Bodour tossed in bed, unable to sleep.
How could she carry on living with a faithless man? How could she sleep next to him in the same bed?
She lied to him only once, while he lied to her every day over the period of twenty, thirty or even a hundred years.
Did he know that she lied to him? That she was in love with Nessim when she was nineteen? That she joined the demonstrations with him? He opened her eyes to injustices on earth and in the heavens, and removed the blindfolds from her mind. He granted her body the forbidden pleasure, and she ate with him from the fruits of the two forbidden trees: the trees of life and knowledge. Like God, she knew good from evil. Good was justice and freedom, as Nessim said, and evil was injustice and chains.
Bodour never broke her chains. She tossed sleeplessly in bed and the baby’s eyes were like motes in her own. Since the two closed eyes opened briefly and peered at her, since that moment that seemed to happen outside time and space, Bodour came face to face with her own cowardice. She felt her heart dripping with blood on the pavement as her liver was torn out of her body with a knife.
If the baby hadn’t opened her eyes at that moment, it was possible that she might have forgotten her. She might have slept like other mortals and continued her life and her career in literary criticism. Badreya, the heroine of her novel, and Nessim might have left her alone and stopped chasing her. Those two ghosts lived on top of her bed. She saw them in the flesh lying next to her in bed, and when they left it, she saw them walking like shadows on the wall, going to and fro. They didn’t leave the bedroom when she slept or the study when she sat at her desk spreading the papers in front of her. She saw Omar al-Khayyam’s lines of poetry in front of her. What was the difference then between God and human beings if God repaid evil with evil, nay, even with a more horrific evil? He burned her in hell forever and ever for one moment of pleasure and joy. He deprived her of her child forever just because the police killed the baby’s father before he could sign the marriage contract. She was sceptical of God’s justice and consequently of His existence. She lost her faith during her sleep and was exhausted by all the buried sorrows in her heart. She chased away the doubts and embraced faith again as soon as she was up, realizing that faith brought joy like alcohol, like Omar al-Khayyam wine.
She hid a bottle in the bottom drawer of her desk together with the novel folder. She drank a glass to drive away her sorrows. After the third glass her mind became open to the wide horizons and she could hear the voices of gods and demons arguing. Her body broke all barriers and soared with her mind and soul in the wide space. She became as tall and graceful as Badreya, and just as courageous. She held the pen and began to write a new chapter of the novel, continuing until she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall or a key turning, or saw the shadow of her husband walking on the walls. It looked like God’s shadow moving behind the clouds, or the Devil’s phantom moving over her head as she lay in bed, his finger as hard as nails boring through the hole of her left foot while God’s finger bored through the sole of her right foot like an iron rod.
When the psychiatrist had listened to her childhood memories, he told her, “You were raped as a child, Bodour, but your fear of God makes you deny it!”
“No, no, doctor. No man ever touched me in reality. I only had sinful dreams. Yes, I confess that I committed many sins while fast asleep.”
The psychiatrist’s voice streamed through her ear as she tossed and turned in bed. She reached out for the light switch to turn it off, but she trembled when she realized that her husband was not in bed. It was three o’clock in the morning. He had gone out at eight in the evening to attend an editorial meeting at the newspaper.
“Could a meeting possibly continue for seven hours?”
On the bedside table stood a dark bottle on which the word VIAGRA was written. He had forgotten to hide it in the bottom drawer of his desk. His memory was getting worse and he often forgot things. He was a few years older than she was, a fact he often forgot as well. He liked to think that she was his age or even older.
In the mirror, Bodour noticed the white hairs on her head, the slight wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and on top of the jaws and neck. Her muscles were sagging and flabby. How old was she?
Her mind could not grasp the notion of time passing. She put her feet in her soft slippers. It was for this softness that she had given up her life, the most precious thing of her life. She left the stuffy, dimly lit bedroom filled with her husband’s breath, his shaving cream and his expensive eau de cologne. The odor made her sick when she imagined him in the arms of a girl who was fifty or a hundred years younger than he was. He only got an erection when he was with innocent, inexperienced girls or prostitutes pretending to be innocent and inexperienced.
Bodour walked in sleep as she did during her wakeful moments. She went out of the stuffy room into the air and the sun. She walked in the direction of Zeina Bint Zeinat, toward truth and not toward dreams, myths or illusions. She saw herself walking toward her, going through the long strip from her seat to the stage. The passage seemed endless and exposed to the cold air from every direction. The flowers on both sides withered, while the trees died where they stood, their green leaves turning yellow.
Bodour suddenly stopped in her tracks. Looking behind, she saw the emptiness, the darkness, the cold air and the fear. Turning to look in front of her, she saw the lights gleaming and Zeina Bint Zeinat playing music, singing and dancing. But the lights suddenly went out and there were sounds of explosions or gunshots. Everything turned dark, illuminated for a second, then dark again. The power was cut off and she was no longer there. She looked for her in sleep and in wakefulness, on the streets, the alleys and the pavements. She had cleared the pavement of the stones and pebbles, laid out the cover, swaddled her in a blue woollen blanket to keep her warm in the coldness of winter. She left her in the dark, and withdrew her plump fingers from the tiny hand, from the five fingers clutching her index finger, which she held on to even during sleep. She didn’t want to open her eyes to see her as she disappeared gradually until she became a star in the distant sky.
How did her body become disconnected from the pavement? How did she develop legs to take her away from her like a phantom?
As Bodour was engrossed in writing, Badreya whispered in her ear, “You’re a hopeless coward. Nothing but writing can cure you of cowardice. Only the letters on the page can cure you of your pain and sadness. With black, blue or red ink, shed your blood on paper, Bodour, cut your chest open with the knife and open your heart. Only the knife can cure you. Don’t keep your tears locked inside, let them loose the way you scream out in the face of God and the Devil. Don’t fear death or hell fire. You’ve had enough hell on earth.”
Bodour tottered in her sleep. Badreya’s voice quivered before it disappeared, melting in the night as though she had never been. The ink also melted on the page. The letters vanished and the pages became empty. The whiteness stuck to her eyes and prevented her from seeing anything except the blackness. Sorrow and depression overwhelmed her and she spoke aloud during sleep. No one was there, not even herself.
“Like God, I don’t exist.”
Speaking to herself, Bodour said, “I’m a literary critic and not a novelist. I’m good at nothing except polishing the shoes of others, for this is the function of literary criticism. In a newspaper interview, I confessed that I felt proud to shine my husband’s shoes. I got votes at the university elections but lost my own voice. I lost my ability to write, and my pen was as broken as my heart.”
Bodour wasn’t speaking to herself, but to her psychiatrist, confusing herself with him. She moved from her bed to the couch in the clinic with slow, careful steps as though sleepwalking. She feared she might fall suddenly if she became conscious again. During the act of writing she got rid of her short plump body and took on Badreya’s tall, graceful figure. Her complexion changed color with the intensity of the light. She looked ruthlessly at her image in the mirror, see
ing the signs of decline graphically clear in front of her. Nothing could save her from falling, except falling further in the pit of writing.
The ink, however, was white and the letters were invisible on the white page. The whiteness stuck to her open eyes and she slept with her eyes open, like a lidless animal.
“My chronic ailment, doctor, is my life. Nothing except death or writing can cure me.”
“Write, then, Bodour. What stops you?”
“God did not create me to write, doctor!”
“Are you embracing faith in God once again?”
“Faith protects me from writing, doctor, because God created me to lie beneath my husband, polish his shoes, rub his feet in warm water, wash his stinking socks with fragrant soap and leave my body to him as a receptacle for his stinking ...”
“You’ve been saying this ever since you got married, Bodour. How many years now?”
“I don’t know, doctor, perhaps a hundred years.”
“Twenty years?”
“Longer, doctor. Each day I ask myself why I still live with him. I can’t make a serious decision, doctor. My friend Safi is much more courageous, for she got rid of her husbands and is now free. Badreya is also more courageous ...”
“Badreya?”
“She was with me in primary school. We called her a child of sin and wrote her name on toilet walls.”
Bodour struggled to open her eyes. The images and names were confused in her mind. She couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction. She lay on the couch and the psychiatrist looked at her with sympathy. On the same couch her husband Zakariah al-Khartiti complained of his sins and sorrows, and their daughter Mageeda opened her heart to the same psychiatrist. Safi, Bodour’s friend, did the same as well. Even the emir himself, Ahmed al-Damhiri, lay on the couch and told the doctor of the agony of unrequited love and the infernal desire for revenge. He didn’t mention the name Zeina Bint Zeinat for he feared the psychiatrist might tell the police.
They all came and lay on the psychiatrist’s couch. They wanted to unburden themselves of the heavy loads weighing down like mountains on their hearts. They relieved themselves of the loads by speaking to the psychiatrist, whose ears were as large as those of God in his heavens or the priest sitting behind the curtain, receiving confessions from guilt-ridden, tortured men and women believers.
“You carry the secrets of the whole country, doctor, from top to bottom, old and young. All the secrets, stories, and weird tales on the couch.”
“What a lovely title for a new novel, Bodour!”
“Yes, doctor, you must write a novel with the title ‘On the Couch’.”
“I’m only a psychiatrist, not a novelist. I can listen well but I can’t write a one-page letter. Writing is a gift from God, a gift granted to whomever He pleases.”
“Writing is a curse, doctor. It is suffering, pain, tears, and blood. Writing is endless patience and work, day and night. It is a chronic disease, doctor, which can only be cured by writing, real writing, writing a novel and not literary criticism, which is a parasitic activity, a profession akin to tapeworms living off the blood of others.”
“You are the greatest literary critic in the country, professor.”
“I should have presented my resignation to the university. Every day, I tell myself I must make up my mind to resign and must take the step of leaving my husband. Every morning I tell myself, ‘Bodour, enough is enough. You’ve got to decide to get a divorce from your husband and literary criticism. You have to free yourself from the two things that have choked you, the two things that have ruined your life.’”
“You are the most successful woman in the country, Bodour. You’re a well-known celebrity.”
“I’m a failure, doctor. I’ve failed in the most important thing in life.”
“And what is the most important thing in your life, Bodour?”
“I don’t really know, but I feel I’ve given up the most important thing in life in return for trivial things.”
“Trivial such as what?”
“Like a chair at the university, for example, my name in large font in the paper, a photograph inside a frame, the honor of the family, a greatly respected husband, the large villa in Garden City, the luxury and wealth and all this rubbish.”
“And the most precious thing in your life?”
“My daughter, doctor.”
“Your daughter Mageeda, God bless her, is a great writer.”
For a long time Bodour was silent, hesitant, perplexed. Could she possibly tell him the most serious secret of her life? She had told him everything except that. Would he keep it secret? Would she have the courage to tell? She longed to shake off the load that was weighing down on her heart, to cure herself of this chronic disease. She wanted to walk with Zeina Bint Zeinat, to take her in her arms, to confess to her that she was her mother, and to ask her for forgiveness. She would tell her, “Have mercy on your tortured mother who was paralyzed with fear: the fear of God, of people’s tongues and of the tongues of flames in hell. Forgive me for having abandoned you on the pavement, on a bed of dust, your back to the railings of the Nile front. I swaddled you in a woollen cloth and covered you with the bigger blanket of darkness. I abandoned you to the dew and the croaking of frogs. I called you Zeina, and walked away in the night’s darkness before the break of dawn.”
Bodour woke up to find herself sitting at her desk. In front of her was the yellow folder on which the words The Stolen Novel were written.
How many times had the novel been stolen from her? How many times had she retrieved it, rewritten it and lost it again?
Her husband Zakariah al-Khartiti was probably the culprit, for he believed that a wife’s proper place was underneath him in bed. Even if she moved up in the world and became a professor, a doctor, a minister, a prime minister or a president, her natural place would still be beneath her husband in bed and never on top of him. Should she climb momentarily to the top, she must be returned to her place again.
Zakariah al-Khartiti wrote in his column about women’s liberation and was awarded first prize on International Women’s Day. In Egypt, he received accolades and was called the champion of the Egyptian woman’s liberation. Journalists asked him, “Behind every great man there’s a great woman, so who’s the woman behind you, Mr Khartiti?”
“My mother. She was the one who encouraged me to tell the truth and respect women.”
They turned to his wife, Professor Bodour, to ask her, “Behind every great woman there’s a great man, so who’s the man behind you, Professor Bodour?”
“My husband was the man who encouraged me to write. Without him I would have written nothing.”
Bodour skulked away into a dark corner, shrinking inside her short, plump body, slapping herself several times, admonishing, insulting, castigating herself.
“You’re nothing but a lying, cowardly hypocrite. Lies, cowardice and hypocrisy are the three causes of depression. They are the source of your sadness and sterility, your inability to write or to face the truth. You’re beyond redemption and your impotence and sterility have no cure except death.”
Badreya woke up when Bodour went to sleep. Bodour lay curled up in bed beside her husband like a porcupine, visited by the youthful dreams when she joined the demonstrators and shouted “Down with injustice and long live freedom, long live love.” She surrendered to love and freedom. The idea of the novel came to her and she became pregnant with it at night. But she dumped it on the pavement and ran away. She was now being chased by ghosts and phantoms, by Satan’s finger which was as hard as an iron rod, by God’s unsleeping eye, by her husband’s half open eye pretending to be asleep in spite of being awake, or pretending to be awake although he was sound asleep.
Badreya whispered in her ear, “The price of freedom is high, Bodour, and there is no writing without freedom. Break your chains, Bodour, break free of your prison and reach out for the forbidden tree. If you eat from it, you will not die, for knowledge leads you to
life and not to death. You will live forever.”
Badreya’s voice sounded like that of the serpent luring Eve. Although the name Eve meant throbbing with life, it became connected in the minds with the serpent and death. Bodour quivered in her reveries, and her hot breath came out of her mouth like intermittent waves of light. The words that came from her lips were truncated and filled with fear:
“But God, Badreya, told me I would die if I ate from the tree.”
“That was the voice of the Devil, Bodour, and not God. If it was God’s voice, it wouldn’t be any different from the Devil’s. I ate from the tree, Bodour, and so did all the creative men and women in all the areas of knowledge, from philosophy and art to science. Human civilization was built on their ideas. We’ve never tasted anything better than the fruit of this tree. We enjoyed the pleasure of knowledge and the exuberance of life, and not a fake dead life. If God stopped you from enjoying life, then He was not God but the Devil. Satan’s pointed finger stole your life and your novel, Bodour.”
Bodour trembled in her sleep. She tried to move her lips to say something, but they were as heavy as lead. Her body was a rock glued to the earth, curled in on itself like a porcupine. It was a ball of lead rolling from bed and falling on the floor with a thud like an explosion or a gunshot.
Her husband woke up when he heard the thud. His eyeballs protruded with fear, for his wife Bodour wasn’t really herself. Her body, which joined them, was now setting them apart, and her writing, which connected them, created a wedge between them. Badreya, the Devilish woman occupying her body, was pushing her toward vice. There was also her illegitimate daughter, born in sin, Zeina Bint Zeinat, who was in fact the fruit of countless sins. There was also the novel she wrote at night, filled with ghosts, phantoms, shadows walking on the walls, and the finger tickling the sole of her left foot. Was it Satan’s finger? Or God’s? And the iron rod that tickled her right foot? But how dare she write all this rubbish about me? How could she write this about me, Zakariah al-Khartiti, her husband, a man of faith and virtue, who had never known another woman, who had won the prize of science and faith, as well as ethical conduct medals at primary and secondary schools, the university, the higher academy and the Supreme Council for Literature and Culture? I, Zakariah al-Khartiti, had a daily column in the paper, read by millions of men, women and young people, and had been awarded the golden cup on International Women’s Day. How could she paint such a disgusting image of me? She described me as a man who looked like an iron rod penetrating any hole in the wall or any human body, whether of a man, woman or child. Even the lame illegitimate street boy wasn’t spared the viciousness of her pen.
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