God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (45 page)

She let her body go limp on the bench, opening her pores to the attack of grief, which poured in to fill her completely and give her strength. Only rarely does sadness give; and then it earmarks a special kind of person for its giving, one who is able to exchange the offering. And Hamida was able to give herself completely to sadness. She could devote herself exclusively to it and live from it: eating and drinking it, digesting it so that its juice ran in her blood, to be sifted by her intestines and then secreted by her pores. It would trickle over her body like glistening threads, which she would lick off and swallow once again, to be digested once more, and secreted yet again.

To any passer-by, her erect stance, alone in the night, would suggest a Ramessid statue. A tongue of water moves over its cheeks, neck, shoulders, thighs and feet, moving so gently that the motion cannot be sensed. The moisture remains on the skin, not evaporating despite the dry night breeze, but rather entering the pores, returning whence it came, to its origins in the mother's womb. For it is sadness and cannot be mistaken for anything else. She and the everlasting embryo in her womb live for each other, and it comes and goes at her bidding.
Whenever she wishes its emergence, it becomes her child – a natural child, not like the artificial children who from birth possess certificates inscribed in ink. In their bodies, black ink runs in place of red blood. Their sexual organs are amputated, their hair is uprooted from their heads, and alongside every thigh hangs a toy pistol.

Her child has no familiarity with pistols, or dolls handmade of rags or straw, or any other toy: playthings are for children, and he is not a child. He is born standing on two feet; scrambling among the piles of manure, by himself, he laughs. It is this laugh which distinguishes him from children, for it is a soundless laugh that produces no movement in the facial muscles. His small eyes, though, are each coated by a tear which gives them a particular lustre. Beneath the tear a point of light diffuses, like a solitary star, wakeful and vigilant in a moonless sky.

Hamida walked through the night searching for her child. She circled the dung heaps. She looked behind the garbage bins. Next to the wall she spotted a little body huddled into a ball. She recognized him at once, and reached out into the darkness to enfold him to her chest. The darkness was cut by a yellow light and the brass eye appeared: always there is an eye watching, round and lidless, like a snake's eye, while the tail behind it is long and soft. The softness did not deceive her, though; she looked behind the tail. She saw the killing tool, hidden there, hanging alongside the thigh. It was not a male
snake. Yet, even though she saw a female viper, Hamida knew that anything which kills must be male, and she screamed out to her child: ‘Watch out for him, he'll kill you!'

The fangs entered the spindly leg. Like a long, thin tail, the blood flowed out, wetting her little toes, and running down to the soles of her feet. She raised her head, and saw her mother's wide, jet-black eyes fixed on her own eyes, looking at her mutely, the black
tarha
covering head and chest and belly. She opened her mouth to form her question, but the large palm was clapped over her mouth. Her breathing, the slight breeze, the rustling of the trees: all became a soundless, impermeable, black mass. The black
tarha
melted away into the night as a drop of water melts into the ocean.

But the legs pounded along behind her, towering above her like a high wave that followed her into the sea, constantly checking her position, plunging with her to the depths, and floating with her, a pair of corpses, on the surface. The wave lost itself with her in the middle of the ocean, then reappeared on shore, colliding with her against the edges of the rock, getting lost in the white foam, swaying with her between ebb and flow.

The flow was weak; the ebb was weaker. For the sea was not a sea after all, but rather the River Nile; its waters lay sluggish in the river bottom, their movement slow and heavy, like a half-paralysed foot that lies immobile once it is lowered to the ground. Hamido pulled the foot upward,
though, with all his strength, using all the muscles in his thin, bowed leg. Raised above the ground, the foot became fixed there, and would not descend again. But the ground pulled it back with all its force so that it fell heavily, like a foot carved from stone.

It was early morning; the sun was still slanting across the ground, and his shadow was sketched over the earth: long, thin, as bowed as a rainbow. The head was shaven and the shoulders uneven, one higher than the other. One leg was longer than the other, too: this was the frame of a lame man. Laughing, the children behind him were clambering onto his back.

The children's voices and screams hurl themselves at him from somewhere above his head, and their feet pound over his back like the wheels of a train. Each one grasps the hem of the next, and they whistle, and the whistling ascends in the air. Each of them runs to hide from the seeker – behind a dung heap, in the animal pen, or behind the lamp-post.

The lamp-post stretched so far into the sky that it seemed stuck fast to the moon. The moonlight fell onto Hamida, turning her face, arms and legs white as she stood concealed behind the lamp-post. Her entire body shone pale, smooth and hairless. Only the roots of her plucked body hair protruded, becoming rigid with a shiver that spread across her skin.

She extended a white hand and touched her skin. Only her body could give her reassurance, for nothing outside it
was reliable or secure: the world beyond consisted of strange bodies harboured in corners, behind walls and doors, in the darkened bends of streets, everywhere. Although the angles might seem smooth and innocuous from the outside, as if nothing lay within, when the sides of the triangle parted and the legs drew apart, the killing tool would emerge, clearly visible, hard and erect.

Hamida screamed, but the sound that emerged did not have the familiar timbre of a cry of fright or a plea for help. As a matter of fact, Hamida was not asking for anyone's help, since she knew that the road was empty of people. She was well aware that its windows and doors were shut and its lights extinguished. It was an area devoid of sounds, of voices, of everything.

No, it was not a scream for help, but it was sharp and long, going on and on as if it were in fact millions of screams coming together, welded into a single scream as endless as the night, and bonded in place with millions of the black particles from which the darkness and silence are made.

Nor was it a scream of alarm or fear. Hamida had no fear of the dark, or of silence, or even of death, for she was part of the darkness and her voice was the silence. And death has lived with her. She has borne it like a second body clinging to hers, like a second person, dead and living inside her. It occupies the emptiness within, enfolding its arms and legs, stretching itself out, its scent spreading
outwards through her eyes and ears, from her nose and mouth, wafting from every opening in her body. At night, when the gloom intensifies and solitude weighs heavier, she reaches out and feels him beside her, clinging to her; in her embrace his breaths mingle with hers, the heat of his body indistinguishable from her warmth.

Hamida planted her hand on her back, and a feeling of safety came over her. Were one to see her warm, soft, gently curved body from the rear, one would mistake her for a child. But as she turns around and her eyes grow visible, one sees unmistakeably that she is old. The faces of the elderly, like those of children, are sexless, but her growing belly, expanding with the live embryo, identifies her as a woman. One would be at a loss to determine her age, for Hamida is ageless. Such is the status of children born in defiance of the government employee who determines birth dates. They live untouched by the government, unaffected by history, unmarked by time and place. They do not pass through the stages of childhood, youth and old age as do ordinary human beings. They live on, beyond old age, notwithstanding the government employee who records dates of death. Like the gods, they are spared the boundaries of time, and they live forever, sharing a single, extended existence unmarked by developmental stages.

Born as adults, they grow old without experiencing childhood or adolescence, and then move suddenly from old age
to infancy, or from childhood to adolescence. They pass by in a single fleeting second, faster than the eye can see, for the human eye cannot fathom their essence. Such creatures appear as child, youth and old person at one and the same time and place. Sometimes they walk the roads when already dead, and when their smell is virtually unbearable. Yet the human eye remains incapable of distinguishing them from the living. Even wrinkles hold little significance in such cases, because they appear not as wrinkles but rather as the natural laughter lines which show on a child's face when it laughs forcefully but inaudibly.

Hamida was still standing behind the lamp-post, her face swollen, round and white as flour beneath the light, her wrinkles concealed by powder, and her cracked lips – chapped by hunger – glazed with a bloody, red crust. Her chest protruded from the opening of a torn gown, and her belly jutted out below. Her cracked heels were visible inside backless, slipper-like shoes. Her hair, as thick and black as a piece of the night, covered her head and chest, encasing her entire body in blackness. From within the blackness her white neck arched out, like a healthy tree trunk showing above the forest horizon, signalling that its roots are sunken deep into the moist ground.

An observer would think her a woman of the night, even though she was not a woman and the time was not night. The sun was directly overhead, at the exact midpoint between the
eyes. Hamida was staring at the blazing red disc, unblinkingly, without the slightest twitch of a facial muscle, staring with all the patience she could summon. She saw him clearly at the centre of the circle, like a rainbow: long, thin and stooped, passing before her eyes with his characteristically slow gait, one shoulder higher than the other, one leg longer than the other – the frame of a lame man. She recognized him immediately and almost shouted out 'Hamido'. But she feared that her hiding place behind the lamp-post would thus be revealed, that he would recognize her swollen belly and pull out the killing tool.

She clamped her lips together and held her breath. But he smelled her anyway, for her odour was strong and penetrating, like that of the dead. He came to a stop, and stuck his long, thin hand behind the lamp-post, but it found nothing to grasp. ‘Hamida.' The barely audible voice was familiar, an imitation of her own voice, in fact. He bent his trunk into a skilfully crafted imitation of her shape – for there had been great progress in craftsmanship, industry and technology. So skilful was his portrayal, that Hamida was confused into thinking the voice was actually hers and mistaking the body as her own. She emerged from behind the lamp-post confidently, walking out with head bent, as usual. But as she lifted her head, her gaze clashed with the yellow eyes. So terrified was she by this surprise that she saw double. Then the four eyes multiplied with lightning speed, until yellow eyes surrounded her: ten
marching down the chest and five along each shoulder, giving off a brassy yellow light.

The metallic voice bounced across the asphalt like the clanging of iron against iron.

‘What's your name?'

‘Hamida.' Her voice was barely audible.

The razor-blade moved over her head, her soft, thick hair fell into the pail. The razor dropped to her body, and passed over her skin, uprooting the hair. When it reached the pit of her lower stomach, moving through the patch of black hair it stumbled upon the tiny white bud that looked like a newborn bird. It plucked the bud from its roots, leaving in its place a deep wound in the flesh, like the scabbed-over cleft. (In those times, this surgical operation was called ‘purification'; its goal was to ‘purify' the human being by removing any remaining sexual organs.)

Hamida lay on the cement floor, surrounded by four cement walls, her arms and legs rigid and bound together into a single bundle. Between her thighs hung the iron padlock of a hard metal belt. (This has entered history as the chastity belt.) Its chain clanked dully against the cement floor whenever she moved a limb.

Beneath her, a pool of blood seeped through the cracks in the floor. The walls were splashed with blood in the shape of human fingers: old, black blood, like spots, millions of them, stains left by every age and race and sex: children, men, women, old folks, white, black, yellow, red. Everyone had
a particular stain, an individual one shaped like the imprint of a hand.

Hamida stuck a small fingertip into the cleft; it came out wet with blood. She wiped it on the wall, imprinting her mark on the cement, like a personal signature. (Illiterate people – the likes of Hamida – all seal official documents this way.) Black, bloodstained fingers reached out to imprint their seal on the documents – millions of documents, bearing millions of seals, all black, their lines crooked and spidery like the legs of cockroaches, or flies, or locusts. Millions of insects, diffusing over the earth, night and day, on to bridges and city walls, at the bend of every street, behind every house and every wall, inside every crevice in the earth, their bare and shaven heads poking out across the surface of the ground while their skinny, bowed bodies remain inside the fissures. Their insides are hollowed out, empty of internal organs, devoid of livers, hearts, stomachs, intestines. The vast, empty cavity becomes a secret storage place packed tight with hatred. (In those days, only this spot was beyond the reach of the security apparatus. More recently, the military have made great advances; in the field of medicine, for example, they have invented x-ray equipment which reveals foreign bodies inside a human being, and an electronic speculum which is placed in the anus to reveal the contents of the internal cavity.)

X-rays fell upon her swollen belly, showing the cavity full to the brim with hatred, layer upon layer upon layer, millions of
fine layers, like thin sheets of near-transparent metal massed on top of each other to form a solid bulk of hard metal. The doctor probed at her with his soft, carefully manicured fingers and let out a shout.