At this point the Imam, seized with a great excitement, cried out, ‘Kill her, and the sin will be mine!’
But the Leader of the Opposition said in a quiet voice, ‘Is there enough in the safe for both of us, O Lord Imam? What about my share of love?’
The guardian of the safe kept his silence, but the Chief of Security quickly asked in his turn, ‘What about me, Lord Imam, what about my share of love?’
There was a gleam in the eyes of the Great Writer as he took them all in at one glance. The guardian of the safe broke his silence at last, as though he had decided it was time for him to say something. ‘There is only enough for the Imam and one other man whom he can choose in addition to himself,’ he said, thinking that the Imam would certainly choose him, for as the saying goes, water cannot avoid a thirsty man. The Imam looked around at them as though it was difficult for him to choose between the four pillars of his rule, reluctant to offend any one of them. His life was in the hands of the Chief of Security, his safe in the hands of the guardian, democracy in the hands of the Leader of the Official Opposition, and the cultural patrimony in the hands of the Great Writer. So the only way the matter could be resolved was for the four of them to give up their share to the Imam, since according to the faith it was he who had the right to all the pleasures of this world and the next, to as many slaves as he liked on earth, and to seventy-seven nymphs, at least, in Paradise. No one else was allowed the same rights, since all men but he are equal before the law, and any attempt to change this, to bring in what does not exist, is nothing more than heresy, than falling into a snare prepared by the Devil personally.
So the Chief of Security took the ninety thousand dinars and went round the markets talking to the traders and the brokers, hunting high and low for a slave who would fulfil the wishes of the Imam. He issued orders that no slave quoted at a price of more than ninety thousand dinars should be sold without being shown to him first. But the market was rather slow at that time, for after the defeat in the war, most of the slaves and the girls had emigrated to other lands where God had opened up better opportunities for their charms. The Chief of Security went from house to house searching carefully, accompanied by his guards dragging their trained hunting dogs behind them, but he could not find a single virgin who fitted the description given to him by the Imam. He was on the point of turning round and going back empty-handed when he caught a glimpse of her running, as light-footed as a doe, with her dog beside her, close on her heels, followed by the guards and the hunting dogs panting and straining at their leash. He only had time to glimpse her from behind as she flew through the night, upright and slender as a spear, her waist like a bracelet holding in the rounded curves, so that from behind her silhouette had in it all the sacred, inherited, and imagined things held in such esteem by the Imam. He lifted his arms up to the sky in gratitude to God. And now there was no longer any chance for her to escape, to slip away from destiny, for the will of God is above all things, and the will of God had decided.
The Imam saw her as she came in. He was lying in bed with his last wife under him, snorting with the effort made in coupling, and without a moment’s hesitation he swore a triple oath of divorce, muttering the words through his lips quickly, so that the woman was already repudiated legally before he had time to withdraw. He put on a pair of new trousers hastily and watched her walk in, her back straight as a spear, her head upright in the air, with her dog Marzouk close behind her. The dog looked him in the face just once and recognized him despite the many years which had gone by, for dogs neither forget the heritage of the past nor what happened in history. He jumped on him and caught on to his trousers with his teeth, pulling at them with all his might, repeating what had happened before. And since dogs were not permitted to make history repeat itself, the Chief of Security caught hold of him around the neck, and quickly put his legs in chains. And that night, when all was silent, when all things seemed to sleep, even the wind, he shot him dead with one silent bullet in the head.
Meanwhile, the Imam had taken her into his arms, holding her in a close embrace, leaving her with one remaining night in which to live. It was the night of the Big Feast, when the moon becomes a full moon once again. She lay on the ground, her naked body bathed in light, just as it had been when she was born. She could see her mother’s face looking tired and pale and white, and as she lay there on the ground she whispered to herself, ‘I must either save my life or I must die for my sisters. I must deliver them from the tyrant for all time.’
Watching through the keyhole of the door, the Chief of Security was seized with amazement when he saw her spray the Imam with water from a tin cup, saying all the time, ‘Change your image from the one you have and become a sheep right now,’ for less than a moment after she had pronounced these words, he saw a sheep appear in front of him, and the sheep continued to bleat insistently all through the night. But before the sun started to rise she took hold of the tin cup again and spoke a few words into it, then she sprayed the sheep with water and said, ‘Come out of your present image and go back to what you were before,’ and immediately the Imam became himself once more.
The Chief of Security trembled at what he had seen through the keyhole, for it meant that she possessed the secrets of magic and sorcery like her sisters mentioned in the old books. He was seized with wonder at the ability of this slave girl to change the Imam into an animal with four legs, whereas he could do nothing to change his own image in any way. He struck one palm against the other in consternation. This could only be the will of God revealing itself through the weakest of His creatures. But he quickly discarded such a possibility and implored God to have mercy on him for his heretical ideas. Such happenings could only be the work of Satan and God was certainly on the side of the Imam and would never allow them to go on. Then a moment later he begged God for His mercy once more, feeling that to put things in that way was also wrong, for God’s will was above that of Satan and Satan could do nothing without the will of God. Then, closing his lips tightly together as though he had decided never to pronounce himself any more, he screwed his eye to the keyhole and continued to watch what was going on.
It was the night of the Big Feast and on that night they wed me. I had no choice. They wrapped me up in a pure white robe like the clothes of an angel or the shroud surrounding a dead body and dragged me by a chain tied around my wrist to be wed. I found myself naked in a bed of rich marble with gilt decorations like the graves of queens in bygone times, and in the bed I remembered that I had not seen my mother since the days of the orphanage when I walked in my sleep, looking for her.
In my dream I hear God’s voice calling to me, and it is like her voice, so that I cannot tell between them. I run towards Him and bury my face in His breast, hiding from devils and evil spirits. I sleep all night and God is with me and I awake in the morning to Jesus Christ moving His velvet feel within me. I put my arms around Him over my belly, lift Him up to the sun for God, my people, and the Imam to see, and I smile in their faces, but they do not smile back. Their eyes go round and round under their lids, and their faces fall from their heads, and their heads become red flesh without hair, but their faces are covered with black hair which is thick, and the soft gentle voice of God becomes like the howl of a wolf tracking me down in my sleep as I walk through the night looking for my mother. Behind me I can hear a loud noise like the noise the Devil would make, and as I run I can hear the tread of hundreds of thousands of feet running behind me, like a never-ending army, and I can feel hundreds of thousands of hands striking out at me from the back, but when I turn round they disappear, leaving no trace behind them, for they are afraid to stand their ground and face me. Each one of them is scared to be alone, and each one of them feels strong only when he carries an instrument of death over which his hand is tightly closed. They advance in a straggling line with legs that are bowed and eyes that squint from side to side. I know their faces one by one, the faces of their leaders, and the faces of their dogs straining at their leashes, and each dog wears the face of a lamb by day and the face of a wolf at night, and when they advance, the men march in front, followed by the guards, then the dogs, and the cats join in baring their teeth and crawling on their small fleshy feet, their eyes shining with lust, their bellies swollen with a foul hunger like stagnant air in closed rooms.
I am running, and as I run I see my mother standing near the rock, waiting at the top of the hill which rises between the river and the sea, her arms held out towards me. I almost reach her where she stands, almost reach the safety of her arms, away from harm, but I stop for a short moment when I reach the top to fill my eyes with the beauty of the land, with the peace and calm of the spot where I was born. As I stand in wonder and in love, they stab me in the back, and before I have time to fall or to forget some letter of the alphabet, I turn round and say, ‘Do you kill the victim and leave the criminal to escape?’
They say, ‘Who is the criminal whom you mean?’ And I point to the face hanging down from the top of the column reaching to the sky.
And I saw him standing over me as naked as a man could ever be as on the day his mother brought him into the world. I shrank under the covers of the bed like I used to do as a child in the orphanage and said, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am the Imam. Do you not know my face?’
‘I do not know you,’ said I.
‘Have you not seen my face before this day?’ he asked, and I again said no. ‘How come?’ said he. ‘Do you not read the newspapers, watch the screens, look at the pictures hanging from the arches of victory, buy postage or excise duty stamps?’
‘What are excise duty stamps?’ I queried.
‘Don’t you know what excise duty stamps are used for, girl?’ he asked.
‘I have never heard anything about them,’ I said, and he got into a rage and said, ‘You are neither of this world, nor are you one of us, and if you do not know the Imam then you have nothing to do with this land of ours, and if you have no loyalty towards your country, then you have no place for God in your heart. Have you never heard the people when they shout, “Long live the Imam, Long live our country, Glory be to God”?’
I said, ‘I have never heard them shout things like that.’
He struck one palm against the other, greatly surprised. ‘Are you a member of Hizb Allah or of Hizb al-Shaitan?’ he enquired.
‘Neither,’ said I.
‘That’s very strange,’ said he. ‘Then are you familiar with our cultural heritage?’
‘I do not read,’ said I.
‘But if you do not read you have at least heard of certain things in it, like
The Thousand and One Nights
and King Shahrayar,’ said he.
‘Who is Shahrayar?’
‘You do not know King Shahrayar, who had a wife as fair as honey, yet she betrayed him with his black slave?’
‘I do not know him,’ said I.
‘Then do you know why a white woman should prefer a black slave to her husband, although her husband is a king and has a white skin?’
‘Because she loves him more than her husband,’ said I.
He struck one palm against the other in great astonishment and said, ‘But can a woman love another man more than her husband?’
‘Yes, she can,’ said I.
‘But what can her lover have that her husband does not have?’
‘Love,’ said I.
He laughed uproariously with a sound like the beating of drums for the Big Feast and stretched out his arms as though to embrace the universe. ‘My love is so great that it is enough for the whole world, and my heart is so big that it is enough for all my people,’ he said.
‘If you have a heart which is big enough to include all people then you carry nobody in it,’ said I.
He rested his head against a gilded cushion stuffed with ostrich feathers, reclining with the weight of his body on a Persian carpet on which was embroidered the picture of the Kaaba, and whenever the glass in his hand shook, it spilled over, filling up the depression in the holy stone with some of its amber contents. His naked body was covered in hair, but my nakedness was smooth, without a single hair except over my pubic area. He fixed his eye on my body and said, ‘Why do you not kneel at my feet?’
‘Throughout my life I have not kneeled to anybody,’ I said.
‘But I am not anybody’, he said, ‘and besides all women kneel.’
‘I am not any woman,’ I said.
‘And pray who may you be?’ he said.
‘A woman without name, without father, without mother, who can neither read nor write but does not love you and who carries another love in her heart,’ I said.
The glass in his hand shook so violently that it spilled over completely, drowning the Kaaba, the shrine and the tomb of the Prophet. The Imam sprang to his feet, the hair on his body bristling all over, his bones tense to the very marrow. His lust was now at its utmost, but the vitality of his mind was at its lowest ebb, for nothing can inflame his desire and make him lose his reason more than a woman who refuses to be possessed. Now nothing could extinguish the fire which had been aroused in him except one thing, to lay her at his feet and devour her like a vulture eats up flesh, leaving bones behind.