Even with caution and practice, we couldn’t help banging our heads or some part of our bodies as if it was some sort of daily toll, although the payment of it was accompanied by hilarity, laughter, and jokes. ‘Everything okay?’ one of us would ask another, on hearing the other’s sudden exclamation. A voice, pained at first, would reply, ‘Okay!’ And the three of us would laugh, and then laugh some more when we tallied up the bumps and bruises. I announced, ‘I’m more careful than you two — I only bumped my head three times: twice on the first day, and then the third time I was so busy singing I didn’t pay attention.’
‘That’s a skewed analysis!’ Nadeem exclaimed. ‘You’re the shortest and smallest of us, so you’re at less risk of banging into things!’
‘Every time I’ve gone into the bathroom,’ Nadir put in, ‘I’ve felt as though I was in a box and had to adapt myself to its shape! Yesterday, when I left you in the breakfast room and went up to use the toilet, I opened the door and stood there for five minutes calculating the space and considering my own bulk, in an attempt to come up with an idea of the ideal posture for sitting, getting up, going in, and going out. “Moving the shoulders this way,” I thought, “is inadvisable, as is taking a step exceeding such-and-such a length, and when you open the door you should bend your torso to such-and-such an extent!” I told myself, “You’ll make an engineer yet, my boy, unless your calculations are ‘way off!” ’
‘And were they off?’
‘Of course not. I figured it all out, and I haven’t bumped into a single thing since yesterday morning! Now you two can wait and see how it goes!’ Nadir went into the bathroom, and then we heard him yell, even though he made haste to flush the toilet at the same time, so as to disguise his ‘Ouch!’ with the sound of water gushing into the bowl.
We laughed still more when Nadir put the question to us: ‘If Mama were with us, how would she sort herself out in there?’
We were rapt, picturing the situation, and designing strategies whereby Hamdiya — with her height and her substantial girth — might manage to get in and out of the bathroom.
‘She’d have to leave the door open.’
‘No way. She wouldn’t even be able to get past it.’
‘With a bit of effort she could manage it.’
‘And the tub?’
‘She’d have to strike that one from the agenda and settle for washing her face in the washbasin.’
‘How would she do her ablutions at prayer-time? There’s no space for her to raise her leg.’
‘As long as she intended to perform the correct ablution it would be all right. Our religion is meant to enable worship, not impede it!’
This exchange was conducted with all seriousness, not even the ghost of a smile, as if we were gathering and storing our laughter, until the three of us all at once burst into manic guffaws that got us leaping to our feet and clapping hands, our own or each others’.
We laughed in that cramped room, in the glass-fronted breakfast salon that overlooked the rue des Ecoles; we laughed at the offerings of the ‘Continental’ breakfast which, no sooner had we finished it than Nadir demanded, ‘So when can we have breakfast?’ We laughed in the restaurant across from the hotel when we crossed the street to have dinner there. We laughed in the Metro, at the museums, in the street; we laughed when I told them how angry I got with my mother because of what she said to Gérard; we laughed when I said, ‘And what was I hoping for, anyway? That the boy would hold my hand or kiss me on the forehead when he told me goodbye?’
The twins were racing at full speed, as befits eighteen-year-old boys, and I was flying, as a matter of temperament and habit.
Chapter nineteen
An episode
Nadir and Nadeem enrolled in the College of Engineering at Cairo University. Nadir took on extra work and thus earned some money. Sometimes he tutored classmates, and other times he worked at a computer repair shop; during the summer he contracted with a private company and worked throughout the months of his holiday from nine in the morning until nine at night. He seemed happy, so I didn’t interfere. Hamdiya objected that sitting in front of the computer so much was bad for his eyes — it distressed her that he had gone to an eye doctor and discovered that he needed eyeglasses. ‘No one in our family,’ she said anxiously, ‘has had glasses: neither your father nor I, nor Nada nor Nadeem. It’s because of the computer!’
Pretending to be in earnest, Nadir replied, ‘I got my bad eyesight from my French grandmother!’
Nadeem enrolled in the school of architecture, as planned. He threw himself into his studies, which he loved. He did a great deal of reading in the history of art and architecture. During the summer holiday he couldn’t find work, but during the summer after his third year his brother recommended that he work with him at the computer company where he himself was employed, and Nadeem agreed to this.
My relations with the twins were smooth and pleasant, and there were no problems in my relationship with Hamdiya. When we disagreed and I lost my temper with her or she talked irrationally, we would quarrel, but in general the row would be a passing thing, lasting no more than a few hours and leaving neither of us with hurt feelings.
Then came the event that broke all the rules.
I was sitting in front of the television. The programme was a talk show featuring a former prisoner I believed was a colleague of my father’s. I called Hamdiya and the boys to listen to the discussion with me. The man (who was close to eighty years old by then) was recalling his fifteen years of incarceration in the military prison, as well as the Citadel, Liman Tora, and Mahariq. He didn’t speak at length about torture, but rather went into detail about the improvements at Mahariq Prison: the theatre they had built, the technical workshop, the newsreels they produced, the educational sessions, the school they set up to teach literacy skills to prison guards who could not read or write, and the pictures that were drawn or engraved by artists upon the prison walls and doors.
The host asked him, ‘You alluded once to the incident when a prisoner bowed his head and licked the dust — do such things really take place inside a prison?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you experience this?’
‘Of course.’
His face registered a calm that was unimaginable to me. Was it old age and the remoteness of the past, or wisdom attained at last?
The announcer asked him, ‘Did your father cry when he saw you, a fine and promising doctor, with your hands in shackles?’
‘No, he didn’t cry.’