Butterfly Wings: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (2 page)

The hostess, bearing newspapers and magazines, stopped at Doha’s seat. Doha took one at random and put it in the pocket in front of her. Her neighbor, however, took a copy of every newspaper the hostess had, and said to her, “If you have any more papers, let me have them. I’m following the coverage of a matter that concerns me.”

Finally the plane was on the runway. A few seconds later its wheels left the ground, and Doha’s whole body sensed it was rising through the air. She felt she was about to enter another world. Looking out of the window, she saw the dust haze covering the houses and streets of Cairo. She watched the city grow smaller and smaller as the plane ascended, until it broke through
the clouds and reached cruising altitude. The houses, the streets, the Nile, the desert, Egypt, and the whole world disappeared.

She reclined her seat, rested her head on the headrest, and closed her eyes to draw the curtains on a day that had tried her nerves. She thought about the great things awaiting her on the northern shore of the sea separating Egypt from Italy.

2 Ayman

T
he journey was arduous, but he had to go through with it. The distance might not be far, but the course of his life would change. It meant an end to years of anguish. Ayman al-Hamzawi was a young man who had to make a journey to the truth. He had to go to Tanta to find out who he was, to find out who his mother was and whether she was alive or dead. Just as the nation was mother, mother was also a nation. People who did not know their mother did not know their nation. They were without origin, without roots, without identity.

The first hardships on his journey that cloudy day were the roadblocks en route to Ahmad Hilmi station, from where he would take the Peugeot service taxi to Tanta.

The road was closed. Behind the barriers stood Central Security vehicles carrying riot police, who looked drawn at this early hour of the morning. It was not even eight-thirty, but the street was full of people out looking for work.

Buildings still bore graffiti written by demonstrators in large black letters:
“O my country, where are you? We’re forced to beg, and our children too.”
He did not read the rest. Perhaps not doing so
would spare him from being stopped and searched and having his papers checked by the police like everyone else on the street.

He was only a few minutes away from the taxis leaving Cairo, but his microbus had been stopped at the checkpoint. All the passengers had gotten out, and the driver was being detained. An officer had checked his papers, and it seemed they were not in order. The passengers were lined up before an officer who was looking at their ID cards one by one.

At last it was Ayman’s turn. The officer took his ID and examined it. He asked, “Where are you going?”

“To Ahmad Hilmi taxi station.”

“Why?”

“To take a taxi to Tanta.”

The officer gave him a hard stare, then handed him his papers. Ayman walked quickly away toward Ahmad Hilmi. To avoid the police he took a quiet-looking side street and bypassed the main road until he came out near the taxi station.

He jumped straight into one of the cars being called for Tanta. It quickly filled up with passengers. Then it headed off for the agricultural road through the Delta: greenery on both sides and no officers, no barricades, and no Central Security wagons.

The journey to Tanta
should
have taken no more than an hour and a half, but it took Ayman more than three hours. The taxi broke down after about forty minutes. The driver left the passengers and went to find a replacement drive belt for the one that had snapped. Half an hour later he returned with the needed part. The car stopped again when a woman who was nine months pregnant started to feel very unwell. The passengers thought she might have gone into labor. The driver pulled up at a small café by the side of the road. After drinking a glass of lemonade, the woman felt better and the journey resumed.
One of the passengers asked the driver not to go too fast and jolt the woman’s womb about. The driver’s speeding had caused the problem in the first place, added another.

The woman was sitting next to Ayman. She was in her thirties and could have been his mother. He must have had a mother who had been pregnant with him, but he did not know her, just like the unborn child in this woman’s womb did not know its mother yet. Ayman felt he was that unborn child and, just like it, was speeding toward birth at the end of this journey, when he would meet his mother for the first time.

Ayman had lived his life believing that the woman at home was his mother. Was she not his father’s wife? Did the children—he, his older brother Abdel Samad, and their sister Nesma, who was five years younger—not call her “Mama”? True, Mother dealt differently with Nesma. She took greater care of her and showed her more tenderness, but he thought that was because she was a girl or because she was younger.

The woman was not callous and did not mistreat him. If he was sick, she gave him money for the doctor and told him how to get to the clinic. But if his sister caught a cold or the flu, Mother would rush her to the doctor and change the routine at home. No one would be allowed to talk loudly if she slept after taking her medicine, and no one would eat in front of her if she was not allowed certain foods.

As a child, how he longed to be a little girl like Nesma for his mother to cuddle. How he longed to be the youngest so that his mother would help him with his homework and go with him to the end-of-year party at school like other parents.

Ayman grew up longing for something missing. It was the same longing the kittens born in the stairwell had for their mother’s milk. He would watch those blind, trembling kittens
on his way back from school. He often threw their mother a few pieces of bread to help her produce the warm milk without which her young would die of hunger.

One day he returned from school and found neither the cat nor her kittens under the stairs. He discovered that, in their mother’s absence, the old lady who lived on the ground floor had thrown them out onto the street. That made him furious and made him hate that ugly old lady even more. She had become embittered by age and was nasty to the neighbors as well as the kittens.

He searched for the kittens in all the streets around the house, but could find not a trace of them. Every now and again, he would hear the mother cat meowing when she returned in search of her children. Abdel Samad said, “Give up on it, brother. Don’t make those kittens a headache for us. They’re not part of the family.”

Of course they were not part of the family, but they stood for the family Ayman wished he had. Abdel Samad did not understand this. He expected nothing from the “mother” they lived with under the same roof. He had an independent life and did not care what anyone thought. He worked at the supermarket at the end of the street and had his own income, which gave him a certain independence from his parents. But did that make him emotionally self-sufficient? How did he overcome the instinctual longing of children for their parents? That was what Ayman did not understand.

Then Abdel Samad turned sixteen. That day, he brought home the application form for an ID card from the police station. His younger brother asked him, “What’s that?”

He replied as though talking about grown-up affairs that were no concern of Ayman’s: “These are the forms for my ID.”

That was the beginning: the moment when Ayman first learned that his doubts were correct.

Abdel Samad sat at the dining table in the living room and started filling out the forms. He asked Father for some information, and Father asked him for the papers and started filling them in himself. As soon as Father filled in the section for the mother’s name, Abdel Samad exclaimed, “But that’s not Mama’s name!”

Father remained silent, saying nothing for a while. Then he said, “Just you keep quiet and take the forms to the police station.”

Abdel Samad did not argue. He got up, took the paperwork, and said he would go in the morning. Right then, Ayman leapt out of his chair and grabbed the forms from his brother’s hand. In the box for the mother’s name he read, “Amna Abdel Rahim al-Saadi.” He repeated it at the top of his voice, looked at his father, and said, “Why did you write that name?”

“It’s nothing to do with you. When you grow up and are as old as Abdel Samad, I’ll tell you.”

“But you didn’t tell Abdel Samad.”

Father did not reply.

The boy pressed again: “Who is Amna Abdel Rahim al-Saadi? Please tell me, Baba.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Father said to him, “She’s your mother, but she died.”

Ayman gaped for a moment, then burst into tears as if his mother had died at that very instant. He fired questions at his father. “How did she die? When did she die? Why didn’t you tell us our mother was dead? Why didn’t you tell us before?”

Father avoided answering his son’s series of questions, dodging them as if they were bullets aimed deep into his heart. Then he said, “It’s an old wound and there’s no need to open it again.”

His son asked, “Where did you bury my mother? Where’s her grave? Why …?” Father cut him short, telling him to drop the subject.

This discovery upset Ayman and turned things upside down. He felt he was living a big lie. His mother was not his mother; his real mother was an unknown quantity; and his father was concealing what it was his right to know.

In the morning, Abdel Samad went directly to the police station to apply for his ID. Ayman stayed in bed, incapable of getting up. Questions filled his mind as he sought the truth. It was certain that his father’s wife was not his mother. He had known that in his heart anyway, without anyone having to tell him. But what had actually happened? How had his mother died? Had she been ill or killed in an accident? Where was her family? He must have aunts and uncles, so where were they? Why had his father concealed it all? Plus, was it really true that his mother was dead? Was it not possible that she was still alive? How could he find out what his father did not want him to know?

Abdel Samad, unlike Ayman, was not one to waste time for nothing. Getting something was his prime concern, and that did not apply to wondering about his family: where they lived, what they did, and all the rest of the questions his brother Ayman wondered about. Although Ayman was only two years younger than him, Abdel Samad thought his little brother still had a long way to go before he would grasp what life was about and learn how to cope with it. What was the point of rushing to find out about your family? He too knew nothing about his aunts and uncles. Even when it came to his father’s family, he only knew that his grandfather’s name was Abdel Samad—as the eldest son, he had been named after him. In any case, that grandfather was dead, just like his mother, and he had never
seen him or gotten to know him. He knew his uncle who lived in the countryside and visited them every few years when he came to Cairo to go to the Mosque of Hussein or to sort out some official paperwork. All he remembered about him were the things he brought with him. These included “farmer’s cream,” as his father’s wife called it, and whose pleasantly sour taste he discovered when he stuck a finger in the jar and took a surreptitious taste. He knew that he also had an aunt in the countryside. He had never seen her, but had heard his father talking about her. He could not be bothered to ask about her. What was the use of having relatives here and there? What was in it for him when it seemed they all lived in the countryside? The only person of any use to you was yourself.

His little brother often talked to him about these things, and Abdel Samad would say to him, “Concentrate on your studies and forget about these old wives’ tales. What have we got to do with aunts and uncles? Haven’t you heard the proverb that relations sting like scorpions? Everybody’s a scorpion, so look out for yourself and your own interests.” In Abdel Samad’s eyes, Ayman was still a child because, like a child, he was looking for emotional ties and worrying about things that had no place in real life.

Abdel Samad was happy to have applied for his ID card. It meant a lot to him and marked a transition in his life. From now on he was an independent being, not dependent on anyone. An ID card was the symbol of this independence and proof of his being a man. Now he could work without having to get his father’s permission and, if he found a job that paid enough, he could leave the house and begin his own life.

The subject of the brothers’ mother became the talk of the teachers at Ayman’s school after he went and told the math teacher, Miss Fatma, who was fond of him. In his innocence,
which so annoyed Abdel Samad, he told her how he had found out that his mother was not his real mother, that he had another mother who had died. The teachers talked about it all day and asked both Ayman and Abdel Samad about their mother and her story. During break time, Abdel Samad took his little brother to one side. He grabbed him by his shirtfront and said menacingly, “If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll whack you till I break your jaw. What does any of this have to do with the teachers?”

An argument developed and Ayman said to him, “Leave me alone. It’s nothing to do with you. I’m free to say what I want.” Their voices grew louder and they started to grapple with each other. Miss Fatma heard them through the staffroom window. She called out to them and told Abdel Samad off, saying, “Don’t you have any feelings?”

He replied, “What have feelings got to do with it?”

“I’m amazed at you and your brother. You’re as different as black and white. Haven’t you just found out after all these years that you have a mother who’s not the mother you thought you had?”

“What use is that? She died years ago and that’s the end of it.”

But for Ayman that was not the end of it. He did not broach the subject with his older brother again, but it kept him awake at night for long years to come.

3 Dr. Ashraf

D
oha must have dozed off, for when the hostess came by with the menu, she woke up with a start. She was always startled when someone woke her up. She did not know why, though she had read once that it was a sign of repressed insecurity. But surely that could not apply to her. Her life was as safe and secure as was imaginable. Perhaps that deadening security was the bane of her life, making it dull and uninspiring.