Blue Lorries (14 page)

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, ‘Were 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.)

‘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.