Authors: Radwa Ashour
Novelty
Nadir was training me to use the computer. I found it confusing, and felt completely stupid at first, then less so. I groped my way as timidly as someone taking up a pen for the first time, or someone expected to be responsive in a language of which he has learned only the rudiments. Losing patience, I would say, ‘I get it now. Let me figure it out.’ He would leave me alone to flounder for a bit, and then I would call for help, demanding explanations every few minutes. Nadir would come and sort me out, but he would overdo the explanation, going on and on until I protested, ‘What, do you think I’m an idiot?’ He would go away again, and things would seem simpler for a bit, then get complicated again. Then I would summon Nadeem.
For the first week, working with the programmes and files and windows and message boxes that jumped on to the screen in front of me – to which I didn’t know whether I should answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ – I felt I was wandering a maze in the streets of an unknown city. I would stop. Then I would make up my mind and say, ‘This is the way,’ and proceed with some degree of confidence, but this would gradually fade, until I became convinced that I was simply lost, with no idea how to get to where I wanted to go, or how to go back the way I had come. I said, ‘Teach me how to work with just the documents.’ I was good at writing quickly on the keyboard; now I wanted to learn how to open a new document, how to close it, how to get back to it, and how to organise what I’d written and edit text by adding to it or cutting from it. He taught me.
The following day, I opened a new document, and began translating. I put the text on my right and looked at the Arabic sentences, moving my fingers easily on the keyboard, as the French sentences took shape on the screen before me. I usually translated quickly, and as a rule I would go back over the draft of what I had translated at the end of each paragraph. Now the emendation process was simpler and faster: I could delete a letter or a word or a line and substitute another. No need to draft text only to white it out and then go back to it for the final adaptation, to be copied for the third time. I worked assiduously on the document for four days, during which I translated fifty pages.
I was happy, as I generally was, when my translation of a text pleased me, and happier still about my success in working with a device that, only one week earlier, had seemed like an insoluble puzzle.
What had happened? Some keystroke resulting in some action or other. The document had disappeared. For two hours, I tried to get it back, but I got nowhere. I was certain it was hiding somewhere in the depths of the machine, so I sat waiting for one or the other of the boys to return and find it.
Nadir came home and as usual declared that he was starving to death, that if he didn’t eat immediately we would have to summon an ambulance, and that before the ambulance could get there the doctor would have pronounced him dead!
I took him by the hand and sat him down before the computer. ‘The document first,’ I told him, ‘and then you can perish at your leisure, I won’t stop you!’ Hamdiya stared, astonished, but held her tongue.
Nadir sat at the computer and asked me the name of the document, the date it was created, and the last time I had worked on it. He searched. ‘It’s not there,’ he said. Then his fingers began a series of rapid clicks on the mouse. Boxes and lists appeared, while he indicated ‘no’ or ‘yes’, closing this, opening that, closing the other. At last he announced, ‘I have a right to eat now. I worked for my snack. You’ve lost the document, Miss Nada!’
‘That can’t be! How did it go missing?’
‘You must have needed to press “save”, but . . .’
‘What do you mean, “press ‘save’”?’
‘That means you preserve the document. That’s computerese: “Saving” means preserving your work.’
‘And?’
‘The document got lost because you shut down the computer without saving it.’
‘That’s not what happened.’
‘Then tell me what happened. But let me eat first, and then I’ll listen.’
I sat next to him while he had his dinner. I told him, ‘The power went out, and the computer turned off. Then the power came back, I turned it on, and the document was there – no problem. I worked on it for four hours, and when I decided to stop the message box for me to save it came up, so I pressed “Yes” as usual, and the same box came up a second time, and then a third and a fourth. I did the same thing twenty times, then decided that the “Yes” button was useless. It seemed as though pressing “No” would solve the problem, so that’s what I did. After that I closed the document, shut down the computer, and went into the kitchen. Then this afternoon when I turned it on I couldn’t find the document.’
‘Brilliant! Fantastic! I’ve got to hand it to you, by God! When the electricity went out, the computer saved a temporary copy of the document. You simply had to change its name or save it with the same name by substituting the temporary document with a permanent one. Every time you gave the “save” command, the computer was waiting for you to tell it under what name you wanted the document saved. What you were supposed to do was . . .’
I wasn’t listening anymore. I was thinking about how I had lost four days’ worth of work.
‘From now on,’ I announced, ‘I’m not going anywhere near the computer.’
Nadir shook his head, shrugged, and said, to goad me, ‘ “Scared to get into the water, Nadir? Shame on you!” ’
He was mimicking what I used to say to him when he was little and fearful of swimming.
When Nadeem came back, Nadir turned the loss of the document into a stage comedy.
‘I come home and find Nada raising a lament, wailing, “My document, my document!” I tell her I’m about to die of hunger. “My document, my document!” she says. The telephone rang, and she answered it, “My document, my document!” There was a knock on the door. It was a grocery delivery-man. She said, “My document, my document!” ’
For weeks I didn’t go near the computer. Then one Friday after breakfast the boys pulled me over to the machine and sat down, one on either side of me and each with a newspaper. ‘We’re not moving,’ they said. ‘Turn on the computer and work with it.’ Every time I tried to move from my place they prevented me. Finally I said, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’ They didn’t believe me. ‘I swear,’ I told them, but they still didn’t believe me. I said to them, ‘Look, lads, I’ll work on my own!’ They let me go. They stood by the bathroom door, and shouted, one after the other, ‘That’s it!’ And they dragged me back from the door of the bathroom to the computer.
Then the new plaything caught hold of me. It took hold even more firmly when I learned how to use e-mail and surf the Internet. I could follow the news, read the papers and the magazines, and look for whatever I wanted to know on one subject or another.
One glorious morning I announced, like a cock crowing, ‘News of the hour: I’ve now got my own blog!’ The boys shouted as if the team they were cheering for had scored a goal – they clapped and cheered.
‘What’s your blog called?’
‘ “Mendicant dervish.”’
‘Beautiful!’ said Nadeem.
But Nadir retorted, ‘That’s pathetic. Think of another name.’
‘Such as?’
‘ “Aziza, the sultan’s daughter,” Or,’ he added, ‘ “Princess Qatr al-Nada” – dewdrop, like the meaning of your name.’
‘ “Mendicant dervish,” ’ said Nadeem. ‘It’s beautiful – if you decide to change it, make it “I wonder”.’
‘I’ll leave it the way it is!’
Hamdiya disliked the computer. She felt it had taken Nadir away from her, then Nadeem, and then I, too, started putting in long sessions in front of it. The boys and I would often find ourselves absorbed in conversation that made her feel left out, since she didn’t understand what we were talking about. She kept saying that the computer wasted time and strained the eyes. Days went by when I didn’t enter the kitchen at all, and I noticed how tense she was when she set the table. Rather than put the plates, forks, and knives down calmly, she banged them down with a clatter loud enough to jangle my ears, even in the next room.
I resumed my quarrel with Hamdiya when Nadir applied for, and was offered, a job in Dubai. I was amazed when she rejoiced at the news. I objected. ‘You like your work,’ I said to him, ‘and you earn good wages by it.’ I tried to talk him round, but he maintained that the job that had been offered to him would afford him mobility within his field, broader experience, a bigger salary, and higher status.
He’d made up his mind, and he went abroad.
We were in touch every night by e-mail, but it seemed that Nadir had a great deal of work in hand, so his communications were brief, except on Thursdays and Fridays. He seemed to be happy with his job, and with the large salary he was earning.
Nadeem had no luck finding a job. All the architectural engineering firms gave preference to those with experience, and he couldn’t find a job that would provide him with such experience: a catch-22. He moved around from one job to another in private computer firms. He enrolled in a graduate programme, hoping that if he got a master’s degree in architecture it would improve his chances of work in his field.
The firm he had left allowed him time for his academics, but was late in paying its employees. Nadeem would receive his pay packet in the latter half of the month, or at the end of the month, or sometimes the following month. They would say they were waiting for some cheque to come through before they could pay their wages. ‘This is a small firm?’ I asked him. He said, ‘No, it’s a large firm, with hundreds of employees. The owners know we need work, and they know that the number of qualified candidates is limitless. If one of us leaves, there’s a queue of thousands of unemployed people looking to take his place. They put it bluntly: “Nobody’s forcing you to stay.” ’
The new firm he transferred to paid wages regularly, and therefore squeezed him hard, like juicing a sugar cane. He would leave the house at seven-thirty in the morning and come home at one o’clock in the morning, every day, six days a week. He would come in like a sleepwalker, eat his meal in a semi-somnolent state, then go to bed. (Had Marx been alive, he would have added a new observation regarding the surplus value produced by university-educated white-collar workers. I wonder how he would classify them: as a middle class, or a toiling workforce?)
Fridays were my only opportunity to communicate with Nadeem. We would have a leisurely breakfast and stay seated at the kitchen table, chatting and at ease. He would tell me about his co-workers and their situations, and about what he saw on the microbus he took back and forth to work. (It took him more than an hour to get to work – an hour and a quarter or an hour and a half each way.)
Months went by, and Nadeem said to me, ‘The driver used to play a recording of Qur’anic recitation. The volume was turned up high and reverberated throughout the bus, but it didn’t stop the passengers talking. They made their comments, and gossiped, and told their stories, sometimes making fun. No one tells jokes now. Lately a strange thing has come about: The driver doesn’t play recordings and none of the passengers talk – silence has fallen on the microbus, everyone is lost in his own thoughts – it’s as if a bird had landed on everyone’s head. That’s what I’ve observed on the different microbuses I take every day. But the strangest thing I’ve noticed is that if the passengers do talk – which happens only rarely now – if one person speaks and another answers, then conversation breaks out, and people talk provocatively about politics, and in stronger terms than you can imagine. Their criticism touches on everything, from the price of bread to government corruption to the gunboats moving in to strike Iraq.’
Nadir surprised us with an unannounced visit. There was a knock on the door Thursday evening, and there we found him. He had a small case in his hand, with another smaller bag slung from his shoulder. The commotion of our reunion was followed by mad excitement, as we hugged him one after another, with Hamdiya weeping, me laughing, Nadir talking, and Nadeem emitting odd sounds, so it was as if a flock of birds were fluttering and squawking and singing. Nadir announced, ‘First of all, this is one of those visits of the kind that go, “Is so-and-so with you? No? Then I’ll be on my way.” ’
‘You mean one week?’
‘Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday morning I’m off.’
‘No!’
Nadir continued, ‘The reason for this visit is Nada’s birthday. I said to myself, “This is the first birthday with me a solid working man earning a solid wage.” ’
With that he set upon me, kissed me on both cheeks and on my forehead. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said, ‘and many happy returns – you’re the best!’ He handed me the bag that had been hanging from his shoulder since he appeared on the doorstep. ‘Open it.’
I did so. I didn’t say a word, for I couldn’t have uttered a sound without shedding tears. Nadir understood me, and didn’t prolong the moment. He turned to Hamdiya. From his jacket pocket he drew a small box, opened it, and presented her with an elegant little watch. She wept some more. He said, ‘As for Nadeem, he’ll have to wait until the next visit, since my salary goes only so far. I bought two shirts, one for you and one for myself.’
Within seconds, the boys had taken off their shirts and begun taking the wrapping off the new ones, pulling out the pins and plastic collar-pieces, and undoing the buttons. Each donned his new shirt – the two garments were identical. Then Nadir announced, ‘If I don’t eat straightaway, I’m going to die and miss the chance to go out in my new shirt!’