But Hamido knew he was something other than Hamida. He was aware that ever since their birth his body had been separate from hers. The resemblance was strong, though, and it was so easy to mix them up that sometimes he himself became confused and thought he was Hamida. Concealing himself behind a wall, he would raise his galabeya until he could peer between his thighs. When his eyes fell on that small, narrow cleft, he thought himself Hamida; then, a stick held tightly in a huge hand would swing down over his head, causing him to pull his galabeya hastily down over his body and cry. His tears, though always real, vanished quickly as children’s tears do. Spotting the stick that had been tossed on the ground, he would scurry over and pick it up, jamming it into the deep pocket of his galabeya. From time to time, he would reach into his pocket to finger it. Its hardness penetrated his fingers and moved on, into his arm, his shoulder, his neck, and when he tightened his neck muscles, his head would be thrown back, repeating the movement his father was wont to make with his head. He would try to speak from his throat, producing a coarse, oppressive timbre that echoed his father’s voice.
Whenever Hamida heard her brother speak with his rough intonation she knew that the stick was in his possession. She couldn’t see it, of course, but knowing he had it hidden somewhere beneath his galabeya, she would take flight, Hamido following at a run. To the casual observer, they would seem to be at play, but Hamido was not a child, and he had something hidden in his galabeya pocket, something hard which hung down his thigh like an alien limb.
And should Hamida glance in his direction and see his face, she would not know that it was Hamido standing there. The surprise would stop her in her tracks – or perhaps it was fright that caused her to freeze on the spot, as if she were a statue. Hamido’s open palm would move over the sculptured surface, touching the stony eyelids, and poking a finger between eyelid and eye, just like any child exploring the head of a new doll – especially one of those big ones with hair and eyelashes so real that it could almost be alive.
Never in his life had Hamido held a doll, whether large or small. Peasant children don’t play with shop-bought dolls, or rag dolls made at home, or toy trains, or paper boats, or balls, or anything else. In fact, they don’t know what playing is. After all, playing is for children, which they are not. They are born full-grown, like insect larvae, which no sooner know the touch of the earth than they fly, or like the worms which reproduce and grow in fermented cheese: as soon as the new worm separates from its mother, one can hardly tell the young worm from the old one.
Hamido caught sight of Hamida’s face; as she walked towards him from afar along the canal embankment, his heart pounded with the primal joy of children. But as she drew nearer, he recognized his mother’s black tarha, encircling her head and falling over her body. He ran to her and rested his head against her belly: when Hamido stood tall next to his mother, his head came up no further than her waist. He filled his nostrils with his mother’s distinctive smell, blending into the odours of bread baking, the soil of the fields, and sycamore figs. He loved sycamore figs. Whenever he spotted his mother returning from the fields, sycamore fruits wrapped in her tarha, he would run to her. Seating herself beside him on the ground, she would give him the figs, one by one, after blowing the dust from them.
His mother pushed him away with one hand. But he pressed himself against her, stubbornly clinging to her body and managing to insert his head beneath her left breast. It was precisely here that he loved to rest his head when sleeping next to her at night. Although she would position herself on the other edge of the mat, at a distance from him, he habitually awoke in the middle of the night, and, not seeing her beside him, would crawl over and bury his head under her breast.
She did not always push him away. Sometimes, her arms came out and encircled him, pressing him to her so fiercely that she would hurt him. Through him would run a mysterious, vague feeling that she was not his mother – nor was she an aunt, nor any relation at all – but rather a stranger, her body alien to his. He would feel an unfamiliarity that made him shiver, generating a tremor that ran from surface to depths, convulsing his body like the shivering of a fever.
The tremor shook him so violently that he wrapped his arms around her, but he felt her big strong hand – strong as his father’s – pushing him away, pushing him so forcefully that he nearly fell into the embankment’s waiting grasp. He lifted his face to look at her, and saw instead the ageing, dilated eyes of his father, red capillaries running over their white expanse. His shivering grew more violent; he was so scared that he opened his mouth to let out a scream, but was prevented by his father’s great hand, clapped over his mouth, and his father’s coarse voice that now sounded more like a hiss:
‘Follow me.’
As there was no room, and the half-light which just precedes the dawn had not yet appeared, the night was dark. The entire village was asleep, still and silent in that moment falling between the last hour of the night and the beginnings of day, just before the dawn call to prayer. His father’s large, bare feet practically ran over the dusty ground, with Hamido following so closely behind that he could almost touch the hem of his father’s robe.
He was just meaning to open his mouth to ask the question in his mind when his father came to a halt at a squat wall which separated the main country road from the railroad. Hamido knew this wall: he often hid behind it when playing hide-and-seek. His father handed him a long object, rigid and sharp, which gleamed in the darkness like a knife.
Hamido jammed the knife into his galabeya, and it fell deep into his pocket, where it hung down alongside his thigh. He felt its sharp, pointed tip against his flesh; the muscles of his thighs, legs and feet contracted, and he stood rooted to the ground. The piercing sound of the train whistle made the ground beneath him shake, so that he had to plant his feet even more firmly on the ground, resisting any movement, as if he were an intractable wild horse. But his father’s large, powerful hand pushed into his back, and his coarse voice, kept low, came out once again like a hiss:
‘Only blood washes out shame. Go on, follow her!’
So Hamido plunged towards the approaching train, but then stopped to turn around momentarily. He spotted his father, standing exactly in the same place as before, as if rooted to the ground, impassive and motionless, eyelids unmoving, the capillaries on the whites of his eyes frozen in place, like threads of blood drawn on a painting with a careful hand.
* * *
Just as her brother boarded the train, Hamida was stepping down onto the station platform. It seemed as if she were sinking into an ocean, a turbulent sea with waves not of water but of humanity: men, women and children, all wearing sturdy leather shoes. And long lines of cars, which to Hamida looked like trains, went by in a steady stream, moving along gleaming streets that showed no dirt, branching out in all directions only to intertwine and then diverge once more, endlessly, like a tree sending its crown high into the heavens and plunging its roots deep into the earth. And the houses here were packed together in a single, enormous, towering mass that entirely obscured the sky. The commotion, the sounds of people and car horns, were deafening, and Hamida could no longer hear a thing. But her bare feet were moving over the asphalt as if of their own accord, one foot behind the other, in that natural movement one learns from earliest childhood. As she did not know her way, Hamida might have gone on in this mechanical fashion indefinitely. She had no idea where her path had started, or whence it might take her. But her movements were interrupted by a heavy leather shoe that trod on her left foot and almost crushed it. She staggered back momentarily, only to find an enormous car bearing down on her. Her mouth open to its widest, Hamida shrieked; her voice, stifled for so long, let go in a long, shrill scream which lasted as long as two or three normal screams, or ten or a hundred or a thousand successive screams all merging into a single, unbroken sound that went on and on as though it would continue for all time.
The terrific din swallowed up her scream as the waves of the se
a swallow a drop of water, a bit of straw, a butterfly, or a newborn bird not yet able to fly. No one heard her voice, and her scream changed nothing. Around her, the world surged on, like a roaring cataract that tears apart crocodiles and leaves the splintered remains of ships in its wake, its pulverizing waters unaffected all the while, and its surface remaining as white as ever.
Hamida hobbled on her wounded foot to a sheltered corner next to a wall that seemed relatively remote from both vehicles and people. She leant her head back against the wall and stared before her, into the hazy vagueness that seemed to envelop everything around her, as if she were engulfed in a dream – or a nightmare – from which she would awaken shortly, to jump up from the mat like a little bird. She made to support her weight on her hand in order to spring up. But her palm brushed against her belly, and suddenly the haze lifted. Things fell into place, becoming intelligible not through the rational faculty which takes in new facts, but with that instinctive, mysterious understanding which issues from an utterly fatigued body in moments of rest or extreme languor.
She fell asleep right where she was, and awoke hungry. She noticed a bakery just next to the spot she had chosen, and out in front – very near indeed – sat row after row of carefully arranged loaves. She reached out a skinny arm; her fingers closed around a loaf and brought it to her mouth. She was just closing her teeth on it when a large hand gripped her arm.
She inhaled sharply, her chest rising up so that her small breasts showed, just like two olives, beneath the wide-cut galabeya; her protruding belly, inflated like a child’s balloon, revealed itself too. The black tarha still covered her head and hair and fell over her shoulders as far as her lower back, coming to an end just above her small, rounded buttocks.
Her gaze travelled upwards in alarm until it met a pair of eyes staring straight at her. She tugged at the tarha, bringing it across to half-hide her face, as she had seen the women of her village do. Only a single eye was visible now, dilated and black, its look of bafflement still alight with the innocent sparkle of childhood: the gleam of an eye that had always been closed, and was now opening for the first time onto the infinite world. A taut, circular muscle – like a severed question mark – surrounding the eye intimated alarm, and over the cornea dry tears had deposited a film which hung there like a light cloud. She sensed a new feeling creeping over her face, moving from the bridge of her nose towards one eye: a realization that she was a female, with a femininity not yet complete. No one had acquainted her with herself; it was she who had discovered this, on her own, a few minutes before, finding herself to be a newly, ripening fruit, fresh and still coated with dew.
Eluding the large hand, she managed to slip off at a run. The figure charged behind her. She turned into a street and hid behind one of its many doors. Poking her head out, she saw no one there and believed herself safe. But the long arm appeared from somewhere behind her and grabbed her by the neck, and a rough, brutal voice pierced her ears.
‘I’ve got you now, thief! You’re under arrest! Come on, now, walk ahead of me, to the police station!’
She gave in, leaving her thin white arm to his grasp. The hand clutching her was coarse and large, its joints protruding and its bones unnaturally curved, with veins bulging beneath the skin. Under the stubby fingernails ran a layer of dirty black. Her eyes crept up the long arm: over each broad shoulder marched a horizontal row of five brass buttons, separated by a burly neck encased in a high collar blackened around the inner rim with dirt dissolved in sweat. The collar encircled his neck with perfect fit, then descended over his chest in a line of ten brass buttons. During her stretch of compulsory schooling, Hamida had learnt some rudiments of arithmetic, and she began counting the buttons. Five over each shoulder, that makes ten on the shoulders, plus ten more on the chest: that makes twenty buttons in all.
Midday had arrived, and the sun was now blazing hot. Its red disc was reflected in the round brass buttons, giving them the likeness of twenty suns that made one’s eyes water at a mere glance. Unable to go on looking at them, she dropped her gaze to the ground. But the surface beneath her bare feet seemed aflame; she had never felt such heat underfoot before. His high boots struck the ground with a strange metallic sound, like iron grating against iron. His stride was long, each foot planting itself firmly on the asphalt. The feet rose into long legs inside trousers of heavy cloth, with a deep, vault-like pocket in which was hiding a sharp, hard implement, hanging down along his thigh.
They turned off the broad thoroughfare into a narrow side street, the long fingers still encircling her arm. But now the five fingers had become only four. The fifth had disengaged itself from the rest, moving upwards on its own, over the soft arm, cautiously, stealthily, until it buried its coarse black tip into the soft childlike armpit that as yet bore no sign of hair.
She tried to pull her arm away. But the four fingers contracted, closing around her upper arm more tightly, digging into the soft flesh, while the fifth finger emerged from beneath her armpit, straining until its pointed black snout reached as far as the soft rise of her breast – still just a bud – bearing down on it with cautious, trembling, jerky pressure which became firmer at the bend of a street, or behind a wall, and relaxing or stopping altogether whenever they were walking down the middle of the street; and occasionally, as they passed a throng of people, that fifth finger would retract itself quickly and join its four brothers.
A foul odour suddenly filled her nostrils, she found herself in a dark, narrow alley. She saw him come to a stop before a small wooden door. He drew a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, pushed her inside ahead of him, and closed the door.
At first she could see nothing, for the place was pitch dark. He lit a small kerosene lamp, which at once revealed a bare, tiled floor, with just a little rug in one corner that reminded her of the mat at home. It was a cramped room, and had only a single, small, iron-barred window high in the wall, a clay water-jug perching on its sill. In the faint light, the walls of the room looked a grey colour, overlaid with the sort of black tint produced by soot from a gas burner. On a nail in the wall hung a suit of heavy cloth. From its chest and broad, padded shoulders, yellow brass buttons gleamed in the darkness like eyes, open and feverish with a viral liver infection. On the floor sat one huge, high-topped boot, looking like a headless animal, and beside it was tossed a pair of white, baggy pants, the rear yellowed and the belly gone blackish, giving off the smell of old urine.
She raised her head from the tiled floor and saw him standing there, naked. His broad shoulders had become narrow – bony, even – and his collarbone protruded sharply. The sturdy trouser legs had given way to thin and bowed limbs; his massive feet, which before had rested so far above the ground, now had nothing to separate them from the tiles. The sharp, rigid implement concealed in his pocket had become visible.
She caught her breath with a gulp, her surprise imbued with a panic that she resisted instinctively. But he threw her down on the floor, his bulky finger tearing at the neck of her galabeya so that the threadbare garment ripped in half down the front, revealing no underclothes below.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice cracked and weak.
‘I’m the government.’
‘The Lord keep you – let me go.’
He answered in the same coarse, imperious tones. ‘Go where, girl? You’re already condemned.’
Everything began to happen with the extreme rapidity of panting breaths, of muscles contracting and expanding, an extraordinary speed which occurs only in dreams. But this time no confusion marked the dream: instead of a shopkeeper beating her with his stick, there was before her a male creature with a rough moustache that rubbed coarsely across her face, a smell of tobacco which stifled her, and a chest of thick hair, matted and plastered to the skin by a sticky, viscous sweat.
Suddenly everything stopped: a moment of stillness akin to the moment of death. She lifted her head from the tiled floor and looked about her. She saw him lying on his back, eyes
closed, utterly still. She thought perhaps he had died, when a faint snore began to issue from his gaping mouth, soon rising to become like the gurgling of an ancient waterwheel turned by an ailing bull. She raised herself quietly and composedly from the floor, pulled the two sections of her torn galabeya over her chest and stomach as best she could, and tiptoed to the door. She twisted her head back calmly, and saw the twenty yellow eyes, wide open and staring at her. Hastily, she opened the door.
The broad main street was visible ahead of her. She took off along it, running with all the strength she could summon, fleeing without a moment’s pause.
* * *
That very moment, Hamido had stepped down from the train. Now, his back to the south and his face turned northward, he stared straight ahead, gazing at the many faces crowding the area outside the Bab al-Hadid railway station, Cairo’s old central depot. His bare feet padded over the asphalt; beneath the ample folds of his galabeya, the knife swung down close to his thigh like an artificial limb or an organ newly implanted in his flesh.
The knife’s sharp tip bumped against the flesh of his thigh, and he shivered, the tremor passing through his neck and head. He staggered, and almost fell among the heavy leather shoes surrounding him, but he tautened his leg muscles and kept his balance. His eyes lost themselves in the vast, buffeting ocean: rising with the buildings’ towering summits, falling with the sun’s rays reflected on the gleaming asphalt, circling with the movement in the immense traffic circle, at the centre of which stood a huge stone statue with a human head. Around it moved row after row of people, and flags, and cars, round and round, uncoiling and branching off into numerous straight lines, only to intertwine once again, pouring into another traffic circle, and then branching off, the branches splitting into still more branches, separating, then mingling again, and dividing, endlessly.
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels Page 31