Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

I don’t know how comprehensive this answer is, as for the most part I am afraid of broad generalisations — that is, of absolute judgements or conclusive answers in matters relating to the history of an epoch or the exertions of a generation. All I have to go by is what I saw with my own eyes: a wave that swelled and receded. And because we were young, we saw in the wave only what the young see. We started out laughing, roused by the unexpected sport. Then we held our breath and plunged into the depths; one moment the waters closed over us and the next we raised our heads and took a deep breath, confident, declaring that we were the most capable of winning the contest. Then we would swim on, laughing, jumping, diving, surfacing, playing in the water. As the sun tanned our skin, we found ourselves and each other that much more robust and beautiful.

Hazem is irritated by what I say, finds my words provoking; he remarks acidly, ‘Fill in the picture, Sitt Nada: the young people on the beach at night, alone, naked, and frightened, the whirlpools that can drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, the sinking ships! I can’t take your overwrought fantasies. It’s not about a bunch of children, the ocean, people feeling sad. The reality is more complex and more cruel — besides, we were never that innocent. The difficulty and guile of the surrounding circumstances were more than we could handle, it’s true, but we, despite all the good intentions and the splendour of our collective efforts, were corrupted by a thousand things: from the little shops that treated the street like a puppet show whose strings they could pull, to the deep-rooted ignorance and stupidity, the miscalculations, and the high-handedness of mini-generals.’

‘You didn’t like Arwa. It was your right not to like her. But try to read her book objectively!’

‘The fact that I object to shameless reductivism doesn’t mean I’ve lost my objectivity. I recognise that she hadn’t entirely recovered from her health problems, but her posing as a theorist upsets me. There are some intelligent insights in the book, but taken as a whole it’s poor from a theoretical standpoint, marred by its own facile approach: “The bourgeoisie is the problem, and the behaviour of the bourgeoisie is responsible for every false step, every perversion, every failure” — what could be more convenient than a rack to hang our mistakes on, so we can wash our hands of them, and be relieved?’

‘God, that’s unfair!’

‘It’s not unfair. Any reading of this reality — which is freighted with history going way back, and with endless contradictions — requires of us a greater effort. It’s a responsibility, Sitt Nada, and if we’re not equal to it then we’d better admit it!’

‘Her book is rather like passing reflections, her personal papers.’

‘And judgements, lots of judgements, false generalisations, provocative oversimplifications. I think the split she points to between the ideal in her mind and the reality she lived is nothing but an internal split between what she believed about herself and the reality she disowned, even though she herself was part of that reality. Wasn’t Arwa one of the leaders of the movement? Wasn’t she at the head of one of those little shops? Didn’t you tell me that, in prison, they wanted to break Siham because she wasn’t one of their number? Wasn’t their jealousy of her and her astonishing popularity a part of their motive?’

‘You’re harsh, Hazem, you never forget a grievance.’

‘Maybe so. But I hate nihilism, and I hate seeing the people brought to despair by the fall of one person who, in his own personal state of despair, proclaims with casual ease that any undertaking people may turn to in order to create meaning in their lives is just tilting at windmills. In her book, Arwa writes that family, children, the struggle, are all imaginary solutions. By what right…’

I interrupted him. ‘You’re like some fool of a teacher with a metal ruler in his hand that he’s using to beat the palms of a little girl, unable to see her terror and confusion, or even to notice that she’s bleeding. Actually, your behaviour is even worse than that, because the girl you’re beating died! How did you get to be so cruel?’

He got angry, and we parted.

Not all was well in my relationship with Arwa. Was it the chemistry that attracts and repels, or a difference in temperament and ways of looking at things? Or was it that the coolness that arose between us when I refused to join her group became like a snowball that just keeps getting bigger with or without cause? But at this point I wasn’t nitpicking, so why was Hazem? He wasn’t cruel by nature. He had been closer to Arwa, coming more into direct contact with her, for the collective embraced them both. Then Hazem left, declaring that the way things were being managed was ineffective, and would lead no one to safe ground. They didn’t accept this statement coming from him; when Arwa herself, fifteen years later, said some of the same things he had said, and called her book Before Their Time , she found an audience that would celebrate her wisdom and cheer her on. Against Hazem, on the other hand, they had levelled the popular indictment: ‘Bourgeois’, they called him, saying, ‘He sold out for the sake of his own personal aspirations.’ In spite of this he didn’t cut himself off from them — he would still be there to lend his support to any of them in their hour of need, ready to provide medical treatment if someone was ill, and quick to assist with funeral arrangements in the event of a death. He took part in Arwa’s funeral, although he had announced, when the news was first brought to him, that he wouldn’t march in the procession. ‘Arwa,’ he said, ‘spat in all our faces. I can forgive her for everything,’ he said, ‘except killing herself. That I can never forgive.’ And yet he did march in the funeral procession. He helped carry the coffin. He accompanied the mourners to the gravesite. He evinced a strange grief I had never seen in him before — for grief is a powerful downward force, lowering the head and shoulders, as if the body, in sorrow, grew feeble and insubstantial, lending gravity the virulence to overpower it. But Hazem’s grief was expressed as a peculiar kind of anger, rather like the force of a violent storm. It was as if Arwa, before his eyes, had split in two: a dead person whose loss he grieved, and a killer against whom he blazed with wrath, confronting her with a violence he could scarcely contain.

‘There’s more to it,’ I thought, ‘than just abusing someone he doesn’t want to forget.’ I rang him the following day, and we made up.

It’s strange that I should cling to the same perception of someone for thirty years; that time should pass, years go by, the scene keep changing, and my image of that person remain just as it was when it fixed itself in my mind at the time of our first encounters. It is as if, by intuition or perspicacity, I had acquired, once and for all, the ability of that tall, slender boy to remain upright in a frightening scene, buffeted by bilious and pestilential winds. (Was it actually on a brilliant, sunny morning that we had that picture taken, or was it cloudy and ominous?)

Hazem grew up and so did I. We went our different ways, meeting on occasion by chance, or by arrangements we made through telephone calls from one country to another. For years we wouldn’t meet, and then we would resume seeing each other once more, each of us finding the other just as when we last parted company, apart from a little weight gained or lost, hair greying or black threaded with white, a bout with depression just surmounted or about to begin — each of us found the other still alone, still a comrade.

I never fully acknowledged to him the place he occupied in my soul. I was in the habit of dissimulating, and of putting on the affability of a colleague, of joking and bickering. We would get together and laugh raucously. We would playfully trade off the costumes of a masquerade, and for moments in which confusion reigned be unable to distinguish between what was real and what was the disguise. We would banter and joke, and laugh still more loudly, like a pair of lunatics, mocking the world, playing with words. Or he might be absent-minded, impervious to humour, and then I might put up with him or not: we might have a row, quarrelling in loud voices, then abruptly going our separate ways, one of us walking away from the other in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of the road, giving both ourselves and the other a break.