Two Women in One

by Nawal El Saadawi

  Standing close to her and motionless, he whispered, ‘Bahiah’.

  She shuddered at the sound of his voice. The name Bahiah had become very special. It was not like the name Bahiah — any Bahiah — but referred to her in particular, her and nobody else, her to the exclusion of all others, that particular being of hers now standing beside him, the borders of her body sharp, separate from the space outside, the lines made by her hand on the canvas creating their own special shapes and movement, the deliberate movement she had wrested from the jaws of the wills of others.

  She looked around. They were alone, standing side by side, not touching, still separated by that hair’s breadth as fine as air, so fine the lightest touch could have torn it away. But neither of them moved. They stood as still as two stone statues. Their eyes were motionless, as though they were terrified. Their skin was pale, as though the blood had drained from it.

  It was like the fear we know in dreams, except that it was real. She was aware of its truth because her body trembled as she stood upright, and because of her sweating palms. Cautiously she moved one foot, then the other, beginning to move her body towards the door. But his body followed: ‘Bahiah’.

  She stopped, rooted to the ground for an instant, and answered faintly, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Uncertainly, she realized that the regular sound of footsteps on the asphalt came from her own shoes. The sound was familiar, like her name ringing in the air. But her mind no longer trusted her ears. What sounded familiar to her ears became extremely strange to her mind. What had brought her feet to the asphalt of this street? She had never seen it before. It was not one of Cairo’s usual flat streets which stretched on and could be seen right to the end. This street was not horizontal. It rose, like a road climbing a high mountain.

  Astonished, she asked, ‘Have we left Cairo?’

  When she heard his voice beside her, she realized that she was not on her own and that the two of them had reached Qasr al-Aini street, passed through Fam al-Khaleej square and were now heading for Jebel al-Muqattam. She had never been there before. She had never walked up a mountain road, as she was doing now. Her life had always run on flat, horizontal lines. Her home was on the ground floor, and she entered it by climbing four steps. The tram took one or two steps. The dissecting room was on the ground floor, and the lecture hall was just three steps above the college grounds. The six steps leading to the laboratory were as high as she had ever climbed.

  Now something strange began to happen to her body as she moved away from the earth. It became both heavier and lighter. It was as if she were shedding her body with every step, jettisoning the invisible weights that had hung from her wrists like heavy iron bracelets.

  The sound of her shoes on the asphalt became less pronounced. Her feet moved independently — lightly — as if they no longer carried her body, or as if her body had become weightless. There was not a sound in the air around her. She clapped her hands together as she ran happily along: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever climbed Jebel al-Muqattam.’ She heard the echo of her voice from the foot of the mountain. She stopped and looked down. There was the great city, like a green carpet spread before her, with houses like tiny boxes. Her feet were inside her own familiar shoes, on the edge of the mountain. Near them another pair of feet stood inside an unfamiliar pair of black shoes.

  She raised her eyes in astonishment and they met his. They were black, with a strange penetrating gaze that tore the mask from her face, stripped away the layers, making her visible.

  She turned her head away and found nothing but the sky above and the bottomless abyss. She was overcome by that mysterious feeling that something momentous was about to happen to her: the chunk of brick underfoot would suddenly peel away from the mountain and her body would be drawn by the dreadful force of the earth and would shatter into little pieces, like particles. And just as in a dream, it seemed to her that had she jumped, her body would have torn loose from the earth’s grip and soared into the sky. She stretched out one foot and nearly followed it with the other and jumped, but some mysterious force pulled her back. She thought it was his hand; but he was far from her, erect and motionless as a statue. His arms hung at his sides and his black eyes were firmly fixed on her, penetrating the long narrow corridor deep within her and seeing her profound secret depths. Then there was that rapid throb like the pulse of the universe in the night silence, and that mad rapid motion she had buried in the folds of her self and rolled up inside her, layer after layer, until it had become invisible and eternally secret.

  The blood drained from her face and her fingers felt ice-cold. She closed her eyes with that deceptive movement she had learnt in her dreams. Then she opened them and realized that she was not dreaming and that the black eyes were still on hers. The blackness was not completely black; it was tinged with blue, a deep blue that spoke of unknown depths like the blue of the sky when we gaze at it and see that it does not exist, and the body trembles with awe at the immensity of the universe — a dreadful and terrible immensity silent and still, frightening not because of its real stillness, but because of its underlying motion, a violent motion of dazzling speed.

  She hid her face in her hands and gasped almost inaudibly, ‘Saleem’.

  He answered in his low voice, ‘Yes’.

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Of death.’

  ‘Death does not exist . . .

  ‘But I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of life then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anyone seeing her at that moment would have sensed that she was trembling. But her fear was not the kind that takes us away from danger; this was different, a fear that carries us closer to danger rather than further from it. It was a violent consuming desire to experience the peak of danger to its very end, that we might be rid of it for ever. This fear had weighed upon her heavily ever since she came to have a body of her own, separate from the world, wrenched from her mother’s body as a small definite mass. The earth drew her downwards, the sky pulled her upwards, and the air pressed in from all sides. Her small body was always in the world’s grip, caught between the lion’s jaws. She was sure that someday the jaws would inevitably close. Had she ever doubted this, she might have considered some attempt at escape. But she bore her certainty within her body, in every throbbing cell, and she knew that the time would come and the pulse would stop. So sure was she that she longed for that moment, for the pulse to stop, relieving her of the burden.

  She said faintly, ‘Hold me with all your strength until . . . ’

  She stopped before she had finished the sentence. She had wanted to say ‘until my pulse stops’, but her secret death wish, once out in the open, would have seemed taboo and she understood why, for most people, the forbidden wishes are the real ones and the licit wishes unreal.

  One move from him would have been enough to carry her to the end. But she had always been afraid of ends. She sensed the danger of arrival and realized the impossibility of going back where she had come from. She had always known that, in some magical way, she could become another person, someone other than Bahiah Shaheen — she could become her real self.

  She moved away from him, walking on ahead with her long, quick strides, her black eyes looking up. Their colour was just black enough, her nose upturned just enough, her skin pale from ill-concealed fear. She heard his voice from behind: ‘Bahiah!’

  She would not stop or answer. He shouted so loudly that his voice echoed from the mountain side:

  ‘Bahiah!’

  She began to run from the voice, but it came to her from every direction. She put her hands over her ears, but he pulled them away, shouting angrily, ‘Why are you running away?’

  She tried to move, but his arm blocked her way. She pushed at him with all her strength, but he pulled her towards him. He reached out
, turned her face up, looked her straight in the eyes — angry eyes of black tinged with a terrible dark blue, like the blue of a bottomless sea. She tried to turn away but he stopped her, saying angrily, ‘Bahiah Shaheen will always prevent you from attaining any goal. You will always stand in the middle of the road and fall into the trap of the mundane, like countless millions of others.’

  His voice shook. He let go of her head and his hand fell trembling to her chest. Even her eyes were flickering. Everything in her life felt shaky. She had heard this trembling voice once, twice, many times, hundreds of times before — every day when she sat on the tram and watched the coined human pieces, when she saw the male students with their thick spectacles poring over their lecture notes, when she saw the female students with their legs stuck together, when she heard the lectures delivered in that monotonous drone, when the alarm clock assaulted her ears and when her father called her in that voice of his. Nothing could halt this monotony; it would continue for ever.

  She was consumed by an overwhelming desire to stop this monotony which took possession of her constantly; a desire to shout, for no reason; to jump through the window and break an arm or a leg, to plunge a kitchen knife into her chest so that she would cry and hear her cries with her own ears and know for certain that she was alive and not dead. She had a strong and persistent desire to feel alive to the extent of committing a capital crime, a desire to kill her own body, while conscious and with full intent. She knew it would not have been a crime. There would be a crime only if her body was killed without her consent. She knew that another will was lying in wait for her, ready to seize the slightest opportunity to destroy her — her foot slipping on the tram step, a momentary distraction when crossing the street, a bullet tumbling randomly through the air.

  To die in such a way, by chance and without her consent — that would really be a crime. But death would be legitimate if she were its deliberate target, if she were its choice and it hers.

  When she looked up, she didn’t see him. Turning quickly, she saw his back disappearing round a bend in the street. She shouted, ‘Saleem!’

  But there was no reply. She shouted louder, ‘Saleem!’

  Her quavering voice bounced back and forth off the mountain, but no one answered.

  She stretched out on the bed in her small room. Her black eyes glittered in the dark like diamonds, absorbing the darkness and turning it into white rays of light. Millions of tiny particles floated in the rays, spinning in systematic circles, like the eternal motion of the universe, like the regular hum in her ear, and swept through her, down through her neck and legs, producing a light tickling sensation like the flow of blood through her hands and feet, gathering like pin-heads at the tips of her fingers and toes. It was like the tiny feet of ants crawling under her skin and bones. She could almost hear their continuous faint buzz, like the millions of noises that make up the stillness of the night.

  As she got up and her bare feet touched the cold floor, she lost her balance and would have fallen, had it not been for her strong legs and taut muscles, which kept her body straight. She pulled the canvas from behind the bed, turned the light onto it and sat on the floor on the small white mat, gazing at the cornelian-red particles floating in the light. As she squeezed her brush she felt pain, like the prick of needles. But her hand would not stop. It shuttled over the painting, with that deliberate movement, that urgent sweeping desire to experience the pain to the full, to press until her fingers bled and were crushed, putting an end to her pain.

  A mysterious sweeping desire shook her body and seemed to stir the earth under her. It travelled from her fingers down through her arms, neck and head, as if along a taut electric wire, so that her fingers became stiff, her neck tense, and her head immobile.

  Anyone seeing her at that moment would have thought she had been crucified. Were it not for the movement of her hand, she could have been thought to have died in her chair. But she was fully awake.

  Her wide open eyes could detect the faintest of lines, even a dot. Her fingers could cut the black universe into two with the tip of her brush, making a white line, a hair’s breadth, like the horizon separating the earth from the sky and day from night: a white line tinged with a dark deep red the colour of blood.

  When she saw this deep red, her eyes widened, full of the dread of eyes before real blood. What was it about the colour of blood that frightened her? She gazed at the blue veins under her skin and felt the regular pulse in her wrist, one beat after the other. Some mysterious hidden feeling told her that the next beat would be the last and that the sound would stop, that she would breathe no more. She strained to listen. The final moment was still far off, but her ears could already detect it — faint and drawing nearer, just like the beat before and the next one, a continuous buzz that she fervently wished would cease. She strained to hear, waiting for the next beat and fearing that it would never come.

  The alarm woke her in the morning. Her father’s great eyes loomed over her bed, drawing her up, out of her room and out of the house. They followed her to the tram and the college. Then his thick palms shoved her into the dissecting room.

  She stood on one foot alongside the marble table, lifting the other high as if to kick someone, then put it down with all its weight on the table’s edge. A forbidden posture for man or woman. Dr Alawi, who would sweep past the tables in his white glasses and his short white coat, was the only man who could stand like that, alongside her table, one foot on the floor, the other balanced on the edge of the table next to hers. His blue eyes would be fixed on hers, but she never lowered her gaze. Her black eyes continued to look ahead, staring into space as if seeking something. They released millions of floating particles into the atmosphere. They probed the minute creatures drifting through the world, searching among the thousands of similar beings for the extraordinary face, for the eyes that would see her and make her visible — the black eyes that would pick her face out from among the others, and extricate her body from among the millions of bodies lost in the world.

  But the faces were all the same, both in the dissecting room and out in the street. In the spacious but crowded college grounds, she felt as if she were drowning alone in a sea of people, unseen and unrecognized, and that her face had become like those of her fellow students. Bahiah, Aliah, Suad and Yvonne — it was all the same. Without thinking, she found herself fleeing the crowds, withdrawing to that small secluded corner opposite the college fence, behind the building. She sat on the wooden stool, leaning forwards, gazing at the tiny, palm-sized patch of earth where no green grass had ever grown. Unlike the earth around it, this furrowed patch was always mud-coloured, and between the ridges millions of tiny creatures, the size of ants, came and went.

  ‘Bahiah . . . ’

  The name sounded as if it were someone else’s and she jumped up from her stool. She saw the black eyes penetrating her own, tearing away their mask, stripping off the cover, penetrating the long narrow corridor, mercilessly and without hesitation, to her innermost depths. One brief moment more would be enough to reach the end.

  But she called out faintly, ‘Saleem.’

  He remained silent, looking at her. ‘Why did you leave me yesterday?’ she asked.

  His unflinching eyes fixed hers. She hid her face in her hands and cried.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked her in a hushed tone.

  ‘You don’t love me enough.’

  ‘You don’t love anybody enough. You fear love like it was death — you’re middle-of-the-road. That’s Bahiah Shaheen for you.’

  ‘No!’ she shouted.

  He handed her his white handkerchief to dry her tears. Her black eyes glistened in the sunlight and he smiled. ‘What did you do last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Haven’t you painted anything new?’

  ‘No.’

  He paused for a moment. Then: ‘And what are you doing tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know’, she whispered.

 
; Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a small key. He handed it to her. ‘This is the key to my flat in al-Muqattam’, he said. ‘Come any time after three. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  He vanished behind the college building. As she stood there, her fingers coiled around a small metal object with a rounded top and a hole in the middle. Its tail had small pointed teeth. As she ran her fingers over it, a shiver swept through her like particles of soft hot sand tingling in her hands, down through her legs, up through her head, along her neck and arms, and accumulating in the hand that gripped the small object.

  It looked like the key to any other door. But she knew that objects change when feelings do. A little metal key can suddenly become magic, radiating heat that surges through the body like a burst of air and swells in the palm of the hand, filling it to overflowing.

  She felt drops of sweat in her hot hand under the solid object, but when she ran her finger over its metal surface, she froze. Wrapping it in her handkerchief, she put it in her pocket and slipped through the crowded grounds, moving with a panther’s long strides. She felt eyes staring at her, and slid her hand into her pocket to hide the key, as if, magical as it was, it might tear through handkerchief and pocket, leaping into view, as visible as the sun.

  As she headed unthinkingly towards the college, her hand still thrust into her pocket, she heard a voice calling, ‘Bahiah.’

  She turned and saw Dr Alawi behind his white spectacles, surrounded by female students.

  ‘Bahiah, where’ve you been?’ he asked in his authoritative tone. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  Momentarily at a loss, she said, ‘I’ve been in the girls’ lounge.’

  ‘Come to my room for five minutes’, he said in a tone that bordered on command.