She didn’t like the male students. She didn’t like the way they rushed through the door with their thick glasses, straining eyes and angled elbows. She did not like the way they grabbed the front seats, showing her their bowed backs and exposing, above their white collars, their porous brown skin with its stubble and with the tiny imperfections scattered like sores.
She would look and then whisper something to a girl student, who would gasp with that suppressed feminine laugh and say, ‘Oh, come on, Bahiah, start thinking about your future.’
Some hidden insistent feeling told her that her future did not lie in those long, boring lectures, nor in getting a medical degree and hanging a shingle in the square saying ‘Dr Bahiah Shaheen’, nor in settling her ass in a comfortable seat behind the wheel of a car. Something told her that all this was meaningless, like a blank sheet of paper or a dark night without a single star, as if the whole world had become black or white, it really didn’t matter which, so long as it was all one colour.
It was then that she realized the absurdity of the world around her, of life, of the lecturer posing with a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, of the bowed backs and those spotted necks.
She put her books and notebooks in her satchel, edged out of her seat and left through the back door of the lecture hall. She was on her own in the spacious college grounds. Moving her legs freely in her usual gait, she asked herself what she wanted to do with her life. She left the question unanswered; it hung in the air before her swinging slightly like a pendulum. She stamped the ground hard with one foot and realized that she wanted to do something concrete with her life, something definite. She could do it with a pen-point on a blank sheet of paper; she could touch it with her fingertip just as certainly as she could touch her body, feeling its external boundaries under her clothes, just as she could distinguish it from all the other bodies and lift it from the ground by moving her feet.
In her small bedroom, she gazed up at the ceiling. She saw herself sitting on her small red chair at her red desk, on which lay her notebooks and her textbook with its blue cover and white label. Name: Bahiah Shaheen. Subject: 1st Year Anatomy. She tore a clean sheet of paper from her exercise book. With a movement of her small hand, she drew a clear line with the nib of her pen, a line whose shape she recognized as her own. She knew too that the hand was hers, and the fingers around the pen. She could will them to make her distinct lines on the blank page, drawing a full circle and two smaller circles inside it — making a face and a pair of eyes glaring up from the white paper, a pair of wide black eyes like her own, staring at her woman to woman. She looked at her lines on the sheet of paper as carefully as she would look at her own features. She knew them as she knew her own face, never confusing it with other faces. She could distinguish her face and touch the lines on the paper with her finger, with the same certainty with which she would touch her own body and feel its external boundaries under her clothes.
Her father opened the door and she slipped the piece of paper under the textbook. But his large fingers picked up the book and extracted the drawing. He slapped her small hand with his broad palm and said, ‘What do you mean by wasting your time scribbling?’ He crumpled the sheet of paper and tossed it into the dustbin.
When he left she glanced at her familiar, crumpled drawing lying in the rubbish. She stared at it for a long time, just as she gazed at her face in the mirror. Then she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and with determination she drew her lines, her invisible electric wires of fine silken threads, the colour of air, linking her with the drawing on the white sheet of paper, affirming her ability to distinguish the movement of her hand, the shape of her fingers, the length of her nose and the black of her eyes.
When she heard her father’s voice as he sat in the salon slumped in his Asyut-style chair, she hid the piece of paper under the textbook and began to read aloud, in a voice that rang in her ears like somebody else’s. The name on the cover seemed strange to her, as if it was the name of some other pupil, docile and obedient, doing what she was told, getting on with her homework and concealing her real self in the folds of the hidden sheet of paper.
Ever since she first became aware of life, she had wondered why all the things she loved were taboo. Even food — the stuff they made her eat was the kind she hated most. Her mother shovelled it into her mouth and as soon as her back was turned, Bahiah spat it out. Her father hated her drawings. Let him see her take a sheet of paper and he would tear it to shreds or crumple it up and throw it out with the household rubbish.
Her father stood like a vast, high barrier between her and her real self, blocking her way, guarding the entrance to the house with the bulk of his body, his loud coarse voice, huge palms and wide eyes. When his voice rang out, calling her name, she felt he was calling somebody else but she would answer anyway: ‘Yes, father.’ ‘Have you done your homework?’ he would ask, and she would reply politely and obediently, ‘Yes, father.’ When she heard the word ‘yes’ she realized that the voice was definitely not her own.
Only when her father had vanished from the salon and she felt alone in her room could she hear her real voice. She could distinguish its features and tone just as she could define the features of her own body. Her thin fingers removed the white label bearing the false name on the blue cover. As the nib of her pen moved over the white page, she defined things as she really saw them. When she drew her father, she gave him two red eyes and a black handlebar moustache, huge hands and fingers coiled round a long stick.
Her father did not have a black handlebar moustache. But on her way to and from school every day, she would see the policeman in his street-corner wooden shelter. All she saw of his face was a black handlebar moustache. She always quickened her step when she passed him, and sometimes ran home without stopping. The long stick was the one that was shaken at her every morning as she sat at her wooden desk in the classroom, the teacher’s voice ringing out as sharply as her father’s: ‘Bahiah Shaheen. Have you done your homework?’ At first she thought the teacher was calling somebody else and she pursed her lips in silence, but the sharp voice would ring out once more: ‘Bahiah Shaheen!’ Then she would jump up and reply with that polite, obedient ‘Yes, Miss.’ Friday was the only day she really liked, since school was closed. She would slip out of her narrow bed and onto her red chair, tear a sheet of paper from the middle of her exercise book, take her pen in her small fingers and move her hand over the page, drawing her lines. Sometimes she would take from her bag a red, blue or green pencil that she had bought with her pocket money from the shop near the school or borrowed from a classmate. Then she would colour in the drawing. She gave the tree green leaves and the sea blue water; blood she made red. How did she know that the colour of blood was red?
The first spot of red blood she had ever seen was on her small, white knickers. She would draw that spot like a deep red circle in the middle of the blank sheet of paper. The young girl’s eyes were large and frightened. Her body was small and thin like a sparrow’s trembling behind a wall. There were also many staring eyes, like full circles. With her small swollen fingers, she buried her knickers in a hole behind the wall. She walked out in the street without knickers. The cold wind passed between her legs, billowing her dress, but she pulled it down firmly with both hands, defying the wind. She walked along the tarmac street, her bag bulging with books.
As she neared the wooden shelter, a deep red drop of blood trickled down between her legs and onto the asphalt. It lay on the ground in a red circle that widened to grow as big as the sun. The policeman with his handlebar moustache stared at her. He poked his nose out of the shelter, sniffing the blood. She threw her bag to the ground and ran home breathlessly.
She moved her head across the pillow heavily and saw the leather bag, bulging with anatomy books, on top of her desk. Above the desk were notebooks, a skull and a mug of water with a red rose in it. Glancing out of the corner of her eye at the calendar hanging on the wall, she remembered that she had an examination. She spread out her lecture notes and books and sat gazing at the skull. It was the skull of someone who had died some years ago. She had bought it from the dissecting room attendant for three and a half Egyptian pounds. The year before it would have cost just one pound, but prices had gone up and corpses were scarce and now fetched black-market rates. The undertaker, dissecting room attendant and cemetery guard had formed a partnership. When some unknown person with no next of kin was run over by a tram and killed, the undertaker would immediately appear, followed by a ‘father’ hired by the hour. The ‘father’ would throw himself on the dead body and weep crocodile tears. He would then sign for the body, which was released to him as his personal property to do with as he wished, just as a father owns a son and can do as he likes with him.
The hired father would then sell the corpse to the cemetery guard, who would sell it to the undertaker, who would sell it either to the dean of the medical school or to some rich student who wanted to study it at home without bothering to show up at the dissecting room every day. Bahiah looked closely at the skull. She saw the long crevices between the bones, resembling deep wounds, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep eye-sockets and the tapering jaws above the deep gaps between the teeth.
It was like the face of the child in tattered clothes who climbed onto the tram one day. He carried boxes of pins, matchboxes and a few combs. He called out his wares hoarsely, hopping from one tram to another on his one leg. He looked at people with his deep sunken eyes, searching among the faces for one with the features of a mother or father, who would reach into his pocket for a piastre or two and buy a comb or a box of pins.
But the faces on the tram were not those of fathers and mothers; instead they were those stunningly similar faces stamped out by the government like coins, sitting shoulder to shoulder in silence, their lower bodies immobile and fixed to their seats, their upper parts shaking slowly and rhythmically with the motion of the tram. Their huge skulls swung back and forth like pendulums. Their broad, padded shoulders were stuck to each other, their ties wound round their necks like hangmen’s ropes. When the tram stopped, their heads jerked back violently. They leapt from their seats, holding their heads and staring around them, their yellow eyes wide and fearful. Suddenly a child’s scream filled the air.
Round yellow eyes turned to the body, mangled under the wheels of the tram. Pins, matchboxes and combs lay scattered on the ground. The red spot shone on the asphalt, and the red circle widened like the sun, while the hollow eyes gazed out under the iron wheels like two deep holes in the belly of the earth.
They all ran their hands anxiously over their heads, necks, arms and thighs. Reassured that their heads were still on their shoulders, their bodies on the seats and their blood still coursing through their veins, they parted their lips and let out long, deep sighs. And their eyes gleamed with concealed delight. Some of them shook hands, congratulating each other on their escape and praising God for His great mercy, for the torn body under the wheels was not theirs but someone else’s. They raised their hands to heaven and murmured a prayer of thanksgiving, under the illusion that they were bribing Allah with those recitations (for He might destroy them at any moment), so that their necks would remain on their shoulders for ever and ever.
Bahiah turned the skull so that its hollow eyes faced the wall. She closed her anatomy book, reached behind the bed, pulled out the white painting and stood it against the wall. She sat on a small mattress on the floor, her brushes and paints beside her.
Her room was in total darkness except for a spot of white light shining on the painting from a small lamp. It was dead of night, her father was sound asleep. No voices and no movement except the rustle of the brush, criss-crossing the smooth surface. With a light motion of her fingers she willed her hand in whatever direction she wanted. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, warding off sleep. She gazed at her lines and at the coloured spot for hours.
Sometimes her hand would slap all those similar faces with purposeful brush strokes. She tore away the stretched mask of flesh with her fingers, dragging the torn body out from under the wheels and filling the slender skull with flesh. The two sunken holes became a pair of black eyes like her own.
In the morning she woke to the sound of her father’s voice, shrill as an alarm clock. She put on her black trousers and white blouse, picked up her bulging leather satchel and walked towards the tram, striding along confidently, moving her legs freely. When she saw the sameness of the faces on the tram, she pursed her lips angrily. When she saw the other female students, walking with that strange mechanical gait, their legs held tightly together, she realized that they belonged to one species and she to another. She stood in the dissecting room, one foot propped on the marble table, the other leg, long and straight, of sound bone and muscle, planted on the floor. From the corner of her eye she saw the legs of the male students, their swollen red noses and their backs hunched over the corpses. She looked around astonished, as if she had lost her way. But there was the lancet between her fingers. The blue anatomy book bore the familiar white label: ‘Name: Bahiah Shaheen. Subject: 1st Year Anatomy’, which never failed to astonish her.
As she worked her way down through the block of flesh immersed in formalin, her lancet hit a hard object, which she managed to extract. It fell onto the marble table, sounding like a piece of gravel. The lancet cut it in half, and it turned out to be a dark clot of congealed blood. One of the female students said, with that suppressed feminine laugh, ‘Goodness, I thought it was a bullet!’ Another girl craned her neck to see, staring at the open heart in amazement: ‘A bullet in the heart!’ A third gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth: ‘How sad!’ A fourth sighed audibly: ‘If only it was me.’