Two Women in One

Translated from the Arabic by
Osman Nusairi and Jana Gough

SAQI

To all young men and women, that they may realize, before it is too late, that the path of love is not strewn with roses, that when flowers first bloom in the sun they are assaulted by swarms of bees that suck their tender petals, and that if they do not fight back they will be destroyed. But if they resist, if they turn their tender petals into sharp protruding thorns, they can survive among hungry bees
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N.S
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It was the fourth of September. She stood with her right foot on the edge of the marble table and her left foot on the floor, a posture unbecoming for a woman — but then in society’s eyes she was not yet a woman, since she was only eighteen. In those days, girls’ dresses made it impossible for them to stand like that. Their skirts wound tightly round the thighs and narrowed at the knees, so that their legs remained bound together whether they were sitting, standing, or walking, producing an unnatural movement. Girls walked with a strange, mechanical gait, their feet shuffling along while legs and knees remained clamped, as if they were pressing their thighs together to protect something they were afraid might fall.

She had always been curious to know just what it was that might fall the minute a girl’s legs were parted. Naturally inquisitive, she would constantly watch the worm-like movement of girls as they walked.

She did not look very different from these girls, except that she wore trousers, had long legs with straight bones and strong muscles, and could walk firmly, swinging her legs freely and striding out confidently. She was always surrounded by girls — she went to girls’ schools with classes for girls only. Her name always appeared among those of other girls. Bahiah Shaheen: the feminine ending of her name bound it like a link in a chain into lists of girls’ names.

Since the human brain is incapable of perceiving the essence of things, everyone knew her as Bahiah Shaheen and no one ever penetrated her true essence.

People were always surprised by the way she walked, keeping a visible distance between her knees. She would pretend not to notice them staring at that gap. She would just keep walking, moving her legs, keeping them apart and putting each foot down with a firmness that she knew did not belong to Bahiah Shaheen.

On that day, her eighteenth birthday, she was standing in her usual way: right foot on the edge of the marble table, left foot on the floor. At the time, neither men nor women would assume such a posture. It required a pair of confident legs with flexible muscles and strong, sound bones. Childhood malnutrition had made most boys bow–legged. The most they would dream of doing was to lift one foot and balance it on the edge of a low wooden stand. She often saw boys standing this way. It was normal and permissible — but only for males.

The one man who could lift his foot higher and rest it on the edge of the table was Dr Alawi, the anatomy lecturer, who would sweep past the tables in his white coat and white glasses. When he stopped at a table, the male students would take their feet down from the stools and stand before him, their legs together. Dr Alawi, however, would lift his leg high and plant his foot confidently on the edge of the table, looking directly at the students with his unflinching blue gaze.

When he stood at her table, she would never take her foot down. When he fixed his blue eyes on her, she would stare back at him with her own black eyes. She knew full well that black is stronger than blue, particularly where eyes are concerned. Black is the origin, the root that reaches back into the depths of the earth.

Holding the forceps in his white, blood–splattered fingers, he would stick his hand into the gaping stomach of a corpse, or grab at something in an arm, leg, head or neck, then bellow in his strident voice, ‘What’s this?’ He would always pick the smallest of things — a tiny vein crossing the underside of a small muscle, a fine artery hidden under a fold of skin, or a nerve as delicate as a hair, so thin it could hardly be picked up by the forceps.

Eight girls stood around one corpse. More than one of them knew the names of all the veins, nerves and arteries by heart. No sooner did Dr Alawi ask what a particular object was than a sharp but low feminine voice rang out with the correct answer. He would always look at her, expecting her to answer, to prove to him that she knew, but she couldn’t help it, she refused to be examined by anyone.

On that fourth of September, she felt that something big would happen to her She had the same feeling every fourth of September. When she opened her eyes in the morning the sun would be shining in an unusual way and her mother’s eyes were glittering and sharp. ‘On a day like this’, she would whisper to herself, ‘something big happened to my mother — she gave birth to me.’ Each year she felt that something big would happen again on that day, something even bigger than being born. Whenever Bahiah whispered this idea to her mother, she would laugh that feminine laugh so typical of those times — holding back and letting go at the same time, producing a kind of staccato braying. ‘Oh, come on, Bahiah’, she would say.

Her mother never understood her. When Bahiah saw her mother in her usual place in bed, she would quietly creep in next to her and take her father’s place. She would wind her small arms around her mother’s huge neck just as she had seen him do. She somehow knew instinctively that her mother’s body was the only thing that understood her.

In those days she loved to read fairy tales and myths. In one story there was a terrible god worshipped by the people of an enchanted city. This god could grasp any solid object and clench his fist, and when he opened his hand it would be gone. She was instinctively annoyed by this power, which threatened her very being. As a child she never understood this instinctive irritation, but in the end she came to understand it gradually. She then realized that she had actually understood it from the very beginning, from the moment she became aware that she had a body of her own, separate from her mother’s.

This moment would always haunt her. The pain was like a knife tearing her flesh. None the less, it was not real pain. When her hand reached all the way around her own separate body, she jumped high in the air like a sparrow soaring with happiness, but she was no sparrow, and gravity pulled her back down. Since that fall she had recognized the weight of her own body. She knew it was heavier than she was and that the earth pulled it more strongly than she ever could, like her mother’s arms pulling her again. With all the power she could muster, Bahiah had tried to make their two bodies one, but in vain. The eternal separation took place and the moment passed, never to return.

From childhood she had felt the tragedy of her own body, carrying it with her at every step and every cell. She burned with desire to return to where she had come from, to escape the field of gravity and free herself of that body whose own weight, surface and boundaries divided it from its surroundings: a consuming desire to dissolve like particles of air in the universe, to reach a final, total vanishing–point.

She used to stare at the picture of the magic god, carefully watching him crush things between his large fingers at a single touch. At night she would sometimes waken with a start, creep into her parents’ bed and slip her small body between their naked bodies. Her father’s big arms would push her roughly away, but her mother would look at her with eyes as black as her own and murmur affectionately, ‘Go back to bed, Bahiah. You’re a big girl now.’

The voice was affectionate. She felt its affection, like soft fingers caressing her body, turning in a circle, as if the fingers were defining her body, demarcating its boundaries with the outside world. Back in her own bed, this affection, which filled her with tenderness and reaffirmed her independent existence and separate private being, made her cry her heart out in silence, her body racked by sobs, the bed rocking under her. She would be swept by an uncontrollable desire for those fingers to abandon their false affection and to crush her, to free her from her own body for ever and to weld her mother and herself into one.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but in vain. Fear gripped her, for a strange idea had crossed her mind: what if she wasted her whole life searching for or fleeing that moment? Terrified, she hid her head under the bedclothes. Her bedroom then filled with legendary ghosts and magic gods pressing down on her body to crush her, while she resisted with all her might, kicking and biting and crying out to her mother and father for help.

But it was not real fear that made her cry: it was a trick to deceive her mother, who had taught her deception by lying to her. She used to sleep in Bahiah’s bed, promising not to leave her alone. But at midnight Bahiah would feel her creep out of bed and go to her father. Bahiah would then use a similar tactic. She knew that her quavering, pitiful cries would bring her mother back to her bed.

Her mother had never understood what Bahiah wanted. She used to stuff her with food. When she wasn’t looking, Bahiah would spit the food out. She wondered how it was that her mother didn’t understand her, since her mother had once been like her. Bahiah had asked her once, but she said that she could not remember. So Bahiah learnt that people deliberately forget real memories and replace them with imaginary ones.

Once, with a child’s innocence, she told her mother that she had discovered she was a girl, not a boy — and undressed to prove it. But her mother slapped her hand, and told her ‘Promise me never to do that again.’ When Bahiah didn’t answer, her mother slapped her face. But Bahiah still would not open her mouth to promise never to do it again. Instead her mind suddenly grasped a strange fact: pursing her lips and bowing her head, she realized that people suppress only real desires, because they are strong, while unreal desires are weak and need no laws to keep them in check. It was then that she began looking into all the taboos around her, trying to unravel people’s real desires.

It was nothing less than the search for truth. When Dr Alawi passed by the window of the dissecting room in his big car, seven pairs of female eyes would light up and fourteen irises swing towards him in unison. But Bahiah’s deep black eyes remained focused on that strange sensation which reminded her that everything permissible is unreal. One of the students poked her sharply in the shoulder with a finger and said, ‘Look.’ She glanced out of the window to see a head, with slightly protruding eyes, emerging from the big car. The sharp finger dug her in the shoulder again: ‘What do you think Bahiah?’

‘He doesn’t look real.’

Her fellow student patted her on the back with her soft hand and said sarcastically, ‘Oh, you’re hopeless.’

Seven mouths then opened with suppressed feminine laughter like gasps of eternally unquenchable deprivation. Their deprivation angered her more than their laughter. She flushed, collected her lancets and surgical tools, packed them into her leather satchel, and left the dissecting room. As she walked along in the open air, the smell of formalin and corpses leaving her nostrils, she realized that neither their deprivation nor their laughter angered her. She longed to confide in somebody about that strange sensation building up inside her, like a foetus growing day by day to reach its climax on the fourth of September every year, confirming to her that she was definitely not Bahiah Shaheen.

She left the college grounds and walked along Qasr al-Aini street, staring at passing faces as if searching for her real one. She stopped at the tram station, realizing that she was not searching for anything and that she was hungry and tired.

On the tram she sat with her back to one man, facing another. There was a man to her left and a man to her right. Rows and rows of men sat shoulder to shoulder in silence in front of her. Their lower bodies were immobile, fixed to their seats, while from the waist up they shook slowly and rhythmically with the motion of the tram. When it stopped their heads jerked violently back and their eyes popped open in fright. Once reassured that their heads were still in the right place, they closed their eyes and slept.

They were government employees. Their bodies were all the same shape, their features and suits, fingers and shoes identical, as if the government had stamped them from a mould, minted them like coins in the same conical shape. They sat side by side, and despite the thick padding of their suits, their shoulders somehow drooped, as if they bore some eternal burden — invisible, but present nevertheless. They moved as if shifting that burden from shoulder to shoulder. They seemed to sleep, but the flickering movement of eyes under lids betrayed the fact that their sleep was not real. When they opened their eyes and looked at her, she realized that their waking was unreal too. Then everything in them and around them became unreal. If their lips parted to reveal their teeth, you could not tell whether they were smiling or grimacing. When their fingers moved as they got on or off the tram, they might be exchanging greetings or threats. Everything about them became confused. Their every aspect was identical to its opposite. A smile was a threat, truth a lie, virtue vice, and love hate. Mannerisms, gestures and meanings were alike to the point of suffocation.