Back to Cairo
My anger with my mother didn’t last long, perhaps because I received from Gérard a long letter, very kind and sweet, and from my mother I got a letter in which she apologised to me, saying that she hadn’t meant to hurt me, or to interfere in my business, and that she knew I was now a young woman who ‘understood something of politics’, and could make her own decisions. She repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Sweetheart.’
The two letters imparted to me a calm that allowed me to contemplate the spoils with which I had returned from my trip to Paris for their own sake, despite the unfortunate incident of the night before my departure: the discovery of the concern I felt for my mother, and my intense need of her. Then, too, I was preoccupied with parading my new knowledge before my friends and – more to the point – my father. I would talk at length about how the students raised their red and black banners over the Arc de Triomphe at the heart of Paris; how they took over the university, the College of Fine Arts, and the Odeon Theatre; how they connected with the workers; how the workers went on strike and work came to a stop at the plants and factories; how the transport workers, by striking, were able to bring to a halt Paris’s ground transportation system, and then the trains that connected Paris to other cities. I repeated, ‘Nine million went on strike – can you imagine?’ I would say this with pride, as if I myself had taken part in organising the strike, or even as if I had been one of its leaders. Carried away by my own enthusiasm, I would move on from there to an attack on the enemy: ‘Paul de Roche, he’s the one who . . .’ And, ‘Fouché declared . . .’ And ‘Gremeau said . . .’
He interrupted me. ‘Hold on, Hazelnut, hold on! Who is this de Roche? And who’s Fouché? And the other one, the third name you mentioned – who’s that?’
I puffed up like a turkey. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you keep up with the news, Abu Nada?’
One evening after dinner, a week after I received my mother’s letter, I said to my father, ‘Papa, I think Mama’s not well. She’s pale, and seems exhausted.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘She told me she wasn’t.’
Then I went on, ‘Papa, do you know, Mama participated in the May 13th demonstrations!’
‘I’m not surprised. She has anarchist leanings.’
I passed over what he’d just said, because I didn’t understand it. ‘Papa, why not have Mama come back? Couldn’t you reverse the divorce?’
He didn’t answer. I went on. ‘A divorce can be reversed, can’t it? If you’re with me, let’s write to her about it, or ring her up – she’ll agree. Or, if she doesn’t agree at first, we can just ring her again, maybe a couple of times, and she’ll come round.’
‘Nada,’ he said, ‘it’s over. We had our differences, and we split up, unfortunately.’
‘But since you say it’s “unfortunate”, can’t we still repair the relationship?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it ended.’
‘Nothing ends!’ (Where did I come by this bit of wisdom?)
‘I’ve got involved with another woman, and I’m seriously considering marrying her.’
I shouted, ‘Don’t tell me it’s that second-rate actress!’
‘I told you, she is a respectable woman – stop acting like a child!’
The only answer I could come up with was, ‘By the way, Papa, the position the French Communist Party took on the student revolution was rubbish. Even the poet Aragon – you know how well-loved he is – when he got up on stage to address the students, they made fun of him, jeering at him, “Long live Stalinism!” And at the May 13th demonstration the position of the workers’ union controlled by the Communists was a scandal. They played a suspicious part in the breaking up of the demonstration, and . . .’
He interrupted me. ‘The whole movement was nothing but a tempest in a teapot, stirred up with no thought for the consequences. All too often this kind of thing is fomented by the adventurers of a parasitic leftist movement: Maoists, Trotskyites, anarchists.’
I was caught off-guard by the list of technical terms he deployed. What did ‘parasitic leftist movement’ mean? What was wrong with some of them being Trotskyites? What did ‘Trotskyite’ mean, anyway? And did the word ‘anarchist’ have a political meaning, or only its literal one? Was it connected in any way with Gérard’s messy hair? And how could my mother be an anarchist, when she was so scrupulously careful about the arrangement of her clothes and her house? She had used to scold us for the disorder we created in the house. What did ‘anarchist’ mean?
I seized upon the word I knew. ‘It’s not true – they weren’t adventurers!’
‘Oh, yes they were.’
‘That’s what the French Communist Party said, and it was a poor position. The young people in the movement in France are contemptuous of it, and don’t have confidence in the trade-union leadership that subscribes to it. And here I don’t think anyone even knows anything about the Communists – or cares about them!’
Thrust and parry.
The round was over. I calmed down. Or it seemed to me that I was calmer. As soon as I was by myself, I confronted the question: What was I to do if my father married that woman?
Move to Paris and live with my mother?
Move to Upper Egypt and live with my aunt?
What about school?
There was no French school in the village.
I could switch to an Arabic school.
I could stay in Cairo, enrol in a boarding school, and never have to see that woman’s face, slathered with makeup.
The following morning, instead of ‘Good morning’, I announced, ‘I won’t stay in this house if that bit-player comes to live with us here.’
He shouted at me, ‘You spoiled brat, you think of nothing but yourself! On top of it you’re insolent, you don’t know when to give it a rest – no manners, no respect for your elders! I will marry Hamdiya!’ (Oh, my God, and her name’s Hamdiya! I’d forgotten she had a name. Where did her family come up with a name like that?) He said, ‘I’ll marry her and you’ll live with her and you’ll treat her with all possible respect. I absolutely will not put up with any of your cheek.’
I shouted at him, ‘My mother waits five years for you, while you’re in prison, and when you get out you leave her and marry a monkey named Hamdiya!’
He slapped me.
I didn’t go to school. I spent the whole day crying. If my mother had been with me she would have known that this crying jag was the longest (longer than the bout of tears over the baby’s spitting up on the new red dress I had wanted to dazzle my father with the first time we visited him in prison).
That evening he tried to make up with me, but I refused. For two weeks I didn’t say a word to him.
This was the beginning of the most difficult phase of my life. A woman I couldn’t stand came to our home to live with us, leaving me nothing of my familiar abode except my bedroom, the only place in the house that was off-limits to her. Her presence in the house made me feel stifled, as if she were not merely treading upon one of my limbs, but actually standing on my chest with all her considerable weight. I wished she would die. Every day, every hour, every moment I wished she would die. The resentment I felt for my father was limitless. He didn’t care, paid no attention. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Meanwhile, I crouched with my head in my arms, in a futile attempt to protect it from the debris from the house, some of whose rubble was still coming down on me, wood, glass, and stone, wounding me and causing me to bleed.
It seemed to me that I hated him. It seemed to me that I pitied him, my pity mixed with contempt. I felt my father was stupid – foolish and selfish, that his selfishness was tragic.
I began writing long letters to my mother, and counting the days until hers arrived. I distanced myself from my friends, since it seemed to me that intimacy was not possible unless I talked about my troubles, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about my father in the unfavourable terms in which I had come to view him.