Zeina (18 page)

Nessim encouraged her to rebel against God. He wondered how she could believe in a god that did not address her or mention her by name, and made her subservient to her husband. In all three books, women were not treated as the equals of men.

At nineteen Bodour was torn between her love for Nessim and her faith in God and her belief in the truthfulness of the Qur’an, the Bible, and the Torah. Before sleeping, she opened the Qur’an to read:

Bodour stopped at this verse. Her aunt was divorced from her husband three times. When her husband wanted to re-marry her, the Ma’zoun told him he couldn’t until she had married another man. Only after the temporary man had divorced her might he re-marry her.

She was ten years old when she saw her aunt cry the whole night, talking to God: “But where is the justice, God? Why put me through such misery? My husband divorced me at a whim three times, and every time he re-married me. After the third time, I have to sleep with a stranger for a day, two days or even half an hour so that I can re-marry my husband. But what am I? A doormat to be trampled on by men? You should punish my husband for divorcing me three times, and not punish me by making me sleep with a strange man. Where is the justice in that, God?”

Bodour also read:

Bodour said to herself, why should the Prophet have all those women? He was supposed to be more chaste than other men, a role model of faithfulness to his life’s partner. He stayed faithful to his first wife, Khadiga, for twenty years and never slept with any other woman until she died. Why did his marital fidelity change following the death of Khadiga?

After Bodour became an adult and got married to Zakariah al-Khartiti, she understood why her husband committed adultery. She saw him creep out of her bed to go to other women. When she stopped him, he waved in her face saying, “This is a God-given right. Do you think your husband is going to be better than the Prophet himself?”

After discovering his first infidelity, she couldn’t bear him touching her, let alone penetrating her. His naked body made her sick. She left him naked in bed and went to the bathroom to vomit silently, fearing he might hear her. A deep-seated fear was lodged within her heart from childhood and she had no idea where it came from. She felt repelled by her husband and never believed a word he said to her. If he told her he was going to attend a meeting or a conference, she would immediately know that he was going to spend a night of lust with another woman. As far back as she could remember, she heard women repeat the saying, “Trusting a man is like trusting water to stay in a sieve.”

Bodour tossed in bed, unable to sleep.

How could she carry on living with a faithless man? How could she sleep next to him in the same bed?

She lied to him only once, while he lied to her every day over the period of twenty, thirty or even a hundred years.

Did he know that she lied to him? That she was in love with Nessim when she was nineteen? That she joined the demonstrations with him? He opened her eyes to injustices on earth and in the heavens, and removed the blindfolds from her mind. He granted her body the forbidden pleasure, and she ate with him from the fruits of the two forbidden trees: the trees of life and knowledge. Like God, she knew good from evil. Good was justice and freedom, as Nessim said, and evil was injustice and chains.

Bodour never broke her chains. She tossed sleeplessly in bed and the baby’s eyes were like motes in her own. Since the two closed eyes opened briefly and peered at her, since that moment that seemed to happen outside time and space, Bodour came face to face with her own cowardice. She felt her heart dripping with blood on the pavement as her liver was torn out of her body with a knife.

If the baby hadn’t opened her eyes at that moment, it was possible that she might have forgotten her. She might have slept like other mortals and continued her life and her career in literary criticism. Badreya, the heroine of her novel, and Nessim might have left her alone and stopped chasing her. Those two ghosts lived on top of her bed. She saw them in the flesh lying next to her in bed, and when they left it, she saw them walking like shadows on the wall, going to and fro. They didn’t leave the bedroom when she slept or the study when she sat at her desk spreading the papers in front of her. She saw Omar al-Khayyam’s lines of poetry in front of her. What was the difference then between God and human beings if God repaid evil with evil, nay, even with a more horrific evil? He burned her in hell forever and ever for one moment of pleasure and joy. He deprived her of her child forever just because the police killed the baby’s father before he could sign the marriage contract. She was sceptical of God’s justice and consequently of His existence. She lost her faith during her sleep and was exhausted by all the buried sorrows in her heart. She chased away the doubts and embraced faith again as soon as she was up, realizing that faith brought joy like alcohol, like Omar al-Khayyam wine.

She hid a bottle in the bottom drawer of her desk together with the novel folder. She drank a glass to drive away her sorrows. After the third glass her mind became open to the wide horizons and she could hear the voices of gods and demons arguing. Her body broke all barriers and soared with her mind and soul in the wide space. She became as tall and graceful as Badreya, and just as courageous. She held the pen and began to write a new chapter of the novel, continuing until she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall or a key turning, or saw the shadow of her husband walking on the walls. It looked like God’s shadow moving behind the clouds, or the Devil’s phantom moving over her head as she lay in bed, his finger as hard as nails boring through the hole of her left foot while God’s finger bored through the sole of her right foot like an iron rod.

When the psychiatrist had listened to her childhood memories, he told her, “You were raped as a child, Bodour, but your fear of God makes you deny it!”

“No, no, doctor. No man ever touched me in reality. I only had sinful dreams. Yes, I confess that I committed many sins while fast asleep.”

The psychiatrist’s voice streamed through her ear as she tossed and turned in bed. She reached out for the light switch to turn it off, but she trembled when she realized that her husband was not in bed. It was three o’clock in the morning. He had gone out at eight in the evening to attend an editorial meeting at the newspaper.

“Could a meeting possibly continue for seven hours?”

On the bedside table stood a dark bottle on which the word
VIAGRA
was written. He had forgotten to hide it in the bottom drawer of his desk. His memory was getting worse and he often forgot things. He was a few years older than she was, a fact he often forgot as well. He liked to think that she was his age or even older.

In the mirror, Bodour noticed the white hairs on her head, the slight wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and on top of the jaws and neck. Her muscles were sagging and flabby. How old was she?

Her mind could not grasp the notion of time passing. She put her feet in her soft slippers. It was for this softness that she had given up her life, the most precious thing of her life. She left the stuffy, dimly lit bedroom filled with her husband’s breath, his shaving cream and his expensive eau de cologne. The odor made her sick when she imagined him in the arms of a girl who was fifty or a hundred years younger than he was. He only got an erection when he was with innocent, inexperienced girls or prostitutes pretending to be innocent and inexperienced.

Bodour walked in sleep as she did during her wakeful moments. She went out of the stuffy room into the air and the sun. She walked in the direction of Zeina Bint Zeinat, toward truth and not toward dreams, myths or illusions. She saw herself walking toward her, going through the long strip from her seat to the stage. The passage seemed endless and exposed to the cold air from every direction. The flowers on both sides withered, while the trees died where they stood, their green leaves turning yellow.

Bodour suddenly stopped in her tracks. Looking behind, she saw the emptiness, the darkness, the cold air and the fear. Turning to look in front of her, she saw the lights gleaming and Zeina Bint Zeinat playing music, singing and dancing. But the lights suddenly went out and there were sounds of explosions or gunshots. Everything turned dark, illuminated for a second, then dark again. The power was cut off and she was no longer there. She looked for her in sleep and in wakefulness, on the streets, the alleys and the pavements. She had cleared the pavement of the stones and pebbles, laid out the cover, swaddled her in a blue woollen blanket to keep her warm in the coldness of winter. She left her in the dark, and withdrew her plump fingers from the tiny hand, from the five fingers clutching her index finger, which she held on to even during sleep. She didn’t want to open her eyes to see her as she disappeared gradually until she became a star in the distant sky.

How did her body become disconnected from the pavement? How did she develop legs to take her away from her like a phantom?

As Bodour was engrossed in writing, Badreya whispered in her ear, “You’re a hopeless coward. Nothing but writing can cure you of cowardice. Only the letters on the page can cure you of your pain and sadness. With black, blue or red ink, shed your blood on paper, Bodour, cut your chest open with the knife and open your heart. Only the knife can cure you. Don’t keep your tears locked inside, let them loose the way you scream out in the face of God and the Devil. Don’t fear death or hell fire. You’ve had enough hell on earth.”

Bodour tottered in her sleep. Badreya’s voice quivered before it disappeared, melting in the night as though she had never been. The ink also melted on the page. The letters vanished and the pages became empty. The whiteness stuck to her eyes and prevented her from seeing anything except the blackness. Sorrow and depression overwhelmed her and she spoke aloud during sleep. No one was there, not even herself.

“Like God, I don’t exist.”

Speaking to herself, Bodour said, “I’m a literary critic and not a novelist. I’m good at nothing except polishing the shoes of others, for this is the function of literary criticism. In a newspaper interview, I confessed that I felt proud to shine my husband’s shoes. I got votes at the university elections but lost my own voice. I lost my ability to write, and my pen was as broken as my heart.”

Bodour wasn’t speaking to herself, but to her psychiatrist, confusing herself with him. She moved from her bed to the couch in the clinic with slow, careful steps as though sleepwalking. She feared she might fall suddenly if she became conscious again. During the act of writing she got rid of her short plump body and took on Badreya’s tall, graceful figure. Her complexion changed color with the intensity of the light. She looked ruthlessly at her image in the mirror, seeing the signs of decline graphically clear in front of her. Nothing could save her from falling, except falling further in the pit of writing.

The ink, however, was white and the letters were invisible on the white page. The whiteness stuck to her open eyes and she slept with her eyes open, like a lidless animal.

“My chronic ailment, doctor, is my life. Nothing except death or writing can cure me.”

“Write, then, Bodour. What stops you?”

“God did not create me to write, doctor!”

“Are you embracing faith in God once again?”

“Faith protects me from writing, doctor, because God created me to lie beneath my husband, polish his shoes, rub his feet in warm water, wash his stinking socks with fragrant soap and leave my body to him as a receptacle for his stinking ...”