Butterfly Wings: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) Read online

  She interrupted him: “Like what?”

  He resumed as though she had not interrupted. “Like ending corruption. Like establishing the rotation of power. Like not allowing the will of the electorate to be forged. They are all basic principles for any respectable political system. I’m calling for what the people call for. I’m not a Communist or an Islamist. What I want, the people want, which is reform of our political system. Then let those who win the election form the government. It doesn’t matter whether they’re left or right. All day long the talk is about economic reform. If only some of that effort went into political reform, we wouldn’t be in the state we’re in. Tell me, I beg you, is it reasonable for one party to rule the country for generations?”

  She regretted having opened this door. The last thing she wanted was a lecture. She kept quiet in the hope that this would put an end to the conversation. There was no chance of finding common ground.

  “Of course you won’t agree with what I said, but you asked me to define my aims.”

  She realized that their positions had been reversed and that she was on the defensive again. She said, “The fact that my husband is a member of the ruling party does not necessarily mean I’m in favor of all the party’s policies.” She felt she had submitted more than needed, and added, “Besides, I have no faith in the opposition.”

  “And do you know anyone in the opposition?” he asked.

  “Not personally, but I can see what they’re doing in the country and it seems like blatant political opportunism to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean whipping up the people, exploiting their hardship, pushing them into going to demonstrations and protests whose only aim is to topple the government and let them take power.”

  The playful smile he had had on his face since the beginning of the conversation was gone and he turned serious, saying, “We have not caused the people’s suffering. The government has done that. What we have done is give a voice to the voiceless. All we have done is call for reform and struggle for freedom and democracy. Believe me, nobody could make people demonstrate and clash with the security forces and risk getting beaten up and arrested if they hadn’t had enough.”

  His eyes expressed the same honesty as was visible in some of his photographs in the newspaper. But Doha did not want to give any signs of backing down. She said, “It seems we won’t agree on the subject.”

  “It’s not necessary that we agree. What this country lacks is a culture of respect for difference.”

  She decided to change the tone of the conversation and said, “When you say ‘this country,’ what country do you mean? We must be over Malta now.”

  Laughing, he said, “The same might apply to Malta.”

  She riposted, “Well, why don’t you go and preach it there then?”

  4 Hassan

  The Peugeot service taxi reached Tanta after one more unexpected delay: the driver had to fill the overheating radiator. During the journey Ayman recalled how it had all begun at his friend Hassan’s house….

  One night after they had finished studying, Ayman al-Hamzawi and his friend Hassan al-Lithi were sitting on the balcony at Hassan’s to have a cigarette without alerting the family. The conversation turned to the subject that kept Ayman awake at night, and Hassan said to him, “You have to forget about it. The dead don’t come back. So don’t torture yourself for nothing.”

  “The real torture is not knowing anything about my mother. If I knew who she was, I’d relax. But all I know is her name, and my father won’t tell me anything. I’m almost certain he’s hiding lots of information from me. Hassan, you’ll never understand what I feel because you know everything about your family and have never lost one of them. God grant them all long life and spare you the pain of losing something precious from your life. It’s like feeling lost, like not knowing who you are.”

  Ayman was silent for a few moments as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. Then he continued: “If only I knew where she was buried. If I knew her relatives I could ask them and find out when she died and how. They might have a picture of her. I don’t know what she looks like. And I don’t know why my father doesn’t have a photo of her. Didn’t they take pictures of their wedding or any other time they were together? I want to know what she looked like. There must be some resemblance between us. Perhaps some of her features live on in me without my knowing. Perhaps I’ve inherited some of my character from her. I’m descended from her, just like from my father, but I don’t know her or anything about her. It’s like I don’t know myself.”

  Ayman loved reading, but the word “mother” in any book or article made him sad. Once he had gone to the book fair with his friends from college. At one of the stalls of cheap used books he had come across a book called The Mother, which he bought immediately. When he got home he discovered it contained two novels by an Italian woman, Grazia Deledda, whose name he had not heard before but who had won the Nobel Prize in 1926. Both novels dealt with the relationship between mother and son.

  After that, he bought from the Ezbekiya book market another novel entitled The Mother by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and a play by Brecht called Mother Courage and Her Children that did not move him much. He experienced through fiction the mother–son relationship that he had not lived in reality.

  Hassan was silenced by his friend’s words. He kept quiet for a while out of respect for the tears glistening in Ayman’s eyes, which reflected the streetlights shining on the darkened balcony. Hassan took a last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out on the edge of the balcony and threw it into the street. “Didn’t you say you knew your mother’s full name?” he said to Ayman.

  “I learned it by heart the moment my father wrote it down for Abdel Samad on his ID application more than six years ago.”

  “Maybe my mother can help you find your mother’s family by using the civil registry.”

  Ayman’s face lit up. His tears disappeared, allowing his beautiful smile to come back to his face.

  Hassan al-Lithi was his close friend at the Cooperative Community College where he had enrolled after finishing school. They confided in each other. Hassan would tell Ayman of his love for Hala, the daughter of Ustaz Girgis Abdel Shahid, who lived on the same street in Dar al-Salaam. Ayman would tell Hassan of his love for Salwa al-Eleimi, their fellow student at the college. Hassan had a good heart. He often invited Ayman home so they could study together, and sometimes Ayman stayed the night. Hassan’s mother, Hagga Hikmet, a plump woman who worked for the Civil Registry Office, was fond of Ayman. When Hassan would tell her that Ayman was coming over, she would make the food he liked.

  That night, Ayman felt that Hassan had opened a new way out of the dizzying confusion he had long endured. He did not leave until Hassan had promised he would raise the subject with Hagga Hikmet and find out whether she really could help locate his mother.

  As he left his friend’s house, Ayman wondered whether the relationship between mother and son that he had read so much about might finally become something he experienced.

  5 Clouds Disperse in the Springtime

  Doha imagined that meeting Ashraf al-Zayni on the plane had been a chance encounter. It would be over when the flight ended and they went their separate ways—she to Milan for the annual fashion show and he to Palermo in Sicily for the international NGO conference. Fate, however, had something in store for her that she neither expected nor imagined.

  The three and a half hours of the flight from Cairo to Rome left an impression that would remain with her for the rest of her life. She had never met anyone like Ashraf al-Zayni before. She saw in him something she had not seen in politicians; plus, he had brought back to life something inside her that she had not believed still existed.

  He told her his life story, how he had not married because of his devotion to public affairs. She remembered her life and where it had led to. He said that his mother was the daughter of one of Hoda al-Shaarawi’s associates who had strugg
led with her during the 1919 Revolution. His grandmother had taken part with Hoda al-Shaarawi in the famous demonstration when women had taken off their yashmaks, which were symbols of Ottoman domination and alien to Egyptian women. His father had died when he was a child and his mother had raised him to love his country and work for the people. He had gone to the Faculty of Engineering, where he became a student leader and had been arrested by the university security in Sadat’s day. But he studied hard and graduated with distinction. That led to his appointment to the teaching faculty. He remained in touch with students, whose youth inclined them to rebel against the situation and aspire to a better future. He always worked to guide their movement toward constructive action by joining grassroots organizations demanding change, rather than wasting their energies by boycotting classes or satisfying themselves with going to demonstrations.

  In this fashion, Dr. Ashraf al-Zayni, the prominent architect, had become a student leader and then a leading light in civil society when he founded New Horizon. This movement included a large number of those demanding national reform and was written about in the local and international press, rapidly gaining a good reputation among international NGOs.

  How different her life was from his. Ashraf al-Zayni seemed happy with his life and believed in what he did. She listened to him in silence, and the feeling that this man sitting next to her on a plane, whom she had only known for a few short hours, was trying to intrude and force himself into her life, gradually disappeared. He spoke honestly and nothing suggested he intended more than straightforward human interaction.

  It would seem that soaring through the skies freed people from their inhibitions on the ground. Or was it being captive with another person and far removed from the real world? Like a prisoner whose cellmate became their closest companion. A cellmate to whom they revealed the most intimate details of their life, irrespective of the barriers that might exist between them on the outside.

  Doha looked out of the window and watched the clouds scattered below. They looked to be clearing, departing with the advent of spring to some other region of the world where winter still reigned. The clouds looked like cotton candy. As a child she had always chosen the white kind, like the clouds, and left the pink to the other girls. She remembered how few the moments of true happiness had been in her life—few, and also insubstantial, like cotton candy or the clouds floating below.

  What Ashraf al-Zayni had said about his not marrying brought back memories of the years Doha had spent fighting her mother and rebelling against her authoritarian control. Her mother, who had died a few years before, was Aleya Hanem Hifzi, daughter of the former minister of labor, Talaat Pasha Hifzi. She was a formidable woman whose word was law. She made the decisions in all things related to the family, and when the children grew up she made the decisions regarding their marriages. All of them submitted without resistance, except for Doha. Her father, Dr. Ali al-Kenani, who died two years after her mother, considered his realm to be limited to his work as an undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice. The household and children were his wife’s jurisdiction. In time, the land in the country was appended to the household, and he left his wife to manage it as she saw fit.

  In fact, he could find nothing to complain about in her determined management of affairs. She would meet the farmers at home to go over their accounts. At times, if necessary, she even traveled on her own to the south, to what remained of the hundreds of feddans that had been owned by her husband. The rest had been seized in the 1952 Revolution.

  Doha’s older brother was Talaat, so named by his mother after his grandfather. Doha had been given her name by her father because she was born in the late morning and the moment of her birth heralded the sun’s ascent to the highest point in the sky. Talaat was infatuated with his mother. He would only do what she said. And though he often tried to stand by his sister, once his mother had scolded him he would side with her.

  Doha went to French convent schools, which in itself was a constraint on life. Out of school, she was not allowed to go out to the club with her friends like other girls. She had to produce a family tree for each of the friends she wanted to see. Those friends who came over to her house would be interrogated by her mother concerning their family and background, which was extremely embarrassing for Doha. But she knew that without these investigations she would not be able to see anyone.

  She put up with the situation until her first year at university, when her mother mentioned the need for her to get married. She could not obey her mother any more. She had accepted her mother ruling her life for the present, just as she ruled the lives of everyone else in the family, but she would never accept being ruled in the future as well. She had obeyed her mother because she knew there was a future to come when she would be free of all the restrictions imposed on her at home and at school and able to live as she pleased.

  Life had started to open up before her in her first year studying French at the Faculty of Humanities. For her, university had come to represent emancipation from the discipline of the nuns at the convent school and the strictness of her mother at home. How could she abandon that for another prison in the form of the marriage her mother wished for her? Aleya Hanem had chosen Doha’s husband for her, just as she had chosen her brother’s wife—the daughter of Amin Sabri, Egypt’s former ambassador to Germany. Her husband was to be Medhat al-Safti, nephew of Abdel Rahman Bey al-Safti, secretary-general of the ruling party, whose future prospects—as her mother said—were highly promising under his uncle’s wing.

  She had not met this prospective husband, who had been introduced to the family by one of her mother’s friends, but turned him down on principle. Now was not the time to get married. She wanted to get on with her life at university like the other girls and would never marry in the way she had seen in old Egyptian films.

  When the groom came to visit, she refused to meet him. She went on hunger strike in the face of her mother’s insistence on the marriage. She shut herself up in her room for three days. She cut off contact with the whole family. She refused to take her exams. All her academic efforts were wasted and she failed her first year at university.

  The long summer months were disturbed by the tug-of-war between mother and daughter. Doha’s friend Effat urged her to agree to the match and look forward to the luxurious lifestyle it promised. Mushira, on the other hand, encouraged her to exert her will and choose her life partner herself. Once autumn arrived, however, the papers and glossies had stories and pictures of her engagement to Medhat al-Safti. At a lavish reception at the beginning of winter, she was led in procession to the groom chosen for her by her mother. Abdel Rahman Bey al-Safti, party secretary-general and minister for parliamentary affairs, was a witness to her wedding contract.

  She could not have the life she aspired to, nor could she have children. She underwent all the tests available in Egypt and abroad. The results always indicated that there was nothing wrong with her or her husband. She did not go back to university after getting married. Medhat al-Safti had promised her that he would let her finish her studies, but he kept her busy with a crowded social life, which soon dispirited her. Then she busied herself studying fashion design by correspondence. Once a year she would go to Paris to take her exams, and after three years she graduated from the French Fashion Institute. She made several visits to the renowned Christian Dior fashion house on Avenue Montaigne in Paris and also enrolled for a summer course at Saint Martin’s College in London.

  She set up a sewing workshop to produce her designs. Her clothes were soon well known, and she started to design fashions for some Egyptian stores.

  Yet the whole time, she felt that this was not the life she had wanted and dreamed about as a young girl. Effat often asked her, “What more do you want?” Mushira, however, would say that people were always seeking their true self. Some might find their self early on in life, while others might only find it later on. What was important was not to be satisfied with a life that you chanced upon or
that was imposed on you.

  Even so, her conversation with Ashraf al-Zayni had taken her to another world, where she forgot her life. It was like watching a film and being transported to a world unconnected to your daily life. The plane was the house of dreams, and Ashraf al-Zayni the narrator of the film that had transported her far from the life she led.

  She looked out of the window again and found herself far away from everything. She could not make out the terrain or any features on the ground. But the plane would sooner or later return to earth, despite the long distance it had covered. Doha was afraid of landing. It would bring her back from dream to reality.

  Ashraf said, “This is the first time I’m visiting Italy. Is it like France?”

  “Italy isn’t like anything else,” she replied. “Rome, especially, is unlike any other city in the world.” Her words resounded in her ears and she relaxed a little. Her fear of landing in this city, so different from the city where she had taken off, disappeared.

  The plane touched down on the runway with a smoothness that Doha was not accustomed to from her previous trips. It seemed to her that the plane was floating on water until it came to a halt. Dr. Ashraf stood up to take his bag from the overhead compartment and said, “Have you got anything up here?”

  “My things are here, these magazines. I’ll just add the newspaper the hostess gave me.”

  “I thought you had read it.”

  “I told you, I only looked at the pictures. But now I will read it for sure.”

  6 Hagga Hikmet

  Ayman woke up earlier than planned. As much as he tried, he could not go back to sleep, and he started to feel restless. He got up and dressed without a sound, so as not to wake his brother, and slipped out of the house. Where to go so early? He was quite nervous and went up to the roof, hoping the breeze would calm him down. He stared off into the distance. It was dawn, that wondrous moment dividing night and day, like the silent pause between breathing in and out, between a life over and done with and a life to come.