Zeina (11 page)

“My cousin, Ahmed al-Damhiri, has become a dangerous man, Safi. He was a spoiled child who got everything he wished for, whether by entreaty or cunning, by softness or violence. Ahmed al-Damhiri would kill to get what he wanted, and now he wants ...”

Bodour stopped before finishing her sentence.

“Ahmed al-Damhiri wants Zeina Bint Zeinat.”

“How did you know?”

“Everybody knows the story. Zeina Bint Zeinat has become a famous star and many men are after her. But nobody really deserves her. She’s truly talented. She’s her mother’s daughter, Nanny Zeinat, who suckled and nursed her!”

Safi looked Bodour hard in the eye, but Bodour turned away from her gaze. She glimpsed Zakariah al-Khartiti playing golf, bending his small, thin body in order to hit the ball, which flew for a short distance in the air then fell. He walked proudly toward it, holding his nose high like his colleague, Mahmoud al-Feqqi, and other great writers. Behind him ran a little boy dragging a cart laden with golf equipment. Beside him walked Mahmoud al-Feqqi, tall and graceful, with wide, self-confident steps that were similar to his words on paper. But his back was more handsome than his face, and his eyes were dull and lustreless, the pupils small and colorless.

Bodour was never attracted to Mahmoud al-Feqqi. But when she saw him from the back, she would be overcome by memories, as though she was a different woman, a woman who was not Bodour but perhaps Badreya. Badreya was nineteen when she joined the great demonstrations. Next to her walked Nessim, with his graceful, erect bearing. His large eyes radiating a bluish black lustre that was similar to the color of the night or the sea reflecting the rays of the sun.

“Zakariah al-Khartiti is jealous of Mahmoud al-Feqqi. He believes I’m in love with him.”

“But you’re in love with your shrink ...”

“He’s in love with me. It’s a one-sided love, Safi!”

“But the opposite is true, Bodour!”

The conversation drifted to love and men. Safi had more experience in this area than her friend, for she had known a greater number of men: colleagues, friends, and lovers. She told Bodour, “I’m looking for the man who deserves me. But such a man is not born yet, and perhaps never will be!”

She laughed, tossing her head back. Her thick black hair was cropped short after she had gotten rid of the veil and the turban along with the husbands. She was slightly taller and less plump than Bodour. Her stride was also longer. She stared at things steadily and hard. Her lips were thin, and she would often wet her lower lip with the tip of her tongue as she talked.

“As a matter of fact, men don’t attract me. In my adolescence, I was in love with a woman. Now, at this advanced stage of my life, my adolescence is coming back to me. To be frank with you, Bodour, I’m attracted to women. I sometimes catch myself feeling hopelessly in love with a woman. One day, I dreamt of embracing Zeina Bint Zeinat. Imagine!”

“An innocent embrace, to be sure, a sisterly or a motherly embrace!”

“There’s no innocent embrace, Bodour!”

Safi laughed aloud, a laugh that the golfers almost heard. Bodour joined in her laughter, which eased the burden on her heart a little, the mysterious load of vague childhood fears.

“Yes, Bodour, laugh as much as you can, for life isn’t eternal. We only live once and must therefore live to the full. Let me tell you a joke about the stupidity of men ...”

Safi laughed heartily before she embarked on telling the joke, her head tossing in the air along with her short, cropped hair.

“There was this man who was bent on marrying a young woman who was a one hundred per cent virgin, a woman who hadn’t known any man in her entire life. Every time he planned to propose to a woman, he’d subject her to a test. He would ask her, as he dropped his trousers and uncovered his penis, “What is this, little girl?” The girl naturally said it was a penis. So the man would pull up his trousers and leave, telling himself that he couldn’t possibly marry a girl who knew about men. He repeated the test with every young woman he proposed to, but they all naturally failed the test. After several years of tests, one young woman passed, for when he uncovered his penis and asked her what it was, she told him it was a whistle.

The man was over the moon and congratulated himself on finding a woman who had never seen a man’s penis before. “Eureka, Eureka!” he said to himself.

After thirty years of marriage and a dozen children, as they sat one starry evening on the balcony, it occurred to him to ask her a question. Pointing at his penis, he said, ‘But how is it, darling, that you didn’t know that this was a penis?’ His wife burst out, saying loudly, ‘Do you call that a penis? A penis is as long as my arm here.’”

Bodour and Safi burst out laughing. They laughed so hard and so long that the tears poured from their eyes. Each wiped her eyes with aromatic tissue, as Safi said, “That’s men’s stupidity for you, dear. Shall we go to the theater this evening to hear Zeina Bint Zeinat sing? She’s singing a new song tonight for the first time. You know, she writes her lyrics and her music herself. A truly talented artist! Umm Kulthum used the lyrics and music of others, but Zeina Bint Zeinat is a musician and a poet, and has a lovely voice to boot. I wish I had a daughter like her!”

“I too wish I had a daughter like her!”

“You have your Mageeda, may God protect her, a great writer. Her articles in the
Renaissance
magazine are widely read.”

Safi stressed “widely read”, for she didn’t like the writing of Mageeda al-Khartiti. She imitated her father’s style of writing and her mother’s literary criticism.

“Mageeda is her father’s daughter, Safi. She looks exactly like him when he was young. I sometimes feel she is his daughter and not mine. I wish I had a daughter who took after me.”

Badreya whispered to the pages of the novel “I wish I had a daughter who looked like Nessim.”

In the dead of night, Bodour embraced her pen. A conversation took place involving her, Badreya, and Nessim, as well as the other characters of the novel. But the conversation sometimes came to a halt, the pen ran dry and the light emanating from his bluish dark eyes was extinguished. His tall, lean body was as hard as a spear, and his head towered high above a rock-solid neck. They hit him on the head with the butt of a rifle and slapped him on the face. But he still stood tall, unflinching. He didn’t bat an eyelid and not a single muscle twitched in his face. As they dragged him to the armored vehicle parked outside the basement flat, blood trickled down from his nose and mouth, flowing onto the white vest that revealed the black hairs of his chest and his ribs, gradually coloring it red. Redness tumbled down to his white Egyptian cotton trousers. The smell of cotton filled his nostrils along with the odors of blood, dust, and the black clay of the earth, where little green shrubs sprouted, carrying white buds. He was a child of eight when he sang along with the other village children, running all over the green expanse sparkling 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!”

On the pavement, the children sang that song. Zeina Bint Zeinat played the tune for them, tapping on the asphalt with her long, slender fingers. It wasn’t the same old tune, and nor was it the cotton song about the little white buds dotting the green expanse. Green spaces had shrunk, and the shrubs and the buds had withered. Children’s faces had also shrivelled, for they no longer had land, homes, or families. They walked miles in the darkness of the night with their bare little feet. Born on the asphalt of the streets, they survived by scavenging the rubbish heaps alongside the stray cats and dogs. The passengers of lavish cars, locking the doors and drawing the curtains, peered at them with contempt and tried to keep them at bay. They closed their windows for fear of contracting diseases, and felt their pockets to make sure their wallets were still there.

The children would stomp with their chapped feet on the ground, encircling Zeina Bint Zeinat as though she were their mother. They would sing along with her and dance to the rhythm of her music. Passers-by would stop to see the spectacle, a complete band of children who exchanged roles and crude instruments: drums, tamborines, flutes, and lutes. Their voices would rise with the rising crescendo of the music, their cracked heels kicking the ground. The singing would turn into cheers produced by thousands of voices saying, “Down with injustice, long live freedom”. Human bodies blocked the streets, for there were laid-off workers of shut-down factories, unemployed and unhopeful university graduates, widows, divorced women, bereaved mothers, government employees with heads bent low, oppressed housewives, housemaids, shoe-polishers, and nannies.

Nanny Zeinat marched with the demonstrators. Tall and slender in her gabardine gown and white rubber shoes, she joined the housemaids walking in the last lines of the demonstration. But the protestors were dispersed by the water hoses, the tear gas, and the loudspeakers shouting above the din of bullets. Some bodies fell. Some blood flowed. Armored vehicles moved over the blood, snatching a number of young people. Smoke and dust filled the sky.

Nanny Zeinat continued walking until the night descended. They took her son and he never came back. She had no idea who took him from her, the police or God. She raised her eyes to heaven, entreating God concealed behind black clouds, “Oh God! Did you take him or did the government?”

She trembled, fearing God’s punishment. Faith returned to her with a shudder. The dust filled her nostrils and mouth. He was her only son and her only hope, the apple of her eye and her life. He was tall and graceful, and his stride was long and steady. Light shone in his large eyes as he looked into hers and smiled, “The revolution is definitely coming, Mother! Look, the whole population is rebelling, even the kids on the streets, the cats and the dogs.”

Nanny Zeinat hadn’t been able to sleep at night since her son’s disappearance. Wearing her gown and her rubber shoes, she would go out in the darkness to look for him, her eyes searching earth and sky, raking the rubbish bins and the boxes thrown randomly on the streets. She might rest awhile on a broken wooden bench on the Nile front and follow a column of ants or beetles marching toward a rubbish heap. She’d stare at children competing with little kittens over a crust of bread, their buttocks bare. A small child limped as he raced a limping dog. He had lost his leg when he was run over by a speeding car in the dark.

Nanny Zeinat came back to her room in the basement and filled a black plastic bag with leftovers of food. The basement was the dumping ground for all the rubbish abandoned by the residents of the building. This was where they disposed of unwanted items: old clothes, food leftovers, broken chairs, tattered mattresses smelling of urine, and old worn blankets that had become wafer-thin.

Nanny Zeinat filled the black plastic bag after wiping the dust off the bread crusts and wrapped the pieces of meat in an old newspaper carrying, she saw, the picture of the president, the minister, or a columnist above his column. The eyes were effaced by the dust and mud, or perforated by a fish bone or the remains of a rib bone.

With her hand, she wiped the dust and the mud off the newspaper and used it to wrap a crust of bread, a piece of meat or cake, the remnants of feast cakes, a slice of cheese, a few green or black olives, some pickled lemons, or half a cucumber.

Nanny Zeinat went out at night carrying the black bag. She sat on the wooden bench, surrounded by children, cats and dogs. She opened her bag on the pavement, her eyes staring at them as they devoured the food, their eyes gleaming with happiness. Their happiness reminded her of the sparkle in her son’s eyes when she placed in front of him a glass of milk or an egg fried in butter.

On her way back through the darkness to her room, she tripped over a small, swaddled object. It wasn’t a child, or a dog or a cat run over and killed by a speeding car, which she often found on the road or the pavement. She bent down and picked up the object with her long, slender fingers. She shook it several times to make sure it was already dead, to carry it in her arms away from the road, to place it on the side of the pavement or to dig a hole for it between the asphalt of the street and the earth along the bank of the Nile.

The swaddled object was warm. Hot blood ran in its veins, and Nanny Zeinat felt the warmth as she carried it in her arms. Its pulse throbbed against her breasts. She trembled and stopped in her tracks. Uncovering the face, she was struck by the large eyes radiating light. Uncovering the legs held firmly together, she couldn’t find the little phallus of her son. Instead, there was the feminine slit. She raised her eyes to God, saying, “It’s all the same, God. A girl is like a boy. I thank you, God, for everything, both good and bad.”

Her image had never left my memory since childhood: her erect bearing, her head held high, her large sparkling pupils, and her long, slender fingers moving with the speed of lightning over the keys of the piano. I wished I was like her, even if they called me the child of sin.

On the walls of the school toilets we wrote her name in chalk: Zeina Bint Zeinat.

She wrote it on the blackboard in front of us without a trace of shame, as though she were proud of her mother, Zeinat. We were all ashamed of saying the names of our mothers aloud. We couldn’t write them in our copybooks, let alone on the blackboard. My mother was not a housemaid like her mother, for she was a distinguished professor and her name was Bodour al-Damhiri, the wife of the great writer, Zakariah al-Khartiti. I wrote his name next to mine on the blackboard: Mageeda Zakariah al-Khartiti.