Two Women in One (11 page)

At the door to the new flat, the father handed over his property to the bridegroom: Bahiah Shaheen passed from the hands of Muhammad Shaheen into the hands of Muhammad Yaseen. But neither of the two men yet realized that she was Bahiah Shaheen, and consequently could not be Bahiah Yaseen.

She was the only one who knew. When the door closed behind them she raised her defiant eyes and saw a black moustache topped by a white spot the colour of snot. She saw his sweaty, thick, black chest hairs and the jungle of hair on his lower stomach. When he jumped into bed like a monkey, she laughed audibly and his eyes widened in astonishment. But when she walked slowly towards the wardrobe and opened it, she was astonished too.

She found nightdresses with cut-away fronts, backs and bellies, kinky underwear, perfumes, red, white and green bottles of make-up, eye brushes, slippers with red roses on them, hand towels, toilet soap, hair-removing cream, deodorants, and massage and body oils. Women’s tools in their married life are all sexual. A girl moves from her father’s house to a husband’s and suddenly changes from a non-sexual being with no sexual organs to a sexual creature who sleeps, wakes, eats and drinks sex. With amazing stupidity, they think that those parts that have been cut away can somehow return, and that murdered, dead, and satiated desire can be revived.

He smiled proudly to himself, thinking that her rejection was typical of a virgin who has no knowledge of men. Her ignorance gave him the self-confidence to parade naked before her, exhibiting his virility. She laughed again and his male aggressiveness was aroused, so he attacked her like a ravenous beast. She kicked him in the stomach and he fell to the floor, wiping his eyes in surprise and disbelief. This strong foot could not possibly belong to a female. For a female’s foot, from his experience with prostitutes, was so soft and small that he could bend it with one hand. But this foot was as firm and strong as a bullet.

He told himself that a wife was not the same as a prostitute. He assumed that the strength of a virgin’s rejection would increase in direct proportion to her purity and ignorance of the male. His arrogance mounted: he was now certain that he was the first invader. He felt sure that she would not discover his weakness so he attacked her more violently. She merely kicked him all the harder.

Despite his sluggish husband’s mind, it began to dawn on him that she was rejecting him. His eyes widened in horror and he asked angrily, ‘What makes you refuse?’

She answered even more angrily, ‘I’m not a prostitute.’

‘You’re my wife’, he said in his owner’s voice.

‘Who said so?’ she asked in astonishment.

‘Your father, myself and the marriage broker.’

‘That must be the basest deal in history!’ she shouted angrily.

He slapped her face and she laughed. She realized that people get angry when we uncover their disgraceful secrets. He was naked. His genitals were black and ugly. She glanced at them in disgust.

He hid the lower part of his body under the sheet, like a shy virgin on her wedding night. But then he remembered that he was a man and a man is not supposed to be shy, so he tore the sheet away and looked at her. Her black upturned eyes did not waver.

He shouted angrily, ‘You’re not a woman.’

The traditional insult a man hurls at a woman, believing that it will cause the earth to tremble under her and that she will be left with nothing. What could possibly be left to a woman if she does not worship men’s genitals?

She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Anyway, who told you that I’m a woman?’

‘Your father must have tricked me then’, he said angrily.

‘You should get your money back’, she laughed.

‘He’s a con man.’

‘You should have examined the cow before you bought it.’

She was trying to create a scandal, for scandal alone could save her now, could make everyone cast her out. She wanted to be cast out, to have no mother or father, and no family to protect her. For protection itself was the real danger: it was an assault on her reality, the usurpation of her will and of her very existence.

She sat in the chair and finally saw him pull up the sheet and fall asleep. His snoring gradually grew louder and she realized that a husband’s snores are like a father’s. She tiptoed out into the street. When she saw the red morning glow she realized that it was now the ‘day after’. Scandal awaited the whole family: her father would come looking for blood, her mother would inspect the sheets and nightdresses, and members of the family would be all over the newlyweds’ house searching in vain for the family’s nonexistent honour.

She strode confidently along the street in her white blouse and black trousers, taking long, quick steps like an athlete. She wore flat-heeled shoes; her short black hair fell over her ears and the nape of her neck. Her eyes were dark as she looked up. Her sharp upturned nose cut the world in two mercilessly and without hesitation. Her lips were pursed in determination and anger. When she reached Qasr al-Aini street she knew where she was going.

She saw one of the female students getting off the tram, and she hid behind a wall. She watched the groups of students getting off the bus and tram and walking towards the college. When the street emptied and the college had swallowed up the students, she left her hiding place and walked around the college fence. Through the iron railings she saw the door of the dissecting room. The door next to it still bore a white label with her name on it. She could see students’ heads moving behind the windows of lecture halls and the dissecting room.

‘Bahiah Shaheen!’

The voice rang out behind her and she jumped. One of her fellow students stood before her. She remembered his name. It was Raouf Qadri.

‘How’s college?’ he asked.

‘I never went back.’

‘So they’ve kicked you out too?’

‘Why, who was kicked out?’

‘Four so far. And I’m the fifth.’

‘I was kicked out too, but by a different authority.’

He laughed. ‘Well, there are all kinds of authorities, but kicked out is kicked out.’

‘What about Dr Fawzi?’ she asked.

‘He’s in the hospital as usual.’

She crossed the small bridge between the old and new hospitals. Through railings she saw the decorated boat and the couple waving to the woman standing on the palace balcony.

A big black car drove by. It looked like a police car. It was followed by an ambulance which, with its deafening siren, fought its way through the crowds standing in front of the hospital. There were queues of pale-faced men, women in black gallabiahs, children with bulging eyes, orange peddlers with their animal-drawn carts. Cats and dogs scampered among the piles of rubbish.

She entered the grounds of the spacious new hospital. Cars belonging to college lecturers and doctors were lined up like great ships moored in a port or aircraft waiting on a runway. Their curved tops shone like steel under the sun’s rays. Their bonnets were sharp and pointed like gun muzzles, their rear ends long and soft like snake tails. She stamped her foot hard on the ground, as if she were stamping on all those soft tails and sharp pointed heads, on all lecturers and doctors with their great shiny cars, bulging stomachs and flabby bottoms, their comfortable leather seats, their names hanging from signs in squares and streets, the diplomas they flaunted and the smell of blood and patients’ sweat oozing from the paper money lining their fat pockets.

She headed towards the out-patients’ department and saw Dr Fawzi’s head bobbing over the queue of bodies as skinny as skeletons. People leaned on each other for support. Thin, crooked legs unbent and straightened up. A head held itself erect with difficulty. Eyes were hollow, mouths open and panting, and a vile corpse-like smell filled the air.

She fought her way through the crowds to reach Dr Fawzi — although ‘fought her way’ is perhaps the wrong expression, for no sooner had she touched a body than it would stagger, lean against the wall or fall onto another. Yellow eyes strained towards her, seeing her as if from behind a cloud or from another world. In a daze, they realized they were standing in a queue.

Dr Fawzi was sitting at the head of the queue, his metal stethoscope hanging round his neck like a gallows rope. With his pen he wrote the names of mixtures. Sweat poured from his forehead as his voice rang out above the panting breaths, rattling throats and rasping coughs: ‘Breathe in! Hold your breath! Say ah . . . ! Say one, two, three, four! Stretch out your hand! Stretch out your leg! Pull yourself together!’

When Dr Fawzi saw her standing there he left his seat and came up to her smiling. ‘Hello, Bahiah’, he said. ‘I wanted to get in touch with you to see if you were all right, but I didn’t have your address. Are you all right?’

‘No’, she said softly.

Their eyes met in a long moment of silence. ‘How’s Saleem?’ she asked.

‘They’ve moved him from Misr prison to Torrah prison.’

‘Any visitors allowed?’

‘No, not even his mother.’

‘I heard they’ve released some of the students.’

‘That may be true . . . but no one like Saleem will be released now.’

‘When, then?’

‘No one knows. It might be years.’

‘Years?’ she shouted.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so’, he said sadly. ‘Nobody knows how long.’

She shook his hand with frightened fingers and ran out into the street. She saw people going to work or going home as if nothing important had happened. The most momentous possible thing had happened and no one knew or cared. She wandered the streets aimlessly. When she reached the college fence she looked up at the windows and saw the students’ heads as they bent over the corpses. They looked just like they did on any other day, as if nothing had happened. She growled in anger and stamped the ground. How ugly ordinary life was after a great event!

How awful that life went on heedlessly! The sky remained suspended on high, the earth stretched out below; the clouds moved with their usual nonchalance and people walked in the streets with their usual indifference. Would such frivolity never cease? Again she stamped her foot. Why wouldn’t this indifferent motion stop its grinding cycle? Why wouldn’t people stop for a moment, wake up and see the iron chains around their necks?

‘Bahiah!’

She jumped as she heard the voice behind her.

A face peered out of a big black car like a police vehicle. She recognized the face immediately. Dr Alawi. He got out, came up to her and said eagerly, ‘Bahiah! Where’ve you been all this time?’

She was silent. He took her hand and pulled her to the car. ‘Come with me!’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you!’

It was noon. The sun shone brightly through the car window, she could feel its heat on her arm. ‘Nobody knows’, she said to herself. ‘It could be years.’ She looked out at the sky, aimlessly. An undefined, unknown time, like the length of our lives. We do not know when we will die, and we think, naively, that such a day will never come. Or still more naively, we feel it coming at any and every moment — this limitless, infinite tragedy that we shoulder like an eternal burden.

The tragedy would have been easier to bear had she been told that Saleem would be out in five, ten or even twenty years. Then she might have been able to cope. Waiting for a definite period of time is bearable, when we know when it will end and it can be precisely defined. But to live in the grip of parallel lines that never meet, to be trapped between two jaws never knowing when they will snap shut: this is our tragedy, the secret of the sadness that envelops our joys and the indifferent merriment that surrounds our grief. We know that we are fooling ourselves, that we are gripped by a will not our own, and that this other will must destroy us in the end, though we never know when.

Now, as the car raced along, Bahiah felt gripped by fate: one wrong movement of the car and she would be a crushed corpse. But when she looked at him she realized that she lay in the grip not of fate but of those big hands grasping the steering wheel. One false move by those hands would be enough to destroy both her and the car.

A strange feeling of indifference came over her. The car swerved suddenly and almost collided with another, but she was not afraid. True indifference comes when one realizes the futility of one’s intentional life and untimed death, the futility of living indefinitely in chains. True indifference comes when one knows that death may come at any moment — why not this one rather than another?

She heard Dr Alawi’s voice. ‘I’d like to have lunch with you today. Is it all right?’

His politeness and hesitancy surprised her. Had he said, ‘I’d like to throw you into the Nile. Is that all right?’ she would have agreed straightaway, but he was only inviting her to lunch. That seemed insignificant compared with an invitation to die, so she said passively, ‘All right.’

They drove along a shady tree-lined road. She knew only a few parts of Cairo and she felt she was now somewhere she had never been before, but she asked no questions. She silently enjoyed that comfortable feeling of indifference. She heard him say, ‘Why have you left college?’

She answered sarcastically, ‘They married me off.’

He laughed and took her hand. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘No’, she said. ‘No kidding. They married me off.’

His eyes widened in feigned astonishment. ‘And what have you done about it?’

‘I ran away’, she said quietly.

He laughed again. ‘You’ll be dragged off to the House of Obedience.’

She laughed and turned her face to the sun. When he saw her black raised eyes, her upturned nose and her pursed lips, he asked, ‘How are you going to live?’

She shook her short tousled hair and said, ‘I’ll work and manage somehow.’

‘They’ll look for you everywhere.’

‘They’ll never find me’, she said confidently.

‘It’s not easy to hide in a city like Cairo. There are eyes everywhere. All the authorities are against you.’

She glanced cautiously at the street and looked at him searchingly.

‘And you’re against me too, aren’t you?’

He smiled, ‘I might have been against you, but I love you.’

The words sounded strange. She almost asked ‘What does that mean?’ but she pursed her lips in silence. The car stopped at a small house ringed by a garden. He took a key from his pocket and opened the door. She found herself in a large room with coloured wallpaper, pink curtains. A statue of a naked black woman stood over the fireplace, and on the wall hung a painting of another nude woman. She looked around in surprise and he smiled, saying, ‘I slave all day at the college, the hospital and the clinic just for a few moments of happiness in this hide-out.’