Love in the Kingdom of Oil

by Nawal El Saadawi

  ‘OK. She has made her choice and now she has to lead the women to the way of salvation.’

  ‘What are you saying, sister?’

  ‘There is undoubtedly a path.’

  ‘Haven’t you become pregnant yet?’

  ‘It isn’t easy to find a man capable of love.’

  In the depths of her she longed for love. The other women had husbands and children. Each one of them could list the names of her children on her fingers. Their eyes were full of indifference to everything. They no longer had hope in life, for what had it achieved for them? She had not found anything, but at least she was not ashamed of uncovering her face, and looking unreservedly into the light of the moon.

  ‘Was it because of this that she had never in her life seen the man of her dreams?’

  The man was standing in the doorway. She did not open her mouth. Even if she had said anything he would not have been able to understand, and if by any chance he had understood, fate would inevitably intervene to separate them. They were living within a system governed by fate. And fate only recognised one type of love. That fierce passion for the land and His Majesty. Perhaps that was because of the boundaries imposed by the oil. The strength of ebb and flow hidden in black waters, the roar of the wind and the movement of the waves and the gushing of the waterfall. It was certain that the man standing in front of her was not the man of her dreams. Both of them came from opposing points of the compass to meet by chance. As if all that had brought them together was fate.

  * * *

  ‘Nor was she an excellent cook. She was a woman without value who tried to derive her value from the value of goddesses.’ It was the voice of her husband, or perhaps her boss at work, describing her to the policeman. On her way to work, she sometimes used to pass in front of a kitchen, and notice onions hanging in the window. The sight would strike her like the stab of a dagger. She would long to die before one hair of those head-like bulbs was touched. In her dream the yellow hairs of the onion heads appeared to her like snapping teeth, grabbing her neck from behind and throwing her the other side of death.

  ‘Perhaps she needed some leave to take a holiday.’

  The woman did not have the right to take a holiday. It was as if when the door opened and she went out, she would not return. The thought of love came to her. A great love deserving the death of a woman who had not known love, a woman who had dwelt in a perpetual prison. The non-existent wind, the smoke and the black particles, the silence and the rustling of the pages of the newspaper. The lower half of a sleeping man, and the kitchen. Yes. An aroma of grilled meat might waft from the kitchen and the man would wake up. Appetite would awaken and perhaps love would as well. However, the place itself never used to change. She was pushed into him by virtue of her instinct of self-preservation. The meals were never-ending, but they were not sufficient to quench desire. Yes, there was paper and the typewriter. She tapped out the request with her fingers.

  ‘Did she request a holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had she obtained the agreement of her husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did she manage to go on holiday then?’

  Silence reigned in the interrogation room. The policeman spun round in his swivel chair. He turned on the red light. He kicked out the journalists. He typed a bit more, then spun round. He stared into the faces of her husband and her boss at work. ‘Do you want me to be honest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Won’t the news leak out to the newspapers?’

  ‘Definitely not!’

  ‘OK. Her need to go away was a desperate one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She went away to look for her lost pride. Hers was the pride of an animal who had set herself up on two legs and no longer crawled around on four legs. Indeed, she was not a woman of the kitchen or the bed. She did not memorise the tunes that the women sing in the public baths. And she was not aware of the love that arose in the heart of her husband when he saw her stuffing the cabbage. And more than that, her eyelashes did not flutter when her boss at work or His Majesty looked at her.’

  The policeman’s fingers froze on the typewriter. He erased the phrase ‘His Majesty’ and continued to type with one hand, while with the other hand he wiped the sweat from his face.

  ‘A woman whose eyes are as hard as granite and cut from a mountain of cold ice.’

  At this point the policeman stopped typing completely. He spun his body around a number of times in the chair and then came to a standstill. His face was facing the wall. He did not know exactly who was speaking. Her boss at work or her husband. He did not try to spin the chair round. He continued to stare at the wall, giving his back to the two men.

  ‘What do you mean by this cold ice?’

  ‘I mean that they were two eyes.’

  ‘OK.’

  Her husband exchanged glances with her boss at work. It seemed as if each one of them was trying to imagine the appearance of her eyes. Her boss at work puffed out a dense cloud of smoke from his pipe. Her husband shook his knees and then lowered his eyelids.

  ‘I mean that they were nonchalant eyes. They did not look at you. And if they did look in your direction, it was with a look that went beyond you to a point on the distant horizon beyond your head.’

  ‘Did she ever look at another man?’

  The policeman spun round to face the two men with a look that cut like a sword. They looked at each other before replying together, ‘No, she never used to look at other men. Perhaps for this reason they used to arouse both of us with a desire to slap them so that they would look at us. Yes, you could say that they were impudent eyes, eyes that were nonchalant towards you and me, while paying close attention to everything else, even if it was nothing, a mere dot infinitely small on the horizon.’

  Silence reigned for a long time in the interrogation room. All that could be heard was the rising and falling sound of the three men’s breathing, and the humming of the fan as it spun, and the sound of a fly as it buzzed round and bumped against the red light, and the sound of black particles like a drizzle of rain beating against the window.

  The sounds filtered through to her over the great distance. They all dissolved into one sound with a regular rhythm. The policeman’s silence rang out in a clear manner. She realised that he knew everything. His fingers began to type once again.

  ‘What did her neck look like?’

  ‘Er . . . her neck. This too had a strange appearance, longer than any other neck, as if it was the skyline, rising like the neck of the griffin, a neck that you could not get a hold of in order to strangle it for instance. A neck that aroused your desire, in that you could not dominate it. A neck that was about to . . .’

  Silence fell. The fingers stopped typing. The chair spun round then stopped. All that could be heard was the sound of panting.

  ‘About to what?’

  ‘About to change into its opposite with a sudden movement, twisting and bending in surrender as if carrying a heavy weight.’

  ‘An awesome thing.’

  ‘Yes indeed. There is no doubt that you would tremble before this neck.’

  ‘And what about the rest of her body?’

  ‘That also was awesome.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You would see her body existing indubitably in front of you. An existence that was unendingly present, but that would suddenly vanish to become a quasi-eternal absence.’

  There was total silence. Not even the three men’s breathing could be heard. Perhaps the fan also stopped, or there was a sudden power cut. The lamp went out and the fly flew away or burnt up. All that was left was the drizzle striking her ears with the same rhythm as the pulse of the arteries of her neck, and the whistle of the wind from afar like the silence of the night.

  Then a laugh came to her through the darkness. She did not know which of the men was laughing. A strange staccato laugh like sobbing, high-pitched, resembling the sound of a man guffawin
g. His body shook because of the head shaking with laughter.

  The guffaw came to her from beyond the dunes and the expanse of the lake, resembling the roaring of the wind. It beat against the walls like a drizzle of hail. It filtered under the door with the trickle of black oil. Her face was turned to the wall and her head wrapped in a scarf. With a ninety degree movement of her neck, her head came to face the door. The man was standing with his jallaba tucked up. His head was wet as if it had been soaked by the rain. He shook his hair and his whole self like a frog coming out of the lake. Her eyes met his and there he was, revealing the whites of his eyes with the movement of the wind, hiding the surface to reveal the hidden depths.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  His tone was delicate and controlled, bearing the tenderness of the man when he loses control of his woman. He took off his clothes with the movement of someone trying to strip off a humiliation. He was tall, and his skin was wet and stretched as if made from real leather, glistening in the darkness like a shoe wiped in the rain. He moved towards her with the step of someone who wants to assert that he owns something that he does not possess.

  * * *

  ‘Men are machines for concealing reality, who imagine in their hearts that they possess reality.’

  ‘Are they gods?’

  It was the voice of a woman talking to the other women. It resembled her voice when she was young. Each of them nodded in comprehension.

  ‘We all understand that, sister, but the onion heads are still in the kitchen. No hand has touched them, it is almost time to eat, and the man is shouting. This is clear. Do you understand, sister?’

  ‘Yes, I understand, sister, but frogs have evolved and have emerged from the bottom of the lake into the light, while you women are incapable of movement.’

  Silence fell when the man returned. He shouted as usual demanding food. Then he lay down naked in bed. He stretched out his arm in the darkness under the cover, as if he was stretching his hand underwater. His fingers tried in vain to reach her hand. Finally they reached it across the great distance. She was facing the wall. She felt his hand grasping her, rough and moist with black sweat. The whirlpool bore her to the depths of the earth. His chest was solid, like the chest of a mummy, hollow inside, filled with the emptiness of the world. But there was no escape. She had to put her head on this rock-like chest. As if it was the chest of the god Ekhnaton after they had removed his breasts.

  ‘What are you saying, sister?’

  ‘I’ve realised too late that everything is real. I mean marriage, and perhaps also the search for goddesses, and everything else in life, including death.’

  ‘And love?!’

  ‘No, I don’t love him. If I loved him, the world would be submerged in fantasy.’

  Her body was naked, in contact with the naked world, in all its reality, like flesh. She could have slipped from the bed and fled, but getting out of that well was impossible, or perhaps the oil appeared to her to be better than anything else.

  She bent her arm in the narrow space. She choked with the smoke and the black dust. Death appeared to her to be a type of eternity, and flight appeared to her to be no more than stupidity. Indeed, death was the genius of the living being when it becomes eternal like the gods.

  She pretended to be dead as she lay there. Her body fell into the depths without her bending her other arm. The darkness resembled an immense black eye. An eye that never stopped looking at her. A holy eye that never slept. It must be the eye of the goddess of death Sekhmet, or perhaps the eye of the Lady of Purity looking at her and reminding her of the entrusted message.

  * * *

  She opened her eyes suddenly. The man was staring at her from behind the newspaper. His eyes passed through the paper and penetrated her.

  ‘Yes, she was under constant surveillance.’

  ‘By order of His Majesty?’

  ‘Perhaps, or perhaps it was her boss at work, or her husband. He hired a man to watch her in return for a sum of money. Or perhaps there were three of them – nobody knows exactly. But the surveillance was continual, twenty-four hours a day.’

  The policeman was with them of course, spinning his chair and typing on the typewriter: ‘She met with the women at six-thirty without obtaining permission to meet. She returned home at one-fifty. She drove the vehicle herself without depending on a male driver. All that constitutes a danger to the world order, demanding life imprisonment with hard labour, and the carrying of weights on her head. The matter of course demands that she be dismissed from work and divorced from her husband. If she wasn’t married, His Majesty could have delegated the public judge to sentence her to death.’

  The bed shook in the darkness whenever the man turned from side to side. Groans arose from the wooden planks like the meowing of a cat. With his nose he smelt the aroma of the food. No smell of food was coming from the kitchen. The onion heads were still lying in the sink. The stove was turned off and the aluminium vessel was empty. Its bottom shone under the light with a steely sparkle.

  ‘Aren’t you cooking?’

  From the back of her neck she felt herself being pulled violently beyond the verge of consciousness. Slaps rained down haphazardly on her cheeks, her nose, her lips, her breasts, and her stomach. She could not open her eyes to see what was happening. It was the first time in her life that a man had hit her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to cry out for help?’

  Perhaps it was one of the neighbours coming to see what the noise was. But it was certainly not her who had cried out. Or rather she had cried but no sound had come out. She wanted to conceal the matter in silence. She left her body stretched out on the ground. One of her legs was enwrapped in the strap of the case. She was totally naked apart from the remains of her torn sarwal, which encircled her foot like an anklet. Embroidered round the borders were her name and the name of her husband enclosed in a heart-shaped frame.

  In the pale light her thighs appeared to her vast as if she was looking at them through a magnifying glass. Long and stretching out so far from her that she could scarcely see them over the long distance, as if they were the thighs of another woman.

  Her eyes rose over her body, widening as they rose. They stopped as if stupefied in front of her head, which was dangling above her neck, a black scarf tied around it. Her swarthy face became even swarthier in the dim light, covered as it was with black particles like freckles, and lines like wrinkles drawn with a pen falling away from the corners of her swollen eyelids like black tears, and eyelashes lowered as if they had been transferred from youth to adulthood with a sideways movement of her eyes. She jumped up, tensing the muscles of her arms and legs. She pulled the depths of her inner mind from the caverns of the earth. She remembered that she had seen this face before, and lived through this moment in a previous life. This spectacle of punishment was something she had seen in both waking and sleeping dreams.

  ‘It is shameful for a respectable woman like her to search for goddesses.’

  She heard her voice sobbing. I want at least to die from shame. Then she suddenly silenced her sobbing and a voice came to her resembling the voice of one of the women.

  ‘OK. What’s the problem then? He always beats me and is puffed up with pride. Morning will not come before I have opened the door and left. Yes, I know. I will leave tomorrow, so wipe away those black tears. The world will not be overturned because a woman lay with a strange man in a passing liaison.’

  Her voice changed with every movement of her body, and her body transferred from cold to hot as she turned from side to side. Her smell spread from a depth inside her that she could not probe. The smell of flesh lying in the depths of the earth. Perhaps she wanted to die in that moment. Or she did in fact die – then the tip of her nose touched the tip of his nose, and he withdrew himself from on top of her. Only at that moment did she realise that her body existed and that she had not died yet.

  ‘Was that love?’

  Dampness pervaded her from under the cover with
the trickle of oil. It was sufficient for her to see this trickle of oil to realise that she was without value, and the distant smell was sufficient to purify her from sin. Her mouth like a chimney was puffing out clouds of smoke and the earth was swaying underneath her like water. She was a piece of dryness plunging to the bottom, anchoring her feet to the bottom of the earth.

  ‘A woman fallen to this degree.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know what I mean?’

  ‘Have you got me under surveillance?’

  ‘Yes. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen you with the other man.’

  ‘And I saw you. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘Of course you did. That’s natural. And instead of one wife, God will give me four. Don’t you know that?’

  He was standing up, stretching his neck, full of pride. As the number of women in a man’s life increases, so his neck gets longer. His neck stretched out endlessly like the skyline. It was a scene that terrified her more than death. It put her and the man in a world that was swaying. A house standing on water. A set of scales whose pans sway back and forth without coming to rest.

  He was standing looking upwards. He blinked repeatedly. He tried to grasp heaven with his eyes. As if it was the only thing capable of being grasped in the expanses of fantasy.

  She was still lying in her place. With her hands, she caressed her cheeks, which were swollen from the slaps. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye as he stood there. He was near the door, no more than a few steps away from her. He appeared very far away, as if he was absent.

  ‘How can a man who has been so close as this withdraw to such an infinite distance because of one simple sideways glance on her part?’