By the time I was sixteen, my accumulated knowledge was a startling mixture, in which Balzac’s peasants mingled with Al-Sharqawi’s; the back streets of Cairo crisscrossed with the alleyways of London; to get from Madame Bovary to Amina, the wife of Ahmed al-Sayyed Abdel Gawwad in Mahfouz’s trilogy, required no more than a slight turn of the head; and lovesick Heathcliff and Rochester’s mad wife, whom he imprisoned in his attic, seemed more real and present to me than the actual human beings with whom I interacted every day. Moreover, all this reading gave me power over my peers. I knew more than they did, so I spoke with ease and confidence — who, after all, at the age of sixteen, could have lived through a protracted, tempestuous love such as Heathcliff’s, in which love combined with hatred and evil? To whom was granted the singular experience of transforming in the blink of an eye from the denizen of a thieves’ lair in a gloomy city to a splendid young man taking part in a rally in joyful celebration of Saad Zaghloul’s return, only to be shot by one of the occupying soldiers? And who, in dreams at night, merged the image of this youth with that of another, his hair unkempt, talking of how he participated in the takeover of the Sorbonne?
In the third year of secondary school my teacher said to me, ‘Nada, you have a distinctive style — a subtle, literary style. Will you enrol in the College of Humanities?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I intend to join the College of Engineering.’
In the autumn of 1971 I enrolled at the College of Engineering, and by the end of that school year I had failed. It wasn’t because I had discovered that the curriculum was dull and I didn’t like it or want to continue specialising in it, although in fact I did make this discovery. And it wasn’t because of the stress of Hamdiya’s being with us at home, for I ignored her completely. I had been preoccupied with student activism. It wasn’t merely a matter of participation, but of active involvement in innumerable details and new ideas, and unexpected new horizons that had opened up before me. A new feverishness swept me up entirely, and entwined with it was an attachment to one of my comrades — an attachment that was rather like the roller coaster at an amusement park, carrying me up to dizzying heights and dropping down all at once, only to scale the heights once again.
At the university I buzzed around like a honeybee. I flew from the Engineering School to the Humanities, from Humanities to Economics, then dashed back to Engineering, and finally to the main campus. I attended conferences and council meetings and discussion groups, acceding and dissenting, agreeing and disagreeing, and saying, ‘Point of order.’ Surprisingly quickly, I became conversant with history and politics, and acquired a lexicon of terms that, a year earlier, I would have thought arcane and inaccessible. At home I copied out communiqués on the typewriter and edited a wall newspaper in which I transcribed articles given to me by my comrades, and then filled any remaining spaces with satirical cartoons, decorations, and lines of poetry both colloquial and formal.
Three months after I started at university, Hamdiya, startled, observed that I was securing the waistband of my trousers with a rope. I explained, ‘I seem to have lost a lot of weight. I tried Papa’s belt, but found that it was too big.’
‘Take off the trousers and put on a dress.’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have a clean dress. I pulled my shirt-tail out of my trousers and let it hang down so as to cover my waist and the rope tied around it.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Hamdiya. Then, ‘Wait a moment.’
She brought a measuring tape and put it round my waist. ‘Leave your trousers with me — I’ll take them in for you.’ By the evening of the following day, I found the three pairs of trousers I’d given her on a hanger suspended from my bedroom door. They’d been washed and pressed. I tried one of them on, and it fitted just right.
The episode of the trousers was nicer than that of Shazli’s appearance on the scene.
An amazing paradox: Hamdiya didn’t enter my room that day (nor had she ever done so before, of course, since for her it had been a restricted area from the time she moved in). She left the trousers hanging on the doorknob; the door was closed. But that tentative step she took marked a turning point between two phases. Afterwards the door would be opened to her and she would enter quietly, by degrees. I didn’t take note of exactly when I first said ‘Come in’, but I did say it.
Shazli, on the other hand, arrived with an uproar and departed with an even bigger one, leaving behind him a state of chaos, despair, confusion, and a period of years dedicated to my attempt to reassemble the fragments of my life and put it back in order.
Yes, there were two paradoxes; or you might say it was one that consisted, as is usual with a paradox, of two parts.
Shazli came on the scene just the way Hamdiya had, unexpected and unwelcome.
‘Is it true you’re the daughter of Dr Abdel Qadir Selim?’
‘I’d love to meet your father!’
‘I want to ask him his opinion on the dissolution of the party, and what his position is on two of his colleagues’ having agreed to serve in the ministry, and…’
‘Your mother is French, isn’t she?’
‘I heard she knows Aragon, and that she introduced your father to him. I read the interview your father conducted with him in the early 1950s.’
‘Could I have a talk with your mother about her memories of Aragon?’
I surprised myself with my answer.
‘She wouldn’t agree. She’s writing her memoir, and it’s certain she’ll include in it the story of her acquaintance with Aragon.’
His brashness annoyed me — it seemed to me there was more than a little arrogance in his self-assertion. I concocted the notion of a memoir in order to put an end to the discussion.
What can have happened after that, to make me warm up to him and befriend him? A few days later he told me he cared for me, and that maybe I didn’t reciprocate the feeling because he was of peasant stock, or because he was dark-skinned with coarse hair — maybe also because his name was Shazli. I laughed at that fourth reason he cited; the remainder of the list was as provocative as the first part: ‘And of course you’re half French, with smooth hair, the daughter of well-known people, and your name is Nada!’ I didn’t laugh at his reference to my name; his words felt hurtful. Was he blackmailing me?
At any rate, Shazli succeeded. It was as if he had in some way held out his hand to me, and after I rejected it I became confused, wondering whether he saw in me things I didn’t see in myself.
We started seeing each other.
When at last I invited him to come visit us, my father commented on him unfavourably: ‘The boy looks like a fish — what do you see in him?’
‘He’s courageous, shrewd, perceptive, and easygoing, and he understands the common cause.’
‘ “Shrewd” — do you know the meaning of the word? Look it up in the dictionary!’