Zeina (8 page)

He glimpsed her as she entered the garden door. He was examining his face in the mirror, arranging the little hairs sprouting in the bald spot on his head. He looked with disgust at his triangular chin. He had been trying to call an old mistress. The phone rang for a long time. He dialled other numbers, but to no avail. He couldn’t find any of them, so he wondered to himself in dismay, have they all found husbands or lovers? Or have they all gone on a pilgrimage to wash their sins? Or have they become infected with the HIV virus as a punishment from God?

He moved his head toward the window and looked up at the sky. He watched her come through the door as though heaven had answered his prayers. She came into the garden with her tall erect gait, looking more like a young woman than a little girl of nine. Because she had no parents, Nanny Zeinat took her on and treated her like a daughter. Miss Mariam paid her expenses and predicted a rosy future for her in music and singing. His daughter, Mageeda, looked after her like a sister, and his wife, Bodour, was as kind to her as she was to orphans and illegitimate children. As he opened the door for her, her cheerful voice came to him like the chirping of a bird.

“Is Mageeda here, Uncle?” “

Yes, sweetie. Do come in.”

It was Friday. Through the loudspeakers came the noise of cheers, prayers, and the pronouncements of “There is no god but Allah” repeated a thousand times. The deafening sounds filtered through the various layers of earth and sky, audible to the gods, the angels and the demons, as well as to the living creatures on earth. Even cats reiterated it. They listened to the sounds without understanding the meaning of the words. Like street children, however, the cats picked up the rhythm and repeated it, thinking it was a lullaby a mother sang to her child at bedtime, a poem recited by little girls at school, or the cadence of a dance performed by children on the pavement or on stage.

Zeina Bint Zeinat went into the large study whose walls were lined with bookshelves. She gasped with childish wonder, “So many books, Uncle!”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“You read them all?”

“Of course, sweetie!”

On top of the elegant desk stood a plate on which the statement “God guides whom He wills and leaves astray whom He wills” was engraved in an Islamic calligraphic style.

It was Zakariah al-Khartiti’s motto in life. Guidance came from God and so did transgression. But transgression held a much greater fascination for him than obedience. Sinful joys flowed through his body as warmly as the blood in his veins. The blood accumulated beneath his belly and crept underneath the pubic hair toward the Devil’s gland and the center of temptation.

Zeina Bint Zeinat walked around the room, tall and graceful, looking at the paintings, vases, and antiques. In the corner of the room sat Zakariah al-Khartiti on a sofa made of soft luxurious leather. He held the statuette of Nefertiti’s head.

“Come, sweetie, have a look at this statue!”

“Oh! How lovely! Who’s this woman?”

“Queen Nefertiti.”

“Was she a real queen?”

“Of course! Do you like the statue?”

“Very much, Uncle”

“Take it, then, it’s a gift from me to you!”

She wrapped her long, slender fingers around the statuette and held it firmly. Zakariah al-Khartiti cast a furtive glance at her profile. She held up her nose proudly and her little unformed breasts with their tiny nipples throbbed underneath the white dress. As his finger reached out to touch them, the blood boiled in his veins with the power of an electric shock running through his entire being. He started, panting heavily as if possessed by a mighty force.

She leapt off the sofa, dashing the statuette to the floor. Her fingers clutched the doorknob to open it, but the door was locked and Zakariah al-Khartiti had the key in his pocket. Unlike girls from good families, she had training in self-defense gained from living on the streets. She had lost her virginity long ago, when her mother left her on the pavement. Though only nine, she wasn’t afraid of thieves or highway robbers. He was fifty-one years her senior, a man whose male urges had suddenly erupted. According to the words of a holy man, when men were in the grip of erotic urges, they lost two thirds of their minds. A battle therefore broke out in the study, a conflict between a man bereft of two thirds of his mind and a little girl whose mind was much bigger than her years. He tore off her white dress and her petticoat made of Egyptian cotton. He removed her little white panties and pulled one leg away from the other, forcing his male organ between her thighs. But he couldn’t enter her. His erect phallus couldn’t find its way through the folds of her flesh.

The route inside was completely blocked, as though there was no aperture there and no vagina. She wasn’t like other females.

He couldn’t imagine that a young girl could have such strength or those muscles. In his experience, even after resistance and fighting, women gave in in the end. Strong young women often stopped the fight and lay powerlessly underneath him. A student might weep and plead with him to let her go, but her tears only increased his appetite for rape. Deep down, he was a schoolboy that had been raped himself. The pleasure of sex became therefore connected in his mind and body with violence and the desire to take revenge on the senior teacher who had violated his virginity, on his father who had caned him, and on the university guards who had chased him during demonstrations and beat him with batons. But he sang defiantly along with the others, “You can beat us but you cannot break us!” He also sang the love songs of deprivation, abandonment, and unrequited love. Love was connected in his mind with pain, and sex was inseparable from violence and cruelty. The more cruelly a woman treated him, the more head over heels in love with her he became. He only cared for the women who deserted him and made him suffer, women who fought with him and beat him up so hard that he moaned like a child in front of them, a child being disciplined by his cruel parents, or a worshipper being punished by God Almighty.

In the long fight that ensued, he imagined that she would relent and give in, deprived of her will and overpowered by her feminine weakness. Throughout his life Zakariah al-Khartiti knew only one type of femininity. He was only familiar with women raised in submissiveness. If these women withheld themselves, it was only part of the game. A woman’s tears were also a part of the game, even if she left him or thrashed him with a leather belt until he whinged. It was all a childish game.

But Zeina Bint Zeinat had no home and never played games. She grew up on the streets and the sidewalks like a tree of cactus figs with prickly skin. If you held the figs in your hand against their will, they’d cut your skin with their thorns until you bled. With teeth as hard as nails, she dug into the flesh of his shoulder, neck, belly, and into the tip of his penis, which she tore off. Blood ran profusely onto the decorative patterns of the Persian rug on the floor of the study.

For a few moments, Zakariah al-Khartiti was completely unconscious. He lay on the floor moaning in a suppressed voice that turned, in seconds, to a sound like snoring.

Zeina Bint Zeinat reached out with her slender, pointed fingers and drew the key from his pocket as he lay prostrate. She tiptoed to the door, turned the key twice in its lock, and crept outside noiselessly, locking the door behind her. Zakariah al-Khartiti became a prisoner in his own study until his wife came home at the end of the day.

Zakariah al-Khartiti lay in bed for three days, nursing his wounds with iodine and cotton. On the fourth day, his sexual desires returned. He stretched his hand across the wide bed to touch the back of his wife, Bodour, who was fast asleep. The sound of her snoring was muted, because even during her sleep she tried to suppress it, fearing that her husband might hear it. Women from good families didn’t snore. Women with perfect femininity had soft breaths that produced no sound.

He shook her softly by the shoulder saying, “Bodour, sweetheart, are you sleeping?”

“I am sleeping, Zakariah!”

“And can you talk in your sleep, Bodour?”

“Yes, Zakariah!”

Bodour didn’t open her eyes. She knew his voice when he softened and wished to empty the contents of his gland inside her. It was one of his prerogatives, according to the marriage contract. She should be ready for him whenever he pleased. He would wake her from her sleep and pet her a little on the sole of her left foot with his finger. Over the years he had long training in discovering the sites of pain and pleasure, the spots of ecstasy and love. He massaged her childhood memories and tried to awaken her lust during sleep or death, pulling her gently by the hair to wake her, or hitting her softly on the cheek. If her coldness upset him, he’d slap her on the face or whip her with his belt on her belly and thighs.

She never hit him back. He dreamed that she might slap him on the face or whip him so hard with the leather belt that his skin would graze, in the hope that she might awaken the desires that had lain dormant within him since childhood. But all this happened only in his dreams. He didn’t have the courage to tell her, “Hit me, sweetheart, hit me. Graze my skin and take me ...”

What would she think of him then? A man who had lost his manhood? A male without a shred of masculinity, who craved to be beaten up like a woman?

That night, he lay oscillating between dream and reality. His mind was almost absent and the Devilish gland was swollen and full to the brim. He could not triumph over a nine-year-old girl. She tore his flesh with her teeth and locked him in the room. Deep in his heart he was overcome with a sense of humiliation and the desire for revenge. He could wreak revenge only on his wife, or on his daughter, Mageeda, by beating her up either for no reason at all or for a triviality. He had to vent his anger, to avenge himself on all the men who had beaten him up and all the women who had rejected him, starting with the head of the state, the minister, or the editor-in-chief who wouldn’t smile at him. His body shook with rage, for he was also angry with himself for the meanness of spirit that led him to utter obscenities, to embezzle, steal, rape young girls, and sneak from his marriage bed to brothels. He told himself that the human spirit was abject and longed for sinfulness, for man was sinful by nature. What, otherwise, was the function of penitence and forgiveness? God, in fact, guides whom He wills and leaves astray whom He wills.

With these words of God, he tried to alleviate the weight of his guilt, but to no avail, no avail ...

Deep in his heart, he wished to whip himself with the leather belt. He wanted to wake up his wife so that she might take the belt and beat him. He screamed aloud as she lay next to him, “Please beat me up, Bodour, beat me up so that I may desire you! Hurt me so that my soul may heal and mend!”

But Bodour only heard his gasps, because he was fast asleep. He moaned softly and the sound of snoring merged with that of moaning. The sound stopped momentarily as he turned from one side to another, or moved his head from left to right.

He handed her the leather belt one night and asked her to beat him. Bodour was speechless, unable to lift her hand with the belt to beat him. Something held her back, something deeply ingrained in her soul that was akin to fear, shame, or the sense of what was proper for a woman to do. No, a woman could not raise her eyes to meet those of her husband, just as a slave could not raise his eyes to meet those of his master. By the same token, a husband had the right to hit his wife, just as the master had the right to hit his slave. A woman had no such right. This was prohibited by religious and secular laws, by social customs, and by family ethics. Bodour took the belt and beat the wall really hard as though it were her husband, father, uncle, grandfather, Satan, or God. She hoped the wall might crumble and fall. She wanted to hear its moans and to trample it with her own feet.

But the wall stayed in place. Bodour was so angry that she started hitting herself with the belt, hitting her own body, her arms, legs, and thighs, from the tip of her head to the sole of her feet. She hit herself so hard that she finally fell on the floor, moaning like a wounded animal.

In bed, Mageeda trembled. Through the wall she heard the slaps and the smacks. She had no idea who was hitting whom. Was it her father hitting her mother, or the opposite? Since childhood, she had heard them quarrel at night. The fights continued year in year out, for twenty-four long years. In the morning, everything was back to normal. They drank tea, read the papers, exchanged smiles or glances of love or blame. But a word, a gesture, or a furtive glance sometimes escaped, carrying the full weight of their enmity and hate.

Bodour looked at his photograph framed above his daily column. His name, Zakariah al-Khartiti, was written in large font. He looked at her photograph on the cover of a literary criticism magazine. Beneath it was written “great literary critic and university professor”. News of them appeared in the section dedicated to the social elite. The press followed their every move with the same avidity it pursued movie stars, the celebrities of the world of art, literature, and politics, party leaders, and the presidents of supreme councils and societies. Bodour pouted her lips as her eyes moved over the names that she knew either slightly or well. Zakariah al-Khartiti also pouted his lips, the upper much fuller than the lower. He was a little man with a small triangular head. He held his pointed, triangular chin in his hand and stroked it gently as he read his column from start to finish, beginning with the title “Honoring Our Pledge” until the last word and the signature. He reread it, stroking his chin or the hairs that grew on his chest underneath his silk pyjamas. He might reach down to touch his pubic hair through the opening of his trousers, or he might fiddle with his ears or nose. It was a habit that his wife found disgusting, revealing as it did his humble origins, for his family had no claim to cultivation. The king had awarded his grandfather the title of pasha for no obvious reason. In the old corrupt days, the king used to award pimps titles, for they took him to the prostitutes in bars and brothels. The king also offered titles to the barbers who shaved the chin of the sultan, his grandfather. He didn’t only award the titles of bek and pasha, but he also offered large plots of land as well as posts in government or parliament. The awardees would appear in the papers along with statesmen inaugurating charity projects for the sake of God. This continued until the revolution, when the throne was pulled away from underneath the plump royal buttocks and was occupied by their lean republican counterparts. They strived to acquire and accumulate property under the name of purification, purity, and socialism.