Blue Lorries (5 page)

After a week or two, the private honeymoon commenced. A sense of calm – pure and fine, novel and altogether strange – united the three of us. My mother and I no longer picked quarrels with each other, she no longer shouted, or spoke or moved in that spasmodic way that had made me think she was mad. In light of these new developments, I concluded that she was not mad after all, that rather she must have been in a bad way, exhausted, and frightened for my father. Or perhaps she had been mad, and was now well again. I began to relax into my life with my parents. Gradually I regained that childhood paradise from which I had fallen abruptly one winter morning, incomprehensibly, unreasonably.

I needed no wings to fly – I could soar even when I was chained to my seat in the classroom. Lessons were enjoyable, the teacher amiable, my classmates the nicest of God’s creations. I even approached the one-eyed beggar, who used to stand at the top of the street where my school was, and whose appearance frightened me so that I hurried past him without looking in his direction. I asked him his name, and took to saying, ‘Good morning, ‘Amm Darwish!’ and giving him whatever I could spare – my pocket money if I had remembered to bring any, or the sandwich my mother had made for me, or a piece of chocolate if I happened to have some with me.

Even though I spent a great deal of time sitting with my parents – staying up late with them, fighting sleep until it overcame me and my mother took me off to bed – nevertheless, contrary to both precedent and expectation, at the end of that school year and the next I got the highest marks in every subject we were taught. The day the certificates were distributed, the headmistress announced, ‘Nada has distinguished herself in every way; her academic performance is outstanding, likewise her behaviour with the teachers and with her classmates.’

I didn’t wait until my father came home. I rang him up at work and then, before he answered, I handed the receiver to my mother, saying, ‘You tell him – tell him what the headmistress said!’

What happened after that? Nothing! No earthquake surprised us, no cannon-fire brought the roof down upon the heads it sheltered. Merely foolish little disagreements. I watched, standing by in helpless confusion, as if seated before one of those jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of little pieces, needing to find the right place for every piece in order to complete the picture. Was my father, suffering from some obscure feelings of guilt, in a hurry to establish his position as head of the household? Had the years spent away from us, in oppressive conditions, destroyed his equilibrium, throwing all of us off-balance? Had my mother, after his years away and her own ordeal, expected him to return laden with the flowers of love, understanding and sympathy? Or was misinterpretation at the root of their differences, their mutual intentions lost in translation?

My father was smoking feverishly, and my mother wouldn’t stop reminding him that he had quit smoking when she was pregnant with me. She complained of the odour of smoke that pervaded the house (despite the fact that she herself smoked a cigarette or two occasionally). She threw the windows open wide, and he complained of the cold. She complained about some mates of his who would visit him without bringing their wives; he would sequester himself with them, shutting her out, and yet she was expected to provide for them as guests. ‘Why didn’t you make supper?’ ‘You didn’t say they were going to have supper with us!’ At first, with ‘please’, and a smile, then later ‘please’, but no smile; thereafter a reproachful frown, and at last matters devolved into a battle, in which other issues got mixed up: ‘I don’t understand. Your friends show up without any notice, your cousins come and linger forever, and everyone who comes from the village insists on staying with us. What about that thing known as a hotel, which is designed for people to stay in? What’s more, these relatives of yours, all the while you were gone, only came for brief visits: ten minutes at most, and off they went!’ Perhaps he explained, once or twice, but she didn’t understand, and he gave up the attempt. Was he simply exhausted, unequal to the constant translation, or was it that he wished to impose on her his own system, his authority, without endless discussion? He took to saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ curtly, with no opening for debate. He seemed hard and ungiving, as if we were a heavy weight, an additional burden upon him.

My relationship with him was not like the one I had with my mother, the pattern of which had been set by the life we’d shared on our own, in the absence of our third family member. She would shout, and I would shout back; she would issue orders I would fling back in her face, across the dividing wall. We would quarrel, but at the end of the day find no recourse except to each other in our mutual need – or perhaps we found only our despair, fear and loss, and thus we automatically drew closer to each other, quite as if we hadn’t, but a few hours earlier, been at each other’s throats like two murderous roosters ready to tear each other to pieces. When my father’s return changed everything else, my relationship with my mother remained unchanged. In my battles with my father, on the other hand, no matter how defiant and sure of my own position I was each time I confronted him, he would make me lose my bearings, exhausting me, reducing me to a heap of unrelieved wretchedness.

For five years my father had been an unattainable dream; when he came back, I wanted him to be a dream in whose sanctuary I might live. It may be for this reason that any conflict between us always loomed much larger than the actual problem that had occasioned it, escalating instantly into a crisis that threatened to topple my dream. This made me frantic with anxiety, driving me into a state of panic which the situation didn’t in the least call for.

Within two years of my father’s release, his troubles with my mother became an open conflict. Three years after our reunion, they had begun, in my presence, to talk about initiating divorce proceedings. I believe it was the issue of those hundred pounds that was the precipitating event – it was, as they say, the straw that broke the camel’s back: the ‘camel’, of course, was our little family, living in a flat comprised of three rooms not one of which was large enough to have accommodated an actual camel.

My mother asked my father about the money that had been kept in a drawer, and he told her he’d given it to his cousin. She didn’t understand, so he explained. ‘His mother-in-law died in hospital yesterday, and it was clear he was going to need the money.’

‘When will he pay you back?’

‘I don’t expect him to pay me back. In difficult times we help each other out.’

‘You should have told him the money was a loan, and specified when it was to be repaid.’

He turned away from her, sending an unmistakable message that he had no wish to continue the discussion. But she persisted, ‘You had no right to dispose of that money without consulting me. First of all because it was meant for our family, and secondly because most of it was money I earned from my job. You took money that belonged to me without my knowledge!’

He slapped her.

For a moment the three of us stood there, stunned, and then my father walked out and left the flat. My mother shouted at me, ‘Go to your room! What are you doing here, anyway?’ I went to my room and slammed the door, thinking, this madwoman can’t tell an enemy from a friend – I was on
her
side, and had been on the point of taking her part in an all-out assault on my father, spelling out all of his offences. But she, instead of striking back at him when he hit her, turned on me: ‘What are you doing here?’ I opened my door and shouted at her, ‘What did I do, materialise from Upper Egypt to interfere with your happy life with my father? No, I came because the entire building could hear the two of you fighting!’

But the next day I saw that her eyes were red with weeping, and I wanted to cheer her up. I sat beside her and kissed her. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘do you think Papa is acting strange?’

‘He behaves oddly sometimes. Not like himself.’

‘Do you think he lost his mind in prison?’

‘No, he hasn’t lost his mind. Even though he behaves badly sometimes. Maybe he hasn’t adjusted yet to normal life.’

‘You claim he’s highly intelligent. So how do you explain the stupid things he does?’

‘Your father isn’t stupid!’

‘I think he is!’

‘Well I think you’re an insolent girl!’

‘I’m not insolent – it’s just that I’m living with two lunatics! I reckon you’re as mad as he is!’

I left her and went into my room, slamming the door behind me. All through my adolescence, this was the registered trademark by which I advertised my wrath.

When they divorced, my mother asked for custody of me. I looked at my father. His face was suffused with a bluish pallor. He said nothing. I asked her, ‘Are you staying here or going to France?’ She said she would return to France. ‘I can’t leave my school and my classmates,’ I told her. ‘I’ll stay here with my father.’ But I had known to begin with that I wanted to stay with him, even though I wasn’t confident that he wanted me (already he didn’t want his wife, so did he want her daughter?). I said, ‘I’ll stay,’ even though a few months earlier, when matters between them were heating up, my motto had been, ‘They can both go to hell!’

It seems likely that during this period my father, despite all the trouble he had with me and our frequent clashes, put it all down to the intransigence of a wilful child whose mother had never managed to curb her rebelliousness and bring her up properly. And until that memorable visit to Paris in the summer of ’68, he retained his ability to restrain my insubordination, never feeling as though I had injured his pride, or intentionally insulted him. Perhaps this was also partly – notwithstanding my slogan, ‘They can both go to hell’ – because I put up no resistance to the moments of affection and ease that smoothed over the bad feelings following a row: we would calm down and carry on as before; I would call him ‘Abu Nada’ and he would refer to me fondly as his ‘hazelnut’. We could laugh and joke together, and play word-games. I was happy, too, when he sat and helped me with my maths. I wasn’t especially good at maths, yet I was determined to get into the College of Engineering, like him. He said, ‘Humanities might be a better match for your abilities.’ I didn’t take his advice. He began teaching me maths. I understood his explanations, and by practising with them assiduously, I achieved outstanding marks. I was pleased, and so was he.

In those moments of ease we played games with poetry. He would recite a line, and I would have to follow it with a line that began with the same letter with which the previous one had ended. One evening he asked me, ‘How many lines of poetry do you know by heart?’

His question took me by surprise. As a matter of pride I said confidently, ‘I know lots and lots of lines, Papa – countless lines. Give me two days and I’ll have them all for you!’ With that ‘two days’ I was trying to buy myself some time, but I managed to wangle a full week out of the deal by claiming that I had too much homework. I was in fact spending my evenings bent over my desk, but I wasn’t doing a single one of my assignments – instead I was reviewing all the poetry I had ever memorised, and learning new poems besides, which I would recite out loud to myself as I lay in bed. I would doze off in the middle of a stanza by Imru al-Qays or Al-Mutanabbi or Shawqi or Al-Jawahiri, or Al-Shabi. It seemed to me that only with my answer could I ransom my image and my father’s respect.

At breakfast a week after my father’s startling question, I proudly announced, ‘I know three hundred lines of poetry by heart, Papa – besides all the French poetry I’ve memorised, of course!’

At night we would hold our contest. ‘Ready?’ he said.

‘On one condition,’ I replied. ‘I go first!’

‘Agreed!’

In the evening I prepared his tea and sat down opposite him at the square kitchen table. I began.

‘Should the people one day yearn for life, then fate to them must yield –
d
.

‘Destiny with grievous losses has assailed me, until its arrows do my heart engulf –
f
.

‘Forbid not that which you do yourself, for in so doing lies great shame –
e
.

‘Each man may not achieve what he hopes for, to the will of ships do winds contrary blow –
w
.

‘
W
 . . .
w . . .
w . . .
’

‘Hazelnut, your minute’s up – you lose one point!’

‘My minute’s not up!’

‘Yes, it is.
W
, if you please, Lady Hazelnut:

We make ready the sword and lance, but death slays us without a fight –
t
.’

‘The flanks of a gazelle has he, the legs of an ostrich . . .’

He interrupted me before I could finish the line. ‘Choose another line – that one begins and ends with a
t
. It won’t do.’

‘Why won’t it do?’

‘That’s one of the rules of the game. You’re not allowed to use a line that begins and ends with the same letter. Find another line.’

But my memory refused to come up with another line that started with
t
.

I stalled. ‘I need to go to the toilet.’

‘Say the line and then go.’

‘Papa, I can’t – I have to go to the toilet
now
!’