Authors: Radwa Ashour
‘Didn’t you eat on the plane?’
‘I ate, but only Hamdiya and Nada’s food can fill me up!’
The four of us stood in the kitchen, as I fixed one dish and Hamdiya another, while Nadeem made a salad, and Nadir told us his news. Then we carried the plates to the dining table. We stayed at the table talking and drinking tea until the call to prayer at dawn. Only then did we go to bed.
By seven I had drunk my tea and turned on the laptop computer that Nadir had given me. It was gorgeous, magnificent. I wasn’t sure whether I would have found it so beautiful had I seen it displayed for sale in some shop. ‘It’s beautiful because it’s a gift,’ I said to myself, ‘and beautiful in its own right, irrespective of other considerations.’ It was small, light, and elegant, its cover, the borders around the screen and the keyboard all of a fine silver colour. The keyboard was black, imprinted with Arabic and Roman letters in white. Its case was elegant as well, with one space for the machine, another for papers, and a third for storing the cords, adapter, and accessories, as well as two pockets: a square one for the compact discs that came with the computer, and another rectangular one for the mouse.
I was fixing another cup of tea when Nadeem woke up, kissed me, and shyly held out his hand, in which was something wrapped in coloured paper. ‘Happy birthday, Nada,’ he said.
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ I replied.
‘The gift doesn’t measure up to the occasion.’
I opened it, kissed it, and kissed him.
We sat down to have tea together.
I was about to say, ‘The laptop Nadir brought me is a treasure,’ and then I thought better of it.
‘By the way, Nada,’ said Nadeem, ‘tell Mama that you commissioned Nadir to buy you that computer.’
‘But I didn’t commission him!’
‘I know. But it seems she’s upset. Yesterday while we were fixing tea she let slip a comment that gave her away.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It doesn’t matter what she said, but apparently she knows what that kind of equipment costs, and maybe she was comparing that to the price of the watch.’
‘And why are you passing this on to me?’ (The sharpness of the one-time child-rearer had resurfaced.)
‘I’m not passing anything on to you. I just wanted to prevent the possibility of any misunderstanding or hurt feelings. Tell her you gave him money for the computer, that it turned out not to be enough, and he made up his mind to cover the rest of the cost. That is, a compromise between a gift and something you asked him to get for you. She’ll calm down if you tell her that.’
‘I won’t do it!’
Then I added with finality, ‘I hope Nadir won’t hear about any of this nonsense!’
He was quiet. Then he said, ‘Nadir suggested I go to Dubai.’
‘Did you get a job offer?’
‘No, but he says he’d be able to get me a job with a decent salary. What do you think?’
‘What do
you
think?’
‘I don’t know. But if things go on like this I’m going to take him up on it.’
It’s strange how we react. I took out my anger on Nadeem, not Hamdiya. I was furious with him for telling me what his mother had said – or rather, what was worse, passing along his own version of what she had said. From the time they were small, I refused to listen if Nadir said, ‘Nadeem did such-and-such,’ or if Nadeem said, ‘Nadir said such-and-such.’ I would give them a good scolding, and sometimes even punish the informer. Nadeem wasn’t being an informer. He was trying, pointlessly, to avert hurt feelings. Did he avert them or create them? Nadir was to be with us just one day; there was nothing for it but for me to drop the whole subject as if I hadn’t heard anything of it. But how?
Over lunch, Nadir said to me, ‘You look pale, Nada.’
‘I overate last night, and slept only two hours. Besides, we’ve started the countdown – you’re leaving tomorrow.’
‘Let’s think of today, not tomorrow. Nadeem and I are going to make you a birthday cake, whether it gets eaten or not – it’s the thought that counts.’
‘I’ll make it,’ Hamdiya put in.
I said, ‘I’m inviting you all to lunch at a restaurant – there’s no need for a cake. Thank you, Hamdiya.’
Blue lorries
Something new was happening that struck me as odd, and I couldn’t let it go. I was following the blue lorries – I would encounter them by chance on the road, and pursue them. I said nothing about this to anyone, as my behaviour might provoke ridicule or at least laughter, or doubts as to my mental health. I would catch sight of them two or three cars ahead of me, or notice that they were behind me when they were reflected in the car’s rear-view mirror, or one of the side mirrors. I would find myself spontaneously turning the wheel to the right or left, speeding up or slowing down, jockeying for a place next to them. Most of the time I would be prevented by the heavy traffic in the streets and squares, or a light would turn red suddenly, forcing me to stop, or else a green light would oblige me to move forward inopportunely, or a couple of cars might pass me and I would fail to catch up with them. Sometimes there was a fork in the road, and my day’s agenda (if I was on my way to work or to an appointment I couldn’t miss) wouldn’t permit me to follow them, since I might end up where I hadn’t meant to go, deep in the byways from which it would take me more time than I had to extricate myself.
They were big vehicles, of a hue that was nothing like either sky-blue or sea-blue, but the raw blue of cheap paint to which dust had clung until it became part of it. Perhaps the surface had been repainted over and over, without being cleaned or sanded first, so that the last layer of colour went on muddy and uneven. The driver and the one or two men beside him were all from the rank and file of the police force. Behind them would be the big iron box, with a door at the rear and a set of steps between that and the street. The door would be locked with a large deadbolt and sometimes a padlock in addition to that. In rare cases a couple of boys would be standing there – boys from the countryside in uniforms that were filthy, albeit official – as auxiliary security guards. On either side of the box, in the upper third portion, were four small openings close together, presumably windows, with iron bars or instead of bars some thick metal grillwork that would restrict the airflow for whoever was inside the box and limit the visibility of those behind these openings, keeping them that much more tightly in bonds.
They were called ‘transport lorries’, for they were used to convey those who had been arrested from one place to another – from the police department, for example, or from the public prosecutor’s office to the courtroom and from there to prison.
When I followed one of these vehicles my first concern was to find out whether there were people in the box, and whether they were pressing their faces to the metal grillwork seeking a breath of air or a beam of light or some hope in the sight of a face or a tree or a school door opening suddenly for a group of children.
Having got close enough, I liked to stop my car altogether, so that the necessity of watching the road would not prevent me from staring at those windows secured with grillwork, where I might see a face, or intercept a glance or a smile. Then the urgent honk of a car horn would compel me to avert my gaze, to discover that I was on the point of colliding with the car ahead of me, or that my car was rolling backward and about to hit the one behind me.
I rarely succeeded in overtaking a transport lorry. The two or three times I was lucky, I imagined that I saw a face behind the opening, and I looked intently at it. It seemed to me that it stared at me as well. I would smile. After that, I would have no chance, because of the need to concentrate on the road, to see any response to my smile; then the vehicle would move off, and I would continue on my way.
It didn’t occur to me, when I thought about this new mania that had beset me, that it was a premonition, and that my heart was anticipating what was to happen. I thought my new mania was some residue of the past, that perhaps unconsciously I was remembering my father, and following paths he might have travelled.
It didn’t occur to me that the lorry was the harbinger of an evil event. Maybe I came close to thinking along these lines, and then reconsidered, wondering, ‘How could this be a bad omen, when the only thing that’s new is that I’m the one who’s taken to following the lorries? There’s no omen here, no basis for foreboding or dread. It’s odd behaviour, but, whatever obscure impulses it may suggest, it’s just another of my passing obsessions, nothing more.’
No more friends of mine died on New Year’s Eve, nor did I see a crow making auguries toward the College of Engineering. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred. That is to say, I spent the night in front of the computer, and then, at a polite quarter of an hour before midnight, I moved to the sitting room, where Hamdiya was watching television, and sat down with her. When the clock struck twelve, announcing the end of the year 2002, I said to her, ‘Happy New Year, Hamdiya,’ and kissed her. She kissed me back, and said, ‘Happy New Year.’ Then the phone rang, and it was Nadir ringing us from Dubai; this was followed by another call, from Nadeem, who was spending the evening with his friends.
‘What would you say to a cup of mint tea, Hamdiya?’
‘What an excellent idea!’
I made tea and arranged some pieces of cake on a plate with two sprigs of fresh mint and then on the side I added a handful of almonds and raisins. The plate looked pretty – smiling, I brought the tray to Hamdiya and placed it before her. ‘Chef Nada,’ I said, ‘wishes you a nice night and a happy year!’
Hamdiya laughed and replied, ‘You really have style, Nada!’
‘A little treat on New Year’s Eve!’
We drank our tea and ate the sweets, and it seemed as though the new year, like our shared company that night, would be calm, routine, perhaps pleasant.
That is not what happened.
The first two months of the new year brought cares and troubles that were only the preamble, the dry-run, for what the third month would bring.
Nadeem said that he was going to move to Dubai to work. Despite the care he took over completing his paperwork, and even though he received a travel visa for the Emirates and signed a contract with the same firm for which his brother worked, he didn’t seem happy. He didn’t express whatever was going on inside his head, although it was not difficult for me to read the look in his eyes. His decision to travel meant that he had to accept the way things were and resign himself to them. He wanted to study architecture, and he did; he applied himself seriously and conscientiously to his studies, acquiring knowledge that pleased him, and the door of his imagination had opened on to a dream he must now relinquish – raise a white flag before the age of thirty, and admit, ‘I give up.’
In the background beat the drums of war, another war, bigger than all the rest. We followed the Security Council debates, and the unfolding scenarios of imminent conflict. ‘They’re going to attack Iraq,’ Nadeem said, while I clung to the possibility that it was just scare tactics, an attempt at verbal terrorism. The memory of the previous war was as present as if more than ten years hadn’t elapsed since then, the first war that the boys had been old enough to pay attention to. In 1982 they had been little, more preoccupied with football games, the cartoons on television, a half-point more or less on a test at school, or a goal scored in a game in which a girls’ team had defeated the boys. On that day I confined myself to telling them that Israel, which had attacked us in 1956 and 1967, was attacking Lebanon. I wouldn’t have approved of their watching the news broadcasts with me, and when the occupation forces moved into Beirut, with the ensuing massacre, I summarised what had occurred in an expurgated statement: ‘The Israelis have been behind the killing of a great many people – when you’re a little older, you’ll learn how terrible Israel is.’ I concealed from them, though, the videotape I had acquired, about the massacres at Sabra and Shatila – images of bloated corpses and flies. I also concealed the elaborate tale of the Phalangists and the Lebanese forces that had perpetrated the slaughter as Israel’s proxies. I thought, ‘Two little boys not eight years old – why poison their imaginations with images of bloodshed, the complicated relationship between invading forces supported by locals, and a resistance supported by part of the populace, while the other part wants to crush it?’
But on the day of the first attack on Baghdad, in 1991, they were in high school, and they followed the reports on television, read the daily newspapers, and discussed the course of events with their schoolmates, agreeing or disputing.
This war now looming over Iraq would be Nadir and Nadeem’s second war, and the second one to affect their lives.
Four days before the war began, there was a telephone call from one of my former classmates. ‘Siham died,’ the caller said.
I was about to ask him, ‘Who is Siham?’
I must have been quiet a long time, for he thought the line had been disconnected. ‘Hello? Hello?’ he said.
‘Siham Sabri?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Three days ago. Her obituary appeared in yesterday’s
Al-Ahram
.’
‘Was it suicide?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does her family say?’
‘They’re saying she was struck by a car. We want to organise a ceremony for her. We want to publish a collective obituary in the newspaper in all our names, and we want . . .’