Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

My father was smoking feverishly, and my mother wouldn’t stop reminding him that he had quit smoking when she was pregnant with me. She complained of the odour of smoke that pervaded the house (despite the fact that she herself smoked a cigarette or two occasionally). She threw the windows open wide, and he complained of the cold. She complained about some mates of his who would visit him without bringing their wives; he would sequester himself with them, shutting her out, and yet she was expected to provide for them as guests. ‘Why didn’t you make supper?’ ‘You didn’t say they were going to have supper with us!’ At first, with ‘please’, and a smile, then later ‘please’, but no smile; thereafter a reproachful frown, and at last matters devolved into a battle, in which other issues got mixed up: ‘I don’t understand. Your friends show up without any notice, your cousins come and linger forever, and everyone who comes from the village insists on staying with us. What about that thing known as a hotel, which is designed for people to stay in? What’s more, these relatives of yours, all the while you were gone, only came for brief visits: ten minutes at most, and off they went!’ Perhaps he explained, once or twice, but she didn’t understand, and he gave up the attempt. Was he simply exhausted, unequal to the constant translation, or was it that he wished to impose on her his own system, his authority, without endless discussion? He took to saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ curtly, with no opening for debate. He seemed hard and ungiving, as if we were a heavy weight, an additional burden upon him.

My relationship with him was not like the one I had with my mother, the pattern of which had been set by the life we’d shared on our own, in the absence of our third family member. She would shout, and I would shout back; she would issue orders I would fling back in her face, across the dividing wall. We would quarrel, but at the end of the day find no recourse except to each other in our mutual need — or perhaps we found only our despair, fear and loss, and thus we automatically drew closer to each other, quite as if we hadn’t, but a few hours earlier, been at each other’s throats like two murderous roosters ready to tear each other to pieces. When my father’s return changed everything else, my relationship with my mother remained unchanged. In my battles with my father, on the other hand, no matter how defiant and sure of my own position I was each time I confronted him, he would make me lose my bearings, exhausting me, reducing me to a heap of unrelieved wretchedness.

For five years my father had been an unattainable dream; when he came back, I wanted him to be a dream in whose sanctuary I might live. It may be for this reason that any conflict between us always loomed much larger than the actual problem that had occasioned it, escalating instantly into a crisis that threatened to topple my dream. This made me frantic with anxiety, driving me into a state of panic which the situation didn’t in the least call for.

Within two years of my father’s release, his troubles with my mother became an open conflict. Three years after our reunion, they had begun, in my presence, to talk about initiating divorce proceedings. I believe it was the issue of those hundred pounds that was the precipitating event — it was, as they say, the straw that broke the camel’s back: the ‘camel’, of course, was our little family, living in a flat comprised of three rooms not one of which was large enough to have accommodated an actual camel.

My mother asked my father about the money that had been kept in a drawer, and he told her he’d given it to his cousin. She didn’t understand, so he explained. ‘His mother-in-law died in hospital yesterday, and it was clear he was going to need the money.’

‘When will he pay you back?’

‘I don’t expect him to pay me back. In difficult times we help each other out.’

‘You should have told him the money was a loan, and specified when it was to be repaid.’

He turned away from her, sending an unmistakable message that he had no wish to continue the discussion. But she persisted, ‘You had no right to dispose of that money without consulting me. First of all because it was meant for our family, and secondly because most of it was money I earned from my job. You took money that belonged to me without my knowledge!’

He slapped her.

For a moment the three of us stood there, stunned, and then my father walked out and left the flat. My mother shouted at me, ‘Go to your room! What are you doing here, anyway?’ I went to my room and slammed the door, thinking, this madwoman can’t tell an enemy from a friend — I was on her side, and had been on the point of taking her part in an all-out assault on my father, spelling out all of his offences. But she, instead of striking back at him when he hit her, turned on me: ‘What are you doing here?’ I opened my door and shouted at her, ‘What did I do, materialise from Upper Egypt to interfere with your happy life with my father? No, I came because the entire building could hear the two of you fighting!’

But the next day I saw that her eyes were red with weeping, and I wanted to cheer her up. I sat beside her and kissed her. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘do you think Papa is acting strange?’

‘He behaves oddly sometimes. Not like himself.’

‘Do you think he lost his mind in prison?’

‘No, he hasn’t lost his mind. Even though he behaves badly sometimes. Maybe he hasn’t adjusted yet to normal life.’

‘You claim he’s highly intelligent. So how do you explain the stupid things he does?’

‘Your father isn’t stupid!’

‘I think he is!’

‘Well I think you’re an insolent girl!’

‘I’m not insolent — it’s just that I’m living with two lunatics! I reckon you’re as mad as he is!’

I left her and went into my room, slamming the door behind me. All through my adolescence, this was the registered trademark by which I advertised my wrath.

When they divorced, my mother asked for custody of me. I looked at my father. His face was suffused with a bluish pallor. He said nothing. I asked her, ‘Are you staying here or going to France?’ She said she would return to France. ‘I can’t leave my school and my classmates,’ I told her. ‘I’ll stay here with my father.’ But I had known to begin with that I wanted to stay with him, even though I wasn’t confident that he wanted me (already he didn’t want his wife, so did he want her daughter?). I said, ‘I’ll stay,’ even though a few months earlier, when matters between them were heating up, my motto had been, ‘They can both go to hell!’

It seems likely that during this period my father, despite all the trouble he had with me and our frequent clashes, put it all down to the intransigence of a wilful child whose mother had never managed to curb her rebelliousness and bring her up properly. And until that memorable visit to Paris in the summer of ’68, he retained his ability to restrain my insubordination, never feeling as though I had injured his pride, or intentionally insulted him. Perhaps this was also partly — notwithstanding my slogan, ‘They can both go to hell’ — because I put up no resistance to the moments of affection and ease that smoothed over the bad feelings following a row: we would calm down and carry on as before; I would call him ‘Abu Nada’ and he would refer to me fondly as his ‘hazelnut’. We could laugh and joke together, and play word-games. I was happy, too, when he sat and helped me with my maths. I wasn’t especially good at maths, yet I was determined to get into the College of Engineering, like him. He said, ‘Humanities might be a better match for your abilities.’ I didn’t take his advice. He began teaching me maths. I understood his explanations, and by practising with them assiduously, I achieved outstanding marks. I was pleased, and so was he.