Two Stories by Radwa Ashour

[Radwa Ashour at her office at Ain Shams. Photo by Lobna Ismail] [Radwa Ashour at her office at Ain Shams. Photo by Lobna Ismail]

Two Stories by Radwa Ashour

By : Emily Drumsta

Two Stories by Radwa Ashour

The Man Sitting in the Park is Waiting

At first I didn’t notice him. I was busy playing with the little one: he would throw the ball, I’d raise my head to follow it as it flew up high, then I’d run with my arms open to meet it as it fell. The little one was jumping and running, babbling and laughing endlessly, and like him I was running and laughing, though my movements were heavier, my cries fewer.

The sun’s disc burned orange in a clear sky, casting its rays through the intertwined branches of the many trees that filled the place. Then I saw him.

An old man sitting on a wooden bench nearby, his white, marble face almost disappearing behind large black glasses. He was thin, wearing dark clothing, and leaning both his hands on a thick, rough cane full of knots, as though it were a branch just cut from its mother, a tree.

I raised the ball in my right hand and threw it with great force. It flew up high and disappeared for a moment in the blue of the sky, like a soaring bird, utterly escaping the laws of the earth. Then the ball appeared again and fell far from the little one. “How can I catch it when you throw it so far?!” he said. He continued his scolding, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the man sitting on the bench nearby, wondering how I hadn’t noticed him before. He was very close; all I had to do was turn to see him.

He was sitting, motionless, his face frozen as though sculpted from stone, staring into nothingness as though he had lost his hearing or his sight. “Mama, you need to concentrate on your playing. Right now you have no focus!” the little one said in protest. “When you play, you must not think about anything else!” he added, wagging his index finger like a grade-school teacher. “What were you thinking about?”

I almost drew his attention to the strange man. Then I changed my mind and threw the ball, but it didn’t go very high. “It seems like you’re tired,” the little one said. “It seems like I’m tired.”

He took the ball from me and started running around with it, throwing it up high and hurrying to catch it. I sat on another wooden bench facing the man, who was in the same position, silent, his mouth sealed shut and framed by wrinkles, one veiny hand perched over the other atop the thick cane. Where had this man come from? And how? And what had brought him here? Was he waiting? He must be waiting. And who was he waiting for?

A sudden shiver seized me. Yes, he is waiting. What should I do? I asked myself this question in terror, fear whipping through me like a furious wind that blows suddenly as the sky clouds over and turns grey, casting its black shadow over the earth. “We’ll go back to the house,” now, immediately, as fast as possible. We’ll run back home, lock the door with the key and the latch and the bolt, lock the windows and draw the heavy curtains over them, go into the bed and cover ourselves in a heavy blanket from head to toe, until we can’t see anything and nothing can reach us. “We’ll go back home.”

I felt my heartbeats rising and speeding up. I worried about calling the little one: I turned around to look for him among the trees. I noticed their thick trunks and their roots gripping the earth, splitting it open in order to grow up above and splitting it yet again to grow deep below, branches waving, interweaving, spreading. I saw the trunks rising into thick branches, heavy with the green of the leaves, then I saw the little one carrying his ball, running and throwing it hard, the ball flying as though it might reach the orange disc behind the leafy branches, and he spreading out his arms as wide as he could to catch it, craning his neck toward the sun, whose rays fell on him in columns until it seemed he were part of them.

The little one came toward me hugging his ball, his face, hair, and shirt all drenched with sweat.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No. Will you play with me?

“Yes!”

I cast a quick glance at the man sitting on the bench nearby. Then I turned my head, took the ball, and threw it with determination. I saw it fly, and once again it seemed to me capable of escaping the laws of the earth.

 

He Wants to Be Reassured

The door opened slowly, and ʿAbd al-Qadir’s face appeared, asking for permission to enter. Dr. Qasim gestured with his head, and ʿAbd al-Qadir came in, followed by someone I didn’t know. ʿAbd al-Qadir is the policeman who guards the small gate to the college. You can see him throughout the day sitting on his wicker chair, his tunic fastened with a leather strap that cuts diagonally across his chest and wraps around his right shoulder, arriving finally at a thick waistband with a metal handle. His clothing—whether white cotton in the summer months or black wool in winter—was old and worn, out of step with the power, strength, and fear one normally associates with policemen. Not to mention the fact that his small, kind eyes, cheerful features, and thick white moustache gave him a gentle-hearted air.

“This gentleman’s daughter is a new student in the department here,” ʿAbd al-Qadir explained. “He asked me to bring him to one of the professors.” He then addressed the man, who was turning around as if to leave the room: “Don’t worry, they’re going to help you.” Then ʿAbd al-Qadir waved and went.

The guest extended a large hand to Dr. Qasim, who was sitting behind his desk.

“I am Fahmi ʿAbd al-Sattar,” he said, “father of a martyr, and my granddaughter Nadia Ahmad Fahmi ʿAbd al-Sattar is a student with you all. Do you know her?”

Dr. Qasim asked the man to sit and wait while he cleared away some of the papers in front of him.

The man sat down near me. I was also waiting for Dr. Qasim to clear the papers in front of him, so that he could give me his comments on a chapter of my master’s thesis he had read.

Old age was evident on the man, despite his large body. His face was round and dark—the distinctive brown skin of the Upper Egyptians. He was wearing an old suit and carried a thick cane in his hand.

Dr. Qasim raised his head.

“Yes, what can I do for you?”

The man repeated what he had said before:

“I am Fahmi ʿAbd al-Sattar, father of a martyr, and my granddaughter Nadia Ahmad Fahmi ʿAbd al-Sattar is a student with you all.”

“What year is she?”

“First year.”

“I don’t teach the first-year students, but I am the head of the department. What’s the problem?”

The man smiled bashfully.

“No, there’s no problem, thank God, I just want to be reassured—is the girl coming to class? Is she a good student? Is she well-behaved? I just want to be reassured.

"Dr. Qasim smiled. “You’ll be reassured at the end of the year when the exam results are in!” he said in a tone that only those who knew him well might recognize as derisive.

But the man only repeated, without smiling this time: “But I want to be reassured now. It’s true that I raised her well and didn’t cut corners… Did I tell you she’s the daughter of a martyr? When Nadia’s father was martyred, her mother was pregnant with her. My granddaughter, Nadia Ahmad Fahmi ʿAbd al-Sattar, a student in your department, sir, was born in November 1967, and her mother—God rest her soul—never remarried, even though she was only seventeen. Did I tell you she’s now working in the UAE?”

Dr. Qasim started flipping through the papers in front of him. He had lost attention to the man’s words and was no longer listening.

“I’m from Upper Egypt, and I said: ‘Nadia, education is illumination, but morals must come before education, and modesty is a virtue. Go ahead and talk to your classmates, there’s nothing wrong with that, but… within limits. Don’t raise your eyes to any of them, for looks are seditious temptation, my daughter. Be…’”

“And what would you like from me exactly?” Dr. Qasim interrupted.

“I told you, good Doctor, I only want one thing, and that’s to be reassured.”

“What?”

The doctor said this harshly and impatiently, and I worried that the meeting might end with him throwing the man out of his office. I was still thinking that this might happen when three students knocked on the office door and came in with flyers that they wanted the professor to look over. He read them and then laughed, directing his words at me:

“Listen to this, Camelia—this attractive announcement is for a trip to Port Said:

The free city opens its ocean to you

Port Said: an ocean of commodities

Come with us to swim and buy!

Dr. Qasim went on laughing, looking at the announcement as he passed it back to the three students, one of whom asked me if I was going to on the trip. I said I hadn’t decided yet.

No sooner had the students left than the man resumed speaking, and it seemed for a moment that Dr. Qasim, having recovered from his laughter, had completely forgotten that the man was sitting in the room.

“So, for example,” the man continued, “if you, sir, gave me the department’s lecture schedule and the names of the attendees, I could…”

“The schedule is posted in the hall. The times of all the lectures and their attendees are on it.”

I volunteered to guide the man to the schedule. He followed me, and I took him where he wanted to go. I let him write down the information about his granddaughter while I stood chatting with some of the fourth-year students.

When he finished copying down the schedule, he came to me and stood a few paces away, waiting for me to finish talking. I noticed him and asked if he wanted anything.

“The schedule says that the first-year students don’t have any lectures on Wednesdays, but Nadia comes to university on Wednesdays.”

“What department is Nadia in?”

“In your department?”

“I know she’s in our department, but I’m asking if she is in first-year A, first-year B, first year-C, first-year D, or E, or F? The first-year students are divided into six groups. Which one is Nadia in?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you write down the schedule, then? There are six different schedules for first-year students.”

The man hesitated, then leaned toward me and said in a low voice: “Forgive me, daughter, I’m over seventy and didn’t notice. Anyway, it’s no matter. I’ll write down all six schedules then ask Nadia which group she’s in.”

He continued in the same whispering tone:

“I’m seventy-seven, and my wife, Nadia’s grandmother, is seventy, and Nadia’s father was martyred before she was born, and her mother went abroad to provide her with a better life. It’s a big responsibility, my girl, and I don’t want to fall short.”

I was about to say a few words of comfort to the man before taking my leave of him when I saw a tall, dark girl approaching us with an open and somewhat surprised smile. “Hello Grandpa, what are you doing here?”

Nadia had a kind face not lacking in childishness—a look enhanced by the simplicity of her clothes and her long, black hair tied in a ponytail with a thin, blue ribbon.

“Nadia, what department are you in?” the grandfather asked.

“First-year C, Grandpa. Why?”

“I came to copy down your course schedule, so that I’d know when you have class and be reassured, but then I discovered that the first-year students are divided into many groups.”

A sudden seriousness came over the girl’s face, gradually transforming into a frown. Tears gleamed in her eyes as she said in protest:

“But Grandpa…”

“But what?” he interrupted. “I want to know everything, to protect you and shield you as I should.”

The girl bit her lower lip. “Excuse me, Grandpa, I have class,” she declared suddenly.

She took a few steps away from us, then turned back.

“While you’re here, Grandpa, there’s a trip to Port Said and I want to go,” she said.

“To Port Said?”

“Yes.”

“No, Nadia, there’s no call for going on trips, no call for it at all.”

“But Grandpa, I want to go, so I’m going!”

She left us. The grandfather leaned toward me.

“Are you going to go on this trip?” he asked in the same low voice.

“I don’t know. But don’t worry, even if I don’t go, my girlfriends are going, and they’re graduate students. Some professors will probably go as well.”

“Well, as long as she’s in your hands, I should be reassured. Yes, I should be reassured. Anyway, it’s a trip to Port Said—a chance for Nadia to get to know her country and…”

The man was now speaking in whispers, as if addressing himself.

“Yes, she’ll get to know her country and see something of the land for which her father fought and in whose name he was martyred.”

I left the man and went back to Dr. Qasim’s office to hear his comments on my thesis.

When I left the college two hours later, the man was sitting on a wicker chair next to ʿAbd al-Qadir. The two of them were chit-chatting.

“I thought I’d wait until Nadia finished her classes so that we could go home together,” he explained. “We live far away, and the road is long.”

I left the college thinking about the trip to Port Said. I made up my mind to go. I told myself it was a chance to relax, and also to buy some hair-straightening shampoo and nylons.   

[Translated from the Arabic by Emily Drumsta. From Ra’ayt al-Nakhl: Qisas (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-ammali-l-kitab, 1990)]

Mar 13, 2016 Lebanon

On a Day of a March…

“In his eyes was the sorrow of an Arab horse that has lost the race.”

Yaşar Kemal

On a day of a March…

The three of us are sitting in a hotel garden right above a park. A jovial giant, a cheerful exile, a lucky me... Beneath a sky full of birds… The wind is blowing like a forgotten whisper; the smell of moss is arriving from distant seas. The jovial giant’s phone rings. “Only three people know my phone number: Mehmed, Selim, and the other is…” says the giant as he answers his phone and lends his voice to his dear wife.

The month of March, the year is 2006…

I have a cold. Brother Mehmed is healthy. The giant is happy. The words he utters on the phone, which he has a hard time placing properly onto his ear, are lighter than roses and mingle with the air as if they were mist.

The giant does not get along with his cell phone. Once he called me while my son was riding his bike. We had a long conversation as I followed with my eyes my son’s wobbly moves on his bike. With such excitement, he talked about a novel that might take twenty to thirty years to finish. His voice was cut off suddenly. When it came back, he asked “Who was the girl who spoke a second ago?” Then his voice was cut off again. There was a thing called pay phones back in those days. “Please insert more coins,” or something in this nature, would say a female voice.

Our first meeting was as exhilarating as this one… I was waiting at the Esenboga Airport in Ankara with a staff member and a car Bilkent University provided for us. The year was 2002. The 15th of May. The giant and Zülfü Livaneli emerged from the VIP room. As I was walking toward them in a rather excited mood, I saw the giant embracing with his left arm the leader of Saadet Partisi, Recai Kutan. With a euphoric voice of a tree that hosts a flock of birds from the sky, he said: “Say hi to Necmettin!” Then as I expressed my willingness, under the weight of words becoming heavier in my mouth, to accompany him during the symposium dedicated to him, he quickly asked in Kurdish “Are you Kurdish?” When I said yes, he pressed me against his chest tightly. I sat next to the driver’s seat as Livaneli and he in the back… It was either at the traffic stop or perhaps during the traffic jam when people walking on the sidewalks began to interact with the giant by way of beautiful gazes, waving hands, sending kisses. I thought this must be what it means to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

One day, a very long day, he came to visit my little family all the way from the other end of the city. When I told him I work on Kurdish poetry, he mentioned that he, with Cahit Sıtkı, worked on the early translations of Kurdish poetry. In the darkness of the 1950s, they would hide in some corners and recite Kurdish poetry to each other as they translated them. The jovial giant was thrilled when he heard about Ehmedê Xanî Library, the project of mine that is etched into my dreams. Joining me in my crazy dream project, he said: “I will donate all my books to this library. And you know, among them are the Gallimard encyclopedias.”

The PhD program at Bilkent University offered a seminar on Yaşar Kemal in 2004. Süha Oğuzertem, who taught this seminar, changed our understanding of Yaşar Kemal entirely. We learned that his language in each novel is significantly different from one another. In each novel, there is, as if, a distinctly new novelist. We invited him to the seminar. He came. As he was entering the room, he turned to my dear professor, the late Talât Sait Halman, and said: “Talât, accept Selim into the PhD program, because his father is a dengbêj!” “He is already in,” said Talât.

The day I returned from England. Winter, 2011… This time I called him from a frosty garden. He never wished to exhaust people yet had a voracious appetite for story telling. Witnessing that was such a great pleasure and honor for me. During almost an hour-long conversation, he mentioned again the plans on a novel that would take twenty to thirty years to finish, and the third volume of Akçasazın Ağaları… In fact, he had already told me the ending of Bir Ada Hikâyesi (A Story of an Island) in 2004. He would burn the island in the end! It was such a heavy burden not being able to tell anyone about the ‘end.’ This meant: he, who always put on strong emphasis on “the human” in his nearly sixty years of stellar literary career, would burn everything he had uttered to humanity during his own century. Then the fourth volume of the book came out: My son’s grandpa Yaşar could not burn his island. Yet the speech he sent to be delivered at the ceremony of the honorary doctorate degree he received from Bilgi University was his farewell letter to the world. He talked about literature as an act of responsibility toward the world. With this, he was bringing joy to his island for the last time.

A refugee, a stutterer after seeing his father getting killed, an orphan whose right eye was carved out with a knife, a poverty stricken person, a person who shivered often, an ill-treated Kurd, a revolutionary, a dengbêj, a bard, a mourning flâneur, a story teller, a solemn spirit, a genius of diegesis, a body who fills the world, a chest who embraces the world, a sea of smiles, an island of there-is-always-hope, a human being… he was.

We, three of us, in a garden in the middle of a peninsula on a day of a March were talking as if we all had hard candy in our mouths. The exile paused our convivial conversation with a serious sentence. “I am going to the South,” he said. “The Kurdish government is going to give me the state’s honorary medal. Do you have any message you want me to deliver, Yaşar Baba?” They stared at each other for a while then forgot about me, and the glasses of tea. Tears began to swell in their eyes. The silence lasted like a long winter.

“Tell them that I love them dearly!” said Yaşar Kemal, after a long pause. “I have,” he said, “about thirty novels. Tell them to translate all into Kurdish.” He then turned to me: “Selim can do the translations.” Turning back to Mehmed Uzun, he continued:

Tell them, a people can become a nation only when they pay their writers. I receive a lot more for English or French translations of my work. What I ask from the Kurdish government is $100,000. Ask them to send me this money. I would then go to the bank. There I would ask a bank teller “My daughter, Kurds have sent me money; let me have it.” The bank teller would put the money on the table. Then I would weep profusely while pressing the stack of Kurdish money against my chest. Then I would find your number in my phone list of three numbers. “Mehmed,” I would ask, “find me the bank account number of one of the organizations for the martyred peshmerga so that I can send them the money.

The three of us, on a day of a March in one year, were sitting and conversing in a place somewhere in a world. Now, two of us are no longer on this earth. One of them found out he got cancer on his way from the emancipated part of his country after receiving the honorary medal, then said goodbye to a thousand year old exilic condition and toppled down like a tree on a hillside near Tigris. The other entered the warm chest of the world, leaving houses, shadowy courtyards, plains, wild pears, the mountains with purple violets, nomads with poetry, azat birds[1], the songs of the fishermen, the library shelves, ants, apprenticeship of birds[2], the deer pattern on a kilim spread inside the tent of a dreamy tribe burned to ashes, the blue butterfly, chukars, winds that yellow the weeds, borders, prison doors, the frosty waters of early springs as orphans.

For all, I am mourning over the loss of both.

*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Radikal Gazetesi on February 28, 2015, and is translated by Öykü Tekten.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, and editor living in New York. She is the co-creator of KAF Collective and pursues a PhD degree in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

  


Footnotes

1. Yaşar Kemal tells the story of “azat kuşları” in his novel The Birds Have Also Gone. The fictional characters in this novel would buy the birds near the places of worship only to set them free.

2. The phrase “apprenticeship of birds” (kuşların tilmizi) refers to the pseudonym of Feqiyê Teyran (1590-1660), a legendary Kurdish poet and writer. Kurds believe that Teyran spoke the bird language. He was also mentioned in Yaşar Kemal’s novel A Story of an Island.