Zeinat wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her wide gown. Bodour put her arms around her and cried. They consoled one another.
“I wish I could die, Nanny Zeinat.”
“May God keep you from all harm, Miss Bodour.”
“Death is better than this kind of life, Nanny.”
“You’re still young, Miss Bodour. You’re hardly nineteen and God has given you plenty. You will graduate from university and become a great professor, the great Dr Bodour al-Damhiri.”
“It’s all dark in front of my eyes, Nanny. I’m afraid ...”
“Afraid of what, Miss Bodour?”
“Afraid my mum and dad might find out what happened.”
“What happened, Miss Bodour?”
“Nothing happened, Nanny. Nothing.”
“If nothing happened, why are you afraid?”
“I’m afraid they might find out I went on a demonstration.”
“Many people go on demonstrations, Miss Bodour.”
“But I went with one of my colleagues on the demonstration.”
“You walked together? There’s nothing to it! Demonstrations are not shameful. On the contrary, they are an honor. I went on many demonstrations with workers and farmers.”
“Yes, Nanny, but after the demonstration, I went with my colleague ...”
“Where did you go, Miss Bodour?”
“To his home.”
“His home?”
“Yes, Nanny ...”
“And did anything happen in his home?”
“Yes, Nanny ...”
Bodour wept on her nanny’s chest as she told her the story, her body shaking violently and Nanny rocking her like a mother, embracing her, stroking her hair.
“Tell me, child, what happened.”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone? Not Mum or Dad?”
“May God strike me dead if I do, Miss Bodour! You’re very precious to me, as precious as my son, Nessim. Oh, my dear son, are you dead or alive?”
It was midday on Friday many years later. Horns and loudspeakers were as wide open as the mouth of hell. Though hidden behind the black cloud, the sun radiated scorching heat and sweat. A woman hiding behind her black cloak walked in her pointed shoes on the melting asphalt of the street, panting and hissing. As she walked, she created holes in the sticky mud. She feared slipping on the sticky ground because if she did, everyone would be upon her, tearing her apart. The children would shout at her, “The bull is down, out with the knife.”
The world around her shouted through the loudspeakers, “God is great. God is great ...”
Even stray cats meowed, reiterating the words “God is great”. Every day, from dawn till dusk, she heard all the sounds coming from the loudspeakers as she kneeled in supplication on the ground with others.
She wondered as she walked: can the whole world, with its men, women and cats, be mad, and I’m the only one who’s sane?
On a high wall the words “God guides whom He wills and leaves astray whom He wills” were written.
This principle was her only refuge, for if going astray was God’s will, then she was innocent.
The streets were swarming with people, all dressed up for celebration, for the Great Feast which happened to coincide with Christmas. The Great Feast celebrated the sacrifice of a lamb instead of Ismail or Isaac. Their father, the Prophet Ibrahim, respecting the wishes of his wife Sara, Isaac’s mother, abandoned his other wife Hagar, Ismail’s mother, in the desert. He received God’s command to slaughter his son. The son to be offered for slaughter is Ismail, according to the story in the Qur’an, and Isaac, according to the Bible. Nobody really knows which one of the two he was supposed to slaughter. Ibrahim himself probably didn’t know, for the Qur’an hadn’t been revealed when Prophet Ibrahim was alive. Otherwise, he might have had to kill the two sons in obedience to the two Holy Books, which, together with the Torah, were sent to guide and enlighten people.
It was a dark, overcast morning, the black cloud covering the Cairo sky as usual. Church bells competed with mosque loudspeakers for the dominance of the acoustic airspace. Children played with firecrackers and paraded in their new clothes in front of their peers. With their sturdy leather shoes they kicked the asphalt of the street, made fun of the lame child, and showered him with stones. He ran to escape them, but they chased him until he fell on the ground. They chanted and danced around him, “The bull is down, out with the knife.”
A veiled girl happened to be walking by at this particular moment. In the congestion, she collided with a Coptic boy. He apologized and went on his way. But a Muslim man stopped him and slapped him on the face. The boy retaliated with a slap. A row ensued and turned into a full-blown massacre. The church in the neighborhood was burned and many young Muslim and Coptic people died.
The police were ordered not to interfere until the two factions had finished off each other. Then the armored vehicles and the fire brigade arrived. They surrounded the church and the mosque. Many people were arrested and shoved into police vehicles like sardines in cans. They were transported to God only knew where.
Before going out in the morning, Bodour prepared her suitcase. It was greyish blue and moved on wheels. She put in it all she needed for a long trip. But before that, she sat on the edge of the bed thinking about what she should take with her. Her eyes roamed around the bedroom, looking at the large beechwood wardrobe with decorative patterns, the light blue silk curtains on the window, the wide bed she’d shared with her husband since her wedding day, one night after another, one year following another, for thirty, forty, perhaps a hundred years. More than a hundred years passed from birth to death. How many times had she been born and died, been born again and died? She noticed the grey silk pyjamas on a hanger beside the wardrobe. Her husband had taken them off before he went to his office at the newspaper. The pyjamas took the shape of his sagging and flabby body and shook a little with the breeze. The upper part of the suspended bottoms was unbuttoned, revealing the shrunken piece of flesh which was as small as a little mouse ...
Her eyes were wide with astonishment. It was beyond her comprehension why this small piece of flesh had such devastating power and importance. States and religions were built on it. History carried it as a banner and marched with it since time immemorial. It was this piece of flesh that placed women in the jail of serfdom and humiliated men. It led elderly men to rape little girls, and pious men to lose two thirds of their minds when it was aroused. This piece of flesh deprived three million children in a single country of their human rights. Born on the streets, they lived and died there. The little shrunken mouse between the thighs pronounced the verdict of untimely death on millions of girls. It took away their joy and their smile and their hope and the dreams of their childhood. This little mouse swallowed Viagra in the darkness of the night in the hope of being resurrected and reborn once again.
There was a yellow stain that smelled of urine or blood on the silk pyjama bottoms. It might have been the result of a testectomy or the pale colored liquid filled with sperm, which males called the elixir of life. It smelled of death, or the pungent putrid stink of sulphuric acid. Women head over heels in love or dreaming of illusory happiness didn’t find this smell offensive.
Bodour accepted the love and the smell, hoping for freedom. She lived and died in one passing instant. Then the blindfolds were removed and she opened her eyes to confront the sadness and the truth.
In the open suitcase she placed the old cotton dress she had worn on the day of the great demonstration. There was an old blood stain on the back of the dress, which was the result of the brief moment of love, the fleeting moment that was worth her whole life. It was a real moment that destroyed all reality and transported her to her death. On the front there was another stain, which happened when he reached out for her with his bleeding arm and the blood spilled on his white vest. She reached for her baby on the pavement and placed her inside the suitcase, beside her cotton dress. She took the yellow folder containin
g her novel and the stacks of written and blank pages from the desk and put them in the suitcase. She didn’t know how many pages there were, but they were all drenched in her sweat, exhaustion, and sleeplessness. The tears had dried and hardened into the shape of a black scrawl similar to the handwriting of primary school children. A tremor passed from the papers to her fingers, her arms, her whole body. The smell of ink in her nostrils was like the smell of death or the smell of the marital bed.
“Does a person feel death coming before dying?”
Badreya peered inquisitively from the pages, looking her straight in the eyes. Badreya spoke to her all the time, her voice filling the house and her presence filling the universe. She comforted her, eased her pain, and dispelled the solitude and the silence. They quarrelled and made up, then quarrelled and made up again. They couldn’t live without one another. Bodour noticed some of the lines written by Badreya. They were written in a large, straight, adult hand.
“Sorrows come, Bodour, we don’t know where from or when. They hit us unexpectedly and we feel the pain in our chest, under our ribs, and in our head. We blame ourselves for sins we haven’t committed, words we haven’t written, sounds we haven’t produced, or a heartbeat we haven’t realized existed. Sorrows are harder than death. After a funeral, even when it is the funeral of a parent or somebody dearer, we wake up the next day, drink our tea and eat our breakfast as usual. We read the papers and the magazines, go to work, and come back home as usual. Dreams return to us at night and we have sex as usual. We do all this with the ease and familiarity of walking on our own two feet, as usual, as usual.
“But sorrows are something else, for they sever us from reality. This is when the wheels of life grind to a halt. Food loses its taste and falls in the stomach like a piece of rock. The taste of the water changes also, as does the smell of the air. Our faces look so different in the mirror that we hardly recognize ourselves. Sorrows don’t come at once, but in waves and intermittent currents. Sorrow is a sudden realization of death and a sudden rejection of life. The knees shake, the eyes become blurred, the rituals of everyday life become absurd and the brain cells tremble. The waves of sorrow are like fleeting waves of light that make the body as light as a feather. They enable the body to soar in the sky of happiness before it grows heavier and heavier with sorrow and finally falls down like a log.”
Bodour al-Damhiri sat on the edge of the bed, her suitcase open beside her. Her facial muscles contracted imperceptibly. She felt a pang in her throat and her mouth felt dry, although she wasn’t thirsty. She was suffocating as though there was no oxygen in the room. She was overtaken by the desire to sob, cry, and scream. But she could neither cry nor scream. There was dryness in her throat and underneath her eyelids, and there was silence and emptiness deep in her heart. She remained motionless for a long time, staring into thin air, drifting asleep with eyes wide open, moving from one dream to another, but never waking, getting up, or crying. Her tears dried up. Her vocal cords became paralyzed and she could no longer speak or scream. The cells of her brain had stopped, and the road to insanity lay open before her. It was a long trip into pre-natal darkness, where she was a foetus in the womb, surrounded by thick, impenetrable black water. Her eyes grew wider with shock. She could see the light and her own shock in the mirror. It was the shock of the naked eye watching itself, the shock of the dead watching their own death. Sorrow disappeared, lighting a dark corner of her brain.
Bodour al-Damhiri no longer feared separation, divorce, or death. She could carry her suitcase and go alone on her unknown and endless way. She withdrew herself from the eye of the universe and God’s ever-watchful eye. It wasn’t the withdrawal of despair or emptiness, but the acceptance of a rich, newly acquired loneliness. She used to think of loneliness as a punishment or a pain she should avoid, and not as a pleasure she should look forward to. Before leaving she asked Badreya, “Was it through loneliness that I left the world or went deeply into it?”
Seeing her dragging the suitcase behind her, Badreya whispered in a low voice, “Loneliness isn’t a pleasure in itself, but it may create new pleasures. You may write a new novel or live a bigger love than your first stunted love. You may write using the first personal pronoun, I, instead of hiding behind another woman and using the third personal pronoun, she. You may abandon literary criticism and stop polishing other people’s shoes, including those of your husband. You may begin to polish your own shoes and see your real self on the page. You may banish from your mind the babble of critics and their claim that the use of the first person has less value than the third person, as well as their contention that women’s writings are weakened by overly concentrating on the self. Literary critics, Bodour, have lost the self and the truth. Whoever loses the self will lose others as well.”
Bodour al-Damhiri opened the door. She dragged her suitcase behind her without looking back, without one word of goodbye to her past life. Her husband saw her walking toward the door, her back straight and her head held high. Gone was the old stoop never to return, for the clock could not move backwards, even if the laws of nature and of planetary movements were to change, even if time were to go backwards as some scientists had proposed. Bodour could not turn back. If fate interfered, she would stop it. She would wipe from her forehead all that had been written and recorded before her birth.
Her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, was standing in the hall when she opened the door to leave. Light fell on his face for a brief moment like a slap. The door was closed without a sound, without anger, without sorrow or regret. It was as though the long years they spent sharing the same bed were outside time, as though a hundred years were just a brief, transitory moment. It was as though Bodour al-Damhiri was another woman who was born the moment she opened the door and left. Her eyes were open for the first time in her life. She realized that fear, like inherited faith, was blind. If we opened our eyes, it would vanish like a drop of rain into the waters of the sea.
Her husband stood in the darkness, staring at the closed door. He wore his grey silk pyjamas which had become faded with time. His small, dark, sunken eyes took on the color of a white sheet. They withdrew beneath the lids for fear of confrontation, and tried to escape into sleep. But the sudden slap banished all sleep, although it woke up the other male lurking underneath the pyjamas, which said to him, “You were unfair to this woman. You lied and evaded and manipulated until the door was closed in your face. As men, we never retract unless women compel us to do so, but then it is too late. We never desire a woman we own. Our eyes are always in pursuit of the woman we don’t. We don’t realize a woman’s worth until we’ve lost her. Something is rotten in the state of manhood, or perhaps in the law of marriage which gives the man the right to hold and control. As soon as he controls a woman, rot sets in. This is the history that was written before we were born, written by the gods, the prophets, the kings, and the pharaohs. We know this history inside out, from birth until death. We take it with our mothers’ and fathers’ milk, for the father’s milk infiltrates into the mother’s breasts, disguised by the innocent white color.”
Zakariah al-Khartiti shook off the voice. He continued standing in the hall, staring at the door, recalling her image after she had left, remembering the first time he saw her. Although many years had passed, the first encounter remained engraved in his mind. That moment stayed like a piece of real time, as though a human life couldn’t be counted with the number of years. He often heard her say, “One brief moment of life may be worth a whole lifetime.” He used to laugh at her. He regarded her as a woman who was ignorant of the measurements of time, a woman who was deficient in reason and in faith, as his father and grandfather used to say, and as he read in the books of history and religion. During their first encounter, he told her, “I’m different from my father and grandfather, in fact from all men, for I don’t believe in male gods.”
But God and Satan had crept into his blood with his mother’s breast milk, and had taken up permanent residence in his mind. T
here was no universe without gods and devils who, like other males, were obsessed with nothing but women.
He tottered barefoot. He hurried a little to get to the bathroom, for the urge to relieve himself had become more urgent with the years. The smell of his urine was more pungent than before and he moved his nose away from the source of the smell. He used not to feel disgusted at the smell of his own urine or sweat, and nor was he repelled by the sight of wrinkles around his own eyes. But his wife’s wrinkles and her bodily odors repulsed him. He saw her with his eyes wide open but couldn’t see himself at all. His eyes, like those of the gods, saw only worship in people’s eyes, and never directed their gaze toward themselves, because they felt that they were above and beyond all human senses.
Zakariah al-Khartiti sat at the breakfast table in his usual chair, drinking his coffee and reading his column in the paper. The column was still there, though a little shorter than before. His name was written in a smaller font size and his photograph didn’t appear within the usual frame at the top of the column.
The earth shook underneath his feet. The heavens also trembled as though the pillars in the air holding the sky had collapsed, as God said in his Holy Books, “Could the pillars of heaven collapse and fall on earth? Could the dead rise from their graves on Doomsday? Could the living die on streets and in homes? Could the government fall and the throne move from underneath Pharaoh’s buttocks? Could a new ruler and a new god appear, wearing a turban instead of a tie, and carrying the black prayer mark on his forehead and a yellow rosary in his hand? Would he carry the sword in his right hand instead of the gun, and in his left hand God’s Holy Book instead of the constitution? Has Egypt become another Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban?”
Zakariah al-Khartiti jumped out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and saw his column in the paper as long and graceful as it used to be and on the right side of the paper. His photograph was inside the old frame. Everything was in order and the heavens still stood on their pillars in the air.
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