After the episode of the mourning period, I learned that aphorism about the sieve — which is to say, I learned to strain out those contaminants that would certainly have fouled the waters flowing between the two sides, while at the same time I took care that neither of them should suspect my interference. So if my mother was glowering, I would hold back something my grandmother had said and abridge the rest. If my aunt went on the offensive and severely criticised my mother, the attack would be converted in the translated version into a mild rebuke. If my mother was the aggressor, I would whitewash her comments before passing them along, adding some details of my own: ‘My mother says this with good intentions — that is, affectionately.’ And so on.
Meanwhile, that episode of the mourning period culminated in a family catastrophe that, I realised only two or three years later, could have been avoided, had I not been slavishly exact in transmitting the messages.
The prelude to this episode was our being informed one night in Cairo that my grandfather had died; at dawn on the following day we boarded a train bound for Upper Egypt.
At my grandfather’s house the women wailed, my grandmother, my aunt, and some other women I didn’t know sitting on the floor despite the seats that lined the walls. I asked my aunt, who explained to me that such were the rites of mourning in our part of the world, and I passed this information along to my mother when she asked. She said, ‘But I don’t want to sit on the floor!’ And with that she seated herself on a chair, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette!
(I can’t omit these details, because they turned up later in the catalogue of my mother’s blunders.)
After the sunset prayer, my mother asked my grandmother, ‘When will supper be served? We haven’t eaten since this morning!’ The translation was no sooner out of my mouth than I realised how outrageous this remark was. I could read it in the face of my grandmother, who kept silent.
I turned to my mother and said, ‘Perhaps that’s the way things are done around here — just like sitting on the floor.’
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘No, I’m not hungry.’
‘But they aren’t poor — why don’t they serve supper to their guests? Aren’t we guests?’
‘We’re not guests, Mama — Granny always says to me, “This is your home, Nada, your father’s and grandfather’s house.”’
My grandmother likely told my aunt what the wife of her son had said — whether disapprovingly or with the object of getting her daughter to feed the hungry lady, I don’t know. But my aunt leaned over toward my mother and whispered in her ear, so we got up with her, left the house, and set off to a different house.
‘It’s very odd,’ said my mother to my aunt. ‘You’re not poor, and there are so many guests — you ought to have prepared some food for them, even if it was only sandwiches!’
I translated. My aunt replied, ‘Ours is the largest clan in the whole region. At weddings and other big occasions we provide countless animals to be sacrificed for the feasts!’
I asked, ‘What does “clan” mean?’
‘It means all your kin.’
‘What does “kin” mean?’
‘Oh, pet, my little niece, you’re still a foreigner like your mother. A clan is a family that is thousands strong.’
I translated. But my mother insisted, ‘They should have served some food, since they’re not poor, or else they should have advised us to bring our own food with us!’
I translated, and my aunt replied, ‘Tell her she should be ashamed of herself. It’s unthinkable even to talk about food, and your grandfather not yet cold in his grave!’
I translated. My mother got angry, and my aunt changed her mind about taking us to the home of her mother’s brother for supper. ‘There’s no need to make a scene!’ she said. I translated.
My mother decided she was not going to stay for the three days of mourning after all, if it meant she and her daughter would have to starve to death. We left at dawn the following day.
My aunt swore that her tongue would never again address a word to her brother’s wife, and that she would never set foot in her house for the rest of her life (and she kept this vow). Nor was that the end of the matter, for the grievance was kept alive and it was the first thing my father heard about from his mother, his sister and his cousins when he went to the village after his release. And it was one of the sore points he brought up every time he and my mother quarrelled. During their last row, I told my father it had been my fault. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said sceptically.
‘We left before the three days were up, because of the translation, ya Abu Nada!’
‘What translation?’ So I told him. He laughed, and made peace with my mother.
Their many rows following his release from detention didn’t trouble me, so their decision to separate hit me like a thunderbolt.
Chapter four
Mahariq
My father didn’t write about his years of detention, nor did he talk about them. Perhaps my interest in prison memoirs — which began with a collection of whatever I could find concerning Wahaat Detention Centre — had its origins in my desire to know the details of my father’s life during the five years I lived apart from him: the cell he stayed in, the bed he slept in, the food he ate, the corridor he traversed when he went in or out, the kind of work that was demanded of him, and his relations with his prison-mates and his gaolers. My imagination, where my father was concerned, was restricted by the dearth of memories preceding his arrest, while the period between his arrest and his release is a blank, alleviated only by occasional meetings in a dingy room inside a gloomy building, which we reached after an arduous journey on whose end we congratulated each other when the building loomed before us in the distance, in the bleak pallor of the desert.
For five years, my imagination roamed aimlessly in search of a place to alight. Then, when prison memoirs started to emerge, one after another, I began reading them avidly, filling the gaps in my imagination with solid details, which cut like barbed wire. The newly acquired knowledge, however cruel, helped safeguard me against these gaping holes, erecting a bridge by which it was possible to pass from one level to another and reach that point at which Nada’s story and her own personal history was interrupted, and her father was restored to her intact, despite everything.
I could describe Urdy Abu Zab‘al with its six wards. I could describe Wahaat Detention Centre with its three wards, number one of which was designated for convicted Communists, number two for detainees such as my father, who hadn’t been tried or convicted, and number three for members of the Muslim Brotherhood. I know the location of the ten cells in each ward, of the toilets, and of the officer’s room that faces the gate to the ward. My imagination can follow my father at ‘Azab Prison in Fayoum, then at Liman Tora, and then for four years at Mahariq Prison in the oases. At this last prison I can put together an image of my father waking up in the morning in one of the ten cells that were in Ward Number Two; I can picture him then going out barefoot into Scorpion Valley carrying a pickaxe for breaking up rock. His attention would be divided between his labour and keeping his eyes and ears alert for any sudden movement or sound betraying a viper that might leap all at once from its lair and deliver its fatal bite. I imagine him when it’s time to return to the ward for supper and after that, following evening activities, a cup of tea.