Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

Months would go by, and then we would start meeting again.

At some conference where I was working as a simultaneous interpreter, someone said to me — someone of whom I remember nothing except how blue his eyes were and how sleek his blond hair was, gathered in what looked like a short ponytail — ‘To confront the system on your own is simply impossible!’ I don’t remember whether this was the sequel to something he’d already said and he went on at great length, or whether his commentary was confined to this single utterance. Nor do I remember the context. But this comment often surfaces in my mind, and with it a clip from an old black-and-white Italian film — by Vittorio De Sica, I think: a group of people, poor and homeless, who spend their nights wherever they find themselves. We see them on a very cold, cloudy morning, when they have just got up from their haphazard beds, clothed in rags that scarcely keep off the cold. There in the open they approach a small triangular patch of light formed by a ray of sun that breaks through the clouds. They stand together there, seeking warmth, pressing close and then still closer against one another, until none of them is outside the spot upon which the sunbeam falls.

Why did this clip, from a film I saw such a long time ago, stick in my mind? I recall the scene, then wonder all over again about the individual and the group. I think about the two-way street where the individual morphs into the group, or the group dissolves into individuals.

It dissolved, and yet my friendship with Hazem remained, warm and firmly rooted. Strange!

We met initially at the first big sit-in. He was sitting in the seat next to mine — tall, slim, and so young you were amazed he was a university student. I said, ‘Nada Abdel Qadir, pre-qualifying in engineering, Cairo.’

‘Hazem Kamel,’ he said, ‘medicine, Cairo.’

We shook hands.

‘Are you pre-med?’

‘I’m in the bachelor’s programme!’

‘Are you joking?’

‘Of course I’m joking. I’m in my first year of high school, but I skipped school and came to the sit-in. I look a bit older than I am, don’t I?’

‘Which school?

‘Al-Saïdiyya. Just a stone’s throw away. I climb over the school fence, then it’s a hop, skip, and a jump and I’m inside the university.’

When I met him for the second time I asked him, ‘Did you skip school again?’

‘They expelled me for skipping too many times.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘Look for a job — anything at all, because I’m looking after three children and their mother!’

For years these two encounters would fuel Hazem’s mockery — he would ridicule my credulity, with a standard closing remark: ‘Silly girl!’

After I got out of prison, I went back to my on-campus activism as a matter of course, although I was more careful about reconciling it with my academic requirements. More to the point, I was capable of reconciling the two, because I made up my mind to refuse to join any of the existing groups, those that demanded a great deal of effort from their young members (‘the vigorous capacity for endless discussion that belonged to people with too much time on their hands… endless discussion instead of productive work’ — in this Arwa was exactly right, although she herself had been among those with this kind of capability, and had been one of the pillars of these organisations). The issue of wasted energy wasn’t the greatest deterrent for me — rather it was the contemptible situation I had experienced firsthand in prison, which all too often produced petty tyrants and a lot of iron boxes.

By this abstention I escaped the most confining of the Masonic circles — my relationship with, and estrangement from, Shazli was of a piece with this circumstance — and the movement seemed less forceful than it had been for the previous two years. Moreover, a number of its most prominent leaders were graduating and leaving to continue their studies abroad, going off to London or Paris or Moscow. (Sometimes it seemed as though things were turned around: the movement didn’t collapse because they went away; rather they went away because the movement was fading, so there was nothing for it except for them to pursue their individual plans.) Siham and Tawfik separated. The breakup was cataclysmic, an act of treachery, out of nowhere. Stricken with a nervous collapse, Siham was beset and overcome by her fears. Afterward she told me, ‘I lived in a weird state of terror such as I’d never known before. When a knock came on the door I was completely engulfed by fear and hid under the bed — as if hiding there would protect me from Them.’

I hated myself for opening the door to a conversation that induced her to say what she said. I closed it again hastily, and opened a different one. I reminded her of ‘Spearhead’, the plan we had agreed on the day we refused to go into our cells, after roll-call. (We stood in spearhead formation.) They attacked and we attacked, and after that we ran and spread ourselves out around the prison, so as to scatter the guards and wear them down. As usual, Siham was in the vanguard.

I said to her, laughing, ‘You didn’t have the opportunity I had, to follow the chain of events: You had a guard on your right and another on your left, and guards all over the place backing them up, all of them upon you. You pulled one guard’s hair and grabbed the other one, giving them all a good drubbing with your feet. You were too much for them!’

She smiled. ‘I was fixated on repaying them blow for blow. I wasn’t thinking of anything except that I had to get the better of them.’

‘For my part, I was rapt before the spectacle, and forgot to strike out, forgot to kick, forgot to be afraid — I stood transfixed by what I saw, rooted to the spot and musing on your ability to face down three guards all at once.’

We recalled the details of that episode and laughed over our failed battle plan, which ended with some of us beaten up, with those in front of the cells (which they had refused to enter at the staging of the protest) now wanting to take cover in them, while one solitary comrade actually accomplished the second part of our strategy — the plan to spread out into different parts of the prison: she ‘scattered’ all by herself, and so they ganged up on her and beat her to within an inch of her life.

I deliberately invoke the funny incidents, and we both laugh. But when I leave her and go home and get into bed, what she said about her fear, and how she hid under the bed, comes back to me, and I weep until my pillow is wet. I get up and spread a towel over it, but then the towel gets soaked as well, and I replace it with another.

I never told this story about the bed. Once, when I was on the point of confiding it to Hazem some years later, the words froze on my tongue, and I found myself saying to him, ‘Don’t you think we should establish a political association for orphans like us?’

He raised his eyebrows quizzically. I didn’t explain. ‘Just a thought,’ I said. And we took leave of each other.

At the beginning of the following academic year, I took to reading whatever books appealed to me — textbooks or otherwise — without feeling guilty, or worrying that I was doing this at the expense of the cause. I began to express feelings of scorn and contempt for X and Y if I thought that they were stupid or corrupt; now that I wasn’t affiliated with the organisation and its hierarchical structure, I felt no obligation to respect them and follow their brilliant instructions. The reaction of my comrades, who still abided by what I now rejected, availed nothing except to increase my alienation and my determination to accept what I liked and refuse what I didn’t, following only my own head, even if some regarded this individualism as a residue of the ‘corrupt petty bourgeoisie’ to which I belonged. None of my comrades said this to me directly, except for Shazli, who flung it in my face one day — so we quarrelled bitterly. The rift between us lasted several weeks, and then when we made up he took me by surprise: