Blue Lorries (18 page)

Meaning to please me, you paid more than you could afford so that we might go to Yvoire. I should have told you candidly that I didn’t want to go. Yes, I was frightened of that journey. But I also wanted it – otherwise, how do you explain my having gone along with your insistence and submitted to the temptation of returning to Yvoire, even though I was apprehensive about it?

My previous visit to the village had been painful beyond imagining. I hadn’t yet recovered from that pain, or become reconciled to the reality that my village – that familiar realm minutely connected in a thousand ways to my childhood and youth – had metamorphosed into something resembling a railway station, or a marketplace well-trodden by the feet of people passing through, or a tourist resort accessible to anyone having the price of admission. The great big tourist buses were the first thing I saw when I came in sight of the village: a suitable prelude to what I would see moments later in the village itself. The place had changed, utterly changed. The narrow, cobblestone streets remained the same as they’d always been; the houses still stood, as ever at close quarters; the old fortress; the church; the lake – all attesting that this was Yvoire and not some other village, but it had become a different village, taken over by hordes of tourists who filled the streets and alleyways with their languages and loud voices and the flashes of the cameras slung around their necks, until it was time for them to move on to the next village on their holiday itinerary. Chic restaurants and cafés for an affluent clientele. And to top it all off, I couldn’t find the way to our house. How could that be? I passed the house twice without recognising it, and was disoriented for a moment, finding everything thrown into confusion. I went back to where the house should be. ‘Here is our house,’ I said. But where? Before me was one of those souvenir shops catering to the tourists. Then I caught sight of my mother: ample, smiling, doing a brisk trade with the tourists. I went in and hugged her, but we had no chance to exchange more than a few words, for the tourists were waiting, holding colourful postcards or clutching wooden dolls they wanted to buy, or looking to ask the price of some memento or other. I left her to carry on her business with the tourists, and went into the house to see my father. Where had the house gone? It had been eaten by a wolf. The façade of the house, two of its rooms, and the little garden, once my father’s refuge after he retired from fishing, had been appropriated by the shop and its rose-bedecked entryway. The wolf had left only one gloomy room leading onto a small kitchen, and the toilet. ‘How does Papa spend his days, Mama?’ She said with a dismissive gesture, ‘He’s always complaining, but I’m busy with the shop.’

I foresaw that it would be painful to go back again, and yet I was unable to resist. I accepted your invitation, and so we went. It wasn’t my intention to give voice to my distress or pass it along to you. I said to myself, ‘Nada won’t notice anything.’ I made up my mind that my previous visit must have been tantamount to an immunisation, at least to some degree, and that this would enable me to contain my reactions. How did things get out of control? This whole letter, Nada, as I hope you have inferred, is an attempt to explain why the situation got away from me. No, it wasn’t because my father, and then after him my mother, had died, but because this time I went back to the village bringing tourists with me. I’m not criticising you – I swear that I’m not criticising you. That beautiful village on the shores of Lac Léman – I was paying it a fleeting visit. I read in the tourist literature about a magnificent garden called ‘The Garden of the Five Senses’. I said to myself, ‘My daughter is blind.’ Now, two months after the fact, I declare that anyone who is ignorant of a place is blind – no more, no less. And when I say ‘ignorant of a place’ I’m not talking about a road map or where the route begins and ends, but about a place that is specific to us, in which our own story resides, and which houses our five senses. I must admit, the presence of the twins exacerbated the difficulty. I couldn’t endure their noise and their demands; I hadn’t, in the first place, been able to accept that they were the children of another woman with whom my husband had been intimate.

In short, Nada, the trip was a disaster because I knew for certain then that my alienation was total, whether in Yvoire, in Paris, or in Cairo. It was clear that, unwittingly – in a way it was sheer madness – I had made up my mind and decided to go with you to Yvoire, fortified by your presence, as if your being with me would dissipate some of the sense of alienation, and relieve me of it. But I saw my daughter as a tourist in my own birthplace, and I lost my reason.

I’ll leave this letter now and finish it tomorrow, or the day after.

My mother didn’t finish the letter the following day or on any subsequent day. She left it incomplete, and thus I would never have an opportunity to read it except after her death.

I folded the letter, and left the house.

Chapter eighteen

The twins

When the twins were small, Hamdiya tended to buy matching garments for them, but I pointed out to her that it would be better to buy them each different clothes. They became accustomed to this, and, as they grew older, each of them would choose according to his own taste and inclination. They looked similar, although they were not identical: brothers joined by blood and genetic background and by whatever stimuli they were both exposed to every day – the same kindergarten, school, classroom, teachers, classmates, friends, and daily routine. And because human beings are like mirrors, the features of one person reflected to a considerable degree in those of the next, Nadir and Nadeem looked more alike than they actually were. Nadir was not as tall as his brother, his complexion and his eyes were darker, and his hair was coarser. It was easy to tell that they were twins until they got to high school. Thereafter they differed more, for Nadir chose to grow a moustache and a close-trimmed beard, which covered his whole chin and made him look rather like a young French writer of the late nineteenth century. His brother’s moustache, on the other hand, stayed downy until he went to university. When his facial hair began to grow thicker after that he would shave every day. Their voices were very similar, identical in timbre, so that neither Hamdiya nor I could distinguish between them at the start of a telephone conversation, or when one of them called from the bathroom to ask for a towel. Beyond that it was possible to tell the difference, because each had a particular rhythm to his speech.

It is my conviction that seeds sprout by their own inscrutable law, their own particular logic as regards both nature and nurture. From me the twins got their sense of irony and their scepticism, which I resolutely insist are characteristics of intelligence. Nadir, though – the elder by twenty minutes – was more bitingly ironic than the source of his instruction. Perhaps it was the era he grew up in that induced him to look at the world with a cynical and unforgiving eye. And yet his era was also his brother’s – what about that? Nadir would startle me with his ideas:

‘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 beautiful: 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.