Two Women in One (12 page)

He took off his jacket and the banknotes in the inside pocket smelt like the hospital — a mixture of blood and sweat and sick, panting breaths. She looked away and he handed her a glass, saying, ‘This is an Egyptian wine called Omar Khayyam. The best wine in the world. What do you think?’

‘I have no idea’, she replied listlessly. ‘I’ve never tasted wine before, Egyptian or foreign.’

He looked at her sad black eyes. ‘I have a philosophy of life’, he said. ‘To live from day to day. I never think about yesterday or tomorrow. You should do the same, starting now.’

‘I have a different philosophy’, she said quietly.

He laughed out loud. ‘A beautiful woman needs no philosophy.’

She did not laugh. He stretched out his hand, took hers and kissed it. ‘Bahiah, I love you! Don’t you know what love means?’

‘No’, she answered clearly.

His hands caressed her and he pressed her to his chest. She felt the quick beat of his heart. He held both her wrists in one hand and started to undress her with the other. She kicked at him strongly and he fell. As he picked himself up, he stared at her in astonishment. She was even more surprised than he was. He sat on a chair near the fireplace. ‘It seems I’ve made a mistake’, he said. ‘I thought you were in love with me.’

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ she answered in amazement.

‘I understand women’, he said in his lecturer’s tone.

‘With what brain?’

He pointed to his head and smiled. ‘Man has only one brain, in his head. Didn’t I teach you that in the dissecting room?’

‘The dissecting room is one thing, the truth is another’, she replied scornfully.

‘What is the truth?’

‘That a man’s brain is not in his head.’

‘Where then?’

‘Between his legs’, she answered boldly.

He put on his jacket, saying, ‘You’re not normal, girl.’

‘You’re a perfectly normal man’, she said smiling.

She strode out proudly. ‘Not normal.’ And what do they consider a normal girl? One with beaten eyes who walks with closely-bound legs, obedient and submissive, with amputated sexual organs? One who drips with perfumed powders and paints, saturated day and night with sad songs and sex films? One who knows romantic stories by heart and can’t really experience anything? The virtuous and pure virgin preoccupied with removing body hair and enticing men?

She walked along with her quick, long strides, looking left and right, inspecting people’s faces. The street was full of them. Their faces, their movements, their voices were all similar. When she looked at their eyes she did not see them. She felt she was drowning with no one to see or recognize her and that her face was becoming like that of Aliah, Zakiah, Najiah or Yvonne.

Absent-mindedly, she ran in the direction of al-Muqattam street. Her eyes searched earth, trees and sky for those eyes that were capable of seeing her, for the thin face with the intense features burdened by people’s cares. ‘Saleem!’ she shouted. But the mountain swallowed her voice and its echo. ‘Saleem!’ she cried out still louder. No one answered, but she did not turn back.

She knew he was there, like the sky, the air, the sun, the moon and the stars. He was part of the universe. She breathed him every minute, she felt his touch on her body as she walked, sat or slept. When she gazed at the sky she saw his eyes in its blueness. She saw his nose in every high, pointed arch. With each step she took she heard his footsteps. She almost turned to see him but stopped herself. She knew he was not there, that the sky was empty of him, that the earth was devoid of people, and that the universe was hollow like an empty box whose air has been sucked out by a magic pump.

‘Bahiah!’ His voice rang out behind her and she started, but no one was there. She pulled herself together. In that determined gesture, she realized that she would go to him, she would devote her life to going to him, and nothing could stand between them, not death, bullets, blood, the sharp lancet cutting into flesh, the high iron door, the lock.

She took long, fast strides as if she knew where she was going, but soon she stopped. She did not know where to go. When she looked around she saw her father’s head through the window of a taxi. Beside him was her uncle and someone else, a strange head that she seemed to glimpse through thick fog. Suddenly she remembered her wedding night. Panting, she hid behind a wall. The taxi drove on and was swallowed up by the traffic. She came out and walked on with her straight, strong legs. She knew the sound of her footsteps, one after the other, as she stamped the ground in defiance. She would lift one foot high and bring it down hard as if penetrating the earth and defying the whole world around her. She would kick anyone who approached her and gouge out the eyes of anyone who dared to touch her or even to stir the air around her. With her lancet she would rip open the belly of anyone who stood in her way. Yes, she would kill him. She was capable of committing murder. In fact, nothing but the crime of murder could extinguish the fire now burning within her.

It was three o’clock in the morning, just before dawn. Darkness ruled the narrow mud streets. The old houses leaned against each other for support like the skeletons of sick bodies. The breaths of the Dirassah neighbourhood, with its small overcrowded rooms, steamed out through the windows, carrying the dust of the mountain and the smell of sweat, onion, lentils and rice, and fried fish. This area, a hive of activity in the daytime, was now fast asleep, the sleep of exhausted bodies so similar to death. Now and then a dog barked, a baby cried, or a cat miaowed, breaking the silence.

But life was in full swing in the basement of the old house. The small printing press covered the white paper with black characters. When one sheet was fully printed the machine would spin and a fresh sheet would be sucked in, soon to be filled with black lines and replaced in turn by a new sheet of paper. The three thin faces were pale and exhausted. Six staring eyes followed the circular movement of the paper. One pair of dark eyes looked up in a familiar way. They were intensely black. The nose was sharp and upturned, dividing the world in two. The lips were pursed in determination and anger.

‘Bahiah!’ The voice rang in her ear. She looked around to see Raouf stuffing the papers into the leather bag, and Fawzi hiding the printing press in a hole in the floor and replacing the floorboards. The small wooden door creaked in the silence and the three people slipped out, one after the other. No one would have recognized her: their features looked alike in the dark. Her legs were sinewy inside her trousers and a bulging leather bag dangled from her right hand.

In the small square Raouf turned right and was swallowed up by the dark street. Fawzi headed for the main square. Bahiah strode towards the waiting bus, her chest heaving, her breath coming in gasps. She clutched the bulging leather bag to her chest, cradling it like a mother cuddling her baby. She would get off at the next stop. She knew where to go. She knew where to take the blazing words.

‘People of Egypt! Awake! Throw open your windows, open your eyes and see the chains coiled around your necks! Open your minds and see that the sweat of your brows is being plundered. Your crops are stolen, your flesh devoured until you are left only skin and bones, queueing skeletons each leaning on the other. Your breath is torn by fits of coughing and blood pours from a deep wound in your chest.’

She hurled the words and letters at the faces and returned with the empty bag, free from her burden, hopping like a sparrow and humming an old tune. She swung the empty bag like a child returning happily from school. She tossed it in the air and caught it as it fell. She saw the man with the spying eyes walking cautiously after her. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. When she decided that he was following her she turned into another road, slipped away from him and returned to the main street, to be swallowed up by the sea of people. She walked along, observing people on the treadmill of their daily lives. The tram with its uneven steps creaked under the weight of bodies. Its iron wheels hungered for any stumbling foot. On the platform an old, blind woman sat stretching out her veined hand. Children looked out at the world with yellow eyes, their gaping mouths hungry for any bite that came their way. In the windows of the tram and the bus she could see the identical heads and necks hanged by their ties. She saw the bulging, frightened eyes and heard the murmured incantations. Occasionally a black car like a police car sped by. Through shining windows she saw fleshy faces with their narrow, spying eyes.

At nightfall she strode back towards her small attic room. Her panting breath came like a stifled sob. Streaks of sweat ran down her face and armpits. She pulled the iron bar down across the door, clamped all the windows shut and stretched out on the small iron bed, gazing into the darkness. The thin, intense face, the blue-black eyes able to see her loomed before her. ‘Saleem!’ she called out faintly, but no one answered. Realizing that she was alone, she got up, pulled the painting out from under the bed and stood it against the wall. The pressure of her hand as it coiled around the brush gave her a mysterious joy that spread from her fingers to her arms, neck and head as if along a taut electric wire.

Anyone seeing her there in the dark would have been astonished. Her muscles were as taut as if she had been crucified. Her black eyes were fixed on her lines, her head steady, her arm confident. Her fingers gripped the brush and her feet were solid like a granite statue.

No one could know how long she would stay like that. The whole night might pass as she sat, immobile, adding no lines to her painting: but her eyes never shifted. She relived her life, saw it parade before her eyes, moment by moment, like a film.

Shortly before dawn she moved her brush over the painting, changing the lines and creating new moments in her life, new moments that she chose to create through her own will. With that deliberate movement across the paper — in any and all directions — she destroyed other wills and designed her own lines and features. She would make her eyes blacker, her nose more upturned and her lips pursed in ever greater anger and determination.

When she felt tired she would let her body fall and stretch out on the iron bed. She shivered under the old blanket, pulling it over her head and around her freezing feet. Her teeth chattered, making a faint sound like a baby sparrow that had fallen from its mother’s nest in an arid land, trembling as its tearful eyes glowed in the dark with the frightened look of an orphan.

A hot tear ran from the corner of her eye onto the pillow. She felt its wet warmth on her cheek and peeped out from under the blanket to see her mother: the long thin face like her own, the wide black eyes, and the breast that offered generous warmth. She buried her head in her mother’s breast, sniffing her and seeking an opening that would contain her, hoping to hide from the world and the forces threatening her. She wanted to curl up like a foetus. Her body shook with a strange violent yearning for security. She longed to curl up in her mother’s womb, to feel security, silence, with no sound or movement. Her mother’s big arms embraced her with amazing strength, pulling her body towards her once more. With all her might she tried to make their bodies one, but in vain. The eternal separation took place in a fleeting moment never to return.

‘Bahiah!’ The voice rang out and she opened her eyes. But no one was there. The sun had started to penetrate the rotting wood of the shutters. She heard the slow knocks from behind the door that greeted her every day. She saw the old man with his turban, kaftan, grey eyes in which the white seemed to have melted into the iris, his thick brown fingers curled round the yellow worry beads, moving them fast and regularly like a constant shiver. The same shiver could be seen in his thin yellow lips, which muttered incomprehensible words in which the letter
s
recurred like a whistle.

When he saw her, the gap between his dry lips widened and the edges of his decaying yellow teeth appeared. He whispered in a voice like a sleeping snake, ‘Are you awake?’

‘No’, she answered angrily, and closed the door. She heard him hiss behind the door. He was an old man whose lungs had been destroyed by smoking. He had bled his life away in the beds of four frigid, virtuous wives: each had given birth to a number of children, half of whom were dead, the others married off. He had only one wife left, an old woman who propped herself against the wall, made him black tea and set up the water pipe for him in the evening. He would lie near her in the wooden bed and bury his thick fingers between her sagging breasts. Their thin bodies would shake wearily and their cold stagnant breath would be visited by a faint glimmer of warmth, soon to disappear like a death rattle, leaving them like two corpses in their old wooden bed.

She wrapped up the painting and went out the small wooden door, her tall body slim, her straight legs enveloped by her trousers. One foot trod firmly on the ground before the other, and her legs parted noticeably. The men of the neighbourhood gazed at her from the shops; the women stared through keyholes and cracks in the windows. Was she woman or man? Had it not been for the two small breasts showing through the blouse, they would have sworn she was a man. But since she was a woman, it was legitimate to stare. Her body was the victim of hungry, deprived eyes. They stared at her and whispered. One dared to laugh obscenely, another made a dirty crack. Street urchins were encouraged to follow her, wiggling their bottoms. Teenage boys would expose themselves to her. One threw a stone, another let out a long cat-call. Men sitting in the cafe laughed hoarsely, slapping their thighs with rough hands cracked like arid, thirsty land. Women would strike their breasts and heave that ever-suppressed feminine sigh, saying, ‘Just look at what Western women are like!’

She fought her way through stares, noise and obscene remarks. She raised her black eyes and pursed her lips in anger, defying fate. Once she disappeared down the street, life in the neighbourhood returned to normal. The blacksmith’s hammer and anvil rang out; the clinking of glasses and the click-clack of backgammon could be heard in the cafe; children crying, boys fighting and women quarrelling were heard from behind the cracks — and also the coarse voices of men taking the oath to divorce their wives. The smell of boiled fish,
falafel
, rice and lentils was everywhere. Worry beads danced in the hands of the old man sitting on his prayer mat by the window. When he bowed down, his body touched the wool of the carpet: he would be overcome by suppressed desire, and his old eyes would search the neighbourhood for any plump body.