I told my aunt about Arwa (omitting some of the details), but I didn’t tell her about Siham. Strange. A person talks about something painful in order to cover up the thing that hurts even more.
Chapter fifteen
Encounter
Real or imaginary? Did I miss her so much that I heard her voice without hearing it, or was it she, herself, and I just didn’t recognise her? How could I not recognise her? For weeks this question kept me awake at night. I would answer it with a decisive ‘no’, then contradict it just as decisively.
I didn’t see her, for I was standing a few steps away, examining bolts of cloth, in search of something Hamdiya had asked for in order to make some duvet covers. I was inspecting the fabrics closely for weave and colour, comparing before purchasing. I heard her voice and turned quickly, calling, ‘Siham!’
It wasn’t Siham. I offered a smile that must have looked imbecilic, because the woman I saw before me wasn’t smiling. She turned on her heel and walked off, heading for the shop door. For days afterward I was unable to overcome my conviction that the voice was her voice – for how could I mistake Siham’s voice? But the woman I saw when I turned had been quite overweight and some years older, much resembling a housewife who spends her days at home, going out only when necessary, preparing meals and cleaning house during the day, and surrendering to the television at night, plying her knitting needles smoothly and mechanically as she watches, making a jumper for one of her children or grandchildren. Definitely not Siham.
I kept recalling what I had seen of the woman’s face – a broad forehead, made more so by her thinning hair; a double chin; dark lines and bags under the eyes, in a puffy, round white face. The passing face of a grandmother, who had gone out contrary to habit on a quick errand. But grandmothers, when they leave their confinement, tend to interact even with strangers, returning smile for smile, a conversational opening. This woman’s face was stern, and she turned round abruptly, quickening her steps as if in a hurry to reach the door. Could it have been Siham? The whiteness of the complexion, the greenness of the eyes, and the light-chestnut hair were also Siham’s.
I knew Siham when I was a new student at the College of Engineering, groping my way around the place. During the first days, the departments, the halls, the corridors, and the names of the professors were a labyrinth through which I made my way with no small sense of alienation and uneasiness. From a distance I observed the upperclassmen gathering in clusters here and there, joining together in conversation and laughter, or commenting on a wall-journal, or settling differences on a contentious point in the discussion. I noticed her before she noticed me: a large girl, tall and of generous proportions, distinguished by her green eyes and soft chestnut hair. I seemed to see her just about everywhere around the college, with various students, as if she knew everyone and everyone knew her. She would speak, and listen, become engrossed in the response to a wall-journal, or she would be contributing her own commentary to the journal, or just standing next to it, or leading a dialogue concerning what had appeared in it.
One day I caught sight of her in a circle of students, discussing something with them, with her eye on one of the wall-magazines. I wanted to join them, but I was too diffident, and remained standing not far off – or perhaps my feet moved without my realising it, and I drew nearer. She noticed, and greeted me, then extended her hand, and so I extended mine. We introduced ourselves to each other.
Then there was that conference in the Sawi Auditorium at the college.
The students filled the auditorium until it was packed to overflowing. Onstage was a minister who had come as a government representative, and next to him were two other people I no longer remember – maybe they were representatives of the college and the student union. Questions and comments followed rapidly one upon another, to the point of smothering the beleaguered minister. He seemed confused, either because the situation was new to him, or because he himself wasn’t entirely convinced of the government’s positions, which he had been delegated to defend. I no longer recall the minister’s face, nor do I remember his responses, except one, which was evidently an evasion, and served only to entangle him further. He said, ‘I shall refer your questions to his Excellency the President, and convey to you such answers as he chooses to make.’
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Siham’s voice burst forth like a missile, scoring a direct hit: ‘If what you’re telling us is that you’re nothing more than a postman who carries letters to the President of the Republic, and brings back whatever replies he deigns to make, then we’d like you to inform him that the students will stay where they are, that they won’t leave the university until he comes in person and answers their questions!’
The students were in an uproar, some laughing, some mocking and jeering, others agitated, infuriated by the minister’s words. But some were silent, staring mesmerised at the girl, enthralled by the boldness and decisiveness of the words she’d spoken.
I was beset by doubt. The woman I’d seen wasn’t Siham. She definitely wasn’t Siham.
As soon as I arrived back home I threw myself into looking for the poem ‘The Lament of the Little White Horse’. What I was looking for was not the original text in French, which I had memorised, but a translation of the poem that I’d done at least ten years earlier. I had written it on one of the pages of some notebook or other and then, in order to safeguard my translation, I had torn the page out of the notebook and put it away somewhere. But where? I spent an entire day searching – in the desk drawers, in my wardrobe, in cardboard cartons in which I had stored books and notebooks I didn’t need, in my old suitcases – but I didn’t come across it.
During the following weeks my fever of investigation extended to Siham. I went to her old flat in Giza, behind the southern wall of the zoo. I knocked on the door – knocked for a long time. She wasn’t at home. I asked one of the neighbours, who said, ‘She hasn’t been here in ages.’ I thought, ‘Maybe she’s at her mother’s house,’ and so I rang her mother and was told she wouldn’t see anyone. I asked how she was, and was answered by the standard rote courtesy, ‘Thanks be to God, she’s fine.’ I went back to her neighbourhood time and again; I took to loitering about the street in front of the building where her family lived. I thought, ‘Perhaps we’ll meet by chance, and then I’ll know that the woman I met at the fabric shop wasn’t Siham.’
Yet another of my sudden manias. I was possessed by the spirit of a detective in a mystery novel, or the investigator in a murder. I asked comrades and friends, when and where was the last time Siham had been seen. I gathered the threads and the bits of information. I compiled whatever I had, together with what I gleaned from others. I knew that, after graduation, she had worked – for some months, perhaps – at a private engineering firm, and that she had then left to get her doctorate in the Soviet Union, at the end of 1978. She had written me two letters from Moscow at the beginning of 1979, in which she talked about her circumstances in the city, her homesickness, how acutely she missed her mother, and the ferocious effects of the bitter cold. In a more lighthearted section of the letter, she told me she had gone to the Bolshoi Theatre, to the city’s museum on a sightseeing tour, and that she had visited Chekov’s house (she described to me his famous pair of spectacles, which she herself had been tempted to take off his desk), as well as Tolstoy’s house (‘I saw the desk,’ she recounted, ‘at which he wrote Anna Karenina’). She also told me about her rapid progress in learning the Russian language, and her classmates’ astonishment on discovering that, in addition to Arabic, she spoke French, English, and German. In her second letter, some months later – by which time she had moved to another house specially designated for graduate students – she seemed less homesick, and she mentioned that her room-mate was from Aleppo. After that, there were no more letters from her, whether because of some omission on my part or because she was busy, I don’t remember.
I was told by a fellow student who’d been in Moscow during
the time she was studying there that in April 1979 they had staged a demonstration in front of the Egyptian embassy in Moscow, to protest Egypt’s signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty. He laughed. ‘You know how big Siham was,’ he said. ‘We lifted her up on our shoulders and she began leading a chant, with us repeating after her.’ I asked him whether she had begun to show any signs of illness at that time. He said, ‘It may be that she had an emotional crisis – something to do with her attachment to a Syrian student, I think, but at any rate I’m not sure about this. Possibly she was disappointed in the system over there – the widespread bribery and corruption and other things she hadn’t expected to find. Or it may be that she was shocked by the foolishness or perverseness of some of the Arab students.’ But this friend of ours couldn’t remember when Siham had left Moscow, or whether she had suffered from spells of severe depression during that time. Another friend, who was her classmate, said that her academic progress had been brilliant, but then she suddenly decided to terminate her studies and go back to Egypt.
Other friends told me that, after her return to Egypt, early in the 1980s (summer of 1981? Or 1982?), Siham settled in Cairo for a short time, perhaps three or four years, part of which she spent teaching at the lycée in Bab al-Louk. Then she left Cairo to live with her mother, who was working for UNESCO in Paris. At this point accounts vary, concurring on some points but differing on others. One person said she tried to commit suicide; said another, ‘She tried to kill herself more than once, here and in Paris.’ This one affirmed that she had frequented the hospital to be treated for depression. But one friend said, ‘It wasn’t depression – she was schizophrenic.’ This conversation angered another acquaintance, a woman whom Siham had trained and instructed when she was still a student in her first months at the university. She said, ‘Who amongst us hasn’t experienced depression? Who amongst us hasn’t gone to a psychologist for help in enduring what we have to endure? She wasn’t ill. When what was happening ceased to make her happy, she chose to find a way out. Wasn’t it her right to find a way out?’
The episode of the zoo was recounted by a number of friends, although they didn’t agree on the details, or as to when it took place or just who was an eye-witness and had been the first to tell of it. Siham had gone to the zoo, taking with her some colourful balloons. She stood at the entrance to the zoo, among the hawkers, and sold the balloons to children. (Some said that she was handing them out, not selling them, while others said that it wasn’t balloons, but little toys she had made by hand.) A policeman had approached her, and she had to bribe him (the way vendors normally do) before he would allow her to occupy that spot. The vendors thought her an interloper who had imposed herself on them, to draw off their customers, which she had no right to do. So they picked a fight with her (some said they assaulted her physically and beat her). The story spread in the way that rumours do, passed around among the sons and daughters of the student movement, who were scattered throughout the country.
For several weeks I gave myself up to the investigation, but then some of life’s other preoccupations distracted me – although not from the poem ‘The Lament of the Little White Horse.’ I decided to translate it again. I sat at my desk and rendered it in Arabic – a passable first draft. I went back to the draft and reworked it. When I proceeded to set down the final copy, I found myself substituting a mare for the male horse, both in the title and in the text:
The White Mare
By Paul Fort
Little mare in foul weather, what courage had she!
A little white mare, leading all in her wake.
No fine weather, ever, in that grim landscape,
No springtime, not ever, be it early or late.
Through drenching rain, she rejoiced in her freight
Of children, and still she led all in her wake.
Delighted, a cart drawn behind her small tail,
Onward she went leading all in her wake.
But serene as she was, so she died on the day
Lightning struck even as she led all in her wake.
Not for her then to see the sun through the clouds break,
For she died before spring could come, early or late.
Translated and adapted by
Nada Abdel Qadir
Chapter sixteen
Meditations on time
I wasn’t in the habit of keeping a journal, or setting down my thoughts or reminiscences, but one evening I wrote: ‘Nadir and Nadeem went to the university today. University today, tomorrow a job, a wife. And I? Am I to settle for my professional work? Will I be free, ultimately, to carry out my prison-writings project? To marry? At my age?’
I was in an odd state – or should I say, a peculiar state, out of the ordinary, combining a profound sense of repose – rather like serenity, although it is difficult to describe it as such – and an obscure anxiousness, the nature of which I couldn’t altogether pinpoint: as if, in the thought I had written down, there were some question my mind hadn’t registered, dangling there somewhere, but eluding my grasp.
In the morning, while the boys showered and got ready to go out, I was conscious of a pressing urge to accompany them. I made the suggestion to them, whereupon they exchanged glances and burst out laughing all at once. It was an absurd idea, to be sure. I was sitting on one side of the breakfast table, Hamdiya on the other, in a corner of the kitchen. Hamdiya muttered a protective charm for them under her breath, stealing a sidelong glance in their direction, while I stared unabashedly right at them. Nadeem winked at his brother and said, ‘Mind the cameras – they’re pointed at us!’
Eighteen years – how did they slip by? In a flash, it seemed. I realised I was on the threshold of my forties: just two years to go. I hadn’t noticed that the boys had swallowed up the years, the years required for them to grow from infants with their eyes shut tight, swaddled in white blankets, to two tall youths capable of opposing me in a verbal contest, and winning. The years passed smoothly from this point to that, while they grew up and so did I; and by a strange reckoning these years that were given over to the twins were not written off as a loss. They bestowed upon me countless extraordinary moments, whether of joy, confusion, anxiety, or trouble, but they constituted, at all events, a life. The white hairs that startled me in the mirror one morning were not invaders, but the natural result of a life I had lived. The twins swallowed up the years entirely, much as they might have tackled a delicious meal I had prepared for them. ‘Bon appetit!’ said I.
No relationship or marital prospect I took up ever worked out. Because of the twins? There was love that took me by storm, like a lightning-bolt achieving its target. Then the only marriage proposal that appeared serious and promising ended in disaster when I said, ‘Nadir and Nadeem are more than just brothers I’m devoted to – they are truly my children. It will be as if you were marrying a woman with two children from a previous marriage.’ He was no fool – he said he knew this, that he had worked it out for himself, adding, ‘But things won’t always be this way. Parents become detached sooner or later; they’ll be busy with a life away from you, and you’ll make your own family, having children, and busying yourself with your own life away from them.’ That was all he said.
I found such talk inauspicious – it seemed to bode ill for the future. I said to myself, ‘If you marry him, some mishap will befall one of the boys, possibly costing him his life.’ After thinking about it for two weeks, wearing myself out with the effort to persuade myself that my fears were nothing but superstition, that the man hadn’t said anything to warrant such alarm on my part, I went to him, my mind made up. He didn’t understand. I did no more than state my decision – I didn’t explain. He tried to sway me, to persuade me – patiently, kindly, good-naturedly he tried. Then, the last time we met, he said I was mad, disturbed, unable to take responsibility. I left him, repeating to myself, ‘There’s nothing delusional about it – it’s intuition, true intuition.’
My mother didn’t like the t
wins. She thought they pulled me away from her. It annoyed me that she didn’t mention them in her letters or ask about them when we spoke on the telephone. I repeated to her that for the first five years I couldn’t afford a ticket to travel to Paris, and that the twins had nothing to do with that.
We kept in touch via letters and telephone calls, in general. I would ring her on her birthday and she would ring me on mine. I never told her that I resented her not having come to Cairo during the mourning period for my father. I reproached her, but without voicing my reproach to her. Six years after my father died, I was able to buy a discounted ticket to Paris. My situation at work didn’t allow me to be away for more than a week. My mother was short-tempered and irritable. She said I talked too much about the boys. She kept forgetting their names, or getting them wrong; I would repeat each of the names to her slowly, but she would forget them or immediately say them wrong again.
Three years later, I had plenty of opportunities to do simultaneous translation, and this enabled me to travel again to Paris. I took Nadir and Nadeem with me. I thought, ‘She’ll get to know them and love them, and she’ll realise that her family is bigger than she thought.’
I wrote to my mother, saying, ‘This time I’ll spend a whole month with you. We’ll go together to visit your village, and you can acquaint me with all the places where you spent your childhood.’ She greeted this proposal without enthusiasm.