Blue Lorries (9 page)

His brashness annoyed me – it seemed to me there was more than a little arrogance in his self-assertion. I concocted the notion of a memoir in order to put an end to the discussion.

What can have happened after that, to make me warm up to him and befriend him? A few days later he told me he cared for me, and that maybe I didn’t reciprocate the feeling because he was of peasant stock, or because he was dark-skinned with coarse hair – maybe also because his name was Shazli. I laughed at that fourth reason he cited; the remainder of the list was as provocative as the first part: ‘And of course you’re half French, with smooth hair, the daughter of well-known people, and your name is Nada!’ I didn’t laugh at his reference to my name; his words felt hurtful. Was he blackmailing me?

At any rate, Shazli succeeded. It was as if he had in some way held out his hand to me, and after I rejected it I became confused, wondering whether he saw in me things I didn’t see in myself.

We started seeing each other.

When at last I invited him to come visit us, my father commented on him unfavourably: ‘The boy looks like a fish – what do you see in him?’

‘He’s courageous, shrewd, perceptive, and easygoing, and he understands the common cause.’

‘ “Shrewd” – do you know the meaning of the word? Look it up in the dictionary!’

‘I’ll do no such thing! You don’t know him. He’s my good friend and I know him well!’

I repeated angrily to my father what Shazli had said to me when we were first getting acquainted – repeated it exactly: ‘You snub him because he comes from peasant stock, he’s dark-skinned, and his name is . . .’ And so forth.

‘Right,’ my father replied sardonically, ‘like I’m the Prince of Wales.’

My friendship with Shazli grew stronger during the sit-in. We stuck together in the hall, with thousands of other students, for seven whole days. We discussed economic, political, and social conditions. We criticised authority and its trappings, along with repression, America, and Israel. We raised our hand to vote for or against, or to call, ‘Point of order.’ We agreed and disagreed, we helped with the drafting of statements, shared in discourse and sandwiches, in anger, anxiety, and the glory of our affiliation with a student body with a high committee of its own choosing, whose communiqués bore the legend, ‘Democracy all for the people, and self-sacrifice all for the nation’. We sent a delegation to the People’s Assembly and the unions, and received a delegation from them; we got telegrams of affirmation and support, and we requested that the President of the Republic come and answer our questions.

I would spend the whole day in the hall, but as a concession to my father’s insistent wishes I left the university at nine or ten o’clock in the evening. Shazli would escort me to the door, saying to me repeatedly, ‘Your father is a reactionary, Nada. I don’t see how he can forbid you to spend the night at the sit-in, and I don’t see why you obey him!’ Then we would bid each other good night. He would go back to the hall, while I turned toward the house. In this way, all week long, the discussions were repeated, until all of the participants in the sit-in were arrested at dawn, and my father sent me to my mother for fear that otherwise I would be arrested, too.

Was it a mistake to acquiesce in my father’s decision? He couldn’t stuff me into a suitcase, but he packed me off to France against my own wishes. He made the decision, but I accepted it. My self-doubt would trouble me for years. ‘Fifteen hundred of your comrades are in prison – what are you doing here?’ This question kept me awake nights, resounding in my brain until it became fixed there like information memorised in childhood. Feelings of guilt were etched deep in my consciousness, to be reinforced later by Shazli’s words, half in jest, half serious: ‘You went larking off to Paris for rest and relaxation, leaving the rest of us in our cells!’ Contrary to my nature, I was tongue-tied, and shifty-eyed like a guilty child. I didn’t recount to Shazli the details of the three weeks I spent with my mother in Paris. I only said, ‘I learned to cook.’ He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then burst out laughing.

Chapter nine

‘We need you for an hour or two’

There was no relaxation or peace of mind, despite my mother’s solicitude and her wish to put me at ease. I had no access whatsoever to news of my comrades. It was not the era of satellite and the Internet. There was virtually no word about the students who’d been detained, no news. When I rang my father, he avoided any discussion of the topic, presumably out of a concern for security. Why did I go along with his decision?

In the morning, my mother would go to work, and I would take up a book. I would switch on the television, put a cassette in the tape-player. I would go out and stand on the balcony, return to my book, then leave it again to pace around the house. Back to the balcony. I would look at the clock, then look at it again. I didn’t know anyone in the entire city. Gérard was studying at some university far away from Paris. I didn’t know how to contact the girls and boys to whom he had introduced me; I couldn’t even remember their names. The sky was always cloudy, and usually it rained. I would go down to the street, then go back up to the flat after five minutes. I waited. I waited until I heard the key turn in the lock, and then I would leap up to greet my mother with a hug, and after that we would fix dinner together, and sit down to eat it and talk. I would draw out the conversation, putting off going to bed, dreading the desolation that lay in wait for me the following morning.

On my first trip to Paris, Gérard and his engaging conversation had taken me from my mother, but Shazli, this time, had no chance of taking me far away from her; it’s more likely, in fact, that he brought me closer to her, not because I wasn’t thinking about him (I thought about him constantly, even as I slept under warm blankets, ate nourishing food, and enjoyed the feeling of hot water on my head and body in a warm bath, knowing all such amenities were out of the question for him now). My uneasy thoughts weighed heavily on me, so I ran to my mother – fleeing to her, as I see it now. I wanted to hear what she had to say, get to know her better, be closer to her, and I clung to her, seeking a safe haven.

‘Mama, how did you meet Papa?’

‘Mama, when did Papa tell you he loved you and wanted to marry you? What did he say?’

‘Mama, was it hard for you to go and live in Cairo?’

‘Mama, why did you and Papa separate? It’s not possible that a room full of smoke or those hundred pounds he gave his cousin could be a reason to get divorced!’

‘Mama, could we take a trip to Yvoire? I don’t remember anything about my trip there with the two of you – was I two years old, or younger?’

‘Mama, tell me about your father.’

‘Mama, what was his relationship to my grandmother like? What did she do when he died?’

‘Mama, do you still have family in the village?’

‘Mama . . .’

She talked, and I listened to her, both drawn to and puzzled by the rhythm of her speech, the shade of her honey-coloured eyes. The sudden slight upward movements of her head that emphasised the meaning of her words reassured me and filled me with something as good as serenity.

The second week I decided to treat my mother to a hot meal she would find waiting for her when she got home from work. I referred to a cookbook I found in her library. The game delighted me, so I repeated it. Thus I discovered that the preparation of meals has its own requirements and rituals. I would select from the book the dish I meant to prepare, study the ingredients, and go out to a nearby shop to buy them. Then my mother called my attention to the big market. So I started taking the Metro and going there, not just to buy things, but also for the simple pleasure of going there: the other Paris, the one that escapes the post cards, the fashion shows, and the perfume advertisements. Women unconcerned about their full figures (unapologetically, insouciantly oversized), men in whom was combined the roughness of everyday life with smiles so sweet they took me by surprise with their, ‘
Bonjour, Mademoiselle!
’ I would smile, make my purchases, and chat with vendors and with other customers. I would return home laden with vegetables, herbs, and two portions of meat or chicken, sometimes also flowers to surprise my mother the moment she opened the door and entered the flat.

This is when I started to develop cooking skills. I threw myself into it the way I did with anything new, but my absorption this time, in contrast to other obsessions, didn’t fade away. It grew over the years into a serious hobby, one I both loved and was good at – I considered myself an authority on the subject. Every cloud has a silver lining: from despair combined with feelings of disconnection, anxiety, and remorse a ‘super chef’ was born. (I smile as I write these words, but nevertheless the description is apt!)

The secondary, and more desirable, effect of this new hobby was that it eased relations between my father’s wife and me. Since the subject is cooking, I should say that it ‘oiled’ the hinges of the door that was closed between us, so that it began to open without the squeak that sets the teeth on edge. The first Friday after I got back, I announced, ‘I’ll make lunch for you.’ My father was surprised and so was Hamdiya (if only her family had chosen a different name for her, things would have been a little easier!); I think she regarded it as a well-intentioned move to help her – she thanked me profusely, and praised extravagantly the food I prepared. Then we began to compare notes and exchange advice. I taught her recipes I had pored over in books, and she taught me what she had learned from her mother and grandmother.

Boring courses, intense activism, arrests, a journey, a return, and then activism once more. The result: failing grades in eight out of ten subjects (the two subjects in which I passed my examinations were unrelated to the field in which I had chosen to specialise); the other result was less ruinous – or, let us say, more useful: my having taken refuge in cooking gave me a skill that, if worse came to worst, might qualify me for work as a cook, and in fact for better pay than that of an engineer just starting out on a career!

My father was angry about my failure and upbraided me severely. Hamdiya came to my defence: ‘Let her alone, for heaven’s sake – what a rough year she’s had! Those arrests, the anxiety, the fear, a trip she hadn’t expected or prepared for – what is she, made of stone?’ She patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘God willing, you’ll pass with distinction next year.’

But that ‘next year’ in which my father’s wife looked forward to my distinguished performance came with its own surprises and distractions. I switched to the College of Humanities, and my studies in the French Department, in which I had enrolled, seemed easy, since I was fluent in French and loved literature, finishing in two or three nights reading assignments that it took some of my classmates weeks to understand. But I didn’t pass with distinction – in fact, most of my subjects I barely passed at all; two of them I actually failed, and had to repeat them the following term.

It was a year replete with interesting developments, starting with the appearance of three students from the College of Medicine before the disciplinary board on charges of having written for the wall newspapers, of contacting other groups of students, and of causing unrest. Then fifty-two students were taken into custody. So we began concerted action in seeking an appeal and the students’ release, as well as an assurance that further roundups wouldn’t prevent us from continuing to voice our demands. We held meetings, issued statements, contacted the unions, and staged another sit-in at Cairo University’s Central Celebration Hall. Classmates of ours from the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine at Ain Shams University held sit-ins as well. Then they moved the sit-in to the Za‘faran Palace, the seat of Ain Shams University’s administration. There was another roundup.

This time I didn’t go to France.

The knock on the door at dawn.

My father woke me up. He whispered, ‘Do you have any papers here?’ I gave him the papers. He took them, folded them, leapt lightly and calmly on to a chair, and hid some of them in the wooden frame around the glass of the door to the balcony, while others he concealed in the window frame, in the slight crack into which the pane of glass was inserted. Then he whispered in my ear as he turned to open the door, ‘Deny everything, even things you think don’t matter, and refuse to talk unless a lawyer is present.’

He opened the door. Two men in civilian clothes entered (later it became clear that they were officers), followed by three soldiers or informants. Three men in police uniforms stayed by the door, holding rifles at the ready. They searched the house, but found nothing. One of the officers said, ‘We’ll take her for just an hour or two.’

My father went quickly into my bedroom and returned with a small suitcase into which he had put a few everyday items for me.

As I was getting ready to leave, I said, ‘I won’t need the case, since I won’t be staying with them more than an hour or two.’

‘Take the case!’

I didn’t notice Hamdiya there until she placed her own coat around my shoulders, with a large woollen shawl over it. She said, ‘Look after yourself.’ Her face was red, and wet with tears.

My father escorted me to the door of the building, where two police cars were waiting. They put me into one of them.

I hadn’t been afraid when they were coming into the house and searching it, nor did the appearance of the two armed security officers standing by the door of the flat frighten me, nor the three armed men I found unexpectedly at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance of the building. But when I was sitting between the two officers who had taken me in, watching the dark, deserted streets, I was engulfed all at once by a feeling that I was suffocating. I asked the one sitting to my right to open the car window. I didn’t tell him that I needed air in order to breathe, but this was in fact the case, no exaggeration.