The Republic of False Truths Page 7

  I’m going to tell you about an incident that changed my life.

  One night, I was on the minibus returning from a visit to a friend in Embaba. The officer at the police checkpoint stopped us, made all the passengers get down from the bus, and asked each of us for his ID. In front of me was a young man whom the officer dragged out by his shirt, violently. The young man objected, using a word I didn’t hear. The officer got angry and set about hitting him till the blood was running down his face. I couldn’t restrain myself and shouted at the officer, “You have no right to hit him!” The officer turned around and yelled in my direction, “What do you want, sunshine?” I went up to him, presented him with my Engineers Syndicate membership card, and said, “Kindly speak to me with respect. I’m telling you that you have no right to hit him. If he has broken the law, hand him over to the prosecutor’s office, but don’t hit him.”

  The officer looked at me for a moment, then took the card, tore it to pieces, and threw it on the ground. I let out a cry of protest but the police goons fell on me and beat me till I fell, then picked me up and threw me into a police vehicle and kept on beating me and insulting me with obscenities till we reached the police station, where I received another round of beating and insults in the detectives’ room. I spent the night under lock and key, and when they brought me before the prosecutor in the morning, I asked that the marks on my body be recorded. The prosecutor smiled and said, “Listen, Mazen. You’re an engineer and you look like you’re from a good family. I can record your injuries in the report. It’s your right. But speaking to you as an older brother, if you get into any kind of a fight with the Ministry of Interior, you’ll be the loser. The ministry will never punish one of its own officers even if he commits murder. If you bring charges against the officer, he’ll deny that the incident ever took place and they’ll cook up a case against you and bring witnesses, at which point I’ll be obliged to put you into preventive detention, and you’ll stay in prison until the court lets you out, and it may find you guilty. I advise you to accept the officer’s apology. Let’s put an end to the matter rather than making things more complicated.”

  I agreed to a reconciliation and they took me to the officer’s desk, and when he saw me, he smiled and said, “Okay, Mazen. It worked out this time, but let it be a lesson to you to mind your manners. Don’t ever challenge an officer again. Got it?”

  That was the honourable officer’s “apology.” Can you believe this, Asmaa? Just because I defend a citizen’s dignity, I get beaten and insulted and thrown into gaol with the criminals! And in the end, I go to the officer and instead of apologising, he tells me off! I felt horribly demeaned, as though I had no worth and no rights. I didn’t leave the house for a week. I thought for a long time and decided I had two options: either emigrate to some other country where they respect one’s humanity, or strive for change. I decided to join the Enough! movement, where I found a group of the most courageous and noble Egyptians. All of them think the way I do. After that came the tragedy of Khaled Said, which confirmed that repression can touch anyone, irrespective of their social class. Naturally, I sympathise with your anger at what happened in the school, but frankly I don’t see any reason for you to be depressed. Let us agree on three things: first, our battle isn’t with the police officer, the headmaster, or the Italian company. It’s with the corrupt, repressive regime that has choked the life out of Egyptians for so long and that must be overthrown if we are to build a respectable, decent country. Second, people in Egypt have lived under dictatorial rule for so long that they have lost any hope of getting justice, so don’t blame them if they avoid confrontation with authority and prefer peace and quiet. Third, you, Asmaa, do your work with integrity primarily to have a clear conscience, so you shouldn’t be looking for gratitude from anyone.

  To be honest, these aren’t my thoughts, they’re lessons I learned from my father, the fighter for justice who went to prison, was dismissed from his job, and left homeless, but who never regretted for one instant the positions he’d taken. Once I asked him, idiotically and cruelly, “You’ve wasted ten years of your life in prison, and still nothing has changed in Egypt. Don’t you regret that?”

  My father smiled and said, “I did my duty and what I got out of it was self-respect. Plus, who told you nothing has changed? Every day people’s awareness increases and the truth becomes more obvious to them. Someday, their anger will reach a point that drives them to revolution. Even if I don’t see the revolution, I shall die with a clear conscience because I did everything in my power to serve the Cause.”

  The Cause, in my father’s dictionary, meant the struggle for a democratic state and a socialist society. Don’t be angry at the parents’ reaction. They know very well that you are defending their rights but they are, quite simply, scared of the headmaster. Have patience with them. Little by little, they will learn to trust you and rid themselves of fear. My father used to say, “People will only love you if they trust what you say, and they will only trust what you say if you get close to them and put yourself in their shoes.”

  When I began working at the factory, I found that the workers trusted neither the management nor the engineers, because the latter always sided against them with management. I spent an entire year trying to get close to them before I won their trust, and then they elected me to the union committee, warning the management strongly against rigging the election. If you try to control the workers by using force, they will never love you. It’s true that their behaviour can be coarse, and sometimes aggressive, but if you live with them, you will come to realise that they are the true heroes. If the corruption annoys us, it kills them. Every day, the cement worker stands for eight hours in front of an extremely hot oven that you and I couldn’t stand in front of for even a few minutes. The cement worker suffers from petrification of the lungs and lung cancer from inhaling cement dust because management rarely buy filters for the chimneys, and if they do buy them, they don’t always install them because they affect the rate of production. The same simple worker who faces death every day in a noble battle to raise his children is, in my view, more honourable than the university professors who have sold their souls to the authorities and turned into prostitutes. The factory used to have six thousand workers. Can you believe that the Italian management forced two thousand of them into early retirement? And despite the fact that Essam Shaalan was a friend of my father’s and to him goes the credit for having appointed me, he played a disgraceful role in the early retirement issue. He would call in the workers and threaten them, to force them to ask for retirement: “Do you think you can take on the government? The government wants to retire you. If you say no, you’ll be dismissed without compensation and you may even be arrested and thrown in prison.”

  Can you believe it, Asmaa? Forty-year-old workers with wives and children finding themselves on the streets with a paltry sum in their hands that will have evaporated in a few months. What is the worker supposed to do then? He can beg or he can steal. It’s a real tragedy. Now, we have a strange phenomenon at the factory: many of the workers who were forced into early retirement come each morning and sit in front of the factory gates till the end of the shift, then leave. Management tried every means to get rid of them. Essam Shaalan talked to them politely, then called in the security guards to threaten them, but it was useless. I thought, at the beginning, that their sitting in front of the gates was a way of attracting attention to their tragedy. Then I thought that they expected management would make use of them. I went to them and asked them why they were sitting there like that. One of them said, quite simply, “We miss the factory. We’ve spent our whole lives here.”

  Another worker said, “This is our factory. It means more to us than it does to Essam Shaalan or the Italian management. They threw us out, and they still think it’s too much to let us sit in front of our own factory?”

  Such are the workers. Be patient with people, Asmaa. Don’t be too
quick to pass judgment on them. Overlook their mistakes and get close to them and you’ll discover their amazing human energy. I’m proud of you, my dear friend. Go to the interrogation with your head held high, because you are standing on your own against an entire system of corruption. You are stronger than them because you are defending what is right. Don’t be shaken by them or lose your confidence for a single second. Please let me know what happens. Don’t get upset, my friend, please! Can you give me a smile, please! I want to see those dimples. That’s the way. Bye, champ!

  Mazen

  P.S. Overlook my mistakes in grammar. I’m not a writer like you. I’m an engineer and I only just got through Arabic Language at school.

  More Important P.S. If you want to call, my number is 0127 334 4288.

  Naturally, the phone’s tapped, so don’t talk too much and don’t give out any information. Write to me whenever you like at this email address, it’s more secure.

  7

  Egyptians know Nourhan as a TV presenter but they don’t know her as a person. Truth to tell, her personal history is ringed about by numerous tales, some true, some lies put about by women consumed by jealousy of her beauty, her intelligence, her chic, her celebrity, and, above all, her magical ability to attract men. The following are some of the things that have been said about her:

  1. They say Nourhan attends Sheikh Shamel’s classes simply to make a show of her piety and that when she weeps during the class, it isn’t because she’s moved but just to attract attention.

  The truth: from the time Nourhan reached womanhood, as a student at Mansoura Secondary, she was taken in hand by Destiny, shaper of girls’ ends, and, softened and rounded, her charms began to stand out, and she became the cynosure of all eyes wherever she went. And she weeps during Sheikh Shamel’s lesson specifically when he speaks of the hair covering that she was forced to abandon so that she could appear on screen, a matter that created in her such deep feelings of guilt that she tried more than once to convince those in charge to allow her to appear with her hair covered; however, they refused. Nourhan’s tears and her piety are, then, sincere, and she has never in her life undertaken any action, however simple, without first making sure that it is in keeping with the precepts of religion. Here, we may mention a celebrated episode in the programme she was presenting that was titled “Covering the Hair…Custom or Devotion?”

  Nourhan took the side of covering. She asserted that it was a religious duty, like praying five times a day and fasting. She beseeched girls and women, however, not to go overboard in covering their hair, for any reason. A viewer called in and asked her how she could defend the covering of the hair with such enthusiasm when she herself had abandoned it. Nourhan bowed her head in silence. Low, sad music was broadcast in the background, the camera slowly moved closer to her face, and Nourhan could be heard communing with her Lord in a tremulous voice, saying, “O my God…my Creator and my Master! Thou knowest that I yearn to wear a covering over my hair, and Thou knowest that I do not possess, at this time, the power to do so. O my Lord, O Thou who hearest my cry, hasten the time when I may cover my hair and do not take me unto You until such time as I have adopted the headscarf!”

  That night, Nourhan wept and made the viewers weep, and she had everyone calling on God to bless her with the comfort of having her hair covered.

  2. They say she changed her name from Nour El Huda to Nourhan to hide her low-class origins.

  Nourhan’s origins were humble but not low class. Her father, the late Muhammad Bayoumi, was a police assistant at Mansoura Police Station One. He was poor, with lots of children, but, through hard work and application, he managed to raise them and educate them, and when God took him, his eldest daughter, Nourhan, was in Group Three at the College of Humanities (Geography Dept.) while her three siblings were at various stages of the school system. As for the changing of her name, it’s a well-known fact that work in the media may require a person to change his or her name, to make it more musical and attractive, and Nour El Huda chose the name Nourhan because it was the closest thing to her real name.

  3. They say Nourhan seduced her professor, Dr. Hani El Aasar, and snatched him from his wife and children.

  Dr. Hani is a scion of the ancient El Aasar family, known in Mansoura for its wealth, and a professor of mineral geography at the Faculty of Humanities. He was a counsellor to the Pearl student activities club to which Nourhan belonged. She caught his attention on the Luxor and Aswan field trip and he befriended her. When her father—God have mercy on his soul—died, Dr. Hani stood by her, gave her a shoulder to lean on in her time of trial, and soon was phoning her daily, to check that she was all right. One day he invited her, along with a group of her colleagues, to spend a day at his farm. The next day, he invited her to his office, praised her character and her morals, and suddenly seemed to lose control of his feelings, for he approached her, touched her face, and whispered, “Nour…you’re so beautiful.”

  No sign of surprise appeared on Nourhan’s face, but she removed his hand firmly and said, “Doctor, I am a Muslim woman. It is forbidden for anyone who is not a member of my family to touch my body.”

  The professor had passed the point of no return, and his voice trembled as he moved closer to her and whispered, “I love you, Nour.”

  Nourhan drew back and cried out vehemently, “Please, Doctor! Enough!”

  Then she left in a fury, slamming the door behind her. Dr. Hani had been married for twenty years to a teacher in the Faculty of Law and had two boys and a girl.

  In the days that followed, Nourhan boycotted Dr. Hani completely. She didn’t answer his repeated telephone calls and whenever she caught sight of him in the college corridors would avert her face, purse her lips, and knit her eyebrows (making her look even more beautiful). After two weeks of rigorous avoidance on her part, “Uncle” Abu Talib, the tea man, came to her smiling and said, “Miss Nour, Dr. El Aasar would like to see you in his office.”

  She went to see him, with her furious, beguiling face, and said, in a formal tone of voice, “Uncle Abu Talib tells me that you wish to see me, sir. There’s nothing wrong, I hope?”

  Dr. Hani invited her to sit. She hesitated a little, then sat down on the edge of the chair, as though ready to leave at any moment. Dr. Hani smiled nervously and asked, “Are you angry with me, Nour?”

  “Of course!” she replied.

  “May I know the reason?”

  “I never imagined for a moment that you’d think I was loose.”

  “God forbid! I have the greatest respect for you, Nour.”

  “If a man respects a woman, does he treat her in an immoral manner?”

  Dr. Hani inhaled deeply on his cigarette and looked at her. His face looked exhausted, as though he hadn’t slept well, and he responded with a speech that he appeared to have prepared in advance. He said that he was an adult, not an adolescent, and that he had given the matter long thought and made sure of his feelings towards her. He respected her uprightness and commitment to her religion but was, at the same time, solicitous of his family and didn’t want his children to pay the price in any way for his love for her. Nourhan folded her arms across her chest and looked at the floor, appearing, at that moment, like any woman who has been deeply insulted and awaits the immediate restoration of her honour. Dr. Hani lit another cigarette and said that he was prepared to marry her right away, on two conditions—first, that their marriage should remain a secret, and second, that they would have no children. This aside, he was entirely ready to fulfil her every demand. Nourhan said nothing for a while, then stated, tersely, that the offer of marriage had taken her by surprise and she needed time to think. She forced herself to give a wan smile, said goodbye, and left the office with slow, slightly faltering steps (reflecting her confusion), while he followed her with his eyes.

  She disappeared again for a whole week, during which she returned none of his calls, which co
mpelled him to summon her to his office again, via Abu Talib. She seemed mournful and worried this time, and when he asked her why she’d been absent, she said she was going through a personal crisis, and had said the prayer for guidance for a number of nights in the hope that God would bless her with the right decision. Dr. Hani didn’t ask her what her decision was, as though afraid that it might be a refusal. Instead, he repeated his offer of marriage. Nourhan said nothing and averted her beautiful face, as though seeking the appropriate answer. Then she looked him in the face and said that she agreed, in principle, and would leave the bride price and trousseau for him to decide, because she had no interest in money. However, she did have two conditions: first, he must tell her family of the marriage and have them witness it, so that it would be legal from the religious perspective, and second, that Dr. Hani should buy a flat in her name in Mansoura. And here, for the first time in weeks, a sweet smile appeared on her beautiful face, and she said, with seeming affection, “Even if it’s just a small flat, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it’s in a decent neighbourhood and registered in my name, so that I feel like a legally wedded wife and not a mistress moving around from one furnished flat to another. I agree, of course, to delaying having children until we agree on the appropriate time. As far as your family is concerned, I swear to Almighty God that I shall be mindful, because I couldn’t bear the guilt of distancing you from your children.”