‘It’s not unfair. Any reading of this reality — which is freighted with history going way back, and with endless contradictions — requires of us a greater effort. It’s a responsibility, Sitt Nada, and if we’re not equal to it then we’d better admit it!’
‘Her book is rather like passing reflections, her personal papers.’
‘And judgements, lots of judgements, false generalisations, provocative oversimplifications. I think the split she points to between the ideal in her mind and the reality she lived is nothing but an internal split between what she believed about herself and the reality she disowned, even though she herself was part of that reality. Wasn’t Arwa one of the leaders of the movement? Wasn’t she at the head of one of those little shops? Didn’t you tell me that, in prison, they wanted to break Siham because she wasn’t one of their number? Wasn’t their jealousy of her and her astonishing popularity a part of their motive?’
‘You’re harsh, Hazem, you never forget a grievance.’
‘Maybe so. But I hate nihilism, and I hate seeing the people brought to despair by the fall of one person who, in his own personal state of despair, proclaims with casual ease that any undertaking people may turn to in order to create meaning in their lives is just tilting at windmills. In her book, Arwa writes that family, children, the struggle, are all imaginary solutions. By what right…’
I interrupted him. ‘You’re like some fool of a teacher with a metal ruler in his hand that he’s using to beat the palms of a little girl, unable to see her terror and confusion, or even to notice that she’s bleeding. Actually, your behaviour is even worse than that, because the girl you’re beating died! How did you get to be so cruel?’
He got angry, and we parted.
Not all was well in my relationship with Arwa. Was it the chemistry that attracts and repels, or a difference in temperament and ways of looking at things? Or was it that the coolness that arose between us when I refused to join her group became like a snowball that just keeps getting bigger with or without cause? But at this point I wasn’t nitpicking, so why was Hazem? He wasn’t cruel by nature. He had been closer to Arwa, coming more into direct contact with her, for the collective embraced them both. Then Hazem left, declaring that the way things were being managed was ineffective, and would lead no one to safe ground. They didn’t accept this statement coming from him; when Arwa herself, fifteen years later, said some of the same things he had said, and called her book Before Their Time, she found an audience that would celebrate her wisdom and cheer her on. Against Hazem, on the other hand, they had levelled the popular indictment: ‘Bourgeois’, they called him, saying, ‘He sold out for the sake of his own personal aspirations.’ In spite of this he didn’t cut himself off from them — he would still be there to lend his support to any of them in their hour of need, ready to provide medical treatment if someone was ill, and quick to assist with funeral arrangements in the event of a death. He took part in Arwa’s funeral, although he had announced, when the news was first brought to him, that he wouldn’t march in the procession. ‘Arwa,’ he said, ‘spat in all our faces. I can forgive her for everything,’ he said, ‘except killing herself. That I can never forgive.’ And yet he did march in the funeral procession. He helped carry the coffin. He accompanied the mourners to the gravesite. He evinced a strange grief I had never seen in him before — for grief is a powerful downward force, lowering the head and shoulders, as if the body, in sorrow, grew feeble and insubstantial, lending gravity the virulence to overpower it. But Hazem’s grief was expressed as a peculiar kind of anger, rather like the force of a violent storm. It was as if Arwa, before his eyes, had split in two: a dead person whose loss he grieved, and a killer against whom he blazed with wrath, confronting her with a violence he could scarcely contain.
‘There’s more to it,’ I thought, ‘than just abusing someone he doesn’t want to forget.’ I rang him the following day, and we made up.
It’s strange that I should cling to the same perception of someone for thirty years; that time should pass, years go by, the scene keep changing, and my image of that person remain just as it was when it fixed itself in my mind at the time of our first encounters. It is as if, by intuition or perspicacity, I had acquired, once and for all, the ability of that tall, slender boy to remain upright in a frightening scene, buffeted by bilious and pestilential winds. (Was it actually on a brilliant, sunny morning that we had that picture taken, or was it cloudy and ominous?)
Hazem grew up and so did I. We went our different ways, meeting on occasion by chance, or by arrangements we made through telephone calls from one country to another. For years we wouldn’t meet, and then we would resume seeing each other once more, each of us finding the other just as when we last parted company, apart from a little weight gained or lost, hair greying or black threaded with white, a bout with depression just surmounted or about to begin — each of us found the other still alone, still a comrade.
I never fully acknowledged to him the place he occupied in my soul. I was in the habit of dissimulating, and of putting on the affability of a colleague, of joking and bickering. We would get together and laugh raucously. We would playfully trade off the costumes of a masquerade, and for moments in which confusion reigned be unable to distinguish between what was real and what was the disguise. We would banter and joke, and laugh still more loudly, like a pair of lunatics, mocking the world, playing with words. Or he might be absent-minded, impervious to humour, and then I might put up with him or not: we might have a row, quarrelling in loud voices, then abruptly going our separate ways, one of us walking away from the other in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of the road, giving both ourselves and the other a break.
Months would go by, and then we would start meeting again.
At some conference where I was working as a simultaneous interpreter, someone said to me — someone of whom I remember nothing except how blue his eyes were and how sleek his blond hair was, gathered in what looked like a short ponytail — ‘To confront the system on your own is simply impossible!’ I don’t remember whether this was the sequel to something he’d already said and he went on at great length, or whether his commentary was confined to this single utterance. Nor do I remember the context. But this comment often surfaces in my mind, and with it a clip from an old black-and-white Italian film — by Vittorio De Sica, I think: a group of people, poor and homeless, who spend their nights wherever they find themselves. We see them on a very cold, cloudy morning, when they have just got up from their haphazard beds, clothed in rags that scarcely keep off the cold. There in the open they approach a small triangular patch of light formed by a ray of sun that breaks through the clouds. They stand together there, seeking warmth, pressing close and then still closer against one another, until none of them is outside the spot upon which the sunbeam falls.
Why did this clip, from a film I saw such a long time ago, stick in my mind? I recall the scene, then wonder all over again about the individual and the group. I think about the two-way street where the individual morphs into the group, or the group dissolves into individuals.
It dissolved, and yet my friendship with Hazem remained, warm and firmly rooted. Strange!
We met initially at the first big sit-in. He was sitting in the seat next to mine — tall, slim, and so young you were amazed he was a university student. I said, ‘Nada Abdel Qadir, pre-qualifying in engineering, Cairo.’
‘Hazem Kamel,’ he said, ‘medicine, Cairo.’
We shook hands.
‘Are you pre-med?’
‘I’m in the bachelor’s programme!’