He interrupted me. ‘Hold on, Hazelnut, hold on! Who is this de Roche? And who’s Fouché? And the other one, the third name you mentioned — who’s that?’
I puffed up like a turkey. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you keep up with the news, Abu Nada?’
One evening after dinner, a week after I received my mother’s letter, I said to my father, ‘Papa, I think Mama’s not well. She’s pale, and seems exhausted.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘She told me she wasn’t.’
Then I went on, ‘Papa, do you know, Mama participated in the May 13th demonstrations!’
‘I’m not surprised. She has anarchist leanings.’
I passed over what he’d just said, because I didn’t understand it. ‘Papa, why not have Mama come back? Couldn’t you reverse the divorce?’
He didn’t answer. I went on. ‘A divorce can be reversed, can’t it? If you’re with me, let’s write to her about it, or ring her up — she’ll agree. Or, if she doesn’t agree at first, we can just ring her again, maybe a couple of times, and she’ll come round.’
‘Nada,’ he said, ‘it’s over. We had our differences, and we split up, unfortunately.’
‘But since you say it’s “unfortunate”, can’t we still repair the relationship?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it ended.’
‘Nothing ends!’ (Where did I come by this bit of wisdom?)
‘I’ve got involved with another woman, and I’m seriously considering marrying her.’
I shouted, ‘Don’t tell me it’s that second-rate actress!’
‘I told you, she is a respectable woman — stop acting like a child!’
The only answer I could come up with was, ‘By the way, Papa, the position the French Communist Party took on the student revolution was rubbish. Even the poet Aragon — you know how well-loved he is — when he got up on stage to address the students, they made fun of him, jeering at him, “Long live Stalinism!” And at the May 13th demonstration the position of the workers’ union controlled by the Communists was a scandal. They played a suspicious part in the breaking up of the demonstration, and…’
He interrupted me. ‘The whole movement was nothing but a tempest in a teapot, stirred up with no thought for the consequences. All too often this kind of thing is fomented by the adventurers of a parasitic leftist movement: Maoists, Trotskyites, anarchists.’
I was caught off-guard by the list of technical terms he deployed. What did ‘parasitic leftist movement’ mean? What was wrong with some of them being Trotskyites? What did ‘Trotskyite’ mean, anyway? And did the word ‘anarchist’ have a political meaning, or only its literal one? Was it connected in any way with Gérard’s messy hair? And how could my mother be an anarchist, when she was so scrupulously careful about the arrangement of her clothes and her house? She had used to scold us for the disorder we created in the house. What did ‘anarchist’ mean?
I seized upon the word I knew. ‘It’s not true — they weren’t adventurers!’
‘Oh, yes they were.’
‘That’s what the French Communist Party said, and it was a poor position. The young people in the movement in France are contemptuous of it, and don’t have confidence in the trade-union leadership that subscribes to it. And here I don’t think anyone even knows anything about the Communists — or cares about them!’
Thrust and parry.
The round was over. I calmed down. Or it seemed to me that I was calmer. As soon as I was by myself, I confronted the question: What was I to do if my father married that woman?
Move to Paris and live with my mother?
Move to Upper Egypt and live with my aunt?
What about school?
There was no French school in the village.
I could switch to an Arabic school.
I could stay in Cairo, enrol in a boarding school, and never have to see that woman’s face, slathered with makeup.
The following morning, instead of ‘Good morning’, I announced, ‘I won’t stay in this house if that bit-player comes to live with us here.’
He shouted at me, ‘You spoiled brat, you think of nothing but yourself! On top of it you’re insolent, you don’t know when to give it a rest — no manners, no respect for your elders! I will marry Hamdiya!’ (Oh, my God, and her name’s Hamdiya! I’d forgotten she had a name. Where did her family come up with a name like that?) He said, ‘I’ll marry her and you’ll live with her and you’ll treat her with all possible respect. I absolutely will not put up with any of your cheek.’
I shouted at him, ‘My mother waits five years for you, while you’re in prison, and when you get out you leave her and marry a monkey named Hamdiya!’
He slapped me.
I didn’t go to school. I spent the whole day crying. If my mother had been with me she would have known that this crying jag was the longest (longer than the bout of tears over the baby’s spitting up on the new red dress I had wanted to dazzle my father with the first time we visited him in prison).
That evening he tried to make up with me, but I refused. For two weeks I didn’t say a word to him.
This was the beginning of the most difficult phase of my life. A woman I couldn’t stand came to our home to live with us, leaving me nothing of my familiar abode except my bedroom, the only place in the house that was off-limits to her. Her presence in the house made me feel stifled, as if she were not merely treading upon one of my limbs, but actually standing on my chest with all her considerable weight. I wished she would die. Every day, every hour, every moment I wished she would die. The resentment I felt for my father was limitless. He didn’t care, paid no attention. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Meanwhile, I crouched with my head in my arms, in a futile attempt to protect it from the debris from the house, some of whose rubble was still coming down on me, wood, glass, and stone, wounding me and causing me to bleed.
It seemed to me that I hated him. It seemed to me that I pitied him, my pity mixed with contempt. I felt my father was stupid — foolish and selfish, that his selfishness was tragic.
I began writing long letters to my mother, and counting the days until hers arrived. I distanced myself from my friends, since it seemed to me that intimacy was not possible unless I talked about my troubles, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about my father in the unfavourable terms in which I had come to view him.
Chapter eight
Ticket to France
When I started attending secondary school, I read a great deal, but after the bit-player came to live with us I began to read ravenously, ceaselessly. I read novels, books on history, sociology, and politics. (My mother sent me a book on the revolution of ’68, which I started reading the moment I received it on my arrival home from school, and I finished it half an hour before school began the next morning; I fell asleep twice in class that day.) I read everything I could get my hands on. Novels were my genre of choice — the use of language enchanted me, its magical power to transport me from here to there, into other times and places, into the lives and destinies of different characters. I laughed and cried, my heartbeat would quicken or seem about to stop altogether, from fear or anticipation of some exciting turn of the plot. I was living a parallel life that absorbed me entirely, far away from Hamdiya and her husband, a life whose settings and casts of characters changed with each new literary work. I would finish one novel and start another, and, as soon as I was done with that one, take up a third. I polished off all the novels in the house that my mother had left behind, or that my father had acquired. Nineteenth-century French novels, whether romantic or realist: works by Hugo, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola; Arabic novels by Tawfik al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, and Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi; Algerian novels written in French by Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib; and English novels translated into French or Arabic, by Dickens and the Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Television was of no interest to me, nor did I play any sports, other than in physical education classes and the required activities in which we had to participate two days a week at the end of the school day.