Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Middle Eastern Fiction)

by El Saadawi, Nawal

  The god of science knows no mercy and no shame. How harsh he was! How much I suffered in my worship of him! The body of a living person lost all respect and dignity and became exactly like a dead body under my gaze and my searching fingers, and disintegrated in my mind into a jumble of organs and dismembered limbs.

  The night was cold and desolate, the darkness dead and still. The great hospital with its lighted windows crouched in the dark like a wild hyena. The patients’ groans and racking coughs tore at the curtains of the night. I stood alone at the window of my room, staring at the little white flower opening in the vase beside me. As I touched it I shuddered as if I was a corpse touching a living thing for the first time. I brought it close to my face and inhaled its perfume, feeling like a condemned prisoner pressing his nose against the iron bars of his cell to breathe in the fragrance of life. I put my hand up to my neck and my fingers brushed the metal arms of the stethoscope encircling my neck like a hangman’s noose. The white coat hung round my shoulders reeking of ether, disinfectant and iodine.

  What had I done to myself? Bound my life to illness, pain and death; made my daily occupation the uncovering of people’s bodies so that I could see their private parts, feel their swollen sores and analyse their secretions. I no longer saw anything of life except sick people lying in their beds dazed, weeping or unconscious; their eyes dull, yellow or red; their limbs paralysed or amputated; their breathing irregular; their voices hoarse or groaning in pain. Could I bear this life sentence for the rest of my days? I felt a deep gloom like a prisoner must feel when his last flicker of hope has disappeared.

  I left my room and went to sit in the big common room. I opened a medical journal and tried to read it, but I couldn’t help my thoughts straying to the doctors’ wing where the colleague on night duty was now asleep. For no obvious reason it occurred to me that I was alone with a man in the middle of the night and only a closed door separated me from him. Although I was wide awake this idea came to me like a dream and I felt afraid… No, not afraid, worried… No, not even that, for I felt desire, or not quite desire but a strange disturbing feeling that made me glance furtively at the closed door from time to time.

  The telephone buzzed at my elbow and the night sister’s voice summoned me to a woman patient’s bedside. I was there in a flash. She was a young married woman. I listened to her heartbeat; the valves had thickened with rheumatism and begun to make discordant noises, unlike the melodies I’d heard before from healthy hearts. The valves had lost their suppleness and could no longer shut the doors of the heart tightly, so that the blood seeped through them with a gurgling noise like that of a rotten water-wheel.

  I looked at the young woman and saw a gleam in her eyes. ‘What shall I call him?’ she asked me. ‘He’s my first child.’

  I gave her an injection, hiding her eyes from my sight behind a veil of anaesthetic, and said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t yet know if it’ll be a boy or a girl.’

  Time passed, terrible moments, and I watched the child’s smooth black head emerge from the darkness into the light, enclosed by the hard metallic jaws of science. I listened to the woman’s heart struggling and groaning, the blood gurgling weakly and the valves thumping away strenuously. Then the child shot out and uttered a loud cry and I beamed in jubilation, taken aback at the sight of this human being opening his tiny eyes on life for the first time and seeing the big wide world.

  The next moment I became aware of a terrible silence like the silence of the tomb. The gurgle of blood and the thumping of the valves had ceased. I looked at the woman; her face was as cold and still as a granite statue and her chest immobile like a wooden box. What had happened to her? A few moments before she’d been talking, moving and breathing. I rushed to use all the resources known to medical science for snatching human life from the claws of death. I injected her veins with solutions and stimulants; forced oxygen up her nose; tried artificial respiration to get her lungs working; stuck a long needle directly into her heart; opened her chest and began to massage her heart to restore life to it; blew into her mouth and slapped her face to try and get a reaction out of her. But nothing worked. Science was impotent. Nothing on earth had the power to raise this little closed eyelid even one more time.

  I turned my attention to the newborn baby, kicking its legs and crying and screaming in the nurse’s arms. Wasn’t it extraordinary that this lump of live flesh had come out of that stiff dead body lying on the cold metal table? I buried my head in my hands and sat down heavily in a nearby chair. Why was science, the tyrannical god to whom I’d made obeisance, incapable of explaining to me how the valves in the heart could be destroyed by the effects of rheumatism? How could a young woman’s heart stop for ever? How could a dying woman give birth to a living child, a tiny spark of life emerge from dead matter? How did the flame of life burn brightly and then go out? Whence does man come and whither does he go?

  The focus of the struggle inside me widened out from masculinity and femininity to embrace humankind as a whole. Human beings appeared to be insignificant creatures in spite of their muscles, their brain cells and the complexity of their arterial and nervous systems. A small microbe, invisible to the naked eye, could be breathed in through the nose and eat away at the cells of the lungs. An unidentifiable virus could strike at random and make the cells of the liver or spleen or any other part of the body multiply at a crazy rate and devour everything around them. A small sticky drop that found its way from the tonsils to the heart could result in paralysis. The jab of a fine needle in the tiniest finger could take away hearing, sight and speech. One random air bubble could infiltrate the bloodstream by accident and the body would become a motionless corpse like a stinking, putrefying dog or horse.

  This arrogant, proud and mighty man, constantly strutting and fretting, thinking and innovating, was supported on earth by a body separated from extinction by a hair’s breadth. Once severed — and severed it must inevitably be one day — there was no power on earth which could join it together again.

  Science toppled from its throne and fell at my feet naked and powerless, just as man had done before.

  I looked around me, confused and upset: science had destroyed my former belief without leading me to any new faith. I realized that the path of reason which I had pledged to follow was a short, shallow one ending at a huge, impenetrable barrier.

  I opened my eyes wide. What should I do? Retrace my steps or nestle up to the obstruction and cling to it for protection? Neither choice was really open to me: my acts of rebellion had given me a sort of strength and willpower which made it impossible for me to cling to anything outside myself for protection, the more sc if that thing was a huge obstacle with no way through it.

  So I found my feet taking me in a completely new direction.

  3

  I packed my few belongings and boarded the train that was to carry me far away from the city… away from the science professors and their laboratories, from my mother and the rest of my family, and from men and women alike.

  In a remote, peaceful village I took a little house. I sat on the balcony of my country abode, shifting my gaze from the wide, peaceful green fields to the clear blue sky. The sun’s warm rays fell on my body as I sprawled on a comfortable couch. I stretched and yawned in delicious indolence.

  For the first time there was nobody else with me, and I felt as if I was divesting myself of the covering layers which had accumulated over the long years of my past life. I was confronted by my naked self and I began to examine what I saw in minute detail.

  I didn’t take a knife in my hand or put a stethoscope to my ear, but I stripped myself bare of the medical and scientific knowledge I’d acquired, the people I’d seen and known, and the battles I’d lived through over the years, which had finally led me up a blind alley in my thinking. I unloaded my thoughts as well, and began to feel.

  For the first time in my life I was feeling without thinking, feeling the warm sun on my body, feeling that beautiful placid gre
enness which clothed the earth, the enchanting deep blue covering the sky. Face to face with nature, I saw its enchanting magic unspoilt by the hollow clamour of the city; the debased, imprisoned womanliness of woman; the arrogant overbearing masculinity of man; and the limited, ineffectual chatter of science.

  I realized that nature was a beautiful and mighty god which frail, proud humanity in its brief lifetime had tried to clothe in cheap, ugly garments merely for the sake of pride and a sense of achievement. I felt my heart beating faster and this filled my spirit with strange currents of sentiments and emotions. For the first time for ages I could feel my heart beating without my mind racing ahead to draw mental pictures of heart muscles and arteries and estimate the amount of blood pouring from it. There was a new language to my heartbeats which neither science nor medicine could have explained, a language I understood with my newly awakened feelings but which would have been incomprehensible to my old experienced mind. I felt that emotion was sharper-witted than reason. It was more deeply rooted in the human heart, more firmly bound to the distant history of the human race, truer and more responsive to its nature and thoroughly proven by its experience.

  I stretched out further on the couch, flexing my legs and abandoning myself to the new rush of emotions which swept through my body. A sudden thought occurred to me: this was the body I’d once sentenced to death, the female body I’d mercilessly sacrificed at the feet of the god of science and reason, and it was coming to life again. I’d wasted my childhood and adolescence and the dawn of my young womanhood in a fierce battle: against whom? Against myself, my humanity and my natural impulses. And for no reason, since I was about to leave it all behind and begin afresh, start from the cradle of life, with the primitive flat land which yielded crops with spontaneous benevolence; with virgin nature which had covered the earth for millions of years; with the simple country people who ate the fruits of the earth and followed their instincts under a canopy of trees, and ate, drank, bore children, sickened and died without ever asking how or why.

  I smiled, then laughed out loud so that I could hear myself laughing. My mother had always told me that a girl shouldn’t laugh loud enough for people to hear, so my laughter had always faded on my lips before it made a sound. I opened my mouth as wide as it would go and laughed and snorted and the air flooded into my chest — pure, clean air free of smoke and carbon monoxide… and free of medical science and all the refinements of society. The composition of this air didn’t concern me; I just knew that it was refreshing and cooled my overheated insides. I abandoned myself to the sun’s rays and let them fall on my body — pure, clean rays unspoilt by scientific analyses of their properties, whether harmful or beneficial.

  A simple, good-natured countryman brought me a tray of food: flat bread, cream, butter and eggs. I ate with a zest that I hadn’t felt since I was a small child of under nine. I forgot my mother’s instructions about how a girl should eat, and the medical profession’s warnings about butter and cream, and stuffed my mouth with food. I drank cold water from an earthenware jug, making a loud noise and spilling water all down my clothes. I ate till my hunger was satisfied and drank till my thirst was quenched. The couch was scorching hot by now so I went and stretched out on the cool damp earth. I rested my face against it, drawing into me the smell that came from deep inside, and exulting in the sensation of belonging to it and being a part of it.

  A gentle breeze lifted my skirt up over my thighs but I felt none of the alarm that I would have done in the past whenever my thighs were uncovered. How had my mother managed to instil in me this notion that my body was somehow shameful? Man was born naked and he died naked. All his clothes were a mere pretence, an attempt to cover up his true nature.

  As I let the breeze lift up my clothes, I felt that I had been reborn, and that only at the instant of this rebirth had my emotional life properly come into being. But although newborn, it was a mighty giant, wanting to live… indeed, demanding its right to live.

  I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of heavy knocking at the door. I looked out and saw a sick old man supported by a group of peasants. I let them in, put on my white coat and sounded the sick man’s chest. The sound of his heartbeats was mixed with the sound of groaning and I raised my eyes to look at him. His eyes were fixed desperately on me like a drowning man staring at a lifebelt just out of his reach. It was as if I had suddenly forgotten all knowledge and had never examined a patient before. For the first time I was really seeing the eyes of a person suffering and hearing the sound of his groans.

  How had I been able to examine patients in the past? How had my teachers led me to believe that a sick person was nothing more than a liver, a spleen or a collection of guts and entrails? How had they made me look into people’s eyes, shine my light into them, turn up the lids with my fingers, without noticing their freshness and innocence? How had they made me look down people’s throats without hearing their cries of pain?

  I shuddered. For the first time in my life I was seeing the patient as a whole person, not a loose assemblage of discrete parts. The weariness and sickness of the old man’s eyes were getting through to me and his cries were crossing the gap between my ears and my heart.

  I stood at a loss before my patient, my eyes firmly on his, my ears straining to pick up his faint whispered moaning, my soul dumbly watching the unfamiliar scene of human suffering, my mind silently taking in a new meaning to life.

  I rested my hand on my heart and leant my head against the wall. There was something profoundly disturbing in the dull, despairing eyes. Something in the faint moaning made my spirit quail. It was an unfamiliar thing which I hadn’t recognized before, been aware of or suffered from: pain, yes, pain! For the first time in my life I was feeling pain. It was a deep feeling which penetrated many layers and reached far inside me until it arrived at the centres of pleasure. I was in pain but I felt the pleasure of pain, the pleasure of my humanity as I exercised its redundant powers and investigated its unfamiliar horizons.

  My whole being drank this pleasure to the lees, and my soul sucked the sensation of pain dry. This made me feel dizzy and I fell back into a nearby chair, shut my eyes and began to cry. I cried as I had never cried before, as if my eyes had never known what it was to cry. Stinging tears, always held back before, rained down my cheeks in a stormy torrent and I made no attempt to curb them. Let them come for all they were worth to wash my mind clean of its accumulated dust, to dislodge the dark veil that was insulating my heart, and to set my soul free from the prison cell of deadly rigidity where it languished! I gave in to the pain.

  I came to my senses when I heard a sound; it was a weak sound, but full of warmth. I heard him saying, ‘Don’t cry, doctor. I’m all right.’

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. His smile was faint and composed, but it betrayed affection and kindness. It was as if he was the one who felt compassion for me, wanted to take me by the hand and give me of what he had; as if he was the one who possessed knowledge and strength while I possessed nothing. A physical illness seemed to dwindle to nothing when compared with a spiritual illness. I felt that he was the doctor and I the patient.

  I wouldn’t have believed that my faith in humanity would revive just when I’d lost it and decided that human life had less substance than a bubble of air… nor that when I’d lost it amidst the bright lights of the city with all its glittering buildings, aeroplanes and advanced weaponry, I’d recover it in a benighted cave… and at the hands of a sick old countryman who owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, rather than among professors of medicine and intellectuals.

  It was a little smile from dry, cracked lips but it contained the meaning of life… that meaning which is lost to people in the crowd, which science loses sight of amid the clamour of its apparatus, and which reason is incapable of explaining. That meaning was love — a love of life and all its pleasure and pain, in sickness and in health, the known and unknown parts of it, the beginnings and the endings. Love. My heart
pounded at the new word, a tremor of longing went through me and a fire was kindled within me.

  How could I go on living? I was at one and the same time an eager child with unspoilt, untried feelings and a qualified doctor with an old mind. Twenty-five years of my life had passed without my feeling what it was to be a woman. My heart hadn’t once beaten faster because of a man, nor had my lips tasted that wondrous thing known as a kiss. I hadn’t passed through the glowing heat of adolescence. My childhood had been wasted fighting against my mother, my brother and myself. Textbooks had consumed my adolescence and the dawn of my womanhood. And so here I was, a child of twenty-five wanting to play, run, fly and love.

  I gathered together my few belongings and boarded the train which was to carry me out into the world and away from myself. I’d become acquainted with my self: I no longer needed to cling so strongly to it that I was cut off from life. Life, the essence of which I’d gathered from the earth like a pigeon picking up grain in its beak; life, which I’d begun to love with every cell of my being, body and soul, and which I felt an overwhelming desire to hold on to.

  After all that had happened how could I shut myself away in dreary isolation? I had to go back; so I returned to my home, my family, my work and my patients. I opened my arms to life and embraced my mother, feeling for the first time that she was my mother. I embraced my father and understood what it meant to be a daughter, and embraced my brother and knew the feeling of brotherly love. Then I looked around me, searching for something that was still missing, someone who wasn’t there. Who was it? My depths cried out for him, my soul called to him. Who could he be?

  A violent longing swept through me, my body and soul — the yearning of a soul thirsty for love and set free by reason, and of a virginal body newly let out of its iron cell. I wondered what an encounter between a man and a woman was like. The nights grew longer as the fantasies and illusions gathered round my bed. Long powerful arms encircled my waist. A man’s face came closer to mine. He had eyes like my father’s and a mouth like my cousin’s, but he wasn’t either of them. Who was he? The chatter of the girls at school floated to the surface of my memory. I sighed and moaned and had the fantasies of an adolescent girl; it was as if I’d never dissected a man’s body or stripped it naked and been repelled by its ugliness.