family catastrophe that, I realised only two or three years later, could have been avoided, had I not been slavishly exact in transmitting the messages.

The prelude to this episode was our being informed one night in Cairo that my grandfather had died; at dawn on the following day we boarded a train bound for Upper Egypt.

At my grandfather’s house the women wailed, my grandmother, my aunt, and some other women I didn’t know sitting on the floor despite the seats that lined the walls. I asked my aunt, who explained to me that such were the rites of mourning in our part of the world, and I passed this information along to my mother when she asked. She said, ‘But I don’t want to sit on the floor!’ And with that she seated herself on a chair, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette!

(I can’t omit these details, because they turned up later in the catalogue of my mother’s blunders.)

After the sunset prayer, my mother asked my grandmother, ‘When will supper be served? We haven’t eaten since this morning!’ The translation was no sooner out of my mouth than I realised how outrageous this remark was. I could read it in the face of my grandmother, who kept silent.

I turned to my mother and said, ‘Perhaps that’s the way things are done around here – just like sitting on the floor.’

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘No, I’m not hungry.’

‘But they aren’t poor – why don’t they serve supper to their guests? Aren’t we guests?’

‘We’re not guests, Mama – Granny always says to me, “This is your home, Nada, your father’s and grandfather’s house.”’

My grandmother likely told my aunt what the wife of her son had said – whether disapprovingly or with the object of getting her daughter to feed the hungry lady, I don’t know. But my aunt leaned over toward my mother and whispered in her ear, so we got up with her, left the house, and set off to a different house.

‘It’s very odd,’ said my mother to my aunt. ‘You’re not poor, and there are so many guests – you ought to have prepared some food for them, even if it was only sandwiches!’

I translated. My aunt replied, ‘Ours is the largest clan in the whole region. At weddings and other big occasions we provide countless animals to be sacrificed for the feasts!’

I asked, ‘What does “clan” mean?’

‘It means all your kin.’

‘What does “kin” mean?’

‘Oh, pet, my little niece, you’re still a foreigner like your mother. A clan is a family that is thousands strong.’

I translated. But my mother insisted, ‘They should have served some food, since they’re not poor, or else they should have advised us to bring our own food with us!’

I translated, and my aunt replied, ‘Tell her she should be ashamed of herself. It’s unthinkable even to talk about food, and your grandfather not yet cold in his grave!’

I translated. My mother got angry, and my aunt changed her mind about taking us to the home of her mother’s brother for supper. ‘There’s no need to make a scene!’ she said. I translated.

My mother decided she was not going to stay for the three days of mourning after all, if it meant she and her daughter would have to starve to death. We left at dawn the following day.

My aunt swore that her tongue would never again address a word to her brother’s wife, and that she would never set foot in her house for the rest of her life (and she kept this vow). Nor was that the end of the matter, for the grievance was kept alive and it was the first thing my father heard about from his mother, his sister and his cousins when he went to the village after his release. And it was one of the sore points he brought up every time he and my mother quarrelled. During their last row, I told my father it had been my fault. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said sceptically.

‘We left before the three days were up, because of the translation, ya Abu Nada!’

‘What translation?’ So I told him. He laughed, and made peace with my mother.

Their many rows following his release from detention didn’t trouble me, so their decision to separate hit me like a thunderbolt.

Chapter four

Mahariq

My father didn’t write about his years of detention, nor did he talk about them. Perhaps my interest in prison memoirs – which began with a collection of whatever I could find concerning Wahaat Detention Centre – had its origins in my desire to know the details of my father’s life during the five years I lived apart from him: the cell he stayed in, the bed he slept in, the food he ate, the corridor he traversed when he went in or out, the kind of work that was demanded of him, and his relations with his prison-mates and his gaolers. My imagination, where my father was concerned, was restricted by the dearth of memories preceding his arrest, while the period between his arrest and his release is a blank, alleviated only by occasional meetings in a dingy room inside a gloomy building, which we reached after an arduous journey on whose end we congratulated each other when the building loomed before us in the distance, in the bleak pallor of the desert.

For five years, my imagination roamed aimlessly in search of a place to alight. Then, when prison memoirs started to emerge, one after another, I began reading them avidly, filling the gaps in my imagination with solid details, which cut like barbed wire. The newly acquired knowledge, however cruel, helped safeguard me against these gaping holes, erecting a bridge by which it was possible to pass from one level to another and reach that point at which Nada’s story and her own personal history was interrupted, and her father was restored to her intact, despite everything.

I could describe Urdy Abu Zab‘al with its six wards. I could describe Wahaat Detention Centre with its three wards, number one of which was designated for convicted Communists, number two for detainees such as my father, who hadn’t been tried or convicted, and number three for members of the Muslim Brotherhood. I know the location of the ten cells in each ward, of the toilets, and of the officer’s room that faces the gate to the ward. My imagination can follow my father at ‘Azab Prison in Fayoum, then at Liman Tora, and then for four years at Mahariq Prison in the oases. At this last prison I can put together an image of my father waking up in the morning in one of the ten cells that were in Ward Number Two; I can picture him then going out barefoot into Scorpion Valley carrying a pickaxe for breaking up rock. His attention would be divided between his labour and keeping his eyes and ears alert for any sudden movement or sound betraying a viper that might leap all at once from its lair and deliver its fatal bite. I imagine him when it’s time to return to the ward for supper and after that, following evening activities, a cup of tea.