I was told by a fellow student who’d been in Moscow during the time she was studying there that in April 1979 they had staged a demonstration in front of the Egyptian embassy in Moscow, to protest Egypt’s signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty. He laughed. ‘You know how big Siham was,’ he said. ‘We lifted her up on our shoulders and she began leading a chant, with us repeating after her.’ I asked him whether she had begun to show any signs of illness at that time. He said, ‘It may be that she had an emotional crisis — something to do with her attachment to a Syrian student, I think, but at any rate I’m not sure about this. Possibly she was disappointed in the system over there — the widespread bribery and corruption and other things she hadn’t expected to find. Or it may be that she was shocked by the foolishness or perverseness of some of the Arab students.’ But this friend of ours couldn’t remember when Siham had left Moscow, or whether she had suffered from spells of severe depression during that time. Another friend, who was her classmate, said that her academic progress had been brilliant, but then she suddenly decided to terminate her studies and go back to Egypt.
Other friends told me that, after her return to Egypt, early in the 1980s (summer of 1981? Or 1982?), Siham settled in Cairo for a short time, perhaps three or four years, part of which she spent teaching at the lycée in Bab al-Louk. Then she left Cairo to live with her mother, who was working for UNESCO in Paris. At this point accounts vary, concurring on some points but differing on others. One person said she tried to commit suicide; said another, ‘She tried to kill herself more than once, here and in Paris.’ This one affirmed that she had frequented the hospital to be treated for depression. But one friend said, ‘It wasn’t depression — she was schizophrenic.’ This conversation angered another acquaintance, a woman whom Siham had trained and instructed when she was still a student in her first months at the university. She said, ‘Who amongst us hasn’t experienced depression? Who amongst us hasn’t gone to a psychologist for help in enduring what we have to endure? She wasn’t ill. When what was happening ceased to make her happy, she chose to find a way out. Wasn’t it her right to find a way out?’
The episode of the zoo was recounted by a number of friends, although they didn’t agree on the details, or as to when it took place or just who was an eye-witness and had been the first to tell of it. Siham had gone to the zoo, taking with her some colourful balloons. She stood at the entrance to the zoo, among the hawkers, and sold the balloons to children. (Some said that she was handing them out, not selling them, while others said that it wasn’t balloons, but little toys she had made by hand.) A policeman had approached her, and she had to bribe him (the way vendors normally do) before he would allow her to occupy that spot. The vendors thought her an interloper who had imposed herself on them, to draw off their customers, which she had no right to do. So they picked a fight with her (some said they assaulted her physically and beat her). The story spread in the way that rumours do, passed around among the sons and daughters of the student movement, who were scattered throughout the country.
For several weeks I gave myself up to the investigation, but then some of life’s other preoccupations distracted me — although not from the poem ‘The Lament of the Little White Horse.’ I decided to translate it again. I sat at my desk and rendered it in Arabic — a passable first draft. I went back to the draft and reworked it. When I proceeded to set down the final copy, I found myself substituting a mare for the male horse, both in the title and in the text:
The White Mare
By Paul Fort
Chapter sixteen
Meditations on time
I wasn’t in the habit of keeping a journal, or setting down my thoughts or reminiscences, but one evening I wrote: ‘Nadir and Nadeem went to the university today. University today, tomorrow a job, a wife. And I? Am I to settle for my professional work? Will I be free, ultimately, to carry out my prison-writings project? To marry? At my age?’
I was in an odd state — or should I say, a peculiar state, out of the ordinary, combining a profound sense of repose — rather like serenity, although it is difficult to describe it as such — and an obscure anxiousness, the nature of which I couldn’t altogether pinpoint: as if, in the thought I had written down, there were some question my mind hadn’t registered, dangling there somewhere, but eluding my grasp.
In the morning, while the boys showered and got ready to go out, I was conscious of a pressing urge to accompany them. I made the suggestion to them, whereupon they exchanged glances and burst out laughing all at once. It was an absurd idea, to be sure. I was sitting on one side of the breakfast table, Hamdiya on the other, in a corner of the kitchen. Hamdiya muttered a protective charm for them under her breath, stealing a sidelong glance in their direction, while I stared unabashedly right at them. Nadeem winked at his brother and said, ‘Mind the cameras — they’re pointed at us!’
Eighteen years — how did they slip by? In a flash, it seemed. I realised I was on the threshold of my forties: just two years to go. I hadn’t noticed that the boys had swallowed up the years, the years required for them to grow from infants with their eyes shut tight, swaddled in white blankets, to two tall youths capable of opposing me in a verbal contest, and winning. The years passed smoothly from this point to that, while they grew up and so did I; and by a strange reckoning these years that were given over to the twins were not written off as a loss. They bestowed upon me countless extraordinary moments, whether of joy, confusion, anxiety, or trouble, but they constituted, at all events, a life. The white hairs that startled me in the mirror one morning were not invaders, but the natural result of a life I had lived. The twins swallowed up the years entirely, much as they might have tackled a delicious meal I had prepared for them. ‘Bon appetit!’ said I.
No relationship or marital prospect I took up ever worked out. Because of the twins? There was love that took me by storm, like a lightning-bolt achieving its target. Then the only marriage proposal that appeared serious and promising ended in disaster when I said, ‘Nadir and Nadeem are more than just brothers I’m devoted to — they are truly my children. It will be as if you were marrying a woman with two children from a previous marriage.’ He was no fool — he said he knew this, that he had worked it out for himself, adding, ‘But things won’t always be this way. Parents become detached sooner or later; they’ll be busy with a life away from you, and you’ll make your own family, having children, and busying yourself with your own life away from them.’ That was all he said.