Zakariah al-Khartiti tossed in bed, turning from the supine to the prostrate position, with half an eye looking toward the ceiling. God was looking at him with angry, blazing red eyes through the chink.
A voice shook his body as it thundered, “Oh son of Khartiti! Your great-grandfather was a mechanic’s apprentice who was kicked by his master in the belly if he couldn’t fix an iron nut. I gave you and your father countless gifts. I fixed the nut in your wobbly brain so that you could become a great writer and have your own daily column in the great Sphinx newspaper. Can’t you stop these doubts about my existence, you fool? What a beast man is!”
His wife Bodour sat at the desk in her room. In front of her were papers, and in her hand was a pen. The light of an electric lamp revealed her plump, round face. With her eyes half closed, she seemed to be either absent-minded or sound asleep. The characters of her novel appeared to her like shadows moving over the walls, shapes peering through apertures in the black cloud, a speck of light in pitch darkness. She waited for the inspiration from God that would make her pen move energetically on paper as it had in the past. But the pen stood still in her hand and refused to move. Her brain cells had ground to a halt. From the day she married Zakariah al-Khartiti, her head stopped working. The nuts and bolts of her brain had rusted. Her husband’s eyes watched her day and night. Even as he slept, he followed her, spied on her dreams, rummaged in the papers inside her desk, stole the parts of her novel he wanted, especially the secret parts breaking taboos. He collected them in a secret drawer in his desk in a black folder on which he wrote, “The deeper the secrets, the more horrifying they are.”
Bodour dozed off sitting at her desk. She was suddenly alerted by the sound of footsteps. She knew the sound of his footsteps as he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, a movement that was etched in her brain. Year in year out, for twenty or thirty years, and perhaps even longer, since she shared his bed, she had known the sound of the balcony door opened by the force of the wind when he went out to stretch his limbs, and the sound of running water when he went into the bathroom. When he went into the shower, she felt a chill move through her veins, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. She became aware of the rising crescendo of her heartbeats and the currents of blood rising to her head. Her fingers and toes were ice-cold, and her ears were filled with the sound of water splashing in the bathroom and the squeaking of the tap as he closed it. Then silence. There was silence as he dried himself with the large white towel. As he opened the door she smelled the shampoo mingled with the smell of shaving cream, the Eau Sauvage cologne imported from Paris. She knew he had a rendezvous with a new girl. She was probably an intern at the newspaper, or an upcoming writer in love with the limelight, who moved from one great writer to a greater writer until she got her own column and her framed picture. In the picture her long hair would fall down to her shoulders, her lips would be slightly open showing her small sharp teeth, and her eyelids would be half closed in a lethargic, seductive femininity.
At eight years of age, she saw her mother crying in silence, disappearing into her room, burying her face in the pillow, wiping the tears with the corner of the white sheet. Her mother stopped talking to her father completely. She looked at him scornfully as he kneeled in prayer, reciting verses of the Qur’an, for his ears were listening to the voice of the Devil standing on his left side and his eyes were straying after girls’ legs. His mind was preoccupied with election results, although his name never made it to the final list. With other men, he suffered from a sense of low self-esteem, which he compensated for through his successful conquests of women.
Bodour was an eight-year-old pupil. It was Friday, the day off school. Her father went out to pray at the mosque and her mother went to visit her mother in Heliopolis. She stayed at home doing her homework or looking out of the window, watching the children frolicking on the street or gathering around a man with a monkey. He played the flute, his cheeks puffed up and his eyes bulging. The monkey danced to the tune, its red backside gleaming in the sun. The boys and girls laughed, dancing with the monkey and clapping.
Her father forbade her from going out on the street. He told her that street children were born of sin. They were the Devil’s children, especially the lame boy who looked like a little monkey. His narrow eyes were sunken in his cone-shaped face, which was long and bony. His complexion was dark and dotted with white spots, the effect of malnutrition or anaemia. His small ears were red, and there was a hole in each earlobe from which a tin earring shaped like a star dangled. The lame boy danced with the monkey and laughed with the children, his laughter resounding in the air. Some light seeped into his narrow eyes and they sparkled with a smile that was akin to a withheld tear.
The boy was her age. Her mother was kind to him and often gave him a coin, half a loaf of cheese, a feast cake, or an old pair of trousers that belonged to her husband.
On that Friday, she was through with her homework and the call for noon prayers was blaring from the nearby mosque. The sun was bright on that early spring day after the coldness of winter, and the clouds had disappeared. She wanted to go outside for a breath of fresh air and to visit her friend next door before her father came back from the mosque, for he wouldn’t allow her to visit her friend. She was only allowed to go to and from school, without stopping or going anywhere else. She often heard her father say, “A girl’s honor is like a match. It can only light once. Do you hear me?”
Before going out, she thought of walking a little in the garden, which was a large dusty expanse full of withering flowers. Her mother put all the objects that were no longer needed in what she called the “junk” room in the backyard. Lizards and beetles ran freely in it, as well as evil spirits, including the Devil himself. Her father called it the “rats’ room” and he threatened to put her there as punishment for her disobedience.
The old wooden door of the room was never completely closed. As she walked through the backyard, she saw the door standing ajar. Her curiosity led her to approach cautiously, fearing that a rat, a lizard, or an evil spirit might leap in her face. Unlike her mother, she didn’t believe in the existence of spirits, ghosts, or phantoms. Her science teacher told her to think with her mind, and that spirits and ghosts did not exist. She repeated to the teacher what she had heard her father say: “But God in the Qur’an says that spirits and demons exist.”
“Who told you that?”
“My father, miss!”
“Your father doesn’t understand God’s words. You have to understand His words with your own mind, and not your father’s or mother’s.”
Bodour gathered her courage and looked through the chink left by the door standing ajar. The windowless room was pitch dark. She might have gone on her way without seeing anything. But she heard a bizarre sound like that of a child panting. Her eyes froze as she looked through the small opening. She saw the lower half of her father’s body completely naked. His white gown was lifted to his shoulders and his penis looked colossal. It was like nothing she had seen in her entire life, for she frequently glimpsed boys’ penises on the streets as they walked with their bare buttocks and feet. Their small penises, however, were limp little pieces of flesh dangling from between their thighs. Her mother called them “sparrows”. She saw a larger penis in her dreams, dangling from behind a cloud of smoke, resembling the Devil’s finger, moving stealthily from the small nipple to the hairless pubic area, then descending to the folds of the flesh before reaching the site of pleasure and pain deep inside.
At eight years of age, she had little experience. Her father’s phallus seemed enormous in her eyes, much larger than the one dangling from the sky. It was engorged and extended downward toward the body of the boy, whose buttocks looked like the monkey’s. She only discovered the boy’s presence after noticing her father’s phallus, as though he were an extension of it. The little boy lay on the floor, face down, his head raised a little toward the partially open door and the thin ray of light coming through. H
is bare lame leg was raised like a barrier separating her from her father, his hand buried under his chin, and his fingers clutching at something hidden underneath his belly. His small ears were red, and from each lobe a tin earring dangled.
At first glance, she thought they were a single body. But she soon realized that they were two: her father’s body and that of the lame street boy who was eight years old like herself. The two bodies merged in one huge mass, like the kangaroo carrying its child on its back or underneath its belly.
Bodour forced her eyes open. She found herself sitting at her desk holding her pen, a blank page in front of her. Her mind was equally blank and still. Since she’d got married, she’d been incapable of writing. She might have written the novel that her husband later stole. While she was fast asleep he searched her drawers and stole her secret notebook, her old love letters, the chapter she wrote about that scene, which she could not write again. Years passed and the scene was lost from her memory. She forgot the expression on the boy’s face at that moment. She forgot the incident itself, imagining that it never happened. Many other incidents also seemed to her like figments of her imagination. A black cloud of smoke floated over her eyes. Satan’s finger hid behind the cloud, and so did God’s face, which disappeared behind a column of smoke. But she saw him through the chink of the door standing ajar, her own father in the flesh, kneeling as though praying to God, tilting backward, his right palm like a camel’s foot resting on the ground, his left hand cramped, frozen over the boy’s neck. Smoke gathered over Bodour’s memories as she closed her eyes. Her fancies seemed real, and reality seemed fanciful. Her white fingers holding the pen could not hold the truth, which trickled through them like water. She tried hard to recall the scene, but it was as elusive as mercury, perhaps because the past was dead and gone, or perhaps because the pain was too much to bear.
Bodour rubbed her eyes to force herself to wake up. She remembered her father as he half sat up and half kneeled. His long beard was stuck to his chest and his round face blazing red. He was gazing up at the ceiling, his muscles twitching with pain, pleasure, and relaxation. It was as though the doctor had just removed kidney stones, or extracted a painful tooth from his jaw, or removed a malignant tumor from his testicle or prostate. She had heard the word prostate before when she was a child, and thought that prostate was a feminine organ placed in a male body. Ecstasy was evident in her father’s eyes, the ecstasy she herself had never known in her entire life. It was the ecstasy that the flesh craved in the same way that the earth scorched by the sun yearned for a drop of water. Pleasure and pain merged in excitement, relaxation, sorrow, and happiness. Then consummation came as the finale, as death, as the end of worshipping a vindictive, vengeful god who burned with fire, and another god who was merciful and forgiving, who forgave everything except worshipping other gods besides himself. Both were the same.
Tears fell from her eyes and she could see nothing. Her father’s face disappeared behind a dark grey cloud of tears which bordered on blackness. Her body shivered as she remembered her father’s shiver as he snatched his pleasure, wanting and rejecting it at the same time. He was like her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, who loved her and hated her at the same time. She suffered from a split personality as well, for she wanted and rejected him, loved and hated him. She loved writing and hated it at the same time. She started writing with fervor and excitement, but as soon as the pen touched the blank page, the miscarriage happened. The words died under the nib. The hero and heroine of the novel would die, as though everything was a dream or a fancy.
Her psychiatrist told her, “Contradiction is an essential characteristic of life, for there is no life without death. The laws of nature are based on contradiction, and so are heaven’s laws. And if God had a split personality, Bodour, is it possible for human beings to be otherwise? I only love the woman who hurts me and deserts me. I love her after I lose her. This is the reason why prostitutes and unfaithful women triumph over us men, while virtuous women and faithful women suffer in their love for us.”
Bodour tried in vain to forget the face of the lame boy, which was dark and pale and almost bloodless. His eyes were wide open and his eyelashes were wet with frozen tears. The whites of the eyes were bulging. Underneath the clouds was a horrified look that was as frozen as tears.
Before Bodour became conscious again and before she came to grips with what she had seen, her childish mind realized the undisclosed secret lodging in the hearts of her father, mother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, neighbors, and all the adults in her parents’ families and at school. It was the secret she understood after she had grown up. It was the secret that resided within the thighs, the part that became erect and as large as a donkey’s phallus.
Bodour felt drops of cold water falling on her head like rain coming from the sky. Profuse sweat covered her as she stood looking through the slightly open door. Cold winds blew, removing her clothes and her whole body. She trembled as she saw the frozen tears in the eyes of the lame boy. She felt it could have been herself who was lying on her belly underneath the huge phallus and the kangaroo-like body. She remembered her mother when she went into the room with her father. Through the wall she heard moaning sounds, like a little girl crying with pain. There was also the repulsive smell, for he didn’t brush his teeth every morning. And neither did he shower after sex. He moved from her mother to other women without having washed. He took the Prophet as his role model in this respect only. The perfume and the stench were the same in her nose. Good and evil, God and Satan, love and hate, pleasure and pain, life and death all became the same to her.
Bodour stared at her daughter Mageeda, who was eight years old. But she drove the memory out of her mind. She remembered that she was her age. But she didn’t tell her daughter the secret, and it stayed buried within her, locked inside an iron cage under the ribs. She didn’t have the courage or the daring to open it without splitting her heart in two or tearing her liver out of her body with the knife.
Mageeda al-Khartiti threw a huge party to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Among the guests was Zeina Bint Zeinat, who was only a year older, although she looked older by a hundred years. She was tall and erect, and her long slender fingers moved with the speed of lightning over the keys of the piano. Everybody looked at her with admiration and envy: men, women, and children. Zeina Bint Zeinat was a star in the world of show business, and she had her own band of little boys and girls drawn from the narrow streets and alleys. Their little dark fingers played the lute or banged the drums and tamborines. Their pale cheeks were puffed while playing the flutes as they chanted the cotton and wheat song, their own national anthem: “Oh God, bless the wheat tonight, may it grow ...”, “You’ve come to bring us light, oh Nile cotton, how lovely you are!”, and “I love you my land with all my heart ...”
Their eyes gleamed, the black clouds cleared and the frozen tears melted. The dark pupils twinkled like stars in the sky and the little feet kicked the earth to the beat of the music. They danced, sang, and played music. Their feet and legs were bigger and their bones sturdier. Their wounds and bruises had healed, and their limping, rickets, and heartache had disappeared. Zeina Bint Zeinat led the children on the piano. She had known the tune since childhood and dreamed of it at night. The lyrics came to her during her sleep, for her mind was as active during sleep as when she was up and about. She saw the sparkle in the eyes of her mother, Zeinat, and in the eyes of Miss Mariam and her schoolmates. Her friend, Mageeda, looked at her with narrow eyes filled with envy and admiration. It was an ambivalent look that harbored love and hate at the same time. In front of the girls, she defended her, but on the toilet walls she wrote her name: Zeina Bint Zeinat. Like her father, Zakariah al-Khartiti, she remained impartial in her column in the Renaissance magazine. She repeated his maxim: “The middle ground is the best.” So she stood half-way between left and right, between praise and censure. In the jargon of literary criticism, she kept a balanced, objective view. She stayed neutral and u
ninvolved in partisan politics, always raising the banner of independence and freedom.
Ahmed al-Damhiri, her mother’s cousin, came to attend her birthday party. He had acquired the title of Eminent Sheikh by raising the slogan “Islam is the solution”. His aides in the underground group called him the emir. His voice rang out on popular radio channels but was low during secret meetings. His small head was square-shaped, and at the beginning of his career he wore no beard. But then he grew a thick black beard. His forehead used to be smooth and soft before a black mark started appearing there. His short, white fingers, which looked like those of his father, grandfather, and uncle, held the rosary by day and the wine glass at night. With these very fingers he stroked the bodies of prostitutes before dawn. In the dark, he was afraid of demons, cockroaches, beetles, and rats, but his courage returned with the daylight. He wore a turban or a cap on his head. He was usually dressed in a loose white gown, but in formal meetings with ministers, ambassadors, and party leaders he wore a suit made of English wool. The yellow rosary never left his hand. Its soft beads moved along with the soft murmurs of the holy verses, the sayings of the Prophet and the other messengers, and the words of holy men and ancient sages. He was in the habit of repeating God’s name and wiping his head with his little fat palm.
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