Two Women in One (8 page)

‘Yes, Bahiah.’

‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘Then don’t go.’

‘But . . . ’

‘But what?’

‘My father, my mother, the people at the college and . . . ’

‘And Bahiah Shaheen . . . ’

She felt droplets of sweat on her palm and under her armpits. Her complexion turned as pale as Bahiah Shaheen’s, her eyes less dark and her nose less upturned. She tried to raise her head, to make her eyes as dark as they had been and to tilt her nose as sharply upwards, dividing the world into two, passing unhesitatingly through the middle, never fearing to reach the end, the end of the end. But by now Bahiah Shaheen had returned to her. How? She did not know. Suddenly, without realizing what she was doing, she stood, took her bulging leather bag, and walked to the door.

Back in her bed that night, she felt that what had happened was only a dream. If not a dream, then an accident that had befallen her without her willing it, like all acts of fate and destiny. Somehow she was now back in her familiar bed, her body intact and with all its usual external boundaries.

But with some other mischievous part of her mind she realized that this accident was the only real thing in her life. It was not an accident, a dream, an act of fate and destiny or mere chance, but the only act she had ever performed intentionally, the only thing she had actually wanted to do.

None of her life was of her doing or her own choice. It was her mother who had given birth to her and her father who had enrolled her at the medical college. Her aunt, who suffered from a lung disease, wanted her to specialize in this particular field of medicine. Her uncle wanted her to be a successful, highly-paid doctor, who would marry his son, the business-school graduate. Her savings would grow thanks to his expertise in commerce, and they would raise children who would inherit their wealth and bear his name, and the names of his father and grandfather before him.

Everyone told her what they wanted. No one asked her what she wanted. In fact, she had never wanted any of the things they wanted for her. She did not want to be a doctor, and especially not a chest specialist. She used to watch the rows of TB patients looking like walking skeletons, their doctors obese and flabby. She had never liked her uncle or his son the businessman. The whole family thought him good-looking: he was tall, slim, with a fair complexion and pink cheeks. His eyes glowed with health and happiness. His features were as innocent as a child’s. It was as if he was still being breast-fed. He gave everyone the same happy, vacuous smile.

She hated his smile and his happiness, and responded with bared teeth and angry lips. But he never got angry, believing — either because he was stupid or because, like all stupid men, he was arrogant — that she was hiding her real admiration for him behind those bared teeth. He would say to her in his dull, flat voice, ‘I know women. A woman says no, but her heart says yes.’

She would have liked to spit in his face, but she would not do anything out of choice. So when she saw her father smiling at him, she would smile too, saying, ‘Who told you that I’m a girl?’ They were used to hearing this question from her. It did not annoy them; on the contrary, her father was rather pleased by it, as if secretly delighted that his daughter was not really a girl, or as if he wished, deep down, that she was not. She knew that her father’s approval was genuine, for he had wanted her to be a boy. But her mother had willed something different and given birth to a girl — or perhaps it was not her mother at all, but mere chance that had made her female.

The word female sounded like an insult to her, like the first exposed genitals she had ever seen. She felt embarrassed when she undressed in the bathroom. She could not stand to look at her naked body in the mirror. When her fingers approached her genitals while washing, she would jerk them away, as if her hand had touched an electrified or prohibited area. She still remembered the rap her mother gave her as a child. The traces of her mother’s big fingers were engraved in her memory and stuck to her skin like a tattoo. Her mother’s voice still rang in her ears: ‘Don’t do that. Say “I won’t do it again!” ’ She did not say it. What could there be in that forbidden area? She would examine her body with trembling hands. She felt that something dangerous was concealed in that forbidden place. She could not touch it or see it, but it was there all the same. She felt it clearly between her legs. Her mother’s fingers would tremble when she neared it when she washed her daughter’s body. It must be dangerous and frightening. But she carried it in her body as an inseparable part of her. Sometimes she would forget it and consider it one of the myths that had filled her head as a child. At other times it would become an inevitable naked truth like a live wire; when she touched it her body would shiver and tremble violently.

‘Bahiah!’ . . . Her father’s voice rang in her ear like a shot, like the sole voice of truth. It made her realize that she was Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, the pure virgin, untouched by human hands and born without sex organs.

She pulled the bedclothes over her head and feigned sleep as she heard her father’s footsteps coming toward the bed. His big fingers lifted the blankets and he stared at her and discovered, thunderstruck, that she was not Bahiah Shaheen after all: she was not his daughter, nor was she polite, obedient or a virgin; she had actually been born with sex organs, not only clearly visible through the bedclothes but moving as well, like the very heartbeat of life. By moving, she had removed the barrier in her way. She had torn away the membrane separating her from life. It was a thin membrane, intangible and invisible, like a transparent glass panel dividing her from her body, standing between herself and her reality. She could see herself through it but could not touch it or feel it, for it was like glass; the slightest movement and it would shatter.

Her mother used to gasp when she saw her jumping down the stairs. Then Bahiah would hear her heart thumping. She would tense the muscles of her legs, bring her thighs tightly together, and walk towards her mother with that familiar girl’s gait: legs bound together, barely separated from one another. She felt that if they separated, something would tumble down like broken glass.

When her mother disappeared into the kitchen, Bahiah would go back to her jumping. It was not enough to bound down the stairs, so she would stand on the balcony (their flat was on the first floor) and leap, shouting for joy when she felt her body flying, weightless, as light as air. The earth would no longer pull her towards it, she had rid herself of its iron grip for ever — but it was a fleeting moment. She had time for just one joyful shout before gravity pulled her back and she tumbled down like a falling star, her body plummeting to the ground like a stone.

She would pick herself up, brush the dust off her clothes and gingerly touch her arms and legs. Everything was in place! Bones still unbroken. She then came to suspect that her mother had been lying to her and that no part of her was breakable after all. Then she would jump as she walked, swinging her legs freely and separating them wide apart, now certain that no glass object lay between them. She would climb onto the balcony and jump a second, third, fourth, and twentieth time. With each jump she became more convinced that nothing would break, that her muscles were strong and her bones firm. She pumped the air proudly with her knees, as her brother did when he walked. She stood erect, lifted her head high and focused on life, her dark eyes wide, sharp, and unblinking. With great pride she moved her feet over the ground. When standing, she would put one foot up on any chair or table. She would lift it onto any high edge, just like her father when he stood in the living room — and with the same pride.

‘This is disgraceful, Bahiah’, her mother said, slapping her knee to make her put her foot down. ‘Can’t you see how your girlfriends stand?’ She would look at the other girl students with their fat, tightly bound legs, their beaten eyes like the eyes of the corpse laid out on the table, and their trembling lancets as they approached the uterus or penis. Their defeated eyes made her angry, and she was sure that she did not belong to this sex, that nothing in her was breakable. When she raised her eyes, her gaze was level, and no power on earth could make her lower them.

The next morning she went off to college as usual. She entered the dissecting room just like any other day, but she walked differently. Her feet were not hers. The hand holding the bag was not hers. Her eyes were no longer her own. She looked like the person who had been there yesterday, the day before and the day before that, but it was definitely not her. She was different. Things looked different to her. They were smaller and paler than before — and slower too. The bodies of the male students were smaller, the female students’ legs moved more slowly. They walked like reptiles, legs together, and if their thighs happened to separate briefly, they would quickly snap together again. The girls pressed their legs together as if something valuable might fall if they separated. They held their leather satchels bulging with anatomy books against their chests, hiding something valuable from the male students’ gaze and sharp elbows. None of the female students could walk alone. They always went in groups, like gaggles of geese. If one of them found herself alone in the college grounds or in the lecture hall she would quicken her step, her high heels tapping, anxious to catch up to the other women students and hide her body among theirs.

She saw Dr Alawi doing his rounds of the tables and sneaked out through the back door of the dissecting room. She wandered around the spacious grounds as if looking for someone, then went into the exhibition to look at the paintings and see her drawings. Her black eyes searched for those blue-black eyes, for the thin face with its exhausted, sharply-defined features. She left and walked slowly around the grounds scrutinizing the male students’ faces. Their faces, movements and voices were all similar. When you looked into their eyes you would not even see them. She drowned in a sea, seen or recognized by no one. Her face became like those of the other female students: Bahiah, Aliah, Zakiah and Yvonne, it made no difference.

Without thinking, she ran out into the street. She recognized her footsteps. The street was not horizontal like all the others, but sloped upwards. Her body travelled up it and she panted as her eyes were drawn irresistibly to that grey cloud-coloured house; she was pulled by fine wires like invisible silken threads, with all the speed she could muster, in harmony with the blood coursing through her veins. The heat and warmth of her blood drove her on inexorably to her destiny, whatever it might be, even if it meant death and extinction.

With trembling fingers she slid the key into the lock and went in. As she stood in the empty room she could hear her own heartbeat; one breath followed the next in quick succession, as her chest heaved. ‘Saleem!’ she called out faintly, but the flat was empty. She felt that dream-like amazement: the things we hold tight vanish in an instant, the body we embrace disappears in a flash, and when we open our eyes in the dark we see nothing but the wall and the bed beneath us.

She felt for what was beneath her and realized it was the sofa she had sat on the day before. She stretched out her arm in the dark and it hit the hard cold wall. She closed her eyes again and wondered if she was dreaming, but she was not. She knew Saleem was not there, that she was alone in his empty house, sitting wide awake on the sofa. She tried to make sure she was really awake but did not know how. All she could do was run her hand over her body, but she did that in dreams too when she was not sure if she was asleep or not. This frightened her, for she could not be sure of anything in her life. Any attempt to make certain would only add to her doubts.

When she opened her eyes in the morning she realized that she did not feel the familiar touch of her own bed. She saw the window and the mountain beyond it, and leapt up. It was the first night she had ever spent away from home, her first night in someone else’s bed. She imagined her father bellowing like a bull after searching for her everywhere. She imagined her mother, sisters, uncles, aunts and everyone in the family fanning out across the world like locusts to look for her.

She walked heavily towards the mirror. It was obvious she had slept in her clothes; the whites of her eyes were tinged pink as if she had been crying or had stayed awake late into the night. She looked different from usual. She had always been a model girl, her clothes freshly pressed, the whites of her eyes clear, showing that she was a polite, obedient girl who slept in her own bed, had no worries and had never once cried in her entire life.

She had no idea where to go that morning, but her feet carried her to the medical college as usual. The grounds were crowded with students buzzing with unaccustomed activity. She fought her way through and headed for the dissecting room, but a male student stood in her way, saying, ‘There’s a strike today: no lectures, no dissecting room.’

She saw the other female students approaching with their bulging leather satchels and their closely-bound legs.

‘Let’s hurry home before public transport stops running’, said one of the girls on hearing the news.

‘Will it stop?’

‘They say the tram and bus workers are coming out on strike too.’

‘Why?’

‘You ought to be ashamed . . . Don’t you live on this planet?’

‘They’re just kids; it’ll all be over soon and they’ll go back to their notes.’

‘Medical students don’t care about anything but studying and memorizing their lectures. It’s the law and arts students who know something about strikes!’

Questions and comments flew back and forth among the girls. Then: ‘Let’s go take a look’, said one. But another pulled Bahiah towards the tram: ‘Let’s go home. The exam is only a month off.’

Shoulder to shoulder for support, they walked in a bunch towards the tram with their bowed heads and defeated eyes, their tightly-bound legs and their worm-like crawl.

Bahiah was now all alone, looking from afar at the crowd of male students as they assembled, trying to pick out that extraordinary face and those blue-black eyes that could see her and pick out her face from all the others. She leant against the wall, her bulging satchel dangling from her hand; her eyes looked up searching, her sharp, upturned nose divided the world in two and her lips were pursed in anger. She had never liked medical students, especially in big crowds. In her mind’s eye she still saw them as they pushed into the lecture hall, with their thick glasses, bowed backs and sharp elbows, their eyes greedy for anything with the softness of flesh.