‘Momentous decades indeed. An amazing time, between brackets – as if history had made an abrupt U-turn and decided to love us, accommodate us, treat us tenderly, and protect us.’
He interrupted me: ‘By God, I don’t know which is the son-of-a-bitch, us or history!’
‘When it seems as though history’s in our corner, we endure – or at least hope persists, even if we’re weak.’
I go back to my two mirrors. ‘I was struggling,’ I say, ‘to keep my balance and my self-respect as a productive and responsible woman. I watch the scene unfold, a poison dissolved in my tea and swallowed every morning and evening – no, not only in the newspaper or the broadcast news, but in the air I breathed when I went to work each day. For what’s the shame in procuring an antidote like no other known antidote, sweet-tasting, a pleasure to the heart and to those looking on? Like the fava bean I mentioned, or a lentil, or a fenugreek seed on a piece of moistened cotton that I can nurture, and ease my mind by watching it put out its green shoot and grow a little bigger day by day. Call it wisdom or call it withdrawal – call it what you will, and let my mirrors reflect whatever they will reflect.’
Human beings are strange, seeing themselves as the centre of creation, of history, of the narrative. Suppose I had stayed – would I have fixed what had gone bad, would I have prevented the withering of the dream and the movement, could I, with two arms (not three), only two legs, only two eyes in a single head, and the only heart my mother gave me – could I have stopped the monstrous wheel attached to that dreadful harrow from approaching and wreaking its annihilating havoc in our lives?
My harsh mirror says, ‘There were many of you – arms, legs, and minds; so then you redress the situation, and then there is honour in the attempt, and finally martyrdom is glory.’
My gentle mirror says, ‘We did try, we earned the honour of the attempt. But in the end it was plain to see there was no point in foolish obduracy.’
A third mirror says, ‘That’s not a valid account. How can a person bear witness to his own times, his own actions? A dream rose up and was crushed. Leave the tale to those who will come after.’
I carry my mirrors around with me. They torment me. I spend a long time staring into them, then put them into a drawer and carry on attending to the requirements of daily life. Breadwinning. The education of the little ones. Companionship and the pleasure of watching them grow day after day.
Chapter fourteen
My aunt
I never had the chance to get really close to my grandmother. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of days at a time that we ever spent together. I remember her at our home, when she visited us there in the company of my aunt early in 1959, when I was not yet five years old. And I remember her the day we went to the village in mourning for my grandfather (the day of the translation problem). I also remember when she came to our home bringing great baskets, hampers, and sacks laden with the delicacies she had prepared for us, to celebrate my father’s return. Perhaps I met her on one or two other occasions, but I can’t put my finger on where or when – whether at our home in Cairo or at hers in the village. I am unable to remember her appearance, except by looking at some pictures that were taken of us together. I stare at an image, trying to recall her face and its expressions. Her voice, though – the rhythm of her speech and her distinctive way of speaking – these I remember relatively well. She had a loud voice, and she enunciated her words clearly, her speech rich in imagery, as well as in its cadences and its diction. Her way of speaking had a kind of presence, whose differences and distinct qualities did not escape my notice when I was a child, even while it was beyond my capacity to grasp their significance fully, or to appreciate the sources of her expressiveness.
My grandmother died some months after the death of my father. I rang my aunt and let her know that I would not be able to travel and join her in the ritual observations, because the twins were down with fever, and because in just a matter of days I was to take my final examinations for the year. She heard me out, without comment. Years later, however, she chastised me roundly for my conduct. ‘Auntie,’ I told her, ‘I loved and respected my grandmother very much – you know how much you all mean to me!’ The truth is, I don’t know whether what I said was sincere, or a mixture of sincerity and flattery, for I had surprised myself with my own words.
I rarely see my aunt, and we have spent only the odd week here and there under the same roof – which does not explain the closeness that draws us together, which is rather like a secret understanding, something that goes without saying. Maybe the reason for it is the strength of our mutual attachment to the same man, perhaps a shared, tacit admiration. We go for years without meeting; then we get together and the talk flows freely, as if we were picking up where we’d left off on a conversation already begun. I move familiarly around her house, sleep peacefully at night, and awake surrounded by a calm that amazes me. I contemplated this, wondering whether I was unwittingly replicating a romantic scene that had stolen into my consciousness from early nineteenth-century French novels and poems: the state of yearning to return to one’s roots and antecedents, to escape from the city to the innocence of the countryside . . . and so forth and so on. I laughed at this notion, amused because I knew that there was nothing etherial or romantic about my aunt, who was realistic, practical, and earthly; to do justice to a description of her I would have to add all the synonyms the language has to offer. There was no place in my aunt’s life for fragility. Ten times she had given birth, and of those she had borne five survived. She married young, and by the time my father had me, my aunt – two years his junior – had a daughter who was already married. (I no longer remember how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren my aunt had.) Her house was frequented by young and old alike, some who were connected to the household, guests who were as good as connected, others who really were just visitors, people in need of something or seekers of advice, those who came to assist ‘al-Hagga’ or who wanted to enjoy her company and exchange a few words with her. She, meanwhile, was like a bee, never stopping from dawn until dusk – working, issuing orders, arranging, directing, advising, remonstrating, scolding, rebuking, welcoming, and brandishing her sarcasm. (Did I get my own sarcastic tongue from her?)
Early on in my days as a student in the French Department I found myself laughing while leafing through books that contained pictures of Oriental women drawn by French nineteenth-century artists. Their imaginations running wild, all they could come up with was naked or near-naked women, and gauzy, diaphanous veils that covered without concealing anything of the Venus-like bodies. Black-eyed women of the East – and of the artists’ fancy. My aunt’s body was lush, tall, and full-figured, seeming all the more so because of the prominence of her breasts and buttocks, draped in her voluminous jilbaab. At night, she would seat herself on the ground with her legs extended before her, and I would sit close to her so we could chat. It bothered her that I wasn’t married. She would declare she couldn’t believe the young men were so blind that none of them had proposed to me. I would laugh and tell her some had proposed, but that I had turned them down. ‘Bad move,’ she would say. ‘You raised your brothers, and now they’ve grown – what are you waiting for?’ Then she would abruptly cover her mouth with her left hand as if concealing her laughter, or to prevent it escaping from her. ‘Why don’t you marry Salem?’ I didn’t know who Salem was, so I asked her, and she said, ‘Salem is my daughter’s boy!’ She got carried away with enumerating his virtues, and I laughed.
‘Auntie,’ I said, ‘Salem is six years younger than me.’
‘But he’s a doctor and he’s very good,’ she said. I can’t think of anyone but you who would suit him. What do you say? Shall I fix it?’
‘I’m six years older than he is!’ I repeated.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said. ‘My grandfather, may he rest in peace, at the age of sixty married a virgin forty years his junior – younger than his youngest daugh
ter. She gave him three sons and he lived past the age of ninety. Her whole life, his wife had nothing but good things to say about him. If you like Salem, take him!’
I hugged her and drew her off on another conversational tack, to get away from the subject of marriage. I asked her her views on life, anticipating the pronouncement with which she usually professed a reluctance that did not succeed in hiding her readiness for a conversation she actually found interesting: ‘You ask strange questions, Niece!’ She held back for a few moments, then replied, ‘Life is both wide-open and narrow. When we spend it sowing and reaping, nurturing and raising, picking up and putting down, coming and going, going up and going down, loving and hating, enduring hardship and anticipating relief, it’s wide-open. And as long as we’re in the thick of it, with folks to the right and left of us, on top and underneath, everyone oppressed or overjoyed – everyone in it together – it stays wide-open. But if we stand back, we say it’s as narrow as the eye of a needle, we say, “Why do we live, only to die? Why build when building ends in demolition? Why cultivate what the wind will only take away? Why expand, only to open our hands and find them empty?” I say, when we’re living life, we find it wide-open even if it’s confining, and when we step back and look at it we find it narrow and suffocating, meaningless and pointless. For instance, when I buy chicks and look at them while they’re little with their pretty yellow fluff, and I get to know them, and each chick is delightful, and I feed and water them, clean their pens, and keep company with them every day, watching them grow, my heart leaps. Look, Nada, if you think I buy chicks in order to butcher them after they grow up – me and everyone else – it doesn’t change my pleasure in them or the fact that my heart leaps with tenderness toward them. Having children isn’t like having chicks, and yet it is. I mean, I carry them for nine months, and my soul hangs on the baby, and our Lord takes him. If life didn’t have its hold on me, I wouldn’t conceive, bear, nurture, and rear another child after that. But life takes me and pulls me onward, and I go along with it. It gives, and I’m happy with what it gives; it bestows a second child on me, and a third; a fourth comes and goes, but the fifth stays. Wide and narrow, child of my brother.
‘All my life, my body has given up before my brain. I go to bed because my legs are tired and my body is wrecked. In bed my mind keeps circling, it won’t slow down or settle. When they took your father to prison, I kept thinking – all night long I would lie there thinking. Then I’d get up in the morning feeling suffocated, anxious and miserable. I had no desire to cook, or wash, or say, “Good morning.” I asked him when he got out, “Did they beat you, dear heart?” He said, “They beat us, my sister, but we didn’t give up. We learned, we built, we expanded, and we lived.” Afterward I said to myself, “He was nearby, inside. I was outside, far away, standing on the shore and thinking, he’s drowning, and my heart was distraught, but he was there in the sea, a drowning man, swimming.” ’
Suddenly she smiled. ‘Did you know,’ she asked me, ‘that I wrote a letter to Abdel Nasser while your father was in prison?’
So my aunt, too, has surprises up her sleeve. ‘Did you save a copy of the letter?’ I said.
‘I sent it.’
‘Who wrote it for you?’
She laughed. ‘That’s a long story. I dictated it over and over again. Each time I asked the person who wrote the letter to read it back to me, and there’d be language from the newspapers and the radio. I don’t work for radio or newspapers. They were writing things I hadn’t said – one time it was “Immortal Leader”, another time it was “Commander of the Millions”, and a third time it was some big words I didn’t understand the meaning of. I said, “Look, fellows, that’s not what I said!” Then I called my youngest boy, who was in primary school, and I told him, “Copy what I say, and write it to the letter and the word – write it grammatically, and don’t add or subtract anything.
‘ “Write, my son,” I said to him.
‘ “President Abu Khaled, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of Beni Murr, and President of Egypt and Syria,
“I am sister to Dr Abdel Qadir Selim, who went first to the kuttab, then was educated at school, then went to university, then travelled abroad to France to work, in accordance with the word of the Blessed Prophet: ‘Seek ye out knowledge, though it be in China.’ When he brought back the required knowledge and began teaching at the university and doing his part for the good of the country, you put him in prison.
“We are honourable people, we don’t call a dog ‘master’ and we don’t bow our heads except to our Creator, nor do we ask for anything except what is right, and we ask that only of God and the righteous, for respectable persons ask nothing except from those who are also respectable. What I am asking is that the truth be established; I ask for an assurance of honesty from the officer who ordered the arrest of my brother, justice from the judge who ordered his imprisonment, and verification of the papers that were deemed a criminal act on his part, which merited putting him in prison.
“Abu Khaled, I approve you as arbiter, because I approve you as President of the country – how, then, should I not accept your judgement in the matter of my brother?
“The Prophet said, ‘Each of you is a shepherd, and every shepherd is responsible for his flock.’ I am helping you, Abu Khaled, to carry the burden of an unjust judge or an imperious officer. Furthermore, I am helping you because in my brother and all the young men imprisoned with him rests the good of the country – how then can you lock them up and prohibit them from offering their knowledge, for whose sake they exerted themselves, and lived abroad? And how, when you yourself reap the benefits, can you prevent all the world from profiting as well?
“Finally, I inform you that I cannot read or write. I dictated this letter to my youngest son, who has taken the substance of my words and made it grammatical, without adding or subtracting anything. I have asked him to read back to me what he wrote, so I can be sure that he rendered my words accurately.” ’
‘Did Abdel Nasser answer your letter, Aunt?’
‘I got a letter from his office, saying they would look into the matter. I waited. After I’d waited a long time, I said to myself that either he’d received the letter and he was just busy, or else they’d hidden the letter and he’d never received it.’ She laughed. ‘It’s a real friend who doesn’t find fault. “He who loves you will swallow pebbles for you.” Well, I worked out a pretext, because I wanted to forgive him.’
Perhaps my aunt enjoys talking with me because with my questions I give her the chance to talk about things no one around her allows her any opportunity to discuss. Sometimes she protests with a laugh, ‘What is this, a television interview, my brother’s daughter? You keep asking me, “What do you think of this, and what do you think of that?” But I have to say, you are clever and pleasant, not like the television interviewers, with their hair dyed blond and their eyelids painted purple, all dressed up like dolls at a fair, who talk as if they had a hard-boiled egg packed into their throats, and interrupt the person who’s talking to them and read off a paper as if, heaven forbid, they were deaf and never heard a word he was saying!’
I laughed, and told her her opinion mattered, that it mattered a great deal to me. ‘I want to know you, Aunt,’ I said. She found this statement odd.
‘What –’ she said, ‘– you don’t know me yet?’
Occasionally I am caught off-guard by the feeling that I didn’t know my father well enough. All at once I wonder, ‘What would my father have done in such and such a situation, and what would he have said about such and such an issue?’ When this feeling gets hold of me I am perplexed. ‘I don’t know him,’ I say, ‘I didn’t know him.’ Then I fall to wondering once more, is it ever given to a son or daughter to know his or her parents well enough, or does knowledge remain ever incomplete and deficient? Perhaps that was why I kept going back to visit my aunt – the second reason, not the first, for the first reason was that I missed her and it put me at ease to see her. I would visit
her and have long conversations with her, asking her a lot of questions and listening to what she had to say. Sometimes I would see my behaviour as comical and foolish, as I sat beside her in my trousers and shirt and trainers, asking for her opinions as if I were a foreign correspondent or a social scientist who had parachuted down into the village. It was she who dispelled this feeling by her spontaneous and sincere manner, which decisively established the closeness between us. She had never felt, as she herself told me one night, any estrangement from her brother: he had gone and come back, been educated, and taken up residence in Cairo, married the Frenchwoman, gone to prison and got out, and their relationship was warm, communication flowing without being impeded by any new developments. Perhaps her relationship with my father extended itself to me; maybe there were other reasons for this warmth, having to do with the chemistry that attracts and repels, without reference to any discernible logic; maybe its source was the wealth of affection that was apparent even in my calling her ‘auntie’, and her calling me ‘my brother’s daughter’. Each time I left, she bade me farewell with the same words: ‘Don’t be gone long, Nada,’ by which she meant that I should not prolong my absence from her. I would go to visit her once or twice a year, and ring her up every week, to ask how she was getting along, and give her news of the twins and Hamdiya and myself.
On my first visit to her after Arwa killed herself, I told her the story. I expected her to open her comments by saying that suicide was a sin. I imagined the substance of her remarks: ‘Our Lord alone reclaims his own – it’s not right for any of us to take that upon himself.’ But she didn’t say this. She questioned me minutely about Arwa – was she married, and did she have children, siblings, a family? Then she fell silent. The following day, she brought the subject up again. ‘And where,’ she asked me, ‘were you all, when she killed herself?’ Her final comment: ‘My brother’s daughter, you either have to choose our way – marriage, children, kith and kin – or else you have to look after one another, each one being a mainstay to his friend. No one can live alone and unsheltered!’ She said no more than this, nor did she refer to the topic again.