‘Mama, are you ill?’ She said she was not. I asked her whether she had been ill in the preceding months. She assured me that she hadn’t.
‘Mama, your face is pale. It wasn’t like that in Cairo — even on the day you left it wasn’t this pale!’
She laughed, and changed the subject. ‘Today it’s forbidden to talk about our troubles — we’re celebrating our reunion.’
Once I was alone in bed, I didn’t sleep — I didn’t drift off even for a few minutes. I was mulling over those two unexpected developments, trying to understand. wondering and wondering — what was happening?
I started with the second thing, which in reality was foremost: my mother’s condition. What was it about her that was new? It wasn’t merely that pallor — so what was it, then? Something different about the look in her eye? (A sadness mingled with a questioning expression — or something else, too difficult for me to read?) A slowness, unlike before, in the movement of her body and her hands? She was a beautiful woman. There was in her face a sweetness arising not only from the fineness and harmony of her features, but also from the spark in the honey-coloured eyes that were the first thing about her to catch your attention. Intelligence shone from them — reminding you of nothing so much as the gleam in a mischievous child’s eye — lending a certain vividness to her face the moment she opened her mouth to speak. She had a nervous energy that ebbed and flowed, imparting to her rather petite body an animation that expressed itself in the cadences of her speech and the rapidity of her movements. Did she seem changed because her hair was a different length? She had used to keep her hair short, barely even reaching her neck, with a fringe in front. Now it had grown long, extending down her back, and she had tied it in a ponytail. With the ponytail she looked more like me, for I have the same facial features as she, although I have my father’s dark eyes and his height. But this was not the time for sorting out the question of what traits I’d inherited from whom. Was she ill? She struck me as brittle, brittle in the way of someone defeated; or, to put it another way, it was as if liveliness had given way to something softer, as if something in her (that nervous energy, or animation) had receded, or been stilled or extinguished. Was it the loneliness of living by herself in a strange country? But she was French, so how could France be a strange country? Did she find herself a foreigner there after all those years in another country? Was she worn out by her daily toil? Did she miss my father? Did she want to go back to Cairo?
These questions started me out on a path I had never before approached, or even conceived of, a dim awareness that began right away, but gradually, to form itself as an impression that she might need my care and protection. Perhaps I ought not to leave her alone. I had never really thought about how much I depended on her. A little girl depends on her mother without giving it a thought. I was surprised by my longing for her — a longing so strange I could scarcely believe it. How could there be such longing if I was insensible to it while I was far from her? She wrote me lengthy letters, to which I replied with two or three words, as if out of a sense of duty rather than genuine feeling. She pressed me to write to her, and I would chafe at her insistence, going weeks without writing at all. Why then, when I saw her — from the first moment I saw her — was I engulfed by this flood of yearning and tenderness, and the desire to cling to her and weep, and tell her it was all a mistake, a huge mistake? The word buzzed in my ear while we were at the airport, and I didn’t know what I meant by it: her breakup with my father? Her going back to France? My not having gone with her? I had no answer to any of this, and all that night I stayed awake turning the riddles over in my mind, but could come up with no satisfactory solutions; I might seem to find one, but none I could settle on for longer than a few minutes before returning once more to the inquiry.
What happened in Paris is that I encountered the truth of my feelings toward my mother and from there I automatically followed — in a way I didn’t comprehend at the time — the trajectory of my perception that she was in need of protection. Now it was for me to learn, gradually, how to open my arms to embrace and protect, to relax my guard and show compassion, to undertake the role of mother to my own mother. Why then did I not follow through? I forgot, or pretended to forget. Or such is life, that it takes us out of our feelings, or it withdraws those feelings and sets them far from our intentions.
Also in Paris that summer, I made my first step toward taking an interest in public events. In childhood, my father’s arrest was an entirely personal event, no more than that: a reasonless, incomprehensible removal to an obscure place. After my father’s release, politics were not, at home, a matter of daily discourse in which all three of us engaged at meals or in our evenings spent together as a family. Even the 1967 ‘setback’, which I followed to some extent, didn’t — as far as I can recall — penetrate the fabric of my emotional life until later, retrospectively. In June of 1967 I was beginning senior school, following the news of the war and the defeat in radio broadcasts, newspapers, and what I heard repeated, indirectly, allusively, on the tongues of others. But the event in all its tragic import did not permeate the inner life of a thirteen-year-old girl preoccupied with her relationship with her father, and his relationship with her mother, and with the upheavals of a family in a painful process of disintegration, the fear of a dissolution that seemed imminent.
(It was the night Nasser revealed, in the course of his speech announcing the defeat, his intention to step aside — a dark night. My father was following the speech and brushing away tears with the back of his hand. He went on brushing them and brushing them. My consternation at tears shed by my father was greater than anything occasioned by the nation’s president reporting a rout whose impact I would not absorb until years afterward — that is, I would absorb it more fully with the passage of years, as a gradual process beginning that day, and perhaps continuing even up to this moment.
The speech ends. My father weeps, wailing like a child. My mother all at once becomes hysterical, shouting, ‘I don’t understand! I absolutely do not understand! Why are you crying over him? Isn’t he the fascist officer, the brutal dictator who put the lot of you in prison for five years without the slightest grounds? Isn’t he… wasn’t he… didn’t you say…?’ Her words tumbled out in a rush, her voice pitched higher and higher. Suddenly my father said, ‘You must be blind!’ Then he walked out — left the house. After that she spoke not a word, and neither did I.)
Chapter six
Paris 1968
When I got to Paris, I hadn’t the least idea what the country had witnessed in the previous weeks. But Paris that summer talked of nothing but those events. My mother, the neighbours, acquaintances — all were talking about them, while the newspapers revisited, analysed, and followed up on developments. As the boys and girls I got to know — who were of my own age, or older by a couple of years or so — strove to offer their own interpretations of what had happened, they found it entertaining to pass along the details of those weeks to a girl who had come from the faraway land of Egypt, ignorant of the fascinating things they knew.