Certainly, everyone at the airport today will think I’m a criminal. No one will think I’m a poet who writes and rewrites a poem time after time until the poem is happy with its shape and I am happy too. I’m not a hero that I should feel pride, and I’m not a criminal that I should feel shame.

During these moments, I’m a person without feeling.

As though I were dreaming that I’m dreaming.

As though I weren’t here, weren’t with them, weren’t with anyone, weren’t coming from anywhere, weren’t going anywhere. As though it were someone else they were taking away.

This was my state exactly as I fumed and almost exploded, though appearing before all those people as calm as an ironed shirt in a drawer full of clothes.

This was my state exactly as I wished I were a Greek god so that I could kick the blank walls of the airport with a sacred rope sandal and leave its high ceiling resting on nothing but the pillars of my curses.

On that day, when the past had still to become the past, the policeman took me up the stairs and all the way to my seat on the plane. Only there did he undo the shackles that linked my wrist to his, and leave.

I know what the others passengers thought as I came through the door of the plane in shackles. I know why the flight attendant switched the smile in which she’d been trained for so many months for a fearful look of suspicion and then averted her face. I know why, when she put the meal down in front of me, she did so as though she were a faceless prison guard thrusting a loaf at the prisoner through the aperture in his cell door. I know that people find it the more comfortable option to respect you if they see that someone else respects you and to despise you if they see that someone else despises you. But shouldn’t a person make up his own mind? Shouldn’t he examine the reasons to respect or despise you? I tell myself sometimes, especially when things are a little mixed up, that the brain is the laziest of the body’s members and its dullest.

Alone, between sky and earth, I think of Radwa.

Radwa would pay for the policies of Sadat and his successor Mubarak in the coin of her own private life. She would experience the expulsion of her husband and dedicate her time to caring for her son without the presence of his father for seventeen years, except for short and intermittent periods. When she was obliged to undergo a life-threatening operation, she would be alone with Tamim, who was not yet three years old, while I was in Budapest and forbidden to put my mind at rest about her and be by her side. My mother flew to Cairo the moment she heard of the disease and that lightened the burden for me a little. Once more I had failed to be where I ought to be.

I fail to love, or show tenderness, or support, or help, or to look after, or be of use to those whom I love.

I had left Budapest for Doha to visit Mounif, Majid, and ‘Alaa. While there, I got a telephone call from Radwa informing me that she had to have a major operation that couldn’t wait.

What can the banished do to defeat a state, when their bodies are singled out as the target of its army, its police, its prisons, its borders, its stamps, and its ‘sovereignty’? Whenever anyone tried to intercede with a senior Egyptian official to allow me to visit or to have my name removed from the blacklist at the airport, he was told, “It’s a matter of sovereignty.” Long live sovereignty!

If one could voluntarily decide to go mad, I would have decided to go mad.

It occurred to me that the lucky Arab is the one who wakes up one morning and finds that he’s gone mad. That way it’s all over.

I haven’t gone mad.

Or has a thread of madness accompanied me till now, without my being aware of it?

I returned from Doha to Budapest stricken with silence. I turned the key in the door, sat down on the chair to rest for a few minutes before opening my suitcase, and woke up the next day still fully dressed. I went to work and found I couldn’t stand the voices of my colleagues. Every time one of them opened his mouth, I wanted him to shut up. I asked for permission to leave.

That mood didn’t last for more than a day.

I didn’t realize at the time how much ground I had covered in terms of educating myself in getting used to things being disordered, in getting used to the fact that things were by their very nature disordered. The process had begun slowly and with difficulty in June 1967 and continued to firm up by degrees as I underwent all the other unpleasant personal shocks which, with time, had ceased to shock me, by which I mean that I became too dulled to collapse or grumble at my pains. I’d tell my friends jokingly, “Don’t worry, guys. I’m not going to feel bad every time I’m supposed to. I’m not going to get sick every little while. I’m going to drop dead without warning.”

The operation was successful but to this day Radwa’s health remains generally delicate and this makes her susceptible to pains that she has learned to bear with a dazzling courage I’m incapable of learning from. If I catch so much as a passing runny nose I get into a panic and fill the world with my complaining and whining, and if my temperature goes up one degree I’m a dead man for sure (a business that deserves to be mocked and is apparently a bane of the male — but who among us can claim to have rid himself completely of the weaknesses of male nature that have come down to us through the generations?).

Did I say I’d fill the world with my complaining at every passing runny nose? Didn’t I say in the paragraph before that I didn’t feel bad or complain? Am I contradicting myself here? Yes! I’m contradicting myself and it amazes me that people are terrified of exposing their contradictions, flying off the handle in dismay at such an ‘ugly’ charge and defending themselves as vehemently as if their honor had been attacked. It doesn’t scare me when someone yells in my face during a discussion, “But you’re contradicting yourself, Mr. Mourid!” I reply “Of course I’m contradicting myself. You’re right. That is indeed a contradiction.” Sometimes I apologize for my contradictions and sometimes I don’t. Humans are full of contradictions however much they deny it. Each of us holds within him contradictory voices to each of which he listens at different times, thus making his inconsistency clear for all to see. Nor do those who yell at me “You’re wrong, Mr. Mourid” scare me. Of course I will sometimes be wrong. What’s so strange about that? Am I so stupid as to always be right?

Radwa will suffer for years from an irritable colon and in Budapest she contracted acute pleural effusion, which is life-threatening. An aged Hungarian doctor, experienced and gentle, gives her treatment and she recovers once more. With her illness and her permanently delicate health, she seems to me to be made of glass that may break at the lightest touch and this terrifies me. Nevertheless, she confronts the challenges in her life with the hardness of a diamond. Throughout Tamim’s childhood, she organized her university, political, social, and cultural calendars so as never to leave the house after seven in the evening. I was well aware that she was under threat not only of possible harm at a time when the two of them were alone but even of being arrested for her political stands. This was what she feared most, and it was impossible for her to predict how best to deal with the consequences should that happen. Phone calls weren’t easy at that time. Letters sent by mail took a month or a little less (e-mail, chat rooms, and Messenger would have been something out of science fiction). In the slightly more distant past, when Radwa went to Amherst in the United States in 1973 to obtain a doctoral degree, we had to wait more than a month before we could set up our first telephone call.