The Silence and the Roar (3 page)

“What did this young man do?” I asked the one whose arm I was clutching.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I want to know what he did!”

My big mistake at that moment was to let go of the Comrade’s arm. The three of them quickly tried to figure out my rank to know how they should treat me. I should have held on to his arm. I should have squeezed
harder instead of letting go. They left the young man there flailing around on the ground and surrounded me instead. Trying to correct my mistake, I held my ground and didn’t back away. One of them asked to see my identification but I ignored him. In my country you have to create as much ambiguity as you can to get out of situations such as this one, and if you’re bold enough you can even conjure some kind of imaginary rank to protect yourself. I tried to surround myself with ambiguity even though it’s my custom not to pretend to be something I’m not.

“You better have a convincing explanation for what’s going on here.”

“You want an explanation?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I want a convincing explanation.”

“He’s a traitor, he tried to get out of the march,” said the same Comrade, who appeared to be the others’ superior. “Is that convincing enough for you?”

“You could have just written him up instead of beating him like this.”

“And just who might you be, sir?” the third one interjected. Up until that point they still hadn’t been able to crack my riddle. They had been dealing with me cautiously.

“A citizen,” I said.

At that moment their uncertainty dissipated and one of them smiled sarcastically. They returned to their natural disposition.

“A citizen?” asked the second, getting ready to pounce on me.

“ID,” the boss said, reaching out his hand.

I took out my identification and handed it over. He snatched it from me and then motioned for the other two to join him as he walked away.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “My ID.”

“Come on down to the station and pick it up,” he said, without turning around.

They left. I was furious at myself for getting mixed up with them, but the young man was still there, writhing, bleeding. I crouched down next to him and examined his face. He looked up at me again, this time in gratitude. I tried to pick him up and could tell that he needed an ambulance. Two young men who were part of his group had congregated by the door and now came over, thanked me and then took him away. I received one more look of gratitude before they disappeared. A young woman alerted me that there was blood on my collar but I walked away unconcerned.

I backed into the side streets, fleeing the crowds and the noise. The shops were all shuttered and there were only a few people around who had managed to slip away from the march, but they were holding pictures of the Leader in their hands. The next day they would have to return them to the organizers. I wandered aimlessly for a long time because I hadn’t decided whether I was going to my mother’s or to Lama’s yet, bearing in mind that it wouldn’t do me any good to go down to the station right away to pick up my ID because the one who took it wouldn’t get back there before nightfall. Besides, I hadn’t even asked him which station he meant, the Party building or the
mukhabarat
headquarters, and if it was the
mukhabarat
, which branch of the security services? I tried not to get too obsessed with figuring out
the answer to that question because all I wanted to do at that moment was run away from everything connected to the march and everything that had just happened.

I decided to go see my mother because her house is on the outskirts of town. Going to Lama’s would mean heading back in the direction I had just come from, crossing over to the other side of the city by passing through those crowd-clogged streets, the very thing I had been trying to avoid in the first place.

M
Y FATHER PASSED AWAY
five years ago, leaving behind a gentle and beloved fifty-something widow, a son and a daughter. I am that son. My name is Fathi and I turned thirty-one three months ago. Rather than telling you about me, though, this chapter is about my mother Ratiba Hanim and my sister Samira, who is five years younger than me. Because I’m on my way over to her house at this very moment, I may as well tell you all about my mother before you get to meet her.

My father was a young lawyer when he proposed to Ratiba, who had been spoiled rotten by her family. More than five years had gone by since he graduated from university and still he had not managed to find a suitable wife. He was politically combative and a capable lawyer, well known for being simultaneously antagonistic toward the government and the opposition. As a clever lawyer he would come up with bizarre descriptions for his bitterest enemies: the government of monkeys; the government bureaucrats who consume more than they produce; the government that rules through the negation of hearts; the government bureaucrats who walk on all fours; and other descriptions that would make the ministers laugh and outrage them at the same time. Because he was a liberal he used milder
language to criticize the members of the opposition: the chivalrous knights in shining armor; the opposition for sale; spit on me but put me in power; the opposition that depends on God; the opposition op-posing in a fashion show; and so forth.

This young lawyer had created enemies all around him because he published articles packed with such characterizations in a local newspaper, most of whose subscribers were businessmen. The abundance of his enemies and the scarcity of his supporters made it difficult for him to get married, despite the fact that my grandmother was constantly on the prowl for a suitable bride for her combative lawyer of a son. Every time she found someone the prospective bride’s family would entertain the groom for one day, receive an “intervention” and advice from my father’s enemies on both sides, and then quickly distance themselves from him. Before he got bogged down with despair my grandmother came to him with one last candidate for marriage: Ratiba, the spoiled sister of an urban merchant whose father had passed away. In addition to having inherited a respectable amount of money from her late father, she was a very happy woman. Her most distinguishing features were mirthfulness, joviality, cheer and a marked lack of interest in the affairs of this topsy-turvy world—just what the combative bachelor had been looking for. This lawyer, Abd al-Hakim, immediately went to see her brother, introduced himself and informed him about his enemies in the government and in the opposition, hoping to pre-empt their “intervention” this time. That merchant, whom I would later call Uncle Mufid, asked this quarrelsome lawyer, the one who would
become my father, to bring him newspaper clippings of his stinging articles. Mufid spent the night reading those pieces that were supposed to elicit his anxiety but the very next day he announced his consent. My uncle wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed quarreling with politicians. He was serious and rational—unlike his sister who was apt to laugh at anything—and this is what made people find his swift consent so strange. They viewed as even more bizarre the fact that he had stood steadfast against the sort of smear campaign that in our city we call an “intervention.” In my father, Uncle Mufid had found a man fit to become a husband to his sister, who never stopped laughing, not even in her sleep.

The couple were married and spent their honeymoon in a respectable hotel at a chic summer resort, overlooking a densely forested valley. It was there that my father discovered the amazing talents of his bride. When he first read his combative articles she would laugh a bit but eventually she stopped laughing at them altogether. Soon she found them banal and began coming up with new descriptions of her own for her husband’s political adversaries. He found these so valuable that he even started including them in his articles. This wasn’t hard work for my mother. She would come up with such descriptions while putting on makeup or remembering an old joke that would nearly cause my father to fall over from laughing so hard. Because it was so simple for her, my father’s articles seemed like a game to her and she encouraged him to caricature those politicians rather than criticizing them so antagonistically. And that’s just what he did. He became more and more infamous until
the lawyers’ union consequently proposed several times that he should retire.

Although I was the first fruit of that humorous marriage, I was as serious as my uncle and as quarrelsome as my father. In her lack of interest in anything important and her perpetual proclivity to laugh, my sister was a carbon copy of my mother. Let me explain what I mean by this “lack of interest in anything important.” One day, a powerful earthquake jolted the city, causing buildings to shake intensely. The chandelier in the living room where my mother and my sister sat together for years vigorously swayed back and forth. Some valuable
objets
fell off the bookcase and shattered; the TV set nearly fell down too, as pots and pans clattered onto the floor in the kitchen. I hurried out of my room, trying to calm down my mother, my sister and myself, but I soon discovered that I was the only one in the house who was frightened. My mother simply carried on with what she was doing (reknitting a wool sweater for the third time), calmly watching the chandelier swing. The transistor radio was switched on and the announcer interrupted his broadcast in order to report in a panic that an earthquake had rocked the city. My mother noticed the quaver in his voice and burst out laughing. That was how I found her when I rushed into the living room, bolting from my room all yellow in the face as my sister went on with her homework.

But my father’s articles didn’t last much longer because the Leader, who had been a petty officer in the army, launched his military coup, liquidating all of my father’s enemies in the government and the opposition, and became the undisputed
ruler of the country. The first thing the Leader did was shut down publication of all newspapers, permitting only one or two to write anything about the regime, on the condition that they always articulate its viewpoint. Even though the newspaper that used to run his articles stopped appearing, my quarrelsome father failed to grasp as fully as he should have what had just happened in the country. He wrote one more article in the same combative spirit, incorporating my mother’s caricatured images, only this time about the Leader himself, sending it to one of the government newspapers with a clear conscience. My mother had infected him with the scourge of fearlessness and peace of mind. He didn’t even wait for the article to be published before reading it aloud to his colleagues and friends, who all hung out at the same coffeehouse; all he got from them were uneasy smiles. They could sense the danger of such satirical articles that caricatured the Leader, and they were right to feel that way. Now the butt of the joke was the Leader himself, not merely politicians who wore white smoking jackets.

When one editor read the article the blood froze in his veins and he felt dizzy, so he sent it along to the editor-in-chief after tacking on the word Urgent. When the editor-in-chief read it the blood froze in his veins as well and he transmitted it up to the Minister, whose blood boiled in his veins in outrage, and when he finally transmitted it in turn to one of the
mukhabarat
agencies, my father was called in for questioning. His interrogation lasted a full six months. In order to spare him from having to go home and come right back again, they decided to simply keep him there in their dungeons. He came out afterward transformed from
a combative individual into a pathetic shell, banned from trying cases in a court of law for a period of two years. And so, just like that, my father turned from jokiness to gloominess and started practicing law in the most serious way possible. Whenever he heard my mother tell a joke and start laughing, he would sigh and mourn the good old days. At work he was always morose and demanded that everyone remain serious.

But if life and its inscrutable politics treated my father with solemn humorlessness until the day that he died, it bid him farewell with the most hilarious farce. We buried him in a brand-new cemetery that didn’t have any distinguishing signposts yet. On that day moreover he wasn’t the only person being buried there. One of the others was a famous dancer who had a lot of friends and admirers. Rounding out the joke that was his life, the gravediggers forgot which of the two graves contained my father and which the dancer. One of the dancer’s biggest fans had requested a headstone to be made by the same man who engraved my father’s. When that day arrived and he set the two headstones upon the graves, he made a horrible mistake, placing the dancer’s headstone on my father’s grave and my father’s headstone on hers, which meant that whenever we visited the cemetery we would recite the Fatiha over the dancer’s grave, even as scores of her fans, friends and former lovers would show up and place flowers and plants on my father’s grave, sitting down beside him in order to shed tears for their dearly departed dancer. The mixup lasted several months, until one morning, early in the feast of Eid al-Fitr, my mother and my sister accompanied
me to the cemetery where Samira, who possesses keen powers of observation, sensed the mistake at once. It was all cleared up soon thereafter.

Thank God, my mother was home. Even though I know she rarely goes out in the morning, the prospect of not finding her there and having to go back out and wander the streets frightened me very much. All public transportation was out of service because of the march and I had walked a long way to her house. Umm Muhammad opened the door and greeted me warmly. Umm Muhammad is the housekeeper I found for my mother after my father passed away. She always welcomes me with extreme kindness; recently she has taken to kissing me on the cheek and squeezing me against her breasts in order to express how happy she is that I have come. When my mother is there she keeps her voice down, speaking to me in a whisper; when I come over and find Umm Muhammad alone she won’t stop shouting, causing me to take a step back and ask her to say hello to my mother for me when she returns. After dragging me into the kitchen she spoke in a hushed voice. Taking advantage of my presence she lit a cigarette and started smoking. Umm Muhammad loves to smoke almost as much as she loves to complain about her bleak misfortune—my mother doesn’t care for either habit so my presence always cheers her up.