Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

‘I haven’t told you that the seduction had been in his voice, entirely. I was sitting, just as I had sat a thousand times before, in the translation booth assigned to me. I was to translate his presentation, and I knew nothing about him but his name.

‘I jumped when I heard his voice. At first it seemed to be my father’s voice, but then I observed the difference between the two. This man’s voice was more mellifluous — finer or stronger or deeper, or maybe it was his way of speaking that made his voice more beautiful: the rhythm of his speech, or the words themselves. I had to stay with him, doing simultaneous translation. This was quite a predicament, one I had never found myself in before. My heart beat rapidly, my palms were sweaty, and I struggled terribly to carry on translating as if nothing had happened.

‘In Arabic, Mama, when we say that it was as if a bird had landed on someone’s head, we are describing a person in a state of mute astonishment, caught by surprise. When I encountered him, a strange bird landed on my head, one that silenced me in his presence; I would listen, studying his face and his physiognomy. No sooner did I part company with him, though, than my strange bird stepped off my head and inhabited me, and I would fly, fly like the bird, whether I was eating, moving from one place to another, or sitting in the translation booth and doing the job I was there for.

‘Three days, and then we went our separate ways. If it had been other than a fleeting encounter, there would have been an explosion.’ I laughed. ‘The butane gas tanks in the building might have exploded and set fire to the entire street — maybe the whole neighbourhood!’ Still laughing, I added, ‘I sealed off the tanks and opened the windows, and, just in case, I called the fire department and kept the number for the ambulance next to the telephone!’

I told her about how I had turned down a proposal of marriage. Having sprung this on her, I clarified that I was now talking about a different man. I explained the reasons for my refusal. ‘It seems you’re not convinced,’ I said, and proceeded to elaborate on my explanation.’

I said, ‘I’m still gathering material for my book about prison. Someday I’ll write it.’

I said, ‘I miss you — it’s strange how I miss you, because I keep thinking, as I come and go from Cairo, that here it is five years since you left and I must have got used to it. But then here I am now, next to you, and fully cognisant of my need to hold your hand — to take it and hold on as tightly as a child fearful of getting lost, utterly lost, if her hand should slip from yours.’

‘Do you forgive me?’ I said.

‘Good night,’ I said.

On the train going back, I kept blowing my nose. I was perplexed that I had told her ‘Good night,’ when I hadn’t even noticed that the sun had gone down and dusk had fallen.

‘Life is so strange,’ I thought. For during this trip, which I had begun and ended by visiting my mother’s grave, I had laughed with the twins, as I had never laughed in all my life.

Our sojourn in the hotel room seemed rather like a comic play, since, in order to economise, we had stayed all together in one room in a hotel in the rue des Ecoles. With regard to the space it afforded, it wasn’t a bad room, but the en suite bathroom was ridiculously cramped. The toilet was right in front of the door, with no more than two or three feet of space dividing them; also, after relieving oneself, it was necessary to stand up cautiously and bend over slightly, so as not to bump one’s head on the ceiling, and then to contort oneself and incline to the left before opening the door and proceeding carefully so as to avoid colliding with the sink on the right, the bathtub on the left, the toilet behind, or the half-open door in front. Then there was the matter of bathing, which called for still more advanced tactics and strategy. The bathtub was square, with space for one person to stand under the spigot, enclosed on two sides by walls and on the other two by glass panels, one of which was a door that opened only halfway (because of the position of the toilet), such that a person — provided he was not overweight, was humble before God, bowed his head, and raised and lowered his foot cautiously while getting into this square — might accomplish a bath without some frightful accident. There was no such assurance as to the next stage of the process, the business of getting out of the tub: for a section of the towel might fall into the face of the person making the attempt and obstruct his vision, or he might get water in his eyes and have trouble seeing properly. Then the unthinkable might come to pass, and the person would be lucky to do no more than stumble against the toilet, but if he wasn’t so lucky he would collide with the toilet, lose his balance and bump into the glass door, which would send him careening in the direction of the washbasin.

Even with caution and practice, we couldn’t help banging our heads or some part of our bodies as if it was some sort of daily toll, although the payment of it was accompanied by hilarity, laughter, and jokes. ‘Everything okay?’ one of us would ask another, on hearing the other’s sudden exclamation. A voice, pained at first, would reply, ‘Okay!’ And the three of us would laugh, and then laugh some more when we tallied up the bumps and bruises. I announced, ‘I’m more careful than you two — I only bumped my head three times: twice on the first day, and then the third time I was so busy singing I didn’t pay attention.’

‘That’s a skewed analysis!’ Nadeem exclaimed. ‘You’re the shortest and smallest of us, so you’re at less risk of banging into things!’

‘Every time I’ve gone into the bathroom,’ Nadir put in, ‘I’ve felt as though I was in a box and had to adapt myself to its shape! Yesterday, when I left you in the breakfast room and went up to use the toilet, I opened the door and stood there for five minutes calculating the space and considering my own bulk, in an attempt to come up with an idea of the ideal posture for sitting, getting up, going in, and going out. “Moving the shoulders this way,” I thought, “is inadvisable, as is taking a step exceeding such-and-such a length, and when you open the door you should bend your torso to such-and-such an extent!” I told myself, “You’ll make an engineer yet, my boy, unless your calculations are ‘way off!” ’

‘And were they off?’

‘Of course not. I figured it all out, and I haven’t bumped into a single thing since yesterday morning! Now you two can wait and see how it goes!’ Nadir went into the bathroom, and then we heard him yell, even though he made haste to flush the toilet at the same time, so as to disguise his ‘Ouch!’ with the sound of water gushing into the bowl.

We laughed still more when Nadir put the question to us: ‘If Mama were with us, how would she sort herself out in there?’

We were rapt, picturing the situation, and designing strategies whereby Hamdiya — with her height and her substantial girth — might manage to get in and out of the bathroom.

‘She’d have to leave the door open.’

‘No way. She wouldn’t even be able to get past it.’

‘With a bit of effort she could manage it.’

‘And the tub?’

‘She’d have to strike that one from the agenda and settle for washing her face in the washbasin.’

‘How would she do her ablutions at prayer-time? There’s no space for her to raise her leg.’

‘As long as she intended to perform the correct ablution it would be all right. Our religion is meant to enable worship, not impede it!’

This exchange was conducted with all seriousness, not even the ghost of a smile, as if we were gathering and storing our laughter, until the three of us all at once burst into manic guffaws that got us leaping to our feet and clapping hands, our own or each others’.