Butterfly Wings: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (3 page)

She glanced without interest at the menu, the words swimming before her rudely awakened eyes. Her neighbor looked at the menu and said to the hostess, “Great menu! Like a five-star restaurant!”

The hostess went to open Doha’s table, but she signaled to her not to. The hostess raised her high, penciled eyebrows as she said, “Wouldn’t you like something to eat?”

“No, thank you,” replied Doha.

The hostess gave a forced look of disappointment and asked, “Don’t you like our food?” as if she had cooked it herself.

Addressing the hostess and the man next to her, Doha answered, “I have some reading to get on with before we
arrive in Rome.” She felt he was itching to start a conversation. Whenever strangers sat next to her she took refuge in reading, so as not to give them the chance to engage her in conversation.

She opened her magazines and started to scan the pages without reading. The hostess was busy fixing her neighbor’s table, and then he was busy eating. She hoped that the accompanying silence would last until the end of the flight. But as soon as the hostess left, another steward came along. He was in semi-military uniform, like that worn by the officer her husband had spoken to on the phone. He introduced himself: “I am Captain Mohammed Muhyi, in charge of the cabin crew.” She replied with a curt hello. He continued, “It appears that Doha Hanem wants to get us all fired.” She did not understand and looked wordlessly at him. “Madame Doha al-Kenani, the wife of Medhat Bey al-Safti, that is. A VIP of the first order, and on whose account instructions were given in advance by the head of the board and the party secretariat.” What did this loudmouth want? “Turning down our food means questions being asked and perhaps an investigation that might end with us losing our jobs.” He smiled broadly, imagining he had said something clever or witty.

She repeated what she had said to the hostess about reading and added, “Plus, I eat a particular diet, which I do not depart from.”

The man replied sorrowfully, “We were not informed. If we had been, we would have made what you wanted.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t eat before three in any case.”

The steward went sadly off, and the man next to her started a conversation that did not end until the plane landed at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. “What a strange coincidence that I should be sitting on a plane next to my political rival,” he said. She gave him a half-smile as she wondered what he meant.

He asked her to let him see the newspaper she had taken from the hostess if she was done with it. She had not read it yet, but silently handed it to him in the hope that he would be absorbed in reading. But he went on to explain that he had given an interview to the paper and wanted to check whether they had faithfully printed what he said. She made no comment. He quickly leafed through the pages until he found the interview. “Here it is,” he said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a large photograph of the man with his black beard, above the headline “Dr. Ashraf al-Zayni threatens the regime: ‘Meet the demands of the people or expect the floodgates to open.’”

He was quiet for a few minutes as he read the piece, then exclaimed, “They’ve left out the most important line in the whole thing, and they call themselves the opposition press! Every paper has its own agenda. None of them cares about the public interest.” He looked at her as if expecting some response.

She said, “Sorry, I don’t follow the opposition newspapers.”

He smiled as he said, “Yes, of course, you only read the papers of the ruling party.”

The cheek of it! She maintained her composure and said, “The truth is, I’ve got nothing to do with politics or parties, and I don’t read the papers.”

He continued speaking normally: “Well, I’m fated to have to deal with all the newspapers.”

She said to herself, “And I’m fated to have to deal with you, it seems.” She turned her face to the window to put an end to this ridiculous conversation between the wife of one of the most senior leaders in the ruling party and, it would seem, one of the most impudent leaders of the opposition. Still he went on: “If the problem was the press, it would be easy. But the truth of it is, the whole country is corrupt.
Everyone has their own objectives, and no one cares about the public interest.”

She was nearly out of patience. She said, “I told you I wasn’t interested in the press or politics.”

He finished reading the paper with his interview and handed it back to her, saying, “Thank you for the paper you have not read. You should know that there isn’t anybody who isn’t interested in politics.” Then he got up to go to the toilet. She sighed in annoyance, praying this would be the last exchange between her and the passenger she was stuck with. It seemed that all politicians lacked decency and taste. The members of the ruling party she had met with her husband at official functions were not so different from this member of the opposition. For that reason, as far as she could, she avoided going to those functions, which made her feel dispirited. What did she care about some interview given by this dissident with his thick black beard and off-putting smell? What had he said in the interview? Political talk was always the same old stuff, whether from the government or the opposition. She reached out and picked up the paper. There was a mention of the interview in the middle of the front page with his picture and the line, “Strongman of the opposition, Dr. Ashraf al-Zayni, at his most dangerous.” What an exaggeration! If it was the most dangerous, the government would have fallen today after the paper came out. She turned the pages until the interview, which took up a whole page. She looked at the man’s photograph. Did he mean what he said? Her life with her husband had taught her that politics was fraud and pretense. Yet he had an innocent, childlike face in spite of his thick black beard. The beard was not Islamic, but closer to the European style of intellectuals and academics. In another photograph he was holding a pipe that gave him a serious academic air.

His photographs were powerful and full of life. She remembered the smell with which he had announced himself when he came onboard perspiring heavily. The air-conditioning must have cooled him down. She looked up from the paper to find the subject of the photographs standing in front of her. “I’ve caught you red-handed! Didn’t I tell you that there wasn’t anyone not interested in politics? Aristotle said more than two thousand years ago that man is a political animal.” He had a friendly smile on his face and it seemed as if he was talking to an old friend without inhibition.

His words embarrassed her and she replied quickly, “I wasn’t interested in the interview for political reasons. I was just looking at the pictures.”

He laughed as he retook his seat next to her. “Like children do?”

She decided to reply with the same cheek: “I wasn’t actually contemplating the beauty of the pictures. I was trying to determine the personality of their subject.”

But his impudence had no bounds. “So your interest was personal rather than political, then.”

She blushed and wanted to say, “Who do you think you are that I should care?” But she checked her defiance again and said, “My interest really was personal. I wanted to know whether the leaders of the opposition, as they call them, are honest or are all liars.”

“I’ll tell you frankly that most of them are liars, and in that respect are no different from the government’s men.”

She looked directly at him for the first time and said, “And what kind are you?”

He replied without reserve, “I make an effort to be honest with myself. I don’t say or do things I don’t believe in, which has caused me a lot of problems, even with political
colleagues. But my aim isn’t winning the friendship of politicians, but achieving the goals that I work for. In fact, the masses are more mature than politicians. They can always tell who’s honest and who’s a liar.”

She decided to use another weapon, sarcasm. “Do tell me what these aims you are working toward are. A cabinet post? Fame? Or jihad for the sake of Allah?”

He replied, still with a sense of fun, “Why all of that? All I want is to embed a few principles, without which there won’t be democracy or popular rule.”

She interrupted him: “Like what?”

He resumed as though she had not interrupted. “Like ending corruption. Like establishing the rotation of power. Like not allowing the will of the electorate to be forged. They are all basic principles for any respectable political system. I’m calling for what the people call for. I’m not a Communist or an Islamist. What I want, the people want, which is reform of our political system. Then let those who win the election form the government. It doesn’t matter whether they’re left or right. All day long the talk is about economic reform. If only some of that effort went into political reform, we wouldn’t be in the state we’re in. Tell me, I beg you, is it reasonable for one party to rule the country for generations?”

She regretted having opened this door. The last thing she wanted was a lecture. She kept quiet in the hope that this would put an end to the conversation. There was no chance of finding common ground.

“Of course you won’t agree with what I said, but you asked me to define my aims.”

She realized that their positions had been reversed and that she was on the defensive again. She said, “The fact that my
husband is a member of the ruling party does not necessarily mean I’m in favor of all the party’s policies.” She felt she had submitted more than needed, and added, “Besides, I have no faith in the opposition.”

“And do you know anyone in the opposition?” he asked.

“Not personally, but I can see what they’re doing in the country and it seems like blatant political opportunism to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean whipping up the people, exploiting their hardship, pushing them into going to demonstrations and protests whose only aim is to topple the government and let them take power.”

The playful smile he had had on his face since the beginning of the conversation was gone and he turned serious, saying, “We have not caused the people’s suffering. The government has done that. What we have done is give a voice to the voiceless. All we have done is call for reform and struggle for freedom and democracy. Believe me, nobody could make people demonstrate and clash with the security forces and risk getting beaten up and arrested if they hadn’t had enough.”

His eyes expressed the same honesty as was visible in some of his photographs in the newspaper. But Doha did not want to give any signs of backing down. She said, “It seems we won’t agree on the subject.”

“It’s not necessary that we agree. What this country lacks is a culture of respect for difference.”

She decided to change the tone of the conversation and said, “When you say ‘this country,’ what country do you mean? We must be over Malta now.”

Laughing, he said, “The same might apply to Malta.”

She riposted, “Well, why don’t you go and preach it there then?”

4 Hassan

T
he Peugeot service taxi reached Tanta after one more unexpected delay: the driver had to fill the overheating radiator. During the journey Ayman recalled how it had all begun at his friend Hassan’s house….

One night after they had finished studying, Ayman al-Hamzawi and his friend Hassan al-Lithi were sitting on the balcony at Hassan’s to have a cigarette without alerting the family. The conversation turned to the subject that kept Ayman awake at night, and Hassan said to him, “You have to forget about it. The dead don’t come back. So don’t torture yourself for nothing.”

“The real torture is not knowing anything about my mother. If I knew who she was, I’d relax. But all I know is her name, and my father won’t tell me anything. I’m almost certain he’s hiding lots of information from me. Hassan, you’ll never understand what I feel because you know everything about your family and have never lost one of them. God grant them all long life and spare you the pain of losing something precious from your life. It’s like feeling lost, like not knowing who you are.”

Ayman was silent for a few moments as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. Then he continued: “If only I knew where she was buried. If I knew her relatives I could ask them and find out when she died and how. They might have a picture of her. I don’t know what she looks like. And I don’t know why my father doesn’t have a photo of her. Didn’t they take pictures of their wedding or any other time they were together? I want to know what she looked like. There must be some resemblance between us. Perhaps some of her features live on in me without my knowing. Perhaps I’ve inherited some of my character from her. I’m descended from her, just like from my father, but I don’t know her or anything about her. It’s like I don’t know myself.”

Ayman loved reading, but the word “mother” in any book or article made him sad. Once he had gone to the book fair with his friends from college. At one of the stalls of cheap used books he had come across a book called
The Mother
, which he bought immediately. When he got home he discovered it contained two novels by an Italian woman, Grazia Deledda, whose name he had not heard before but who had won the Nobel Prize in 1926. Both novels dealt with the relationship between mother and son.

After that, he bought from the Ezbekiya book market another novel entitled
The Mother
by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and a play by Brecht called
Mother Courage and Her Children
that did not move him much. He experienced through fiction the mother–son relationship that he had not lived in reality.

Hassan was silenced by his friend’s words. He kept quiet for a while out of respect for the tears glistening in Ayman’s eyes, which reflected the streetlights shining on the darkened balcony. Hassan took a last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out on the edge of the balcony and threw it into the street.
“Didn’t you say you knew your mother’s full name?” he said to Ayman.

“I learned it by heart the moment my father wrote it down for Abdel Samad on his ID application more than six years ago.”

“Maybe my mother can help you find your mother’s family by using the civil registry.”