God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (29 page)

‘What's your mother's name?'

Startled by the unexpected question Fouada was taken aback. She couldn't remember her mother's name. Her friend insisted, and the more she pressed, the further away the name escaped Fouada's memory till, in the end, the reading had to continue without it. But Fouada remembered the name at the very moment the friend stopped asking.

She continued to stare into the empty test tube. Then she put it back on the rack and began to pace the room, her head bowed. Everything could disappear except that! Everything could escape her except that! For that to vanish was intolerable, unbearable! It was all she had left, the only reason for her to continue living.

She went over to the window and opened it. Cold air struck her face and she felt somewhat refreshed. ‘It's depression,' she thought. ‘I shouldn't think about research when I'm depressed.' She looked out of the window. The large sign hung from the railing of the balcony. The street was far below and people were going on their way without looking up, paying no attention to her chemical laboratory. It seemed that nobody would be interested in her laboratory, that nobody would knock at her door. She chewed her lips in anxiety and was about to close the window when she noticed a woman standing below and looking up at her window. All at once, she became
excited. No doubt the woman was suffering from gout and had come for a urine analysis. She rushed to the outer room, on the door of which was written ‘Waiting Room', and straightened the chairs. She looked at herself in the long mirror near the door and saw the white overall reaching to above her knees like a hairdresser's, glanced over her gaping mouth and looked into her eyes, smiling as she whispered to herself:

‘Fouada Khalil Salim, owner of a chemical analysis laboratory. Yes, it's me.'

She heard the drone of the lift come to a stop, heard its door open and close, heard the clacking of heavy high heels on the tiled floor of the corridor. Fouada waited behind the door for the sound of the bell, but heard nothing. Very quietly, she slid back the peep-hole and saw a woman's back disappearing through the door of the neighbouring apartment. She read the small copper plaque on the door: ‘Shalabi's Sport Institute for Slimming and Massage'.

She closed the peep-hole and went back into the inner room on the door of which was written ‘Research and Analysis Room'. She avoided looking at the empty test tubes and began pacing up and down the room, then looked at the time. It was eight. Remembering that today was Tuesday, she threw off the overall, flung it on to a chair, then rushed out.

Last Tuesday he had not come – perhaps for an unavoidable reason? And here was another Tuesday. Would he come today? Would she go to the restaurant and find him sitting
at the table? His back towards her, his face towards the Nile? Her heart pounded but inside it was that weight that hardened and contracted like a ball of lead. She would not find him, so why go to the restaurant? She tried to turn and head for home but couldn't. Involuntarily, her feet made for the restaurant like a wild horse that has thrown its rider and is galloping unrestrained.

She saw the naked table-top, the air whipping it from all sides like a rock in a violent and tempestuous sea. She stood for a moment grave-faced, then left the restaurant with head bowed and made her way home with slow and heavy steps.

* * *

Her mother was in the corner of the living-room praying, back to the door and face to the wall. Fouada stood looking at her. Her bowed back was bent forward, the raised hem of her robe exposed the back of her legs. She knelt on the ground for a few moments, then got to her feet and bent forward again, lifting her robe and uncovering her legs. Fouada saw large, blue veins protruding from the back of her legs like long winding worms and said to herself, ‘A serious heart or artery condition.' Her mother knelt on the ground, turned her head to the right and whispered something, then looked to the left muttering the same words. Finally, she stood up supporting herself on the sofa, put her feet into her slippers and turned to Fouada standing behind her.

‘In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!' she intoned. ‘When did you come in?'

‘Just now,' Fouada replied, sitting on the sofa and sighing with fatigue. The mother sat down beside her and looking at her said:

‘You seem tired.'

She was just about to say ‘very tired,' but glancing at her mother's face and seeing the whites of her large eyes, clearly tinged with a yellowness she had never seen before, said:

‘I've been working hard. Are you tired, Mama?'

‘Me, tired?' said her mother in surprise.

‘Your heart, for example,' Fouada replied.

‘Why?' her mother said.

‘I noticed varicose veins in your legs when you were praying,' she said.

‘What's the heart got to do with legs?'

‘The blood goes to the legs from the heart,' she replied.

Her mother waved her hand dismissively.

‘It can go where it likes,' she said, ‘I don't feel tired.'

‘Sometimes we don't feel tired,' Fouada said, ‘but the illness is hidden in our bodies. It might be as well to do an examination.'

Crossing her legs her mother said:

‘I detest doctors.'

‘You don't have to go to a doctor,' Fouada said. ‘I'll carry out an examination.

‘What examination?' her mother said in alarm.

‘I'll take a urine sample and analyse it in my laboratory,' she replied.

Her mother gave a wry smile and exclaimed:

‘Ah, I understand! You want to carry out an experiment on me!'

Fouada stared at her for a moment, then said:

‘What experiment? I'm offering you a free service.'

‘Thank you very much,' her mother said, ‘I'm in the best of health and I don't want to delude myself that I'm ill.'

‘It's neither a matter of delusion, Mama,' Fouada said in annoyance, ‘nor of illness.'

‘So what's the point of analysis then?'

‘Confirming the absence of illness is one thing, analysis is something else,' she replied.

She fell silent for a moment, then more quietly said:

‘Analysis in itself is an art which I take pleasure in performing.'

Her mother's upper lip curled in derision:

‘What's the art or pleasure in analysing urine?'

As if talking to herself, Fouada replied:

‘It's work that relies on the senses, just like art.' ‘What senses?' asked her mother.

‘Smell, touch, sight, taste…' Fouada said.

‘Taste?' her mother exclaimed, staring at her daughter for a moment.

‘It seems to me you know nothing about these analyses!' she said.

Fouada looked at her mother and saw a strange look in her eyes, like that in her wedding photograph, a hard, suspicious look, bitterly mistrustful of whoever was before her. She felt the blood rush to her head and found herself saying:

‘I know why you refuse. You refuse because you don't believe in analysis.'

Without meaning to, she raised her voice and shouted:

‘You don't believe that I can do anything. That was always your opinion of me, that was always your opinion of father…'

Her mother's mouth fell open in surprise. ‘What are you saying?'

Raising her voice even louder, she replied:

‘No, you don't believe in me. That's a fact which you've always tried to hide from me.'

Her mother gazed at her in utter astonishment and in a feeble voice said:

‘And why shouldn't I believe in you…?'

‘Because I'm your daughter,' Fouada shouted. ‘People never appreciate the things that they have simply because they have them.'

Fouada lowered her head, holding it in her hands as if she had a bad headache. The mother kept staring at her, silent and apprehensive.

‘Who told you that I don't believe in you, daughter?' she said sadly. ‘If only you knew how I felt when I saw you for the first time after you were born. You lay beside me like a little angel, breathing quietly and looking around in wonder with your small shining eyes. I picked you up, lifted you to show you to your father and said to him: “Just look at her, Khalil.” Your father glanced at you briefly, then said angrily: “It's a girl.” Raising you up to his face, I said to him: “She'll be a great woman, Khalil. Look at her eyes! Kiss her, Khalil! Kiss her!” I held you so that your face almost touched his, but he didn't kiss you, just turned away and left us.'

The mother wiped away a tear from her eye on her sleeve, and continued:

‘That night I hated him more than ever. I stayed awake the whole night looking at your tiny face as you slept. Whenever I put my finger in your hand, you wrapped your little fingers around it and held on tightly. I cried till daybreak. I don't know, daughter, what illness I had but my temperature suddenly rose and I fainted … when I came round, I found I'd been taken to hospital where they removed my womb and I became sterile.'

She took a handkerchief from the pocket of her
galabeya
to wipe away the tears which ran down her face, and said:

‘You were the only thing I had in my life. I used to go into your room when you were up at night studying and say to you…'

She was weeping and put the handkerchief to her eyes for a moment, then lifted it and said:

‘Have you forgotten, Fouada?'

Fouada was fighting off a sharp pain in the side of her head and was silent and distracted, as if half-asleep.

‘I haven't forgotten, Mama,' she said faintly.

Gently, her mother asked:

‘What did I used to say to you, Fouada?'

‘You used to tell me that you believed that I would succeed and do better than all my friends…'

Her mother's dry lips parted in a weak smile and she said:

‘You see? I always believed in you.'

‘You only imagined I was better than all the other girls.'

‘I didn't only imagine it,' said her mother with conviction. ‘I was sure of it.'

Fouada looked into her mother's eyes and said: ‘Why were you so sure?'

‘Just like that, for no reason…' she responded quickly.

Fouada tried to read the expression in her mother's eyes so as to understand, to discover the secret of that conviction which lay in them, but she saw nothing. In a flash, she felt her irritation grow into anger and snapped at her mother:

‘That conviction ruined my life…!'

‘What…!' her mother exclaimed in astonishment.

Without thinking and as if her words were dictated by someone from the distant past, she said:

‘That conviction of yours haunted me like a ghost. It weighed me down. I only passed my exams…'

She paused for a moment, looking around distractedly, then gulped, then went on, speaking quickly:

‘Yes, only passed my exams for your sake. It used to torture me, yes, torture me, because I loved science and I could have passed by myself…' She put her head in her hands and pressed it hard.

Her mother was silent for a moment, then said sadly:

‘You're depressed tonight, Fouada. What's been happening these past few days? You're not your usual self.'

Fouada remained silent, clutching her head in both hands as if fearing it would snap. A sharp pain split her head in two, while somewhere at the back something pointed made itself felt. She didn't know what it was exactly, but it seemed to begin to disclose the true reason for the mysterious sadness which sometimes came over her just when she'd had a happy moment.

And that reason was none other than her mother. She loved her mother more than anything else, more than Farid, more than chemistry, more than discovery, more than her very self. She was incapable of freeing herself from this love even though she wanted to, as though she had fallen into an eternal trap whose chains and ropes bound her legs and hands – from which she would never in all her life be able to release herself.

Unconsciously, she moved her little finger, ran it over her upper lip, then put it in her mouth. She began to chew it like a child whose teeth have emerged but who is still sucking its
mother's breast. A long time elapsed as she sat on the sofa in the living room, her head between her hands, the tip of her little finger between her teeth. Her mother seemed to have left the room and she didn't know where she'd gone, but after a while she returned holding a small glass of yellow liquid. She extended the slender, veined hand that held the glass to her daughter. Fouada raised her eyes to her and the pent-up tears fell from them into her lap.

* * *

Fouada took great delight in washing the tubes, preparing flasks of alkalis and acids, checking the chemical analysis equipment and the spectrometer. She lit the burner, poured a sample of her mother's urine into the test tube and held it in a metal clamp over the flame. Standing like this, she realized why she had suggested that her mother give her a sample: she had wanted to use the new laboratory equipment.

The sample was free of sediment and since the heat solidified nothing, she turned off the burner, poured a drop of cold urine onto a slide, which she placed under the microscope, and looked down the lens. She saw a large circle inside within which moved small discs of different shapes and sizes. She moved the mirror to adjust the light and turned the knob of the magnifying lens. The large circle widened, increasing her field of vision, and the small quivering discs became bigger and looked like grapes floating on water.

She focused on one of the discs. It had, she thought, the form of an ovule. It was shaking like a living creature and inside it quivered two small dark discs, like a pair of eyes. As she stared at them her conscious, scientific mind was suspended and it seemed to her that they stared back at her with her mother's familiar look. Like an ovule – it was her mother's … perhaps she herself was this ovule thirty years previously … only her mother had not put it into a test tube and closed it with a stopper. It had attached itself to her flesh like a louse to the scalp and had eaten her cells and sucked her blood.