Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

At our last meeting Gérard gave me a precious gift, which I would bring back with me to Cairo exulting in its value and in the awareness of what it had meant for Gérard to have given up, for my sake, not just one, but two of the posters in his collection. (It was clear when he showed them to me how much he prized them and how proud he felt of having acquired them.) The first poster showed the head of a youth drawn against a black background, with only his eyes visible — wide-open, anxious eyes in a face entirely swathed in bandages from the crown of his head to his neck. Where his mouth should have been a safety pin secured the bandages. The second poster had a white background, and at the top were the words ‘The System’, and at the bottom the rest of the sentence, ‘is safe and sound’; in the space between, halfway down, were two figures drawn in black ink at opposite edges of the poster, carrying between them a stretcher as long as the poster was wide, on which was a person covered by a sheet, dying or already dead.

When we said goodbye, Gérard told me, ‘Nada, I’m very happy to have got to know you. If your mother hadn’t told me that the prevailing custom in your country is completely different from the way things are done here, maybe we could have been friends in another way.’ Then he laughed, ‘I’ve violated one of the basic tenets of the Movement: “Nothing is prohibited except prohibition itself!” But your mother assured me that could completely spoil the relationship, and do real damage.’

I don’t know whether I took out on my mother how upset I was at saying goodbye to Gérard, or how intensely moved I was by his gift, or whether it was in order to make it easier to leave her that I picked a quarrel with her. The moment I walked in the house and saw her I said, ‘What right did you have to say what you said to Gérard? How dare you tell him anything on my account without consulting me? How dare you interfere in my relationships with my friends?’

She replied with a strange calm, as if she was insensible to the magnitude of my anger and of the problem she had caused, ‘You’re only fourteen. That warning was necessary, because the way of life here is different, and especially with this generation of young people it’s totally different. He might have…’ I walked out on her before she could finish her sentence. I went into my bedroom and slammed the door.

How dare she appoint herself as my agent? If she hadn’t said what she said, maybe Gérard would have told me he cared for me, that he considered me beautiful, that he was wretched at the prospect of my departure. Maybe he would have liked to take my hand and squeeze it, maybe he would have liked to kiss me. He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the forehead. No doubt this madwoman had told him our customs didn’t allow it!

My anger imposed itself on our parting the following morning. I said goodbye to my mother coldly, and when she tried to hug me I ducked out of her embrace. I said a curt, dry ‘ Au revoir ’ and I didn’t smile. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.

My anger with my mother didn’t last long, perhaps because I received from Gérard a long letter, very kind and sweet, and from my mother I got a letter in which she apologised to me, saying that she hadn’t meant to hurt me, or to interfere in my business, and that she knew I was now a young woman who ‘understood something of politics’, and could make her own decisions. She repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Sweetheart.’

The two letters imparted to me a calm that allowed me to contemplate the spoils with which I had returned from my trip to Paris for their own sake, despite the unfortunate incident of the night before my departure: the discovery of the concern I felt for my mother, and my intense need of her. Then, too, I was preoccupied with parading my new knowledge before my friends and — more to the point — my father. I would talk at length about how the students raised their red and black banners over the Arc de Triomphe at the heart of Paris; how they took over the university, the College of Fine Arts, and the Odeon Theatre; how they connected with the workers; how the workers went on strike and work came to a stop at the plants and factories; how the transport workers, by striking, were able to bring to a halt Paris’s ground transportation system, and then the trains that connected Paris to other cities. I repeated, ‘Nine million went on strike — can you imagine?’ I would say this with pride, as if I myself had taken part in organising the strike, or even as if I had been one of its leaders. Carried away by my own enthusiasm, I would move on from there to an attack on the enemy: ‘Paul de Roche, he’s the one who…’ And, ‘Fouché declared…’ And ‘Gremeau said…’

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?