Roughly thirty years ago, on an
otherwise seemingly ordinary afternoon, he looked different. His narrow chest,
gruff voice, and steely eyes struck me that day as belonging to someone else,
someone one would have expected to find at the Mansoura Corniche of the ’80s.
Even as the schoolboy I was back then, I was able to tell he had quite suddenly
become barely recognizable. I felt a sense of distance from him. As I sauntered
alongside my father, I suddenly felt that he was no longer the man he used to
be. From time to time, we stopped walking and our eyes drifted over to the
opposite shore.
A foreign-sounding voice cut through
the silence. “That is the al-Banna mosque.”
I looked to the place where his eyes
were lingering. The mosque’s dome shimmered in the fading sunlight. It glowed
green and majestic, standing in stark contrast to the darkness that had already
descended over Talkha, the neighborhood where it was located. His voice was
soft, much softer than what I knew it to be. But that was not all. It was also
the tone he had adopted, which, oddly enough, conveyed sorrow and joy
simultaneously. My father started speaking about the mosque and about the Nile,
which according to him had carried so much water back in the day that it had
actually flowed over the promenade we were standing in at the moment. I loved
listening to him. One could read in the tone of his voice that he missed his
early life. It was not that unusual to see him talk to himself. However, it was
the first time that he had taken me for a walk and opened up to me. That made
me feel special. To honor his faith in me, I took it upon myself to become the
guardian of his memoir. Therefore, I listened carefully to every word he said.
Right after returning home, the first
thing I did was write his deliverance down in a small notebook that had the
logo of the Ministry of Education stamped on it. It was one of the notebooks in
which my father used Arabic to scribble down his ideas while at work. I decided
to consecrate that notebook to recording the history of Mansoura. If we’re
being honest, the chronicles of the city didn’t appeal to me per se. Yet, I
figured that the project of documenting them would offer me a wonderful excuse
to ask my father to continue spending time with me. That way, I reckoned, I
would be able to find out more about his past.
However, my fiendish plan foundered on
reality’s need to impose its unpredictability. As it turned out, that day had
been the last time my father would unburden himself to me—the first and last
time we went out on a walk together. I don’t know what happened to the small
notebook stamped with the logo of the Ministry of Education. As far as I can
remember, I had only been able to dash off one or two pages, tops. All I know
for certain is that I am alone now as I amble along Mansoura Corniche. Time has
taken a flippant attitude toward the fact that I will never be able to move
past the last afternoon I got to have him by my side. As my gaze slides along
the opposite shore of the river and meets the dome of the al-Banna mosque, I
realize I am no longer a schoolboy. My father may be buried with the rest of
the family, but I got to see a side of him that will stay with me for as long
as I live.
