Blue Lorries

I said, ‘God give you strength and good health – may you live a hundred years. Congratulations, Hamdiya!’

  Hamdiya was watching my father, waiting for a decision or a pronouncement, which struck me as provocative and offensive. Looking at my father, I said, ‘Congratulations, Abu Nada!’

  He raised his voice. ‘I have a daughter, and that’s enough.’

  I shouted, ‘But Hamdiya has a right to bear a child. And you have no right to deprive her of that, or to deprive me of a sister or brother. Hamdiya may accept your insistence on an abortion, and she may forgive you, but I won’t accept or forgive!’

  I went into my room and slammed the door.

  The battle over the baby lasted seven days, culminating in my father’s capitulation. Nor was this favourable outcome a matter only of the battle to save the child; it was also an occasion for collaboration between Hamdiya and me, as if my defence of her right to this baby conferred on me also some right where it was concerned – not merely that of the sister who would delight in the baby after it was born, but the right to participate in actual maternity, by following its progress from the early stages of pregnancy to preparing to receive the newborn, whose name my father and Hamdiya had given me the honour of choosing.

  Chapter twelve

  Lady Fortuna comes on the scene

  Life can be melodramatic – it can lead you unexpectedly to a series of events so fascinating and so extravagant in their sentimentality that they lend legitimacy to the Arab films we were raised on. For example, there’s the one with the child actress Fayrouz, at the end of which she cries out in the courtroom, ‘Papa, Papa – that’s my Papa!’ and he embraces her – her adoptive father, the goodhearted vagabond (Anwar Wagdi), and the audience’s tears flow at the happy ending. Or any number of films in which we follow the trials and tribulations of the innocent heroine (played by Shadia or Faten Hamama), who is usually young and petite. Her cheerfulness is fortified by the horror of the evils she encounters, and the cruel adversity she endures throughout the film, until the truth comes out at the end, typically with the dawn call to prayer resounding in the background. And since we all, to one degree or another, grew up under the canopy of the shade tree that is Egyptian cinema, we all indisputably know the meaning of melodrama, although we may be unable to define it as a technical term (that is, we are in the position of the little girl in Dickens’s Hard Times, whom the headmaster asks in the classroom, ‘Give me your definition of a horse.’ And the child – whose family works for the circus, living among horses and dealing with them daily at close range – is unable to give the headmaster the scientific definition he is after: ‘A horse is a quadruped . . . etc.’) Life, then, surprises us with its melodrama, just as Lady Fortuna surprises us – she whom the ancient Romans envisaged as a blindfolded woman holding a vast wheel from which were suspended human beings and their destinies. The good lady would turn the wheel suddenly, at random, and those at the top would wind up at the bottom, while those at the bottom would come to rest at the top.

  One week before Hamdiya gave birth, my father died of a heart attack.

  He died before he reached the age of fifty. He died suddenly, with no telltale illness or pain to suggest even a fleeting impression that he might die. The men carried the coffin, the deep hole in the earth waited, and the mourning-women of the village began their wailing, which rose and intensified as soon as we drew near to the outskirts of the village. In a spacious hall designated specially for the women, Hamdiya stretched out on the floor beside my grandmother, who kept asking her if she could manage this, for her belly was bulging with the nine months of her pregnancy, making it rather a problem for her to sit cross-legged on the ground. After two days, my aunt whispered in my ear, ‘Hamdiya’s belly is very large – I’ve never seen such a big belly. She may have twins.’ Then, ‘Her belly has dropped, God help us – she could go into labour at any moment.’ But the baby didn’t give occasion for any further consternation. He waited.

  Six days later we returned home from Upper Egypt, and on the seventh day after my father’s death Hamdiya gave birth to a boy. Twenty minutes later the nurse came out of the birthing room, laughing. ‘And a boy!’ I thought she was repeating the news, either in celebration or in the hope of some extra compensation. It was only after Hamdiya emerged from the birthing room that I realised the nurse had been conveying to me part two of the announcement: Hamdiya had given birth to two boys.

  And so the ending was worthy of a melodrama.

  I didn’t need to wait until I married and had a child to learn that a newborn in the house creates a magnetic field of which he is the gravitational centre. We circled in an orbit with the turning of the hours of the day – how could it be otherwise, with two babies separated in age by only twenty minutes? They demanded attention, they demanded care, and they demanded the provision of a thousand things large and small, all at the same time. So we carried them, rocked them, dandled them, nursed them, changed them, and bathed them. We bought tins of baby formula; we boiled and sterilised; we soothed and gently patted little backs; we changed and washed nappies and hung them out to dry; we rushed a baby to the doctor, ran to the chemist, and called the doctor once more. ‘He’s constipated,’ we said, or, ‘He has diarrhoea,’ or, ‘He’s colicky,’ or, ‘He’s got a cough.’ We monitored body temperatures rising and falling, the appearance of skin rashes, infections of the throat. We noted eye contact, hand movements, teething, babbling, and the first word. The infants’ first step – or steps.

  It was clear to Hamdiya and to me that I was a help to her in the care of the babies, and I believe now, even if it seemed at first a matter of simple necessity, that this woman I had once referred to as a ‘bit-player’ had spontaneously relinquished a portion of her maternity, yielding to me a place in which to partake of it with her, while I spontaneously accepted her gift without taking time to think about it: accepted it easily and joyfully, albeit without feeling any obligation to say ‘thank you’ to her.

  My care-giving and daily intimacy with my infant brothers wasn’t the only source of my powerful attachment to them; it was also my feeling of responsibility to Hamdiya, a feeling that increased by increments as time went on. A month after my father’s death, we had to make arrangements for how we would live. My father’s career had been intermittent; he was incarcerated for two years, from 1954 to 1956 in connection with the case of the Muslim Brotherhood (one of the surprises my father bequeathed to me – I hadn’t known about that first internment, had no memory or awareness of it, and stranger still was this connection with the Muslim Brotherhood. It had been classified incorrectly in the record, I think – or perhaps it had been misfiled at some point?). Then he was locked up for the five years from 1959 to 1964. The extent of his working life was comparatively short, as well as sporadic. His pension was small, and insufficient for the household requirements.

  Hamdiya said, ‘I’ll try to go back to work.’

  ‘Did you use to work?’

  ‘I did work. Before we got married your father persuaded me to quit.’

  (Yet another of Abu Nada’s surprises.)

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He said the wage was too small to justify my leaving the house every day – he said his salary was enough.’

  I didn’t comment on this. I said, ‘Then what will you do about the boys?’

  ‘I’ll take them to my sister in the morning and pick them up on my way home in the afternoon, four days a week. Then maybe I can leave them with you on the day you don’t have any lectures, and the day your first lecture isn’t until afternoon.’

  But Hamdiya had no luck returning to work. She was in the process of looking for a different job when I came home to her flying high with news she received, to my surprise, with tears.

  ‘I got a job – as translator for a news agency, with excellent pay. They offered me . . .’

  ‘And the university?’

  ‘I’ll sort it out. I’ll organise my time.’

  She cried for
a long time. I didn’t understand what had brought on her tears. I was overjoyed at having found a job. Until the boys started primary school, I was the family’s sole breadwinner, and even after Hamdiya went out to work, my material responsibility for my brothers was a foregone conclusion. I thought about their needs, and made them the highest priority of all I wished to obtain. I was concerned about the school in which they were enrolled, the book I wanted to buy for them, and the sport they liked, which I wanted them to have the opportunity to pursue. A second little mother – energetic, easily and naturally capable of accomplishing what she put her mind to.

  Despite my new duties, I got better results in my studies than I had achieved in previous years, which had amounted to: total failure, across the board, in pre-qualification for engineering; in first-year French two failed exams that had to be made up (the year in which I went to prison, which was also the year of the roller-coaster with Shazli, by which I mean the rapid and vertiginous ups and downs in our relationship); ‘satisfactory’ in second-year French (the year my father died). Then I received a grade of ‘good’ in two subjects my third year (the year I began working as a translator), and I maintained the same standard the following year (the year I graduated and earned the certificate). I was advancing quickly and conspicuously at my job. After all, both the languages I was dealing with were my mother tongue, besides which it became apparent that I had a facility for languages; my Arabic was better than that of my colleagues who had studied at Arabic schools. As for English, which I had studied as a second language at school, I had mastered it well enough to qualify me as a translator in three languages.

  The new arrangement, then, was evidently favourable, although I recognise now that among its drawbacks (perhaps the only negative result) was that I was cut off from the interactions of daily life at the university.

  Shazli mocked me when I ran into him once by chance. ‘Where have you been, Nada? Don’t tell me they locked you up for a couple of months, and you got scared and said you’d learnt your lesson?’

  The support Hazem gave me was limitless. I wonder again whether people have a chemistry that attracts them to each other or repels them, or whether luck, pure and simple, ordained that we should become friends and that our friendship should escape the cataclysms that so often strike friends and leave them with nothing but bitterness and ruin. Sometimes I think that perhaps each of us sought in the other a true sibling (it is odd that, in our relationship, the man-woman issue never came up), that maybe Hazem automat­ically, straightforwardly – because I was five years younger than he was – assigned to me the role of a little sister, and I simply stepped into that sacrosanct women’s space. Perhaps I was in need of an older brother to turn to. I know, even if I never told him so, that I received from him a lesson that had a defining influence on my life: he had told me about his family circumstances, about his responsibilities after the death of his father in caring for his mother and his siblings – three boys, all younger than he. I saw with my own eyes, without his having said anything about it, the extent to which this obligation dominated his life. It had become second nature to him, a priority dictating what was possible and what was out of the question in every particular of his life. Sometimes I think that we grasped instinctively the value of our conjunction, so much greater than it would have been if we had subjected it to the violent tempests of fleeting relationships. (Daily, daily our classmates were falling in love, and whether it was for weeks, months, a year, or even two years that they soared aloft, it was only to come crashing down all at once. The boys as a rule were like cats that always land on their feet, or so it seemed to me: they slipped and tumbled, quickly and easily, only to climb up once more – these were nothing more than pleasurable adventures, no more significant than the thrill of leaping lightly from one balcony to another. The girls, while they didn’t break their necks the first time they fell, bore obvious wounds and scars when they got up again, or such marks would appear later, after subsequent falls.

  Perhaps I avoid discussing in detail my relationship with Shazli, because when we split up I didn’t get any of those bruises that turn parts of the body blue, ache for a few weeks, and then heal. Maybe it would be overstating the case to say that my neck was broken or that I was hit so hard all four of my limbs had to be set in plaster. I’m exaggerating a little bit – but not much. Then, too, a fall from a high balcony happens once, and whatever will be will be. The relationship with Shazli ruined my twenties. For a year we were flying, after which for two years I was like a ringdove without a kindly rat to chew the net for me, and this was followed by years of confusion and bitterness, as well as withdrawal, in fear of falling once more.

  Shazli confounded me with his behaviour, his demands, and his judgements – always final judgements that assumed his absolute possession of accuracy and truth.

  In the beginning – blind love. Then confusion. The fact that I was young, inexperienced, and lacking in self-confidence prolonged the stages and made it difficult to move on. And the next stage was nothing but a kind of obligatory love, whose blind half deceived the sighted half, casting doubt upon what it saw.

  Shazli had his seasonal themes, attached to each of which was a certain leitmotif he would keep repeating like a drone, although what they all had in common was that a particular purpose was assigned to each harangue. My trip to Paris had its turn; this was followed by the subject of the older Communists who had dissolved the party and sold out (in this scenario my father appeared as their sole legitimate representative, so it follows that the intent of this attack, inasmuch as I was my father’s daughter, was that I should not escape the guilt my father had incurred); in a third season, my disagreement with his political analysis proved to him that I hadn’t broken free of my petty bourgeois origins and the political alignments they implied; in a fourth, Hazem became the subject of the attack: Hazem aspired to be a successful physician, and selfishly made his work and his studies a priority – not to mention his pathological attachment to his family!

  Seasons and stages, each with its target set up for shooting; at the end of a season, the target was removed and replaced by another.

  I complained of him to Hazem. He said, with a dismissive gesture, ‘Shazli’s a twit. He thinks only of himself. He’s a foolish boy, limited – it doesn’t bode well. He may not even be capable of love at all!’

  And because love is blind, I didn’t believe him. I told myself, ‘This is what he says today, so that tomorrow he can say, “I love you,” and risk his chances on my answering him in kind.’

  I didn’t know Hazem well enough yet.

  Chapter thirteen

  A discourse on the importance of agriculture

  I often wonder whether it is intuition, that ability to sense things from afar, rather like the dog’s sense of smell and its apprehension of imminent earthquakes or cyclones that causes it to begin to whine before people feel the earth tremble beneath their feet, or see the dark cloud descending all at once just before the storm hits. I wonder whether intuition is merely an automatic presentiment of a thing the mind registers before it is fully aware, or even recognises the perception. I wonder whether it was by instinct that I saw, before I was aware, that the coming years were to be violent ones, and more oppressive than any one person, or even a group of people, could face.

  Sometimes I think, ‘Nada, you’re conceited and full of yourself. You’re not so clever as to be able to read the future; on the contrary – quite simply, your mothering of the two little ones seduced you, it obsessed you, so you pursued the task passionately and to the very end: just another one of your manias.’ I say, ‘That’s not true. The truth is that you knew instinctively that the humble profession of a gardener would be more useful in a drought. Which of the two is better: to die of grief, or to be absorbed in the cultivation of a seedling in a window-box, or of fava bean sprouts on moistened cotton in an old saucer placed at the edge of the kitchen window?’

  My harsh mirror interrupts me, ‘Wer
e you thinking of how to be most helpful, or of how to escape and barricade yourself?’

  My gentle mirror replies, ‘Blessings upon anyone who is still of sound mind and spirit in a time of pestilential winds and the spread of plague.’

  ‘Easy, take it easy. Let us review the cost once again – we’ll go over it together, you and I, and neither of us will cheat the other.’

  ‘I graduated from the university in the summer of 1976. I was able, after a year or two, to be satisfied with what I gave the boys. I provided the necessary financial support for them, leaving their mother to assume her own role in supplying their daily needs. I was still a loving sister and a young woman in her prime, living according to whatever the exigencies of life dictated and demanded. I chose the little ones, and immersed myself in them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I knew instinctively that the coming years would overpower me, would overpower the efforts of all of us little clusters of confused dreamers, whatever our good intentions.’

  ‘You raised the white flag, then?’

  ‘I raised no flag, white or black. I observed, and my intu­ition turned to certainty.’

  ‘Didn’t that necessitate confrontation?’

  I say to Hazem, ‘You were born in the early fifties. I was born a few months before the outbreak of the Algerian revolution.’

  ‘An overture like the opening chords of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, astounding, catching you off-guard.’

  He laughs. ‘I refer, of course, not to the beginnings of the two momentous decades of the second half of the twentieth century, but to the appearance of my and your good selves upon the stage!’

  ‘And the grand finale: the Americans’ exit in full flight from Saigon, airlifted in helicopters from the roof of the embassy!’

  (We hadn’t arrived yet at the fleeing of the Israeli soldiers from Lebanon in May 2000, which I followed live via satellite television. Fretting over Hazem’s absence, I began to whisper over and over, ‘If only you had waited . . . why didn’t you wait? If you had seen the hands beating on the gates of the camp prison, and then the gates opening and the jubilation.’ He didn’t wait.)