Zeina (19 page)

“You’ve been saying this ever since you got married, Bodour. How many years now?”

“I don’t know, doctor, perhaps a hundred years.”

“Twenty years?”

“Longer, doctor. Each day I ask myself why I still live with him. I can’t make a serious decision, doctor. My friend Safi is much more courageous, for she got rid of her husbands and is now free. Badreya is also more courageous ...”

“Badreya?”

“She was with me in primary school. We called her a child of sin and wrote her name on toilet walls.”

Bodour struggled to open her eyes. The images and names were confused in her mind. She couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction. She lay on the couch and the psychiatrist looked at her with sympathy. On the same couch her husband Zakariah al-Khartiti complained of his sins and sorrows, and their daughter Mageeda opened her heart to the same psychiatrist. Safi, Bodour’s friend, did the same as well. Even the emir himself, Ahmed al-Damhiri, lay on the couch and told the doctor of the agony of unrequited love and the infernal desire for revenge. He didn’t mention the name Zeina Bint Zeinat for he feared the psychiatrist might tell the police.

They all came and lay on the psychiatrist’s couch. They wanted to unburden themselves of the heavy loads weighing down like mountains on their hearts. They relieved themselves of the loads by speaking to the psychiatrist, whose ears were as large as those of God in his heavens or the priest sitting behind the curtain, receiving confessions from guilt-ridden, tortured men and women believers.

“You carry the secrets of the whole country, doctor, from top to bottom, old and young. All the secrets, stories, and weird tales on the couch.”

“What a lovely title for a new novel, Bodour!”

“Yes, doctor, you must write a novel with the title ‘On the Couch’.”

“I’m only a psychiatrist, not a novelist. I can listen well but I can’t write a one-page letter. Writing is a gift from God, a gift granted to whomever He pleases.”

“Writing is a curse, doctor. It is suffering, pain, tears, and blood. Writing is endless patience and work, day and night. It is a chronic disease, doctor, which can only be cured by writing, real writing, writing a novel and not literary criticism, which is a parasitic activity, a profession akin to tapeworms living off the blood of others.”

“You are the greatest literary critic in the country, professor.”

“I should have presented my resignation to the university. Every day, I tell myself I must make up my mind to resign and must take the step of leaving my husband. Every morning I tell myself, ‘Bodour, enough is enough. You’ve got to decide to get a divorce from your husband and literary criticism. You have to free yourself from the two things that have choked you, the two things that have ruined your life.’”

“You are the most successful woman in the country, Bodour. You’re a well-known celebrity.”

“I’m a failure, doctor. I’ve failed in the most important thing in life.”

“And what is the most important thing in your life, Bodour?”

“I don’t really know, but I feel I’ve given up the most important thing in life in return for trivial things.”

“Trivial such as what?”

“Like a chair at the university, for example, my name in large font in the paper, a photograph inside a frame, the honor of the family, a greatly respected husband, the large villa in Garden City, the luxury and wealth and all this rubbish.”

“And the most precious thing in your life?”

“My daughter, doctor.”

“Your daughter Mageeda, God bless her, is a great writer.”

For a long time Bodour was silent, hesitant, perplexed. Could she possibly tell him the most serious secret of her life? She had told him everything except that. Would he keep it secret? Would she have the courage to tell? She longed to shake off the load that was weighing down on her heart, to cure herself of this chronic disease. She wanted to walk with Zeina Bint Zeinat, to take her in her arms, to confess to her that she was her mother, and to ask her for forgiveness. She would tell her, “Have mercy on your tortured mother who was paralyzed with fear: the fear of God, of people’s tongues and of the tongues of flames in hell. Forgive me for having abandoned you on the pavement, on a bed of dust, your back to the railings of the Nile front. I swaddled you in a woollen cloth and covered you with the bigger blanket of darkness. I abandoned you to the dew and the croaking of frogs. I called you Zeina, and walked away in the night’s darkness before the break of dawn.”

Bodour woke up to find herself sitting at her desk. In front of her was the yellow folder on which the words
The Stolen Novel
were written.

How many times had the novel been stolen from her? How many times had she retrieved it, rewritten it and lost it again?

Her husband Zakariah al-Khartiti was probably the culprit, for he believed that a wife’s proper place was underneath him in bed. Even if she moved up in the world and became a professor, a doctor, a minister, a prime minister or a president, her natural place would still be beneath her husband in bed and never on top of him. Should she climb momentarily to the top, she must be returned to her place again.

Zakariah al-Khartiti wrote in his column about women’s liberation and was awarded first prize on International Women’s Day. In Egypt, he received accolades and was called the champion of the Egyptian woman’s liberation. Journalists asked him, “Behind every great man there’s a great woman, so who’s the woman behind you, Mr Khartiti?”

“My mother. She was the one who encouraged me to tell the truth and respect women.”

They turned to his wife, Professor Bodour, to ask her, “Behind every great woman there’s a great man, so who’s the man behind you, Professor Bodour?”

“My husband was the man who encouraged me to write. Without him I would have written nothing.”

Bodour skulked away into a dark corner, shrinking inside her short, plump body, slapping herself several times, admonishing, insulting, castigating herself.

“You’re nothing but a lying, cowardly hypocrite. Lies, cowardice and hypocrisy are the three causes of depression. They are the source of your sadness and sterility, your inability to write or to face the truth. You’re beyond redemption and your impotence and sterility have no cure except death.”

Badreya woke up when Bodour went to sleep. Bodour lay curled up in bed beside her husband like a porcupine, visited by the youthful dreams when she joined the demonstrators and shouted “Down with injustice and long live freedom, long live love.” She surrendered to love and freedom. The idea of the novel came to her and she became pregnant with it at night. But she dumped it on the pavement and ran away. She was now being chased by ghosts and phantoms, by Satan’s finger which was as hard as an iron rod, by God’s unsleeping eye, by her husband’s half open eye pretending to be asleep in spite of being awake, or pretending to be awake although he was sound asleep.

Badreya whispered in her ear, “The price of freedom is high, Bodour, and there is no writing without freedom. Break your chains, Bodour, break free of your prison and reach out for the forbidden tree. If you eat from it, you will not die, for knowledge leads you to life and not to death. You will live forever.”

Badreya’s voice sounded like that of the serpent luring Eve. Although the name Eve meant throbbing with life, it became connected in the minds with the serpent and death. Bodour quivered in her reveries, and her hot breath came out of her mouth like intermittent waves of light. The words that came from her lips were truncated and filled with fear:

“But God, Badreya, told me I would die if I ate from the tree.”

“That was the voice of the Devil, Bodour, and not God. If it was God’s voice, it wouldn’t be any different from the Devil’s. I ate from the tree, Bodour, and so did all the creative men and women in all the areas of knowledge, from philosophy and art to science. Human civilization was built on their ideas. We’ve never tasted anything better than the fruit of this tree. We enjoyed the pleasure of knowledge and the exuberance of life, and not a fake dead life. If God stopped you from enjoying life, then He was not God but the Devil. Satan’s pointed finger stole your life and your novel, Bodour.”

Bodour trembled in her sleep. She tried to move her lips to say something, but they were as heavy as lead. Her body was a rock glued to the earth, curled in on itself like a porcupine. It was a ball of lead rolling from bed and falling on the floor with a thud like an explosion or a gunshot.

Her husband woke up when he heard the thud. His eyeballs protruded with fear, for his wife Bodour wasn’t really herself. Her body, which joined them, was now setting them apart, and her writing, which connected them, created a wedge between them. Badreya, the Devilish woman occupying her body, was pushing her toward vice. There was also her illegitimate daughter, born in sin, Zeina Bint Zeinat, who was in fact the fruit of countless sins. There was also the novel she wrote at night, filled with ghosts, phantoms, shadows walking on the walls, and the finger tickling the sole of her left foot. Was it Satan’s finger? Or God’s? And the iron rod that tickled her right foot? But how dare she write all this rubbish about me? How could she write this about me, Zakariah al-Khartiti, her husband, a man of faith and virtue, who had never known another woman, who had won the prize of science and faith, as well as ethical conduct medals at primary and secondary schools, the university, the higher academy and the Supreme Council for Literature and Culture? I, Zakariah al-Khartiti, had a daily column in the paper, read by millions of men, women and young people, and had been awarded the golden cup on International Women’s Day. How could she paint such a disgusting image of me? She described me as a man who looked like an iron rod penetrating any hole in the wall or any human body, whether of a man, woman or child. Even the lame illegitimate street boy wasn’t spared the viciousness of her pen.

Zakariah al-Khartiti read her novel while she slept. Badreya saw him creeping in the darkness while his wife slept. He took her key from under her pillow, tiptoed to her study, opened the bottom drawer, got out the yellow folder, drew the lamp closer to him, read the blank pages besmirched with black, blue and red ink, and saw the drops of blue and black blood. Rivers of yellow tears streamed between the lines and underneath the hidden illegible words and those not yet written. There were rivers of streaming sweat, real sweat, on the pages. He knew the distinctive, unmistakable smell of his wife’s sweat. It was a smell that contained no perfume or eau de cologne, but the smell of an exhausted body, a body tired of sinfulness, guilt, and grief. It was ridden with fear and scandal, a short plump body that seemed to have no bones at all.

Badreya whispered in his ears as he read, “Why should your wife wear any perfume for you when you betray her every night? Why should she wear perfume when you hate perfume? You’re only attracted to stinking bodies that never wash with soap and water, bodies oozing sweat, tiredness, wretchedness, and misery, the bodies of oppressed housemaids or secretaries who close their eyes when they lie beneath your weight, unable to open them or look you in the eye. They are unable to shy away from your kisses or obscenities, for you desire nothing but obscenities. Your ears have become attuned to them.”

Zakariah al-Khartiti waved his hand in Badreya’s face as though to drive away the Devil, “Get lost, you wretched serpent. You’ve driven Adam out of heaven.”

But Badreya was not his wife, Bodour, and did not have a body that he could subjugate in bed when he failed to subdue her in the novel. Badreya exposed his innermost secrets, which his own wife didn’t know about. And he hadn’t told those secrets to anybody, not even his psychiatrist. He invented clean secrets and childhood memories that happened only in his imagination. He wrote these memories in his daily column under the titles “Science and Faith”, “Trusted Words”, “Truth”, “Honoring the Pledge”, or “Loyalty to God, the Nation and the President”.

Zakariah al-Khartiti dried his tears with the palm of his hand. His profuse sweat fell on the pages of the novel, mingled with his tears. His sweat merged with his wife’s on the papers as it did in bed during the temporary moments of pleasure and the longer-lasting moments of pain. He whispered in Badreya’s ear as though she was his innocent, uncouth lover, the secretary or the housemaid, “My wife, darling, gave me nothing but misery, for I’m a wretched husband who never had any joy in the marital bed. My wife is so frigid that not a single hair moves on her body.”

He whispered obscenities in the ears of the maid/secretary: “You bitch, you’re the most beautiful woman on earth and in heaven. You’re a nymph in paradise, the virgin who never loses her virginity, even if she’s lost it a thousand times. You’re my refuge and my salvation from grief. You’re my happiness and my paradise. Take me in your arms, between your legs, and make me taste your honey. Raise me high to the heavens of love and faith and bring me down to the earth of profanity. Pour in my ears the words of God and the Devil, speak to me, bitch, daughter of a bitch, and fill my ears with obscenities until I come to the height of pleasure.”

Badreya’s hearing was sharp and her ears were as open as God’s unsleeping eyes. She picked up the words before they were produced. The reason was perhaps that Badreya was an ethereal presence, without a body, like the spirit of God or the Devil or the other unseen entities. Badreya was an idea in the head of the sleeping Bodour, and she came to her during sleep. But when the light was on, she vanished. The novel and all its characters disappeared under the effect of the bright lights, except for Zeina Bint Zeinat, who came to life in the light. This was because she was perhaps the only one who possessed a body, a body that housed the spirits of gods and Devils together. She resembled ancient goddesses: the goddess of life and death, the goddess of vice and virtue, the whore, the saint and the virgin all rolled into one. She rose above the laws of earth and sky and had no god but herself.