Zeina E-Book

Nawal El Saadawi

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Distinguished literary critic Bodour is trapped in a loveless marriage and carries with her a dark secret. She fell in love in her youth and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Bodour doesn't know that Zeina has blossomed into one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers. Pining for her estranged daughter, she writes a fictional account of her life in an attempt to find solace. But as the revolution in Cairo begins to gain fire, the novel goes missing and Bodour must find who has stolen it. Will her hunt for the thief bring mother and daughter together? Or is Bodour destined to lose her daughter to Cairo forever?

Leseprobe

Nawal El Saadawi

Translated from the Arabic by Amira Nowaira

SAQI

To the girls and boys born on the streets without fathers or mothers, without school, church, or mosque, and without papers carrying the official stamp. To children who survive, become adults, and turn into stars that dispel the darkness, bring forth the light, and transform our world.

PART ONE

HER IMAGE was engraved in my memory, and her features were etched in my brain and in the grooves of my subconscious. Her picture reminded me of myself, looking in the mirror at the age of eight. I walked down the street carrying my school bag, my feet stomping on the ground with the sturdy square heels of my shiny black shoes. I walked steadily and proudly, for I was the daughter of the eminent Mr Zakariah al-Khartiti, whose photograph appeared inside a large square frame in the morning paper on top of his daily column called “Honoring Our Pledge”.

Her features at the age of nine had an uncanny resemblance to mine, except for the eyes. Her eyes were large, and their pupils radiated a blue light that verged on nightly blackness. I was hopelessly drawn to them. They broke through the crust of my face and thrust deep into my hidden soul like knives.

She looked much older, as though she had been born a hundred years before me. In fact, she seemed almost ageless. She had no father or mother, and no home or even a bedroom. She had no honor and no virginity that she could possibly fear losing, and possessed nothing worth guarding in this life or in the hereafter.

She was just a girl, like myself and the other girls at school. She was tall and thin, and her body was as sturdy as if it had been made of more than flesh and blood alone. When she walked, her figure was like a spear cutting through the air. With her bare feet, she trod on the pebbles, the stones, and the thorns without feeling any pain, without a single drop of blood.

I wrote my full name on the blackboard. Mageeda Zakariah al-Khartiti. The teacher gazed at me, full of admiration. He told the other girls that I would become a famous writer like my father. The morning papers, the magazines and the silver screen would carry my picture. He told the girls that my grandfather, al-Khartiti Pasha, was a famous nationalist leader. The roots of my illustrious family went back to Saad Zaghloul and Orabi Pasha, and reached back to the great city of Mecca and the Prophet Muhammad.

Every girl had an identifiable father, whose name she wrote next to hers on the blackboard. Each girl was proud of her father, grandfather, uncle, or any well-known male relative.

Except for her. She stood proudly erect in front of the blackboard. The teacher ordered her to write her name. She held the piece of white chalk between her long, pointed fingers and turned toward the blackboard. We saw her straight back, the patch sewn with black thread on her uniform, and the flat sandals she wore. On the blackboard, she scrawled her name with large childish letters: Zeina.

The teacher hit her on the behind with his cane, over the patch sewn on the coarse material of her uniform.

“Write your full name like the other girls,” he ordered her.

She held the piece of chalk and wrote: Zeina Bint Zeinat.

She turned to face us, her eyes large and their pupils glowing with a black flame.

“Write the names of your father and grandfather, asshole,” he shouted at her.

A blue light shone from the two black orbs. She threw the piece of chalk on the ground, stamped on it with her feet, and walked with her head held high back to her seat in the back row of the classroom.

The teacher taught us the basics of language and religion. He said that the girl who carried her mother’s name was a child of sin.

He taught us the singular and plural of words. The plural of “word” was “words”, “greeting” was “greetings”, and “sin” was “sins”.

On the walls of the school bathroom, we wrote her name: Zeina Bint Zeinat. But she never read our graffiti, for she did not come to school every day as we did. She came only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to attend Miss Mariam’s music lessons. Later, a decision was taken to expel her from school. I never saw her again, except by chance on the street.

Miss Mariam taught us how to play the piano. She held up Zeina Bint Zeinat’s fingers, raising them high for all of us to see. She was immensely proud of Zeina’s fingers. She said they were created for music and that Zeina’s talent was unique. There was no one to match her in class. The tears glinted in the corners of Zeina’s eyes, but not a single drop fell. Only the glimmer in the eyes intensified and seemed like tears. But we were proven wrong when we saw her pale, lank face beam with a smile. Light radiated from beneath her dark, chapped complexion as it turned soft and pink.

I peered at Zeina’s long, powerful fingers as she played the piano, moving over the keys with the speed of lightning. Her voice rose high, singing the national anthem. My voice, in comparison, was raucous, grating, stifled, suppressed. Next to hers, my fingers seemed short, fat, and gelatinous, like those of my mother, Bodour Hanem, the wife of the eminent Zakariah al-Khartiti. She was also a great professor, occupying an equally eminent position.

During the night, Zeina’s image came to me in my dreams. I saw her sitting on the little backless stool, playing the piano without looking at her fingers. Her eyes were riveted to her music book as she turned the pages, one after the other. She had learned the music by heart as though the tune were her own and the words of the song belonged to her. Her fingers moved as though of their own accord.

I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “sin”, which the teacher pronounced with the tip of his tongue as if he was spitting. For some reason I imagined that musical talent had something to do with it, for how could the child of sin be superior to all of us in music?

Deep down, I envied her. I saw her walk with her upright gait down the street, moving her arms and legs with perfect ease, and dancing with other street children in total freedom. She wasn’t afraid of returning home because she had no home to speak of to return to, and she didn’t have a mother or a father to scold or slap her on the face for arriving late.

In the dead of the night, before falling asleep, I heard my father and mother quarrelling. I was fifteen then, a student at the secondary school. I recalled the words of my teacher when he said that I would turn out to be a famous writer like my father, Zakariah al-Khartiti.

I saw my father’s published framed photograph. He had a bright smile I never saw at home, for he was silent most of the time. After coming home from his work at the newspaper, he went straight to his study, a large room with walls lined with bookshelves. His desk, which was made of carved ebony, stood near the glass window overlooking the Nile. Its top surface was covered with newspapers and magazines. The photograph, hung on the wall inside a gold frame, showed him bowing in front of the president while receiving the Great Merit Award on Art and Literature Day.

My father warned me against going out on the street. He told me that girls from good families didn’t play with street children, that there were numerous rapes reported in the papers every day, and that crimes increased with the rise of poverty and unemployment. The young men who graduated from universities could find no jobs and no means of earning a living, let alone finding a wife. Living in total deprivation, they assaulted the girls walking on the streets.

Yet something attracted me to the streets. Inside our home, the walls were painted bright pink, but the air was heavy as though it were filled with invisible smoke which the eye couldn’t see and the nose couldn’t sniff. I felt it seep softly through my body, saturated with hatred, silence, depression, and an imperceptible sadness.

The windows of our home were always secured with double glazing and curtains, to prevent the street dust from coming through, and to keep out the escalating noise from the loudspeakers hung on minarets, the drumbeats and cheery sounds of weddings, nightclubs and discos, and the sirens of police cars and fire engines.

As a child, I once asked my mother why she married my father. “It was love, Mageeda,” she answered. I had no idea then what love between a man and a woman meant. I often scrutinized the faces of my father and mother to detect a look of love in their eyes. But I never succeeded in discovering the presence of a single loving glance in our home, until I grew up and understood things I hadn’t known.

My father was mostly silent. If he spoke, it was about his daily column in the paper, the editor, the minister, or the president. He would talk about anti-war demonstrations abroad, the fall of the regime in Iraq, or the problems of poverty in Egypt, the Sudan, or Ethiopia.

Like my father, my mother was also a great personality, perhaps even greater. She was the head of the Literary Criticism Department at the university. She obtained her PhD with flying colors and received the Great Merit Award before my father did. A photograph was hung inside a gold frame in her study, showing her bowing courteously as she received the award from the president of the country on the Art and Literature Day.

When I was fifteen, I realized there was something perplexing about the relationship between my father and mother. At night, I heard them quarrel. Their voices began low, slow, and harsh. But the tone grew higher and was sometimes accompanied by the sound of things crashing on the floor, or the sound of kicking or slapping on the face. My heartbeats would quicken with the rising tempo of the fight. My body would shrink under the covers and I would hold my panting breath lest they should hear it and discover that I wasn’t fast asleep.

I carried this heavy burden in my heart year in year out, for twenty-four long years. This was our skeleton in the cupboard that nobody in the whole world knew about. I dared not tell anyone, as though telling would be a sign of disloyalty to my parents.

In front of people, my parents were perfectly happy. They spoke to newspapers and the media about married bliss and about their perfect union based on love and high culture.

I concealed the truth inside me, and it grew and multiplied against my will like a malignant tumor, pressing on the cells of my soul and mind simultaneously. I went to a well-known psychiatrist who was one of my father’s schoolmates. I imagined that he would cure me of my depression, but, like my parents, he had two faces that were at variance with one another. He wrote books on brain cells and on neurology and its connections with the mind and the psyche, but at the same time he suffered from depression himself. Sometimes he prescribed drugs for me, while other times he prescribed something different altogether.

I graduated from the Faculty of Arts with a general “Pass” grade because I wasn’t fond of literature or writing, and preferred mathematics and figures. I was indifferent to what they called the literary imagination, perhaps out of resentment for my parents, or perhaps for the teacher who predicted that I would become a great writer. Since childhood, I have hated that teacher and wished to prove his predictions wrong. I loved music, dancing, and singing. But my short fingers, like my mother’s, were incapable of producing any music. My body, like hers, was also short and stout. Although my father was just as short as my mother, he was thinner and often went to the club to play golf. I saw him walking in the distance, with his diminutive stature, his small triangular head, and his angular chin underneath his full lips, the upper fuller than the lower. Whenever he was engrossed in deep thinking or saw my mother walking past, he would pout his lips in dismay.

In my dream while I lay fast asleep, I saw the image of Zeina Bint Zeinat. This image had never left me since I was a child. I wished I could be in her place, even if they called me the child of sin.

They called her “duckling”. She wore high pointed heels and walked through the university corridors to get to her office next to that of the dean. She was a little out of breath as she walked, carrying her short, stout body, swaying slightly over her pointed heels. Her neck was short and fleshy and it upheld a small, square-shaped head surrounded by short black hair. The hair was sparse and shot through with some white that quickly disappeared under the sophisticated hair dye applied with special care. She wore a blue skirt suit, with white collars that looked like the collars worn by little girls before they got married or lost their innocence.

She was in her middle years, just before the menopause. Although she was her husband’s junior by nine years, he looked younger by a year or two. This was perhaps because he was a man. Women’s lives, in contrast, are often consumed more quickly, for men do not bear children or give birth, and never carry the responsibility of home, children, or ill repute. No part of their bodies carries the stamp of virginity and they don’t have to deal with the menopause or senility later in life. Nothing, in fact, detracts from a man’s honor or worth except his empty pocket, not even consorting with prostitutes.

Ever since she was a child, Bodour had always been mindful of her reputation. She had the responsibility of upholding the family honor. Her father, Ahmed al-Damhiri, was a general in the armed forces. When the 1952 revolution took place, he was an officer in the army, and although he wasn’t among the revolutionary commanders, he had a family connection with one of them. He was later appointed as the director or the secretary of the New Cultural Organization. As an adolescent, he read novels on platonic love. In his mirror, he saw himself as the hero of Romeo and Juliet. He wrote love poems to the neighbor’s daughter. In his dreams, he imagined himself a well-known poet or novelist. Some of his dreams seeped through to his daughter, Bodour, when she was a child. She read the books she found in her father’s library. Her heart beat hard as she read in bed before going to sleep, tempted by the image of Prince Charming, who made love to her until she orgasmed. Her body trembled under the covers with the sinful pleasure. She woke in the morning, her cheeks flushed and her eyes swollen. She took a bath with warm water and soap, cleansing her body of its sinfulness, but her heart remained heavy with vice.

Six months before the revolution, the fires blazed throughout Cairo. Bodour al-Damhiri had already obtained her BA in literature and criticism. Her body trembled with intense pleasure whenever she heard the acronym BA. A pleasure akin to sex overtook her wholly, body and soul together, in one wild moment of ecstasy. Her short stout figure swayed above her pointed heels. She wished she could jump in the air, dance, and sing. Had it not been for the earth’s gravity which pulled her down forcefully, she would have flown. But her voice was muffled and she struggled to keep her feet on the ground. Her father saw the tears in her eyes and mistook them for tears of joy for having obtained her degree. Totally ignorant was he of his daughter.

Deep down, Bodour had an overwhelming sense of sadness, especially in moments of joy. It might have been her short, stout body, her narrow, lustreless eyes, her suppressed mind, despite her literature degree, or her soul imprisoned inside the confines of literature.

Her chains were never loosened except during sleep, when her mind, soul and body dozed off, when her parents and everyone else went to sleep, when God shut His wakeful eyes, and when everything and everyone dissolved into darkness. It was then that a secret cell buried in the deep recesses of her mind arose from sleep, yearning for love and for the sinful pleasures of the body.

Before the great fire of Cairo, huge demonstrations had broken out. Strong patriotic feelings passed from the father to his daughter, Bodour. He recited for her the clumsy, artless lines of poetry he used to read out to his colleagues in the army. He sang of martyrdom for the sake of the homeland, provided that neither he nor his own daughter were the martyrs in question. He was as certain of his love for his country as he was that Bodour was his own flesh and blood and not somebody else’s. He was confident of the existence of God, the angels, the Devil, and the Day of Judgment.

Since childhood, Bodour had absorbed all his ideas. At school, she sang patriotic songs alongside her schoolmates. At the age of seven, she began to pray five times a day, fast during the month of Ramadan, and chase away the phantom of Prince Charming from her dreams and wakeful moments.

Bodour succeeded in controlling her subconscious mind, which sometimes awoke during her sleep. With the power of her will, she sent it back to dormancy. She surpassed her father in loving God and the homeland, and became a model student with limitless faith in God and the nation. Her convictions ran through her veins and dominated her being from head to toe.

But sleep often won the battle and pulled her down like the earth’s gravity. Her whole body succumbed to the coma of sleep, except for the sole of her left foot, which was smooth and white like her mother’s. It stayed awake and fully conscious, even while the whole universe slept. In her sleep, Bodour would feel something tickling the sole of that left foot. She would kick it with her right foot, thinking it was the Devil’s finger defying God’s will, prickling the sole of her foot while she lay unconscious and urging her to commit transgressions.

In the morning, she would wake up and regain control of her conscious mind. She would ask herself why the Devil always stood to the left of people during prayers, urging them to defy God. She would argue with herself that communists were heretics because they always stood on the left side.

A secret pleasure passed from the sole of her foot up through her leg, reaching her thigh, belly, and chest. Her breasts were two small buds that protruded slightly and were immensely painful when the Devil’s fingers pressed on them.

During her childhood, she thought of the Devil as a pure spirit without a corporeal presence, the same as God. But after she had grown up, she realized that the Devil possessed a finger, perhaps even a body, along with all the other organs, including the sinful part which he used in challenging God’s commandments.

At eleven, she saw the Devil’s face for the first time. As a child, she was always afraid of opening her eyes while asleep. When she was a little older, she became more curious and wished to see the features of the Devil: his nose, head, forehead, ears, and mouth. She sometimes felt the Devil’s breath on the nape of her neck while she lay prostrate. But she never had the courage to open her eyes to see him.

At the age of eleven, she was stunned to realize that Satan had a moustache and a beard just like elderly men. He looked very much like her paternal and maternal grandfathers, and the old man next door, and the elderly man in the movie “Love Among the Elders”, which she had seen in the cinema the year before.

She fell into a state of drowsiness as Satan tickled the sole of her foot. She feigned sleep so as to allow him to continue his flirtatious act. But by keeping this event a closely guarded secret from her parents, she became Satan’s partner in sin. She would bury her head in the pillow, stop her breath and pretend to be dead, thus encouraging him with her feigned death to continue, reaching the focal point buried in the folds of the flesh, deep inside the womb of existence. As she lay in a deathly state, a sensation of pleasure that was free from any sense of guilt would pervade her whole being.

One night, Satan didn’t come as usual. He remained absent for a long time. Bodour imagined that God had punished him with death. But she heard from her mother and father that he had gone to London for a prostate operation. The word prostate sounded uncannily feminine to her ear, and she had no idea where this feminine-sounding part might be located on Satan’s body. She wondered why God should insert a feminine organ in a male body. In any case, Satan never came back from London, having perhaps died there. So Bodour drove him out of her dreams, whether during her sleep or her wakeful moments. At eleven, Satan was gone completely from her memory. He survived, however, in the sole of her left foot, tickling her until she fell asleep and telling her the tale of Clever Hassan and the Ogress. In the morning, when she performed ablution and prayers, Satan no longer stood on her left side. She developed into a chaste young woman who was cleansed of all sinfulness.

Bodour had already obtained her BA degree by the time of the great demonstrations. She was a model young woman whose whole life was consumed by the love of God and the nation. Only her heart felt overburdened, for it still carried the imprint of Satan’s finger on her body. What a burden it was for her heart to keep God, the nation, and Satan all in the same space!

On the day of the great demonstrations, she found herself squeezed between the bodies of thousands of women and men, young and old. The masses poured forth from the alleys and the boulevards, from Bulaq, Maadi, and Helwan. They were a mix of workers, government employees, farmers, and school and college students of both sexes. With bare, chapped feet, or wearing slippers, sandals, or shiny leather shoes of the best quality, the crowds marched at a single pace.

Bodour walked along with them, stomping on the ground with her leather shoes, energized by the strength of the thousands, or perhaps the millions, who screamed in one breath, “Down with the king, long live free Egypt”. The word “free” stuck in her throat like a pang. Although she was moving with the crowds, she felt herself enchained. In vain, she moved her arms and legs to liberate herself from the chains. She cried out, but her stifled screams dissolved in the general noise. Her tears merged with her sweat, and her dress stuck to her body underneath her blue jumper. Next to her walked Nessim. His tall body was gracefully erect, and he trod strongly and steadily on the ground, his blue eyes looking straight ahead. Not once did he look in her direction, although she kept furtively glancing at him. His profile showed his proud pointed nose and his pursed lips. He wore a grey jumper that was tatty at the elbows and made of coarse wool. The white collar of his shirt was creased and his old shoes dusty. The soles of his shoes had a piece of iron like a horseshoe. In her dreams, his thick frizzy hair brushed her fine, smooth face.

Bodour was hugely attracted to men who were masculine and rough, men who wore their lives on their sleeves for the sake of God and the homeland. These men were very different from her cousin, Ahmed, who was scared of cockroaches, mice, and the frogs leaping in the garden, whose fingers were short and fat like hers and whose build was as short as that of his father and of his uncle, General Ahmed al-Damhiri. He inherited their square-shaped head and the square chin underneath thin lips, the upper thinner than the lower. He pursed his lips whenever he fell into deep thought, a gesture he inherited from his father and his grandfather, Sheikh al-Damhiri, who was the deputy or the vice deputy of the great al-Azhar Mosque.

Bodour met Nessim while in her freshman year at university. From the first moment their eyes met, something trembled deep inside her. He wasn’t her colleague in the Faculty of Arts, but he came to university on the days demonstrations were to take place. When she saw him from afar, her heart fluttered wildly against her ribs. Her short figure swayed and swung over her pointed heels. She pressed with her hand on the strap of her bag slung over her shoulder, holding on to it to regain her balance. He often passed her without looking or smiling at her the way the other colleagues did. He sometimes nodded in greeting but continued on his way without looking back. She peered at his straight back, his taut muscles, and his lean body. She admired the way his arms moved in harmony with his legs and the way his tall, spear-like figure cut the air as he walked.

For two years she saw him in her dreams. In the third, when she saw him at one of the meetings, she initiated the conversation. The seat next to him was empty. She smiled at him and sat next to him saying, “Good morning, Nessim.” They met again inside the university or in the Orman Garden nearby, and sat on a wooden bench talking and exchanging revolutionary books. Bodour was at heart drawn to the idea of rebellion. She revolted against everything in her life, including her own parents, uncles, and grandparents, perhaps God and Satan as well. Since the age of seven, her fear of God bordered on hatred, but she never had the courage to admit her fantasies or dreams to herself. Ever since her childhood, she had been committing many sinful acts in her sleep.

She studied Nessim’s profile as she walked side by side with him during demonstrations. The harsh, acute contours of his face looked as though they were carved out of stone. His nose was so pointed that it seemed to cleave the air, and his tall thin body seemed to be made of something other than flesh. As he walked, he carried his body as though it were weightless.

From the moment the Devil’s finger started stroking her, Bodour wished to be free of the weight of her body, the load of plump flesh that she carried each and every day on her arms, chest, belly, legs, and the soles of her feet. She dreamed of a force that would lift this weight off her shoulders. She dreamed of two strong arms reaching down from heaven to crush her body until the flesh dissolved and vanished completely.

After the demonstration ended and the crowds dispersed, she continued walking beside him, wishing she could walk on and on with him until the end of her days. She wanted him to carry her in his arms and march ahead until the moment of death. They walked silently, side by side, through one street after another, until Nessim stopped in front of the basement of a huge building. He stood there for a moment, silent and thoughtful. Then, raising his eyes to her face, he spoke, his voice slightly hoarse and the blue irises of his eyes sparkling with what seemed like choked tears. His words were fitful and broken as he said, “I don’t know what I should say, Bodour! But I feel ... I feel you ... I have strong feelings like you ... but you come from a different class, Bodour ... I live here in this basement flat ...”

All this happened many years earlier when Bodour was twenty and was still dreaming of love and revolution. She later obtained her BA from the Faculty of Arts, although she disliked literature and criticism. She only loved and wanted Nessim, dreamed of him and couldn’t imagine life without him. She would have preferred a life in the basement flat to her life with her parents in the large fancy villa in Garden City.

Bodour couldn’t recall what she told him as they stood in front of his basement room. Did she tell him that she loved him? She might have said it, although her voice was completely silent. The words might have come out of her mouth like warm soundless vapor.

She stood there hesitantly, one hand resting on the cracked wooden door and the other holding on to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled at it as if to keep her balance and resist the earth’s gravity which dragged her down.

He was equally hesitant and quiet. The air was also still. Nothing in fact moved except her breath, while he seemed to have stopped breathing completely and stood there transfixed, almost like a statue.

She couldn’t remember how long it was they stood there, near the closed door. He didn’t produce the key to open the door although it lay there in his pocket. His arm didn’t move, and nor did any other part of his body.

What was he waiting for? Did he expect her to turn and head home? Or raise her hand and slap him on the face before going away? In her eyes, he saw an imprisoned tear that neither fell nor disappeared. Were these the suppressed tears of a young woman feeling mortified, having offered herself to a man only to be rejected by him? Was she a young woman reaching out for help from another human being, but receiving only rejection?

He finally took the key from his pocket and opened the door, and she followed him like a sleepwalker. She stood with her back against the wall, hoping its hardness might provide her with support and strength. But its coldness sent a shiver through her overheated body, and an unnameable fear overtook her whole being.

He held her little white hand in his large palm, and she fell into his arms like a ripe fruit dropping from the tree, or Newton’s apple pulled down by the force of the earth’s gravity.

Bodour was familiar to some extent with the physics of Newton and Einstein, was aware of the theories of relativity and Marxism, and was well read in literature and criticism. Nessim on his part was greatly interested in science and philosophy. He didn’t believe in the story of Adam or the apple that Eve tempted him with, unlike Bodour who still held on to what her parents and teachers at school had always told her.

The mattress on the tiled floor was covered with books, papers and pamphlets. Lining the walls were wooden shelves holding books, magazines, and folders. In the corner stood a bamboo chair on which was spread a washed white shirt. A square iron latticed window opened out onto the asphalt street.

Then the room and all its contents disappeared. As he drew her close to his chest and kissed her hair and eyes, time and place vanished completely. The dream which had been visiting her every night came back to her, although the pleasure she experienced in the dream was much more intense than in reality, for the Nessim of her fantasies was more daring, and much more forceful in invading her body. In the dream, his body seemed harder than a spear that cut through the universe to reach the ultimate point. Reality always seemed pale in comparison with the stark beauty of fantasy.

When Bodour came to, she saw the tiled floor and the latticed window with the iron bars. She could hear the sound of Nessim’s breath as he lay sound asleep beside her. It was almost like she could hear the sound of her father’s snores, and the Adam’s apple on his throat was like her father’s too. Nessim’s muscles were now sagging, passive and unchallenging, like her own muscles and her mother’s.

She got dressed in a hurry, slung the bag strap over her shoulder and tiptoed toward the door. But she heard him calling her, “Bodour?”

She turned. He came toward her with his tall, upright gait, the firmness of his muscles restored and his eyes radiating a blue light bordering on blackness. She felt that she was looking into the depths of the sea or the skies at night.

It was not yet dawn. She wanted to throw herself on his chest and cry, for there had always been a vague sadness inside her since childhood. In his arms, grief vanished and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of joy that shook her whole being and removed all the deep-rooted pains and sorrows. But in her head there was a tiny cell, like a little needle, that reminded her of her father, her grandfather, the family honor, God, Satan, and the blazing fires awaiting her after death.

“Bodour?”

“Yes, Nessim.”

“Shall we go to the Ma’zoun, the marriage registrar, to get married in the morning?”

“Oh my God!”

Her chest heaved with the quickening of her heartbeats. The word “Ma’zoun” had a terrifying, vague, and elusive ring that had absolutely no connection with love. Could she possibly get married in the morning?

Her father was lying in bed sipping his tea, reading the papers, yawning and stretching his limbs, fully at ease and confident that his innocent, virgin daughter was sleeping in her bed or taking a bath in preparation for going to university.

“Is the Ma’zoun necessary?”

“Of course, Bodour. No marriage is valid without the Ma’zoun ... and then ...”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He closed his lips and gave her a protectively paternal look, although she was barely two years his junior. But he felt a hundred years older, for she had never known poverty or hunger and never slept on the pavement. She hadn’t worked as a child apprentice at a mechanic’s shop or gotten kicked by the master mechanic in the stomach. She had never been beaten up at a police station, and nor had she seen her mother die of grief or bleed with every breath she took, or witnessed her father drown in prison.

“I’m older than you, Bodour, and I know how hard life can be. You’re a nice girl and I fear for you if ...”

He stopped at “if” because he wanted to say, “If you became pregnant outside marriage, your father, General Ahmed al-Damhiri, might kill you!” He gave her a sunny smile. The light in his eyes intensified, and he enveloped her in his arms, whispering, “If we could just have a child who is as beautiful as you are!”

She closed her eyes with her head resting on his chest and fell to dreaming. Could she possibly have a boy or a girl who looked like Nessim? A child with the same tall, graceful figure, the sparkling eyes, the lively, rebellious spirit, the defiance and the hardness?

Before the light of dawn appeared, she was shaken out of her reveries by the sounds of police car sirens. Armored vehicles roamed the streets, rifle butts knocked on doors, torch lights fell on the pale, emaciated faces of poor workers and college students who were being pursued by the security police in factories, schools, or universities, because their photographs appeared on the records of the Ministry of the Interior.

Bodour didn’t know how she found herself lying in the safety of her own bed. She closed her eyes under the covers as the warmth slowly engulfed her. The latest events infiltrated her dream as she fell asleep. In the dream, she walked with the demonstrators. Beside her were the two gleaming eyes radiating light like two stars in the darkness of the night. Under the covers, her hands felt her body. Within the folds of the flesh, the dream became a palpable reality, and the fantasy turned into a concrete fact she could touch with her own hands. His voice reached her ears like light waves, “If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Zein, after my father.” Bodour whispered, “And if it’s a girl, we’ll call her Zeina, after my grandmother.”

In the dream, she saw her grandmother’s ghost coming into her room. She was a graceful woman with sparkling eyes. Bodour called her Nana Zizi. When she was eight years old, her grandmother, who was still alive then, sat next to her bed and told her bedtime stories. She also told her the sad story of her life, and how she had wished to become a famous singer, for she loved singing, dancing and writing poetry. But her father took her out of school at the age of fourteen. They dressed her in a white wedding gown, and after the drumbeats and the festivities, she found herself alone, locked in a bedroom with a strange, rough-looking man who was short and hunch-backed. He wore a thick, black moustache on his upper lip.

While Bodour lay warmly in her bed dreaming of her grandmother, an armored vehicle stopped in front of the splintered wooden door of the basement of the tall building. Five police officers carrying rifles surrounded Nessim and flashed a bright light in his face. The pupils of his eyes blazed with bluish black anger. His tall, lean body seemed as hard as a spear, and his head was held high above his firm, sturdy neck. One of the police officers hit him on the head with the butt of his rifle, while another slapped him on the cheek. He stood upright, nevertheless. Not a single muscle in his face moved, and he didn’t bat an eyelid.

One of the police officers grew so angry that he spat in his face and punched him below the ribs, at that point of both pleasure and pain, the source of life and love.

When they dragged him to the armored vehicle outside, his nose and mouth were bleeding, dripping over his white vest which revealed the black hairs covering his chest. The blood streamed to his white Egyptian cotton pants. The smell of cotton merged in his nostrils with the smell of blood, dust and the fertile black soil, where green shrubs grew, carrying spots of white buds. He was eight years old when he sang with the other village children, running all over the green expanse dotted with white buds, “You’ve come to bring us light, oh Nile cotton, how lovely you are! Come on, girls of the Nile, collect the matchless cotton, God’s gift!”

Inside the police vehicle, he sat handcuffed. He saw the image of his grandmother, Zakia, who was tall and proud. Her large cracked hands held an axe and her dark wide eyes could hold the whole universe. One day, she gripped the axe and brought it down on the head of the village mayor. She then lay on the ground and slipped into eternal peace.

The connection between Mageeda, the writer, and Zeina Bint Zeinat had never been severed. Since childhood, something attracted them to each other, despite the vast gulf separating them. With the help of her parents, Mageeda became a columnist at the Renaissance magazine. Deep in her heart, however, she hated writing, which she had inherited from her parents, as much as she hated her short body and the large villa in Garden City. The name of her father and grandfather was engraved on a shining brass plate on the external door of the villa: Al-Khartiti Villa. The name al-Khartiti seemed to her like a deformed limb affixed to her name and her body.

Surrounding the huge redbrick house was a large garden, where trees, roses and other flowers grew. An iron fence encircled the garden in which jasmine and bougainvillea trees grew, with their yellow, white, and crimson flowers.

From the outside, the place looked beautifully cheerful. But inside, there was ugliness in every corner, lurking underneath the colorfully embroidered silk tablecloths.

Mageeda went to school every day in a limousine driven by a dark chauffeur. Before she went to bed, a nanny took her to the bathroom and washed her with warm water and scented soap. The nanny would dry her with the large white towel and carry her to her bed, telling her the story of Cinderella and the prince until she fell asleep.

In her dreams, Mageeda saw herself flying like a sparrow in the sky. Her thickset body no longer weighed her down, and her arms moved powerfully and lightly through the air. Her large wings flapped and fluttered, and when the sunrays or the moonbeams fell on them, they assumed an angelic white color. Her fingers were no longer short and chubby, but became long and thin, like Zeina’s. They moved more quickly over the piano keys than the speed of light. Miss Mariam held her hand high for all the girls to see. She spoke with a voice that was so loud that it reached everyone: her parents, her uncles, her grandfather, the neighbors in Garden City, the porters sitting in front of buildings, the barber in the square, the chauffeur who drove the car, and her nanny who told her the story of Cinderella before she fell asleep. She told them, “Mageeda’s fingers have been created for music. Her talent is unparalleled. There isn’t anyone like her in the class.”

In the dream, Miss Mariam’s voice sounded like a harmonious tune, tickling her ears and sending a titillating sensation from her neck down to her chest. The wave moved to the left breast, just over the heart, and crept stealthily to the belly, then quivered a little when it got to the smooth hairless pubic area. From there it slipped down toward the left thigh and through to the left leg, and thence to the sole of her left foot. It titillated her as it used to do in the past, giving her the well-known but fresh sensation of pleasure together with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.

Mageeda never knew how music, in her childish dreams, turned into a sinful pleasure, a pleasure that was akin to, though still different from, Satan’s finger, for although music descended from her ears to the sole of her foot, Satan’s finger went up from the foot until it reached the focal point of the universe.

Before she slept, Mageeda told her nanny about Miss Mariam and how she held Zeina’s fingers up high for all the girls to see, and how her voice rose high saying: “Zeina’s fingers have been created for music. She’s a talented girl like no one else.”

Mageeda would bury her head in her nanny’s bosom, pushing her nose between her breasts, trying to inhale some motherly love.

Nanny would stroke her head and whisper in her ear, “Sleep, Mageeda, God has been kind to you and has given you plenty. Your father is a celebrity and your mother, may God protect her, is a great professor at the university. But Zeina, poor heart, has no father or mother ...”

Nanny’s voice would stop, as though choked. She would raise her large dark hand to wipe the tears with the wide sleeves of her long, loose gown.

“Are you crying, Nanny?”

“Not at all, my child.”

“Do you have a father and mother yourself, Nanny?”

“Of course, my child, everybody does.”

“Except for Zeina Bint Zeinat, Nanny?”

“She had a father, child. He was a real man, a proper man ...”

“But where did he go, Nanny?”

“He went to heaven, child.”

“You mean he died?”

“Yes, Mageeda, my child.”

“Why did God take him?”

“God always takes the best people.”

“But why didn’t God take my father and mother then?”