by Fadia Faqir
Even though Hinna was furious about the idea of a new woman it did not bring terror to her heart as much as the idea of being thrown out of her house, within whose walls she had tasted those bitter and sweet moments for forty-five years. She had nowhere else to live, she couldn’t live with any of her sons since the eldest lived in a tiny, tworoomed flat. He had two sons and two daughters and they had already turned the balcony into a third bedroom for the girls, so there was hardly enough space for his family as it was. The middle son lived with his wife in one room of his in-laws’ house. His life had become hell because of this; his mother-in-law interfered in every detail of her daughter’s life and always kept an eagle eye on everything that went on between her and her husband. He made great efforts not to let the mother-in-law wreck his relationship with his wife and cause a separation. As for the youngest son, his wife couldn’t get on with her in-laws and the feeling was mutual. She was haughty and treated her husband with disdain because it was she who had solved the problem of finding them a place to live and paid the biggest share of the furnishings for the marital apartment from her personal savings. She also contributed the major share to the family income because she worked in a tourist hotel while her husband was only an insignificant engineer in one of the government departments. For these reasons, the possibility of Hinna going to stay with any one of her sons was completely out of the question.
During the last weeks before Hinna killed her husband, she seemed rather deranged, and was consumed by anxiety since her elderly husband began to spend a great deal of time out of the house, which was uncharacteristic. When he did appear, he hardly talked to her and then only with obvious distaste, he forbade her to share his food or to sit and watch the seven o’clock serial on the television. She concluded that it didn’t require much intelligence to deduce that her husband must have attached himself to another woman, and consequently the question of her remaining in the house had only become one of time. The truth was that it never occurred to Hinna, who had never studied the theory of probability because her education stopped after the fifth year of primary school, that her husband was spending the majority of his time out of the house watching blue films on a video belonging to a friend whom he met in the café, in return for little services or gifts.
However the overriding question of the other woman was enough to set Hinna’s heart ablaze and shatter her nerves because she feared he would throw her out onto the street as soon as that woman arrived in the house to take her place.
One day when Hinna was emptying one of his trouser pockets before washing them, she came upon a picture of a veiled woman, whose age couldn’t have been more than forty, with beautiful seductive eyes and a sensual mouth which did not need a coat of red to make it more alluring. When she looked at the picture she collapsed onto the bed still holding a decorated pin which was pricking her hand, one of the many pins she found, when turning out his pockets, which he bought from the pedlars who worked on the buses. Amongst other things, he bought cufflinks for his shirts, hair preparations and moth balls, sewing thread and elastic to tighten his underwear. He preferred to buy these from pedlars for no other reason than that he enjoyed the way they called out their wares; some told a brief tragic story before the bus started off, while some sang in the style of the well-known songs which were relayed from the enormous broadcasting building standing on the banks of the Nile, but shorter because of the lack of time available to sing them, so they were less likely to cause a headache.
This serious incident, by no means the first, meant that Hinna was forced to consider a novel solution to the tragedy that loomed ahead. Totally convinced that the other woman had become an inescapable reality, her first thought was to escape by killing herself. She found the idea of suicide difficult, however, because her soul rebelled against it and because she had done nothing to call for such an act. She came to the conclusion that there was no alternative but to get rid of her husband and put an end to the matter discreetly and, above all, without letting him find out anything about it in advance.
After Hinna had taken this important decision she felt spiritually at peace and behaved calmly with her husband, ignoring his curses as if everything was normal. It is true that she still repelled his advances but she treated him gently and showed concern for his health and affairs for fear that he might discover what she intended to do to him.
One cold winter’s evening, Hinna got up to place a container full of water on the gas ring. After making quite sure she had heard his habitual snoring which resembled the croaking of a frog and which satisfied her that he was in a deep sleep, she opened the gas cylinder fully, made sure the windows of the apartment were firmly shut, then slipped out to spend the remainder of the night on the sitting-room balcony. She wrapped herself in a blanket and sat with her back leaning against the door, which she had locked from the outside, making sure that it wouldn’t open and allow any air to enter the apartment. She remained in this position all night until daybreak.
As has been said before, the police did not believe that her husband had died by fate and divine decree through asphyxiation because, when they arrived at the apartment – immediately after the urgent call from Hinna’s neighbours who heard her screaming and slapping her face – she appeared to be in perfect health and showed no signs of weakness or breathlessness. Instead she seemed perfectly composed and the police could find nothing wrong with her except that she coughed every now and then. What they did not know, of course, was that she did so because she had spent the entire night outside in the cold. She was, however, also crying quite genuinely because she was upset at losing a friend who had been her companion for forty-five years. When, at the enquiry, the prosecution faced her with the obvious discrepancy between the good state of her own health and her husband’s death by suffocation, despite the fact that she was in the same house when the incident occurred, Hinna claimed that she had spent the night in question in the sitting-room – which was far from the kitchen – because her continual coughing was disturbing the deceased. The police would have believed this story, had the prosecution not discovered a foolish mistake on Hinna’s part. This was to have left the taps of two gas burners open instead of only the one beneath the pot of water. She had been anxious to let as much gas as possible escape in order to cause death in the shortest time, in case her husband woke up and noticed the smell of gas spreading in the house.
After that it was easy to bring a charge of premeditated murder against Hinna and to find plenty of other evidence to support it – the gas taps were only the obvious clue. But Hinna continued to stick to her original statement, and would not deviate from it despite the fact that she was bombarded by questions. The curious thing was that she seemed to believe her story completely and became enraged every time the prosecution mentioned the word murder; it was as if she were being accused of something she had never done. In this way, during the whole period of her investigation and trial, she remained extremely irate at what she considered gross injustice. She was angry with the prosecution whose representative persistently exaggerated the accusations against her, insisting that she was an evil old beast who had devoured her benefactor and the person closest to her, violating all the laws of morality and the godly laws which were ordained by all religions.
As soon as the judgement was announced Hinna felt relief from the burden which was weighing heavily upon her. From behind bars, she set out to dispel the alarm of her sons, who had burst into tears, reassuring them that she would be all right. She even started advising them about the supplies they should bring her when they visited her in prison which included some of her favourite Turkish delight, a crochet needle and some cotton upholstery thread.
Hinna experienced the first moment of real happiness since she killed her husband when she was installed in the ward for the weak with other old women; she regarded it as a place of refuge for the remaining years of her life, convinced that she would be dead before the ten-year sentence was up. But this did not stop her s
ometimes dreaming of a better life should she live to see through her period in prison. She revelled in dreams of reorganizing the furniture in her apartment according to her taste, rather than her husband’s. She also thought of renting out the room he died in – the biggest room in the place – to one or two female students. Her neighbour on the floor below had also rented out to some of those students who came up from the provinces to study at university. She would eat the food of her choice and would start cooking spinach again which she had given up because it was bad for her husband’s mild kidney complaint. She would even buy a new quilt instead of that old one which was worn out and whose history went back to the early days of their marriage – the quilt whose lining she had so often begged her husband to renew.
Meanwhile, Aziza was making a different plan for Hinna, the most beautiful and grandiose plan among small earthly plans, which was that she would accompany her to heaven, and would include her in the golden chariot with its magic, white, winged horses, which would take off to the sound of rousing melodies provided by the god of music and entertainment, like those she heard an army band play long ago in the city. And when the chariot ascended, riding gracefully on the clouds, perhaps Hinna would forget the spinach and the quilt and the husband who killed her a thousand times during forty-five years while she only killed him once. She would then know how much Aziza loved and valued her because she enabled her to obtain the happiness and blessing which she deserved as one of those unfortunate women in the women’s prison. Moreover, she would seat her next to Azima, ‘the giant’, who was the tallest and noblest woman Aziza had known throughout the period of her imprisonment.
Anyone who set eyes on Azima, the giant, would have been shocked by her strange appearance. Even the head of the women’s prison was astonished when he took responsibility for her as an inmate of the prison and saw her for the first time; in fact he abandoned the customary reticence of an official in his position and began to ask her about the secret of her amazing height.
Naturally Azima did not give a clear answer, because she never knew the secret of her awesome height; she was over two metres tall – heads taller than other women – and even quarter of a metre taller than her father, who was considered tall.
Until Azima was twelve, she was a normal child who seemed slightly tall in comparison to her peers but not remarkably so, nor in a way which caused alarm to her family who were preparing her for marriage like her older sisters, like any ordinary young girl looking ahead to the day she would find a suitable match. When Azima failed to obtain her primary certificate – quite usual for most pupils at this stage, given the state of the schools – she became free to complete her education in domestic affairs considered a priority in grooming girls for marriage.
However not long after this signs of Azima’s problem appeared. She began to shoot up with startling speed, made more obvious by her remarkable thinness and the lack of proportion in her physique: her lower half was extended in contrast with the short upper half and her long neck ended in a small head with big, rather bulging eyes so that when you looked at her you thought she might be a giraffe in a human form. By the time she turned sixteen, she had grown so much that she seemed far taller than any other human being around, and was exposed to a great deal of ridicule in the street and even at home; this put a severe strain on her just as it would on any adolescent girl who wanted to be loved and accepted by people generally, and by the opposite sex in particular. She began to feel so bitter that she attempted suicide but her attempt failed because when she threw herself from the balcony of her home, which was on the fourth floor in a block of flats, she fell unexpectedly onto a cement cart which was crossing the road. She suffered nothing more than a broken front tooth which she banged against the metal edge of the vehicle as it proceeded, carrying her with it to the end of the street. The broken tooth was a lasting memorial to this abortive attempt.
If this incident did not scar Azima, another was to change the course of her life completely. A few months later an uncle of hers died in the flower of his youth. It was a tragic death which shook everyone who heard about it. One night, out of the blue, the building where he lived began to fall down. After he had saved his mother, father and his three sisters from certain death, a neighbour asked him to help save her paralyzed mother. He rushed to carry the old woman, who had crawled out to one of the balconies, and threw her down to the crowd which was waiting to catch her below. However, after the woman was saved, a huge piece of stone fell on the young man and squashed him flat.
Then the quarter in which the event took place witnessed a funeral ceremony of the kind which had not taken place since the funeral of the martyrs of the 1919 Revolution, when the people clubbed together to set up the biggest mourning tent possible and hired the best man they could afford to recite the Qur’an. A large crowd paid their respects at his final resting place at the end of an amazing funeral procession which everyone joined in and brought the traffic to a halt for half an hour in Mohamed Ali street, leading to the Citadel. The traffic jam lasted two hours, even after the funeral procession was over. The cars had edged onto the old tramway undeterred by the soldier in charge of the traffic, who hadn’t eaten anything from dawn till the afternoon of the funeral, and now was too busy eating bread stuffed with falafel to notice.
After the members of the funeral procession had paid their last respects, the women grouped together in the small square in front of the house of the recently bereaved family, which was none other than Azima’s family home. Inside, there were enough tears flowing to cause another death by drowning. In the agitation and emotion of the occasion several women fainted through the enormous effort they had expended screaming and slapping their faces. Amongst them was the mother of the dead man and the fiancée whose hopes had been dashed and was left mourning with her intended mother-in-law.
At that time Azima’s talents as a female mourner blossomed in a new way. She was able to deliver words of immense consolation to those who mourned in verses full of pun, antithesis, simile and metaphor and other rhetorical devices emerging from the rich resources of her newlydiscovered imagination and her poetic inspiration, the extent of which matched her bodily height.
In addition to the heroic role he had played, the man they had buried a short time ago was also extremely handsome; this enabled Azima to eulogize and make much of his physical attributes. This served to intensify the grief of the fiancée who abandoned any hope of becoming engaged to a man like him again.
From that day, Azima became the official mourner of the quarter and after a time her activities spread to other surrounding quarters. She could be found on the spot at any calamity which afflicted a family. Through this activity Azima discovered a vocation which enabled her to come to terms with her life, which had always previously been full of psychological pressures of a kind difficult for any young girl to bear. She had suffered continual mockery, directed particularly towards her height which did not conform to the accepted standards of femininity; from time immemorial these have decreed that a woman’s height should correspond to her designated role in society.
As a result of such prevailing standards, Azima’s family were convinced that her desperate wish to marry – an obsession which had gripped Azima’s heart for many a long day – was an impossible dream. As a result of this, she decided to dedicate her life to the world of mourning, thereby finding fulfilment and making a place for herself in society. The gravity of her new role meant that she had to adopt a correspondingly dignified appearance. She made sure that when she went out she wore long, black clothes which suited her because they hid her hugely long legs from view; similarly she began to be seen everywhere with a veil of light chiffon on her head, which she tied in place with a piece of black artificial silk. The only womanly adornment which Azima retained was black kohl on her eyelids which she put on as soon as she woke in the morning and had washed her face; this enhanced the size of her sad expressive eyes, which seemed to belong to someone created only f
or sorrow and pain.
As time passed, Azima discovered she had amazing skills in her field and could produce an elegy to suit the particular qualities of the deceased which she delivered on request for the bereaved relatives. She even managed to versify details of his age, the circumstances surrounding the death and the bodily appearance of the deceased in a harmonious way: if he was tall and broad, like Anwar Majdi in those films of the forties and fifties, then the verse would reflect this and say: “The earth holds his height in her perpetual might” or if he was thin and delicate she would say: “The cruel jaws of death have snatched away this little sparrow’s breath”. She improvised and excelled in her delivery if the deceased was a young man or a beautiful woman who was still a virgin – or at least a virgin according to the official marriage records of the district. She moved the hearts of those who listened and made them explode with grief. The impact was intensified through the words in the poem which she used to rhapsodize about sadness to such effect that she sometimes encountered problems with the bereaved family. On one occasion the brother of one of those being mourned threatened to hit her if she didn’t cease her lamentation and leave immediately because the burden of emotion and sorrow that his mother felt for her dead son had reached such a pitch that she had suffered a serious heart attack. The flame of all this grief had been kindled by the lamentations and elaboration which Azima delivered so passionately in the rajaz metre at the ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of his death.
In addition to this, and to perfect her role which was beginning to earn her enough to make a living, Azima began to study religious exhortations and sermons which she delivered at funeral ceremonies. She flawlessly memorized the Surat al-Rahman [the Merciful] as well as some shorter suras of the Qur’an which had lodged in her memory since her primary school days and she delivered them in a voice which she tried to make as full as possible, not an easy task with a voice box unsuited to the demands of her intensely inspirational style of singing. In her leisure hours she would soothe her voice with aniseed or ginger which the family of the deceased would offer her, or sit at the lunch table to eat boiled meat or a dish of sopped bread, meat and broth. She had also started to interpret dreams, according to the methodology of Ibn Sirin, but changing them radically since she invented happy endings which pleased and relieved the bereaved relatives.