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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The price of things
By Fayza Hassan
My maternal grandmother lived in Europe throughout the first World War. By the time the second big round of European hostilities broke out, 20 years later, she had already settled permanently in Egypt, but the memory of the horrors she had witnessed was revived by the news that filtered through, disturbing her in her new, sheltered environment. Extremely troubled by her daily perusal of the newspapers, she did spare us the most painful tales of death and destruction because we were still very young, but insisted on telling us repeatedly that we were the luckiest children in the world. She dwelt particularly on the fact that we had never had to go hungry. We did not know how it felt to go to bed on an empty stomach, she kept repeating over and over.
I remember her hovering over us during meals, making sure that we polished our plates, reminding us constantly of the plight of children just like us who, through no fault of their own, were starving at the very moment we were dispatching a tasty mouthful of spinach. Long after the war was over, my grandmother continued to use the same technique to make us "eat up", but as we had grown older, she felt she could embellish her accounts with more details. We were told of the time when she and my mother had to survive on potatoes alone for over a month, and of the trips fraught with untold dangers, made in the dead of night, to a distant farm where they hoped to acquire, at an exorbitant price, a bottle of milk, a dab of butter or, sometimes, a bunch of fresh radishes or watercress for a real feast. The story I personally preferred was that of the kitchen drawer in their small apartment in Lausanne, which my grandmother periodically managed to fill with the slabs of cooking chocolate she hoarded, to be eaten only in case of emergency. Since chocolate was a non-existent item in our diet at the time, I wished with all my heart for a war that would deprive us of all other nourishment, forcing my mother to turn to this unique source of energy to keep us alive.
Although I was prompt to heed my grandmother's good advice, warding off hunger with admirable consistency, my brother and sister seemed to require more sophisticated ploys to get them through their fare. Neither threats nor entreaties ever produced the desired results. My sister played desultorily with her food, moving the larger morsels directly into the mouth of our faithful dog, cleverly concealed under the dining room table, while my brother picked and chose what he liked and screamed blue murder whenever ordered to stop fooling around and finish what was on his plate. Despite all her efforts, my grandmother had eventually to face the evidence. Food was being sinfully wasted, on a daily basis, by her spoiled grandchildren.
At a loss, she finally abandoned her war stories in favour of new ones, featuring our father's backbreaking efforts to earn the living that we were happily squandering away. "Do you know how much this cost?" she would ask crossly, pointing to the roasted chicken or the steamed peas, then she would proceed to tell us. Soon our meals began to sound like a recitation of my mother's household account book. Unimpressed, my sister stopped over-feeding the dog once, long enough to wonder aloud if food would cost less once ingested. If that was the case, she commented wisely, "then she"--pointing at me--"is saving you a bundle."
My brother, on the other hand, said nothing, but still refused quite firmly to have anything to do with the vegetables. He must have been quite irked by my grandmother's constant reminder of the price of things, however, because one day, as we walked into the dining room, we were presented with the unusual spectacle of festive-looking red and blue paper flags firmly planted with toothpicks in every one of the serving dishes. On closer examination, we discovered that each flyer bore a painstakingly penned-in number. "See," my brother told my grandmother gently, "you won't have to tell us how much money we are wasting. It is all written down on the tags." My grandmother gasped, but, seemingly indifferent to her reaction, my brother resolutely pushed towards me the artichoke hearts she had been dishing onto his plate, and which he had valued at three piastres apiece. "She can have four," he said generously; then, "she will be eating twelve piastres for starters," he announced, counting carefully on his fingers.
