Zakariah al-Khartiti read her novel while she slept. Badreya saw him creeping in the darkness while his wife slept. He took her key from under her pillow, tiptoed to her study, opened the bottom drawer, got out the yellow folder, drew the lamp closer to him, read the blank pages besmirched with black, blue and red ink, and saw the drops of blue and black blood. Rivers of yellow tears streamed between the lines and underneath the hidden illegible words and those not yet written. There were rivers of streaming sweat, real sweat, on the pages. He knew the distinctive, unmistakable smell of his wife’s sweat. It was a smell that contained no perfume or eau de cologne, but the smell of an exhausted body, a body tired of sinfulness, guilt, and grief. It was ridden with fear and scandal, a short plump body that seemed to have no bones at all.
Badreya whispered in his ears as he read, “Why should your wife wear any perfume for you when you betray her every night? Why should she wear perfume when you hate perfume? You’re only attracted to stinking bodies that never wash with soap and water, bodies oozing sweat, tiredness, wretchedness, and misery, the bodies of oppressed housemaids or secretaries who close their eyes when they lie beneath your weight, unable to open them or look you in the eye. They are unable to shy away from your kisses or obscenities, for you desire nothing but obscenities. Your ears have become attuned to them.”
Zakariah al-Khartiti waved his hand in Badreya’s face as though to drive away the Devil, “Get lost, you wretched serpent. You’ve driven Adam out of heaven.”
But Badreya was not his wife, Bodour, and did not have a body that he could subjugate in bed when he failed to subdue her in the novel. Badreya exposed his innermost secrets, which his own wife didn’t know about. And he hadn’t told those secrets to anybody, not even his psychiatrist. He invented clean secrets and childhood memories that happened only in his imagination. He wrote these memories in his daily column under the titles “Science and Faith”, “Trusted Words”, “Truth”, “Honoring the Pledge”, or “Loyalty to God, the Nation and the President”.
Zakariah al-Khartiti dried his tears with the palm of his hand. His profuse sweat fell on the pages of the novel, mingled with his tears. His sweat merged with his wife’s on the papers as it did in bed during the temporary moments of pleasure and the longer-lasting moments of pain. He whispered in Badreya’s ear as though she was his innocent, uncouth lover, the secretary or the housemaid, “My wife, darling, gave me nothing but misery, for I’m a wretched husband who never had any joy in the marital bed. My wife is so frigid that not a single hair moves on her body.”
He whispered obscenities in the ears of the maid/secretary: “You bitch, you’re the most beautiful woman on earth and in heaven. You’re a nymph in paradise, the virgin who never loses her virginity, even if she’s lost it a thousand times. You’re my refuge and my salvation from grief. You’re my happiness and my paradise. Take me in your arms, between your legs, and make me taste your honey. Raise me high to the heavens of love and faith and bring me down to the earth of profanity. Pour in my ears the words of God and the Devil, speak to me, bitch, daughter of a bitch, and fill my ears with obscenities until I come to the height of pleasure.”
Badreya’s hearing was sharp and her ears were as open as God’s unsleeping eyes. She picked up the words before they were produced. The reason was perhaps that Badreya was an ethereal presence, without a body, like the spirit of God or the Devil or the other unseen entities. Badreya was an idea in the head of the sleeping Bodour, and she came to her during sleep. But when the light was on, she vanished. The novel and all its characters disappeared under the effect of the bright lights, except for Zeina Bint Zeinat, who came to life in the light. This was because she was perhaps the only one who possessed a body, a body that housed the spirits of gods and Devils together. She resembled ancient goddesses: the goddess of life and death, the goddess of vice and virtue, the whore, the saint and the virgin all rolled into one. She rose above the laws of earth and sky and had no god but herself.
On the stage Zeina Bint Zeinat stood graceful and upright, her large sparkling eyes filled with light. The hall was full of men, women, young people, and children. There were the children of good families and the children of the streets. Her eyes roamed, looking for the face of Zeinat, her mother. She found her sitting in the back rows with housemaids and illegitimate children. She descended the platform and walked toward her mother, held her hand and led her to the front row, where she placed her next to the ministers, the heads, the men and women of letters, the winners of literature, science and faith prizes. She placed her mother in the front row, where her head towered above the rest. Mariam’s band of street children, led by Miss Mariam on stage, stood around Zeina Bint Zeinat, who danced and sang her new song which she had written before dawn.
Music had flowed in her blood with poetry since her childhood on the street. In the open air and under the rays of the sun she sang and danced to the music, and the children born on the pavements sang along with her. From birth the dew dropped on them, and the sun and the fresh air dried them. Those children were never confined within four walls or controlled by a mother or father. They knew nothing about hell fires or the gardens of Eden. They tapped with their little bare feet to the music she played. She sang for them until they fell asleep. They called her Mama Zeina Bint Zeinat. The word mama was like music to her ears. She called her mother Mama Zeinat. Her mother held her in her arms at night. In the morning she walked to school with the other girls who wrote her name, Zeina Bint Zeinat, on the toilet walls. But Miss Mariam held her fingers high for all the other girls to see, speaking in a resounding voice, “Zeina Bint Zeinat has fingers that have been created for music. She’s talented and unique, born to be a musician.”
Her wide eyes gleamed in the light. The other girls gazed at her enviously, admiringly, especially Mageeda al-Khartiti, her only friend from among the girls. Mageeda was attracted to her by the power of admiration and envy, as well as by a mysterious force like blood, for her features were like hers and her mother’s when she looked in the mirror.
Mageeda inherited her mother’s short stocky build, the squat chubby fingers that writhed on the piano keys like pieces of dough, as though they were boneless. She inherited from her father the strong drive toward success. Like him, she wanted to achieve glory through writing although she had no desire to write.
The two distinguished families, al-Khartiti and al-Damhiri, never missed a performance by Zeina Bint Zeinat, for she had become the artist of the oppressed masses in Cairo, the city stretching from the eastern to the western desert, and from the green delta to the yellow sands of the desert. The deserts were creeping and devouring the green areas, and concrete constructions were rising on fields and agricultural lands while the asphalt streets were invading the farms, meadows and cornfields. Police cars and equipment trampled on the white cotton buds, and the children stopped singing “You’ve come to bring us light, oh Nile cotton, how lovely you are!” Maize stalks for animal feed replaced cotton shrubs. Steel constructions sprouted along the banks of the Nile, turning the great river into a sickly, ailing crocodile, imprisoned between tall walls and buildings. Houses and flats were as tiny as match-boxes, and mosques and churches multiplied like rabbits. Victory arches carried the names of God, Christ, Prophet Muhammad, and the president, while the alleys and cul-de-sacs were filled with rubbish. Sewage water ran like rivers on the streets after the real rivers had become dry. The stools of stray dogs and cats littered the streets, and there were three million boys and girls living without families and fending for themselves on the pavements.
Zeina Bint Zeinat tapped on the stage with her foot, dancing, singing, and reciting poetry. She cut the air with her tall, robust figure, walking the fine line between earth and sky, breaking the barriers with her feet, opening for herself a pathway never trodden before. She opened and closed the windows to her soul with her own will, which was as strong as her powerful figure. By facing hardships, she had become as hard as a rock.
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p; Her gleaming eyes seemed to be ageless, for they could be the eyes of a young woman of twenty or an old woman of more than a hundred. Their charm was deceptively alluring, for men regarded them as inviting love although they were only reflecting the sunlight. Journalists described her as a fiery woman, while critics thought of her as hot-blooded. She responded with the lyric of a song, saying that they were cold-blooded. The head of the department of literary criticism described her as the worst thing that had happened to the country, using “thing” and “worst” to refer to her, as though to deny her being a woman and an artist in a single stroke.
When she was on stage, people forgot what critics wrote about her, for she had a presence that obliterated books, articles, and critical studies. On stage, her beauty became her special virtue. People’s eyes moved toward her as if driven by a spell. They gazed at her eyes, the two windows open to the sky and reflecting the depths of the sea. They didn’t just look at her eyes, but dived deep into them to discover and to remain, not wanting to leave them even after the lights were out at the end of the performance.
Badreya wrote a secret letter to her mother, Bodour, saying, “Did you give birth to so much beauty, Bodour? How can you possibly produce so much beauty and be unable to describe it in your novel? Can your womb be more creative than your pen? Such beauty does not only crush us with pleasure, but it also fills us with pain and uncertainty. We feel frustrated and incompetent before the power of this beauty and this charm, for we cannot give it up. It pushes us toward knowledge. The unknown makes us feel anxious, and drives us to resistance and revenge. This beauty makes us lose our delusions of grandeur. Although we are the gods of literature, art, and culture, our inherited language is incapable of describing this beauty, as it is incapable of defining love, life, God, Satan, and all the other mysterious notions.”
Zeina Bint Zeinat never paid any attention to refined, sophisticated language, for she hadn’t obtained a university degree. She didn’t wear high heels, or a scarf on her head. She wore no make-up, no bracelets on the wrists, and no ornaments on her feet. She didn’t apply paints to her lips or eyelids, no reds, greens, or blues.
Zeina Bint Zeinat wasn’t conscious of her own beauty, her greatness or her talent. It was all natural to her, nothing to boast about. It was like freedom and health. Only those deprived of them were aware of them.
At school Zeina Bint Zeinat wore a uniform made of cheap cotton, with irregular collars and a loose belt. Her hair was dishevelled and her shoelaces untied. Zeina Bint Zeinat never looked at herself in the mirror, for she didn’t have a mirror at home. She didn’t in fact have a home. The principal would draw her out of the morning congregation to give her a wrap across the fingers. She would punish her by making her stand for an hour or two with her face to the wall and her arms raised. The only crime perpetrated by Zeina Bint Zeinat was that she ran faster than the other girls during physical training classes. The other girls’ legs were short and plump. They could not run. Or she might have been punished because she received the highest marks in music or poetry reading.
The girls’ stubby fingers couldn’t move quickly over the piano. Girls from good families had no bones in their fingers, and their tongues slurred when they read Arabic poetry, for Arabic wasn’t respected in good aristocratic homes. It was spoken only by housemaids, chauffeurs, cooks, gardeners, make-up women, and fortune tellers. It was the language used by housemaids and prostitutes, who were indispensable for masturbating males from distinguished aristocratic families.
Mageeda al-Khartiti cried all night, asking God why He created her with such short fingers and narrow eyes lacking sparkle. Why did He give all the talent to the child of sin? Did He prefer the girls born in sin to the daughters of decent families?
During the music lesson Miss Mariam would say, “In music, talent alone is not enough, and neither are the fingers. You’re lazy, Mageeda, because you want everything to come to you easily. God has given you numerous gifts and blessings, and therefore you have no motivation for creativity and no ambitions. Zeina Bint Zeinat sleeps and dreams of music and never stops playing music or singing. She trains three hours a day, at school or in my house. I welcome her into my home because she loves music and singing. This love is her secret and her motivation to live. In music she has found the love she has been deprived of in her life. Music, like writing and all other arts, loves those who love it and dedicate themselves to it. Zeina Bint Zeinat has no other love in her life. And you, Mageeda, what is the love of your life? What is the dream of your childhood? What would you like to be?”
This question haunted Mageeda at night as she slept: what do I want to be? What do I want to be?
She didn’t know the answer. All she knew was that she wasn’t interested in the workings of the language or its letters. She preferred figures.
“One plus one equals two, exactly two. Not three.”
Figures were simple and clear, while language was complex. A word could have several meanings, often contradictory meanings. Sometimes, if you added a letter or a punctuation mark, the whole meaning changed. One instant might be worth thousands, or even a whole lifetime.
Mageeda didn’t like this ambivalence. She preferred figures because they were definite, clear, straightforward, and unambiguous. But more than anything, Mageeda loved sleeping, because during sleep she was transported away from reality, from the voices of her parents quarrelling, from the voice of God threatening eternal damnation in hell, from the voice of Satan tempting her. Before she was ten, she had committed many sins, one of which was that she hated her parents instead of loving them as she should have done. There were times when she drank a few drops of water before breaking her fast in Ramadan. Sometimes she didn’t perform ablution before praying. At other times, she farted during prayers but didn’t break her prayers to go and wash. She didn’t cover her hair while praying and sometimes urinated in bed out of sheer terror. In the dream, she saw herself walking on a tightrope on Doomsday to test the righteous, her small feet bleeding from its razor-sharp thinness. But she swerved and fell into hell. She woke up drenched in sweat and crushed by shame.
The gravest sin she committed after the age of ten was obeying her father, Zakariah Al-Khartiti, and joining the Department of Journalism. Her father had always looked up to journalists who had their own columns in the distinguished Sphinx newspaper. He had his photograph placed within a frame at the top of his long column, on the front page on the left. His head in the picture was titled toward the left side, like Satan. Then he changed to the right side, after he got his column about science and faith in God. His head in the photograph had a triangular shape, with a sharp apex resembling the Pyramid of Cheops. His eyes stared vacantly into space, like the great thinkers: Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Freud, Marx, Avicenna, and Averroes. Despite this, his features didn’t hint at any great intellect. There was only the reflection of light on the bald spot as the photograph was taken. Cigar smoke concealed part of his face, particularly the nose, whose bone changed shape with the changes of the light falling on the face and the movement of the earth around the sun.
Mageeda al-Khartiti became a distinguished writer at the Renaissance magazine, earning the highest salary possible. Her parents helped her write her articles. On Journalism Day, she was awarded the Literature Prize for an article she had written entitled “The First Lady’s Achievements on Women’s Day”.
The magazine building was shaped like a white pyramid. It towered high above the low, dark buildings around it and the slum behind it, which was inhabited by new immigrants from the countryside coming to seek a livelihood in the city. They lived alongside old immigrants without work, ex-convicts, pimps, whores, and the sellers of salted fish, sardines, canned beef, rosaries, charms, censers, and Ramadan time schedules.
The editor-in-chief was one of the aides of the first lady. An opposition paper published some facts about his embezzlement of a couple of million pounds from the magazine funds. People, mostly unemployed young men and women,
went out to protest, calling for his indictment. Police forces dispersed them using water hoses and tear gas, and a few shots were fired. Blood flowed on the pavements and merged with sewage water when the pipes burst. In a few hours, peace returned to the city and people forgot all about the case. The editor-in-chief’s photograph shone once again within its frame on top of his daily or weekly column. It was a more youthful photograph, where the bald spot had disappeared underneath the black wig, and the wrinkles had been ironed out during cosmetic surgery in New York. His eyes, which were fashioned anew, sparkled with ecstasy. His lips smiled triumphantly.
Mageeda al-Khartiti had a large office on the top floor, next to that of the editor-in-chief. On her door was installed a red lamp. No one was allowed to enter her office except through the office manager and the private secretary. As soon as they heard the voice of a young upcoming writer, male or female, asking to meet her, they would say, “Oh, the great lady is at a conference abroad with the first lady”, “She’s at an important meeting with the minister”, “She’s busy writing her column and isn’t answering calls. I swear to God she has locked herself in to write her article. She’s now writing and nobody can interrupt her work. This is Thursday, a sacred day for her because she is writing the article, which the printing department is clamouring for. Can you call her next week? I apologize for the inconvenience.”
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