Which of the two men is better?
I have to reconstruct in my imagination what occurred at our home at dawn on the first of January 1959. I was asleep, and didn’t witness any part of the event. I woke in the morning to my mother’s pale face. I was surprised at how preoccupied she was with tidying the house – she worked rapidly, nervously, mechanically, as if it were essential that, by some specific time, she do away with the clutter and disorder all over the place. In the days that followed, although no one said a word to me about what had happened, everything around me appeared strange and bewildering: my father’s absence, the expression on my mother’s face and the jarring rhythm of her speech, the sudden arrival of my grandmother and paternal aunt who came from Upper Egypt to stay with us for several days – which had never happened before – the frequent visitors and their whispered conversations among themselves and with my mother: conversations that broke off abruptly any time I turned up in their vicinity. Then those evasive answers each time I asked about my father: ‘He’s travelling.’ ‘He’ll be back soon.’ ‘His job required him to travel unexpectedly, and he didn’t want to wake you up.’ ‘He’ll stay there for a while.’ ‘We’ll go and visit him soon.’ ‘His work is far away, we can’t go there now!’ Answers that proved there were no answers, fashioning around me a dense fog that only intensified my fear and confusion.
One morning I awoke in tears. ‘Why did you lie to me? You didn’t tell me my father died like the rabbit!’
‘Your father’s not dead! He’s fine, and he’s coming back!’
‘You’re lying – he died like the rabbit. When I went to sleep the rabbit was on the balcony, and when I woke up the rabbit was gone! And it’s the same, just the same with Papa!’
My father had bought the rabbit for me, and my mother had taught me how to feed it and care for it. Then one morning it vanished, and my mother told me it had died.
This day my mother had to sit beside me on the bed and have a long talk with me about an important and learned man who understood many things, and said matters must proceed in this manner and not that, and this was right and that was wrong. And about officers who held a different opinion – thinking the way a headmaster thinks, that the system must be run their way. They disagreed with him, and so they put him in prison.
‘What’s a prison?’
‘It’s a place that’s locked up so you can’t get out.’
‘Like the lion at the zoo?’
‘Like the lion at the zoo.’
‘What happens next?’
‘I’m not telling you a story. I’m explaining why Papa doesn’t live with us right now. He hasn’t died – he’ll stay there for a little while, and then they’ll let him come home.’
I found it all quite perplexing; yet it was the beginning of awareness, and of a need to compare my own situation with that of others. These comparisons would preoccupy me in the years that followed, often placing me in uncomfortable positions. I wasn’t alone in this, for I recall that Mona Anis – whose father, Dr Abdel Azim Anis, was my father’s colleague, both of them university professors and both incarcerated in the same prison – confided to me that one of Abdel Nasser’s sons was her classmate. I told her I wanted to meet him, so that I could ask him why his father had put our fathers in prison, and if he didn’t know we could ask him to find out. Mona never got the chance to introduce me to the boy, for her school was in Manshiyat al-Bakri, while mine was in Garden City. But she did relate to me a detailed account of what passed between her and the classroom teacher. Mona said, ‘I asked the teacher in front of the whole class, “Whose father is better, his or mine?”’ When the teacher didn’t answer, Mona said, ‘Papa’s a university professor, he has a doctoral degree, and he used to teach at London University. When Britain attacked Egypt, he organised a demonstration in England. He left his job there and said, “I’m going back home to help my country.” His father’s an officer, and it’s true he fought in the war for Palestine and staged the revolution, but he doesn’t have a doctorate, and he’s never taught at London University! My father is better educated, and he’s more knowledgeable!’ Mona insisted that the teacher acknowledge before all the pupils that her father was the better man. The teacher, however, said, ‘This won’t do. All of you here are my children, and it wouldn’t be right for me to say that one person is better than another, or that one person’s father is better than another’s.’
I asked her in astonishment, and with a good deal of admiration, ‘You said that in class, in front of all the boys and girls?’ Mona crossed her legs, spoke more loudly and said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she repeated the story in all its particulars. Now I admired her even more. She was three years older than I was and several inches taller, and whenever I declared that she was my friend I felt an access of pride, as if this friendship lent some of her height to my childish body, and conferred upon me a part of her authoritative mien. She knew lots of things, which she discussed in detail, while I looked on in wonder, confident that she was my superior in her wisdom and her understanding of the world, and, between us, the more capable of interpreting and unravelling its mysteries.
One day Mona visited us with her mother, and she read me a poem her father had written for her. The poem so unsettled me that I stopped listening to it, distracted by the question: Why didn’t my own father send me a poem? Did her father love her more than mine loved me? I couldn’t keep the question to myself – I confided it to my mother. She laughed, and said, ‘Her father knows how to write poetry; your father doesn’t!’
How was I to apply this new piece of information to the comparison between my father and Gamal Abdel Nasser? What reasoning could I bring to bear? I found myself thinking, ‘He doesn’t know how to write poetry to his daughter – maybe he’s no better or smarter than Nasser.’ But then the scales would tip the other way, and I would think, ‘But my father has a doctorate from the Sorbonne, he was a university professor, so surely he knows and understands more than officers do, and his political goals are superior to theirs.’
My father wasn’t there, though, while Nasser’s name, his voice, and his picture cropped up everywhere, on a daily, even an hourly, basis. He was celebrated in songs that I loved, whose lyrics I could recall, and I would sing them, whether I got the melody right or not. He wasn’t merely a leader, merely a president. He was a topic of conversation in every household and on every street and in every school – quite simply he pervaded the very space in which we grew and took shape, as if he were water or air or earth or sunbeams that we absorbed as a matter of course, becoming what we became. It was Nasser who brought us up, proud though I was of my kinship to my father. When I pronounced my own name, my voice would be normal, or perhaps softer than normal, on ‘Nada,’ but then it would grow louder as I went on to say, ‘Abdel Qadir Selim,’ as if ‘Nada’ were no more than a prop, or a point of entry, or a stepping-stone for the name that should be prominent and unmistakable. I don’t think any of these ideas ever occurred to me when I was that age, but I remember clearly what happened when I watched Nasser deliver a speech, following his words and staring intently at his posture and his facial expressions; suddenly I said to my mother, ‘Mama, doesn’t he look like Papa?’
‘No,’ my mother replied.
Then, ‘Well, maybe he looks like him.’
When I went to bed. I tried to call to mind an image of my father, the better to make a comparison, but my imagination ran up against a blank wall. I tried a second time, and a third. I didn’t realise what had happened until I found my mother kneeling by the bed, pale-faced, asking me, ‘What’s the matter, why are you screaming?’
This incident may have been a repetition of a previous one that occurred some years earlier, maybe a few months after my father’s arrest. I remember my mother kneeling by the bed, then carrying me to her big bed. She fetched a red metal box, opened it up and took out pictures of my father to show me. As she picked up each one, she would say, ‘Here’s Papa on such-and-such a day . . .’ Presently I calmed down and chose one of the pictures, a large one in which my father’s features were clear, and then I went back to bed. Instead of lying face-down the way I normally did, I lay on my back and held the picture up before my face. I drifted off, still holding the picture, and when I awoke in the morning I found it bent at the edges, perhaps because I had been lying on it. This started me off on another bout of crying and irritability.
Whether or not they resembled each other wasn’t the question, even if they were of the same generation, sharing Upper Egyptian origins, and both embodying the idea of ‘father’. The first was a generic father, held in common by all, while the second was the individual, actual father – with a hop, skip, and a jump I could be in his bedroom, open up his wardrobe, and run my hands over the neatly folded shirts in one of its drawers.
I was nine years old when a classmate of mine – having suddenly found it necessary to express her nationalist zeal – said, ‘Your mother’s French. The French attacked Egypt as part of the Tripartite Aggression. From now on we’re not friends.’ Although she had caught me off-guard, without a moment’s thought I heard myself say to her, ‘I’m the one who doesn’t want to be friends with you. You have bad breath, and it’s not as if you were poor and couldn’t afford toothpaste – you go to an expensive French school. And by the way, our bawaab’s wife, who comes sometimes to clean our house, doesn’t use toothpaste, but she rinses her mouth regularly and her breath smells lovely. Her clothes are clean as well. You’re horrid – I don’t want to talk to you.’
Quick though I was with an answer, her words took me aback. (The comment ‘it’s not as if you were poor’, and the allusion to a preference for the wife of our bawaab, were like a goal scored in her net, proving that I had learned the lesson my mother taught me. She was careful of my upbringing in matters like these, admonishing me, ‘A certain little girl – the bawaab’s daughter, let’s say – is the same age as you, and by chance – purely by chance – you’re privileged to wear the dress you wear, while it’s not given to her to wear one like it. It may be that she’s better than you. We’ll have to wait and see what you do with what you have, and what she may do in spite of the hardship she faces. And that boy’ – she was referring to a child my age, clothed in rags, who stood at the traffic light selling packets of tissues – ‘is an innocent victim. You get more, he gets less.’ She had an endless supply of these sermons, adducing as evidence my clothes, food, and – the thing she harped on most insistently and distressingly – chocolate. I would grow fidgety with all her instruction, or I might become anxious in the expectation that she would forbid me to buy chocolate. My mother was like a machine, incessantly, tirelessly producing her educational directives, and at that age I could not know anything of the ideological basis for such directives.)
But what the girl had said unsettled me. At lunch I asked, ‘Mama, why did France attack Egypt in 1956?’
‘Because France is an imperialist state, and it had begun to lose the countries it occupied, so it became more aggressive. It had been defeated in Indochina and . . .’
‘What’s Indochina?’
‘A country called Vietnam, in Asia – I’ll show it to you on the map.’
She was about to get up to go fetch the book, but I persuaded her to put off fussing with the atlas (another of the pedagogical tools to which she frequently had recourse).
‘No, carry on.’
‘Well, France was confronting a revolution in Algeria, and Nasser was supporting this revolution, and moreover he had nationalised the canal. He was a threat to France’s interests, and they wanted to get rid of him.’
‘Were you on the side of the French when they attacked Egypt?’
She laughed. ‘How could I have been on their side?’
‘But you’re French!’
‘Are you in favour of your father’s detention?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So you don’t agree with everything your country’s government does!’
I understood, and I laughed. Then I told her about the horrid girl. She said, ‘There’s no need to cut her off. You could have explained things to her.’
‘I want nothing to do with her,’ I announced firmly. ‘She has bad breath, and besides, I don’t care to keep company with fools – if people saw me with her they might think I’m as stupid as she is. That would be bad for my reputation!’
I particularly emphasised the part about my reputation, and my mother laughed, just as I had intended her to do. And when she laughed, so did I.
My mother did get up to fetch the atlas, and began to instruct me purposefully on the map of Asia and the location of Indochina, reinforcing geography with history. She told me in which years France entered and departed from Indochina, and how . . . and now it was America’s turn . . . and all the while I nodded my head, saying, ‘Yes, it’s very clear,’ although in fact nothing was clear, for the simple reason that my head was full of a new question: My mother had said, ‘Nasser constituted a threat to the French, and therefore they attacked him.’ This bit of information assumed a powerful significance in the debate that preoccupied me, as to which man was right – the president who had arrested and detained my father, or my father, whose opinions had led to his incarceration and his being exiled from his family for all these years.