I didn’t see her, for I was standing a few steps away, examining bolts of cloth, in search of something Hamdiya had asked for in order to make some duvet covers. I was inspecting the fabrics closely for weave and colour, comparing before purchasing. I heard her voice and turned quickly, calling, ‘Siham!’
It wasn’t Siham. I offered a smile that must have looked imbecilic, because the woman I saw before me wasn’t smiling. She turned on her heel and walked off, heading for the shop door. For days afterward I was unable to overcome my conviction that the voice was her voice — for how could I mistake Siham’s voice? But the woman I saw when I turned had been quite overweight and some years older, much resembling a housewife who spends her days at home, going out only when necessary, preparing meals and cleaning house during the day, and surrendering to the television at night, plying her knitting needles smoothly and mechanically as she watches, making a jumper for one of her children or grandchildren. Definitely not Siham.
I kept recalling what I had seen of the woman’s face — a broad forehead, made more so by her thinning hair; a double chin; dark lines and bags under the eyes, in a puffy, round white face. The passing face of a grandmother, who had gone out contrary to habit on a quick errand. But grandmothers, when they leave their confinement, tend to interact even with strangers, returning smile for smile, a conversational opening. This woman’s face was stern, and she turned round abruptly, quickening her steps as if in a hurry to reach the door. Could it have been Siham? The whiteness of the complexion, the greenness of the eyes, and the light-chestnut hair were also Siham’s.
I knew Siham when I was a new student at the College of Engineering, groping my way around the place. During the first days, the departments, the halls, the corridors, and the names of the professors were a labyrinth through which I made my way with no small sense of alienation and uneasiness. From a distance I observed the upperclassmen gathering in clusters here and there, joining together in conversation and laughter, or commenting on a wall-journal, or settling differences on a contentious point in the discussion. I noticed her before she noticed me: a large girl, tall and of generous proportions, distinguished by her green eyes and soft chestnut hair. I seemed to see her just about everywhere around the college, with various students, as if she knew everyone and everyone knew her. She would speak, and listen, become engrossed in the response to a wall-journal, or she would be contributing her own commentary to the journal, or just standing next to it, or leading a dialogue concerning what had appeared in it.
One day I caught sight of her in a circle of students, discussing something with them, with her eye on one of the wall-magazines. I wanted to join them, but I was too diffident, and remained standing not far off — or perhaps my feet moved without my realising it, and I drew nearer. She noticed, and greeted me, then extended her hand, and so I extended mine. We introduced ourselves to each other.
Then there was that conference in the Sawi Auditorium at the college.
The students filled the auditorium until it was packed to overflowing. Onstage was a minister who had come as a government representative, and next to him were two other people I no longer remember — maybe they were representatives of the college and the student union. Questions and comments followed rapidly one upon another, to the point of smothering the beleaguered minister. He seemed confused, either because the situation was new to him, or because he himself wasn’t entirely convinced of the government’s positions, which he had been delegated to defend. I no longer recall the minister’s face, nor do I remember his responses, except one, which was evidently an evasion, and served only to entangle him further. He said, ‘I shall refer your questions to his Excellency the President, and convey to you such answers as he chooses to make.’
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Siham’s voice burst forth like a missile, scoring a direct hit: ‘If what you’re telling us is that you’re nothing more than a postman who carries letters to the President of the Republic, and brings back whatever replies he deigns to make, then we’d like you to inform him that the students will stay where they are, that they won’t leave the university until he comes in person and answers their questions!’
The students were in an uproar, some laughing, some mocking and jeering, others agitated, infuriated by the minister’s words. But some were silent, staring mesmerised at the girl, enthralled by the boldness and decisiveness of the words she’d spoken.
I was beset by doubt. The woman I’d seen wasn’t Siham. She definitely wasn’t Siham.
As soon as I arrived back home I threw myself into looking for the poem ‘The Lament of the Little White Horse’. What I was looking for was not the original text in French, which I had memorised, but a translation of the poem that I’d done at least ten years earlier. I had written it on one of the pages of some notebook or other and then, in order to safeguard my translation, I had torn the page out of the notebook and put it away somewhere. But where? I spent an entire day searching — in the desk drawers, in my wardrobe, in cardboard cartons in which I had stored books and notebooks I didn’t need, in my old suitcases — but I didn’t come across it.
During the following weeks my fever of investigation extended to Siham. I went to her old flat in Giza, behind the southern wall of the zoo. I knocked on the door — knocked for a long time. She wasn’t at home. I asked one of the neighbours, who said, ‘She hasn’t been here in ages.’ I thought, ‘Maybe she’s at her mother’s house,’ and so I rang her mother and was told she wouldn’t see anyone. I asked how she was, and was answered by the standard rote courtesy, ‘Thanks be to God, she’s fine.’ I went back to her neighbourhood time and again; I took to loitering about the street in front of the building where her family lived. I thought, ‘Perhaps we’ll meet by chance, and then I’ll know that the woman I met at the fabric shop wasn’t Siham.’
Yet another of my sudden manias. I was possessed by the spirit of a detective in a mystery novel, or the investigator in a murder. I asked comrades and friends, when and where was the last time Siham had been seen. I gathered the threads and the bits of information. I compiled whatever I had, together with what I gleaned from others. I knew that, after graduation, she had worked — for some months, perhaps — at a private engineering firm, and that she had then left to get her doctorate in the Soviet Union, at the end of 1978. She had written me two letters from Moscow at the beginning of 1979, in which she talked about her circumstances in the city, her homesickness, how acutely she missed her mother, and the ferocious effects of the bitter cold. In a more lighthearted section of the letter, she told me she had gone to the Bolshoi Theatre, to the city’s museum on a sightseeing tour, and that she had visited Chekov’s house (she described to me his famous pair of spectacles, which she herself had been tempted to take off his desk), as well as Tolstoy’s house (‘I saw the desk,’ she recounted, ‘at which he wrote Anna Karenina’). She also told me about her rapid progress in learning the Russian language, and her classmates’ astonishment on discovering that, in addition to Arabic, she spoke French, English, and German. In her second letter, some months later — by which time she had moved to another house specially designated for graduate students — she seemed less homesick, and she mentioned that her room-mate was from Aleppo. After that, there were no more letters from her, whether because of some omission on my part or because she was busy, I don’t remember.