Memory lane - personal narrative on automobiles - includes related articles

Memory lane

IT was the early 1940s. It was wartime, but our village, in the northernmost part of Egypt, east of the Nile delta, was far from the scene of action. Little did we know that over there, deep in the Libyan desert, a battle was being fought between the Allied armies and the Axis powers that was to mark a decisive turning point in the war.

We were between six and ten years old. We were allowed to play in freedom at the end of the long schoolday. We had to stay within the area of the village or its immediate surroundings. But sometimes we would venture as far as the highway between Damietta and Izbet El Borg....

Barely a few hundred metres away from the crossroads where the highway intersected with the little road that led to our village was a British army base with a radar station. Soldiers of various nationalities bustled all around.

To rid us of any desire to take a closer look, we were told that the soldiers would seize the slightest opportunity to kidnap lone children. Sometimes they ate them. Sometimes they raped them. Had they not been living for months, perhaps years, far away from women? The terror inspired in us by these threats assumed apocalyptic proportions when the nocturnal silence was suddenly shattered by the sound of muffled explosions which startled us from our sleep. We were told that these were German toredoes smashing into Allied ships out at sea.

Our earliest memories of motor vehicles date from that time. Convoys of sand-coloured army trucks and jeeps wending their way to and from the base. Outlandish machines bristling with weapons and swarming with otherworldly figures, each of which represented a danger for every one of us.

From time to time, however, a different kind of vehicle would appear. It would pass fleetingly along the road, sometimes even stopping for a moment or two at the crossroads to drop off a grown-up returning from Damietta. These were private cars containing Egyptians.

We had no reason to be frightened of them. We could give free rein to our sense of wonder. All of our senses responded to the utter newness of these contraptions which were so different from the familiar landmarks of our lives by virtue of their flawless lines, the smooth finish of their bodywork, their even, gleaming colours, the purr of their powerful invisible engines, and the smell of petrol and exhaust fumes--which we would greedily fill our lungs with, racing for the privilege, and which was as intoxicating to us as the headiest of perfumes.

Then the marvellous machine would set off towards the town, whose unknown charms it epitomized, all those charms that then seemed to us for ever out of reach.

We did not know that shortly those of us who had successfully completed the course of compulsory education would have the opportunity to continue our studies in Damietta itself. At least the well-to-do or educated families would seize this opportunity for their children.

The first journey

Damietta was too far away for us to go there on foot or even by donkey. So one fine day, without any warning, we were taken to the famous crossroads and told to wait. We didn't know what we were waiting for but we were very excited. It was the first time that, instead of going there by ourselves, without any grown-ups knowing, we had been taken to the crossroads by one of them, acting on behalf of all our parents. A car approached, slowed down and stopped. The driver looked at us with an encouraging smile. Then our hearts missed a beat. He asked us to get in.

During that first car ride we were just as frightened as we were thrilled. But fright soon disappeared. On days when it wasn't too hot some of us would stand on the running-board, clinging to a window ledge, leaving the seats for grown-up passengers. What words can express the elation induced by speeding headlong into the wind, at that moment when we cast off for ever the weight of our childhood? In the fields, the peasants would often stop work to watch us whizz by, so quickly that we had no time to give them the customary sign of greeting.

Two or three years later, when the war was over, some families decided to go and settle in Damietta, or to send their eldest children there to live with other families who had already made the move. This gave us an opportunity to explore a town that we had until then only glimpsed as we hurtled through it in the collective taxi that took us from the village to school and back. Explore was the word. Damietta seemed immense to us, with empty squares so huge that each one could have held an entire village, with tarred roads along which plied buses, trucks, private cars and taxis, and across which nonchalant donkeys ambled at random. The small crossroads at the entrance to our village that had for years seemed to us to be a rendezvous for all the traffic in the world, was no more than a pathetic memory.

Disturbing images

But our discoveries were only just beginning. Another enchantment lay in store for us in Damietta--the cinema. The magic of light-borne images. And stories that unfolded, with a beginning and an end, with heroes whose love, courage and kindness enabled them to triumph over fate. And for whom the present ceased to be a mere repetition of the past.

Most of the films were Egyptian. But some of them were foreign--English or American--and they were even more disturbing. These men and women were indefinably different from us. We were affected by their sufferings and their joys, but why did we feel that the nevertheless belonged to a different planet from ours? Because of their uninhibited way of talking about themselves? Because of their way of tackling life head on, of seeing an adventure through to its conclusion, of deciding and acting according to their own desire and judgement, without bothering about what the family thought or what the neighbours would say?

These men and women...but particularly the women, so incredibly free in their speech and in their movements. Their image remains engraved on our memories. Young, beautiful, blonde, elegant, they drove convertibles. Why did this image disturb us so? Around us were other pretty girls and women whom we sometimes saw in the streets bareheaded, with their hair loose. They might be stylishly dressed, in frocks or skirts that discreetly emphasized the curves of their bodies. But they had to be accompanied by father, brother, uncle or husband. Even for a quick errand, on a donkey, a woman had to be escorted by a man. And now here was this fabulous American actress who went out alone and drove all be herself, controlling unaided a piece of machinery so mysterious, so complicated, that it seemed to be pre-eminently the preserve of men.

On the brink of adolescence cars and women were to be a source of other mixed emotions. A few of the older boys took us out of the town at nightfall, to an isolated spot where, between the trees or by a fence, parked cars could be made out. The older boys encouraged us to go nearer, using all our stealth and guile, to look through the window and see what was going on inside. A man and a woman were kissing passionately, impetuously. Once or twice it seemed to us, in the darkness, that they were going even further. We watched them, torn between a sense of shame at intruding on their privacy and fear that we would be caught spying on them. We would make a bolt for it when the man's gaze met ours or when the woman suddenly stared at us with terrified eyes.

The privileged few

Cars thus lit for us, one by one, all the fires of the modern world, so alien to our ways, which were however already directly exposed to them: the desire for escape and self-assertion, a love of technical efficiency, the emancipation of women, freedom....

But for most of us the ownership of a car would long remain an unattainable dream. We had left Damietta and were continuing our studies in Cairo. At university, some students occasionally turned up in their parents' cars. A few others, even less numerous, drove their own. They were the most privileged of all.

The rest, if they came from far away, had to take the bus. This was the 1950s when public transport was a disaster. Buses were old wheezy vehicles sagging beneath the weight of too many passengers. It was impossible to get in through the jam-packed doorways unless you were ready for a fight. Being young, we were lucky enough to be able to get in through the windows. Envious looks and sometimes insults were cast our way by those whose girth or social standing prevented them from doing likewise....

Imported luxury goods were subject to increasingly restrictive measures. And these measures applied especially to private cars. Yet mysteriously these steadily increased in number. City streets, which had not been designed to accommodate such a concentration of traffic, became each year slightly more congested than before.

The capital, far bigger though it was than Damietta, suffered an even more massive invasion. Whole districts, suburbs and satellite towns sprang up around it. And as the distances grew, so new highways were built, and were immediately submerged by more and more cars. Except for a small minority of people who worked and lived in the same neighbourhood, it became increasingly difficult to do without a means of mechanical transport. How could one walk to an office, factory, faculty, or cinema miles from home, or to the homes of friends and relatives who were now scattered far and wide?

In the buses, the number of which never kept up with the increase in the working population, travelling became a mental and physical ordeal. Taxis, which were too expensive, could be taken only from time to time. The private car became a necessity as well as a status symbol. People paid for them by instalments, or purchased imported second-hand models which could be tinkered with all day long. But those who had succeeded in business or saved some money while working for a few years in an oil-producing country made it a point of honour to buy, cash down, a brandnew German sedan.

Driving into an impasse

Cars were no longer a pipe-dream. Either you had one or, if you didn't, you wanted one. But for everyone they had lost their mystery. They were everywhere, they could be seen, they could be touched. All the streets were lined with them, bumper to bumper, the latest models and ancient jalopies. Cars no longer partook of the eternal springtime of dreams. Every day we saw specimens in every stage of physical deterioration. There were traffic jams, accidents, breakdowns, causing endless problems both for drivers and for the millions of passers-by. Everywhere people cursed the fact that they needed cars and bemoaned the frustration they caused....

Strangely, the cars seems to have created as many problems as it has solved. A gigantic game which ends in a draw, in which everyone may be said to feel a little freer and slightly more trapped. We produce more, we consume more, we drive more. At the cost of gutted cities, expressway strung between apartment blocks, blocking off the sky in whole districts, parks sacrificed for the sake of parking lots and pollution that sets a screen between us and the light of day....

Perhaps, despite everything, the car remains a pipe-dream. Or a marvellous machine that meekly obeys us, on roads that do not disturb the beauty of the landscape or the cows' slumber. But the dream is no longer one of the future. It is nostalgia for a lost childhood, near the end of the war, at a deserted crossroads.

MAHMOUD HUSSEIN is the pen name of two Egyptian writers who have published several books of political sociology, most recently versant sud de la liberte, Essai sur l'emergence de l'individu dans le tiers monde ("The Southern Face of Liberty, an essay on the emergence of the individual in the Third World", La Decouverte, Paris 1989).

COPYRIGHT 1990 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group