Blue Lorries (6 page)

I went to the toilet, closed the door, and tried to think of a line that started with the letter
t
. Then I went back to the kitchen. ‘I can’t think of a line that starts with
t
! Papa, it’s not fair – I really did need to go to the toilet!’

He laughed uproariously. I joined in.

‘Two points,’ he said. Next:

‘Then he took refuge behind a rock on Radwa summit, among the soaring peaks of mountains high –
h
.’

I tried to remember a line that started with the letter
h
, but I couldn’t.

‘Three points – you’re out, Hazelnut!’ Then:

‘Heroic in magnanimity the branching limb, that bends as need requires but will not break.’

He usually won. All the same, though, I enjoyed it every time we competed, because I loved playing games with him, and I loved listening to him recite poetry – the timbre of his voice, his enunciation of the letters, his style of delivery all enchanted me. When he declaimed a line I had trouble understanding, I would say, ‘Explain,’ and he would explain, and I would take still more pleasure in the meanings of the passages as he elucidated them for me.

In the spring of 1968, when I was fourteen, my father introduced me to a woman I hated on sight. When he asked me what I thought of her, I launched straight in with my criticism of her looks, her height, her girth, the clothes she wore, her hairstyle, and the way she spoke. He tried to argue with me, to sway me by enumerating her virtues, which only increased my dislike for her. I said, ‘So why does she slather her face with loads of makeup, like some bit-player in a Farid al-Atrash film, all ready to dance in the background as soon as the music begins?

He didn’t laugh, and I was bewildered – I had assumed he would be as amused as I was by the impromptu comparison with which I had surprised even myself.

A few weeks later he started talking to me about her again. I said, ‘Who, the bit-player?’

He got angry then, and left the room. He didn’t speak of her again to me.

When examinations were over, I went to France to meet my mother in Paris, as I had promised her I would do, and to spend the summer holidays with her.

It would be the first time we saw each other since she had left Cairo nine months earlier. When she spread her arms wide to embrace me I was surprised to discover how much I had missed her, and I was the more puzzled that in Cairo I had been unaware of these feelings – of how attached to her I was and how much I needed her; it was as if I had decided all at once to fasten a belt, like in an aeroplane. Perhaps that surrender to my need for my mother was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Her departure had seemed a matter of course. I suffered under the strain of accepting that swift collapse of the status quo, although indifference was still the predominant attitude I affected in my behaviour and emotions (such emotions as I admitted to, that is).

When I saw her at the airport I was startled by the tumbling of those walls I hadn’t, to begin with, even realised I had erected and retreated behind. I held on to her for a long time, hugging her tightly, and on our way out of the airport I held her hand just the way I had used to do as a child, clinging so hard I was practically digging my nails into her palm. This time she didn’t object.

At the supper table at home, I was struck by something else. I had noticed it at the airport, but it hadn’t given me pause then, for I had been too taken up with the pleasure of seeing my mother, and too preoccupied with my own unexpected reactions and feelings. Or perhaps in that moment I had assumed it was simply that she was so moved by the sight of me after nine months of separation. Certainly I had noticed her pallor, even as I was walking toward her with my bag on the luggage trolley – I saw it from a distance, before I reached and embraced her. But now, as she sat opposite me while we had our supper, I looked at her more closely. Her face was still pale, and this wasn’t the only thing about her that was new. What else? Was it possible that old age could overtake someone who was only forty-five? And could this happen in just nine months?

‘Mama, are you ill?’ She said she was not. I asked her whether she had been ill in the preceding months. She assured me that she hadn’t.

‘Mama, your face is pale. It wasn’t like that in Cairo – even on the day you left it wasn’t this pale!’

She laughed, and changed the subject. ‘Today it’s forbidden to talk about our troubles – we’re celebrating our reunion.’

Once I was alone in bed, I didn’t sleep – I didn’t drift off even for a few minutes. I was mulling over those two unexpected developments, trying to understand. wondering and wondering – what was happening?

I started with the second thing, which in reality was foremost: my mother’s condition. What was it about her that was new? It wasn’t merely that pallor – so what was it, then? Something different about the look in her eye? (A sadness mingled with a questioning expression – or something else, too difficult for me to read?) A slowness, unlike before, in the movement of her body and her hands? She was a beautiful woman. There was in her face a sweetness arising not only from the fineness and harmony of her features, but also from the spark in the honey-coloured eyes that were the first thing about her to catch your attention. Intelligence shone from them – reminding you of nothing so much as the gleam in a mischievous child’s eye – lending a certain vividness to her face the moment she opened her mouth to speak. She had a nervous energy that ebbed and flowed, imparting to her rather petite body an animation that expressed itself in the cadences of her speech and the rapidity of her movements. Did she seem changed because her hair was a different length? She had used to keep her hair short, barely even reaching her neck, with a fringe in front. Now it had grown long, extending down her back, and she had tied it in a ponytail. With the ponytail she looked more like me, for I have the same facial features as she, although I have my father’s dark eyes and his height. But this was not the time for sorting out the question of what traits I’d inherited from whom. Was she ill? She struck me as brittle, brittle in the way of someone defeated; or, to put it another way, it was as if liveliness had given way to something softer, as if something in her (that nervous energy, or animation) had receded, or been stilled or extinguished. Was it the loneliness of living by herself in a strange country? But she was French, so how could France be a strange country? Did she find herself a foreigner there after all those years in another country? Was she worn out by her daily toil? Did she miss my father? Did she want to go back to Cairo?

These questions started me out on a path I had never before approached, or even conceived of, a dim awareness that began right away, but gradually, to form itself as an impression that she might need my care and protection. Perhaps I ought not to leave her alone. I had never really thought about how much I depended on her. A little girl depends on her mother without giving it a thought. I was surprised by my longing for her – a longing so strange I could scarcely believe it. How could there be such longing if I was insensible to it while I was far from her? She wrote me lengthy letters, to which I replied with two or three words, as if out of a sense of duty rather than genuine feeling. She pressed me to write to her, and I would chafe at her insistence, going weeks without writing at all. Why then, when I saw her – from the first moment I saw her – was I engulfed by this flood of yearning and tenderness, and the desire to cling to her and weep, and tell her it was all a mistake, a huge mistake? The word buzzed in my ear while we were at the airport, and I didn’t know what I meant by it: her breakup with my father? Her going back to France? My not having gone with her? I had no answer to any of this, and all that night I stayed awake turning the riddles over in my mind, but could come up with no satisfactory solutions; I might seem to find one, but none I could settle on for longer than a few minutes before returning once more to the inquiry.

What happened in Paris is that I encountered the truth of my feelings toward my mother and from there I automatically followed – in a way I didn’t comprehend at the time – the trajectory of my perception that she was in need of protection. Now it was for me to learn, gradually, how to open my arms to embrace and protect, to relax my guard and show compassion, to undertake the role of mother to my own mother. Why then did I not follow through? I forgot, or pretended to forget. Or such is life, that it takes us out of our feelings, or it withdraws those feelings and sets them far from our intentions.

Also in Paris that summer, I made my first step toward taking an interest in public events. In childhood, my father’s arrest was an entirely personal event, no more than that: a reasonless, incomprehensible removal to an obscure place. After my father’s release, politics were not, at home, a matter of daily discourse in which all three of us engaged at meals or in our evenings spent together as a family. Even the 1967 ‘setback’, which I followed to some extent, didn’t – as far as I can recall – penetrate the fabric of my emotional life until later, retrospectively. In June of 1967 I was beginning senior school, following the news of the war and the defeat in radio broadcasts, newspapers, and what I heard repeated, indirectly, allusively, on the tongues of others. But the event in all its tragic import did not permeate the inner life of a thirteen-year-old girl preoccupied with her relationship with her father, and his relationship with her mother, and with the upheavals of a family in a painful process of disintegration, the fear of a dissolution that seemed imminent.

(It was the night Nasser revealed, in the course of his speech announcing the defeat, his intention to step aside – a dark night. My father was following the speech and brushing away tears with the back of his hand. He went on brushing them and brushing them. My consternation at tears shed by my father was greater than anything occasioned by the nation’s president reporting a rout whose impact I would not absorb until years afterward – that is, I would absorb it more fully with the passage of years, as a gradual process beginning that day, and perhaps continuing even up to this moment.

The speech ends. My father weeps, wailing like a child. My mother all at once becomes hysterical, shouting, ‘I don’t understand! I absolutely do not understand! Why are you crying over him? Isn’t he the fascist officer, the brutal dictator who put the lot of you in prison for five years without the slightest grounds? Isn’t he . . . wasn’t he . . . didn’t you say . . .?’ Her words tumbled out in a rush, her voice pitched higher and higher. Suddenly my father said, ‘You must be blind!’ Then he walked out – left the house. After that she spoke not a word, and neither did I.)

Chapter six

Paris 1968

When I got to Paris, I hadn’t the least idea what the country had witnessed in the previous weeks. But Paris that summer talked of nothing but those events. My mother, the neighbours, acquaintances – all were talking about them, while the newspapers revisited, analysed, and followed up on developments. As the boys and girls I got to know – who were of my own age, or older by a couple of years or so – strove to offer their own interpretations of what had happened, they found it entertaining to pass along the details of those weeks to a girl who had come from the faraway land of Egypt, ignorant of the fascinating things they knew.

My mother introduced me to Gérard and his family, who lived in the same building. The first time we met, Gérard volunteered to accompany me on a visit to any of the city’s landmarks I might care to see. I said I wanted to visit Notre Dame (it wasn’t that I was interested in church architecture, but I wanted to see the cathedral and its great bell, which the hunchback Quasimodo had rung in the novel by Hugo that I had loved, and that had made me cry). We agreed that he would take me there in two days’ time.

Gérard came by for me at ten in the morning; my mother had gone to work. We set off from the house toward Notre Dame. On the way to the Metro, and in the train, Gérard told me about the student demonstrations that had begun on 22 March in Nanterre. Eight students had stormed the dean’s office, to protest the arrest of six of their classmates for being active on a committee organised against the Vietnam War. It had been decided that these eight students would come before the disciplinary board a month later.

Gérard said, ‘On Friday the third of May, in the forecourt of the university, a group of student activists made a circle around the eight students who were to stand before the disciplinary board the following Monday. The crowd got bigger, and just kept growing. At four o’clock in the afternoon, riot police surrounded the university and began arresting students. As the news spread, even more students began showing up, and a battle ensued between them and the police. The closure of the university was announced – it’s only the second time in seven hundred years that the Sorbonne has been closed down; the first time was in 1940, when Paris was occupied by the Nazis.

‘Less than ten days after the decision to close the university, the President of the Republic was forced to make the decision to withdraw the police and reopen it. But things were not about to go back to the way they’d been before. The students took over the university. They opened up the gates, so that anyone who wanted to could join them in brainstorming and discussion sessions.

‘Between the closure and reopening of the university, lots of battles were waged, and workers’ strikes mounted and spread throughout France.’

‘Are you sure you want to go to Notre Dame?’

We changed direction.