‘I’m going to study computer engineering. There’s a demand for it in the labour market. If I do well, I can work for Microsoft, and go and live abroad.’
Troubled, I refrained from comment. I turned to Nadeem, who said, ‘I’m going to study architecture.’
The boys graduated from high school. I had promised to take them to Paris if they did well. I didn’t say that I would have taken them regardless of their performance, superior or not. I had a pressing desire to visit my mother’s grave, and I didn’t want to go alone.
Life is so strange, so bizarre — is it by strength or by selfishness that one prevails? As soon as we arrived in Paris we went together to visit the cemetery. I regretted bringing Nadir and Nadeem with me. I tried to hold myself back, but my resistance was in vain — I began to weep. I wept until Nadeem turned his face away to hide his own tears from me and from Nadir.
Nadir played the clown on our way back, telling comical anecdotes — the story of a fellow who said this, and a girl who did that, and a day when such-and-such happened, and another day when — scarcely stopping for breath as he leapt from one story to another, until he managed to get the result he was looking for: by the time we stopped for dinner before arriving back home, we were chatting as usual.
Before we left, I went back to visit my mother. I didn’t cry. I engaged her in a long conversation — any passerby who saw me would have concluded that here was a woman who had lost her mind. I talked at length about her, myself, and my father. Also about Hamdiya and the boys. I said, ‘You didn’t accept them, but they are your grandsons — they know your name, what you look like, and the things you’ve said. They know about the fat woman you were talking with on the train, the quarrel that arose between you and my aunt and ended with a severing of relations. They know how you respond when you are possessed by anger, what you do when you give way to sweetness and your good nature wins out against whatever caused the tension. They came to visit you, just as they go every year to visit their father’s grave in Upper Egypt, and one day they may come when I’m gone, and ease your loneliness by talking to you about me and about my father, gathering our three graves together into one, dispersed though they may be.’
I told her, ‘I forgave you for moving to Paris. I didn’t realise at first how angry and upset I was about that move. When I did acknowledge it, I was past being angry, and I forgave you.’
I made no allusion to her unfinished letter. ‘If I do that,’ I said to myself, ‘it will open up an expanse of pain she doesn’t need.’ I thought, ‘I’ll entertain her by talking instead.’
I told her about all the new things that had happened since she died.
I thought I would amuse her. I told her the story of the odd passion that had burned for three days.
‘I descended on him as if by parachute. So, without any previous introduction, he found a woman, younger than he by no fewer than twenty years, standing before him and inviting him to dinner. He suppressed his surprise and embarrassment with a smile that robbed me of whatever good sense I had left. When he said, “Well then, shall we meet at such-and-such a time?” I stood on tiptoe and planted a swift kiss on his right cheek. I left him standing there rooted to the spot, and dashed to the shops. I bought a maroon silk dress. I scurried from there to a shoe shop and made my purchase: a pair of shiny black spike-heeled pumps such as you might have seen on the feet of Claudia Cardinale when she went to dinner with Marcello Mastroianni. From there I hurried to the hairdresser’s salon and had my ponytail replaced with a luxuriant, shoulder-length wave. You wouldn’t have recognised me! Nor did I recognise myself, for, having taken off my trousers, blouse, and trainers and put on the dress, which was sleeveless and low-cut, while my newly-styled hair covered my shoulders. I looked in the mirror, gasped, and then burst into laughter, exclaiming, “All this because of a voice?”
‘I haven’t told you that the seduction had been in his voice, entirely. I was sitting, just as I had sat a thousand times before, in the translation booth assigned to me. I was to translate his presentation, and I knew nothing about him but his name.
‘I jumped when I heard his voice. At first it seemed to be my father’s voice, but then I observed the difference between the two. This man’s voice was more mellifluous — finer or stronger or deeper, or maybe it was his way of speaking that made his voice more beautifuclass="underline" the rhythm of his speech, or the words themselves. I had to stay with him, doing simultaneous translation. This was quite a predicament, one I had never found myself in before. My heart beat rapidly, my palms were sweaty, and I struggled terribly to carry on translating as if nothing had happened.
‘In Arabic, Mama, when we say that it was as if a bird had landed on someone’s head, we are describing a person in a state of mute astonishment, caught by surprise. When I encountered him, a strange bird landed on my head, one that silenced me in his presence; I would listen, studying his face and his physiognomy. No sooner did I part company with him, though, than my strange bird stepped off my head and inhabited me, and I would fly, fly like the bird, whether I was eating, moving from one place to another, or sitting in the translation booth and doing the job I was there for.
‘Three days, and then we went our separate ways. If it had been other than a fleeting encounter, there would have been an explosion.’ I laughed. ‘The butane gas tanks in the building might have exploded and set fire to the entire street — maybe the whole neighbourhood!’ Still laughing, I added, ‘I sealed off the tanks and opened the windows, and, just in case, I called the fire department and kept the number for the ambulance next to the telephone!’
I told her about how I had turned down a proposal of marriage. Having sprung this on her, I clarified that I was now talking about a different man. I explained the reasons for my refusal. ‘It seems you’re not convinced,’ I said, and proceeded to elaborate on my explanation.’
I said, ‘I’m still gathering material for my book about prison. Someday I’ll write it.’
I said, ‘I miss you — it’s strange how I miss you, because I keep thinking, as I come and go from Cairo, that here it is five years since you left and I must have got used to it. But then here I am now, next to you, and fully cognisant of my need to hold your hand — to take it and hold on as tightly as a child fearful of getting lost, utterly lost, if her hand should slip from yours.’
‘Do you forgive me?’ I said.
‘Good night,’ I said.
On the train going back, I kept blowing my nose. I was perplexed that I had told her ‘Good night,’ when I hadn’t even noticed that the sun had gone down and dusk had fallen.
‘Life is so strange,’ I thought. For during this trip, which I had begun and ended by visiting my mother’s grave, I had laughed with the twins, as I had never laughed in all my life.
Our sojourn in the hotel room seemed rather like a comic play, since, in order to economise, we had stayed all together in one room in a hotel in the rue des Ecoles. With regard to the space it afforded, it wasn’t a bad room, but the en suite bathroom was ridiculously cramped. The toilet was right in front of the door, with no more than two or three feet of space dividing them; also, after relieving oneself, it was necessary to stand up cautiously and bend over slightly, so as not to bump one’s head on the ceiling, and then to contort oneself and incline to the left before opening the door and proceeding carefully so as to avoid colliding with the sink on the right, the bathtub on the left, the toilet behind, or the half-open door in front. Then there was the matter of bathing, which called for still more advanced tactics and strategy. The bathtub was square, with space for one person to stand under the spigot, enclosed on two sides by walls and on the other two by glass panels, one of which was a door that opened only halfway (because of the position of the toilet), such that a person — provided he was not overweight, was humble before God, bowed his head, and raised and lowered his foot cautiously while getting into this square — might accomplish a bath without some frightful accident. There was no such assurance as to the next stage of the process, the business of getting out of the tub: for a section of the towel might fall into the face of the person making the attempt and obstruct his vision, or he might get water in his eyes and have trouble seeing properly. Then the unthinkable might come to pass, and the person would be lucky to do no more than stumble against the toilet, but if he wasn’t so lucky he would collide with the toilet, lose his balance and bump into the glass door, which would send him careening in the direction of the washbasin.