Everything around her seemed familiar, as if it had all happened before. She had experienced the pain in her body before; she had seen these red spots on the ground and this same policeman before: the eyes, the nose, the whip, the wall, the red spots, the door — everything repeated itself. It was as if she could fore-tell what would happen tomorrow. She hid the white sheet of paper under the straw mat as she used to hide it from her father. When the guard disappeared she took it out again. She looked at her distinctive lines. She could recognize them as easily as she could recognize her own features. With that strong deliberate movement, she drew her brush over the blank sheet of paper. Everything took on a new form and new colours. She had discovered the true colours of things. Her eyes saw that the leaves of the trees were not green, the sky not blue, the wall not grey — indeed, it was as transparent as a silk curtain. Her body could penetrate it easily. She felt a strange power, not illusory but real, with a tangible material density. She felt it with her fingers, strong and flexible as rubber. She would not break, merely bend under pressure. She knew that her body could not withdraw from life. Her heart would continue to pound in ever faster bursts. Everything took on a splendid, radiant colour. The red spots on the floor shined like the sun, the stars burned as brightly as the moon. The green of the trees turned dark blue. The veins and texture of each leaf were as prominent as chattering teeth and the air shook them with an invisible vibration like the motion of time. The past merged with the present and future. Yesterday was today and the day after. Time ceased to exist. Only in a prison cell can this glorious truth be discovered.
This discovery was the real reason behind the strange ecstasy that now appeared in her black eyes, and which made her bleeding body dance with a rare agility and toy with the hordes of bedbugs swarming over the straw mat. The body acquires this extraordinary ability when it rids itself of its false human consciousness and achieves true awareness.
The prison guard was surprised when he peered through the door. Bahiah was holding out her arm and running her hand over her swollen veins. When she felt the blood coursing through her body she laughed: for thousands of years people had tried to unravel the mysteries of blood circulation. She looked at the policeman with her black eyes. She now understood that the world revolved in time with the circulation of blood in her body; it was this circulation itself that frightened policemen and paralysed their thinking, especially if the circulation was so powerful that the surface became smooth and still like the surface of the earth — though it was blood-red and flowed slow and proud through the blue veins under the skin.
The policeman asked in a sharp, effeminate voice: ‘Are you Bahiah Shaheen?’
Still laughing, she looked up with her usual arrogance and replied ‘No!’
The policeman stared at her with bulging eyes, ‘Are you lying?’
She laughed, snapping her fingers. He slapped her face. Thin red streaks ran from her mouth and nose, but her black eyes were still upturned and her nose kept its sharp upward tilt, dividing the world in two. When she walked alongside the policeman, her legs seemed long in their black trousers. Her muscles were taut, her bones straight; with each stride she hit the ground distinctly, separating her legs confidently. When she reached the large room crowded with people, she assumed her usual stance: her weight on her right foot, she lifted her left foot high and propped it on the wooden barrier that separated her from an officer seated behind a small desk.
The officer opened a large book the size of his desk top and his voice rang out: ‘Bahiah Shaheen!’
She realized he was calling someone else, so she did not reply. But he called out once more, still louder: ‘Bahiah Shaheen!’
She looked around, searching among the faces for someone called Bahiah Shaheen. She could not recognize her face among the women standing or sitting on the floor. A long, feminine laugh rang out, followed by giggling and the popping of chewing gum; kisses were blown, and the smell of sweat and dirt mixed with an overpowering odour like iodine; some faces were fat and chubby and others were just skin and bone. On some faces the black eye-shadow had melted in the heat and formed a smudgy black ring around the eyes. A plump, flabby body revealed its curves under a tight silk dress that clung to the lines of breast and bottom. There was also a skinny body like a dried corn-stalk, with no breasts or bottom. Small feminine feet with long, red nails and cracked heels darkened with mud poked out from open slippers.
One of the skinny ones said, ‘Where’s Bahiah Shaheen?’
A fat one answered, ‘I’m Bahiah al-Sharbatali.’
‘Welcome!’
‘Thank you.’
‘When will God have mercy on us?’
‘God is pleased with us all right.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure, we’re the best of women.’
‘I feel better now.’
‘Without us honourable husbands would have died and respectable households might have collapsed.’
‘But they hate our smell . . . ’
‘Because it’s their real smell.’
‘And they put us in prison.’
‘Because we know what their genitals look like.’
‘They’re scared to death of us.’
‘And they die of desire for us.’
The long, drawn-out laughs, the clacking of slippers and the popping of chewing gum went on. The smell of perfumed filth filled the air. The officer thumped his hand on the colourless desk which looked like a kitchen work-table and shouted angrily, ‘Shut up, gypsies! Where are your manners?’
One of the women giggled: ‘What manners, sergeant! The people with manners are all dead.’
He winked at her, ‘You got that right.’
Then he glanced at her with threatening eyes shining with lust.
Bahiah’s lips parted in a smile, which died when she saw her father, who seemed to have emerged from the depths of the earth. He gave her a sharp, threatening look as he answered the officer’s questions, scribbled his signature on the investigation record, paid ten Egyptian pounds and took his daughter away.
She got into the taxi. Her father sat on her right, her uncle on her left. The door shut and the taxi moved off. It was as if she had been arrested again, but this time by another kind of police. Her father on one side and her uncle on the other seemed like policemen. Their faces, in profile, were immobile. They stared straight ahead, avoiding her eyes; they were like two strange policemen to her, taking her to the guillotine or a prison cell.
All the men of the family met. They sat round the table devouring stuffed chicken. After lunch they sat smoking in the hall, picking their teeth with toothpicks; their bellies swelled over their thighs like pregnant women and their fat, flabby bottoms filled the big bamboo chairs. Each would belch audibly, clear his throat and say something in a coarse, deep voice that was not his own. ‘In my opinion, we should take her out of school. Universities corrupt girls’ morals.’
Another replied, ‘I think we should marry her off as soon as possible: marriage is the strongest protection for girls’ morals.’
A third said, ‘It’s my opinion that we should do both: take her out of medical school
and
marry her off. We already have a groom.’
She was in the grip of fate. Iron fingers held her relentlessly. The bars were so close together that she could not even poke her head out. Fate was her father, who owned her just as he owned his underwear. He might or might not educate her, for he was the one who paid the fees. He could marry her off or not marry her off, for he was the broker, even though she had never authorized him.
A conspiracy was woven against her in great secrecy. She heard whispers. She saw the look in their eyes. She sensed the impending danger and looked for a way out. At midnight, when she heard her father’s snores, she sneaked out of her bed, dressed, and sat on the edge of her bed wondering where to go. Where could a girl of eighteen like her go at this time of night?
She had never felt that she was a girl or that she was eighteen. This used to be called the age of puberty. A suspicious word. At the mere sound of it fathers and mothers tremble with suppressed sexual desire, baring their teeth and shaking a warning finger at their sons and daughters. Other eyes look at them suspiciously, but mothers and fathers follow their own instincts free from suspicion.
She knew they would interpret her escape from home in sexual terms alone, although at the time she had no sexual desire at all (her relationship with Saleem was something different). Since the time her mother had smacked her when she was three, she felt disgusted by the sight of sexual organs in the bathroom, and would quickly avert her eyes. She was not even aware of being female. She did not consider Saleem male. She saw her real self in his eyes. Going to him was an assertion of her freedom and choice. When she was with him, she lost all desire for food as well as her sexual appetite. She would become a human being without instincts and without those familiar desires. She would be in the grip of a new, wild, nameless desire: the desire to be her real self and to trample all other wills down with hers, to tear her birth certificate to pieces, to change her name, to change her father and mother, to gouge out the eyes of those who had cheated and deceived her, including herself, so that no one would be able to take her own eyes and replace them with eyes that were not hers.
She had always known that her eyes lied and that they hid her sexual desires, but not by choice. Her sexual desire was shrinking despite her. She could feel it withdrawing from her, leaving her body on its own. Sometimes when she felt the need for it she would try to summon it up, but it refused to respond and never settled in her body. The cries of her sister Fawziah still rang in her ears: there was a red pool of blood under her. Every day she waited for her turn. The door would open and Umm Muhammad would enter with the sharp razor in her hand, ready to cut that small thing between her thighs. But Umm Muhammad died and her father was transferred to Cairo and that small thing between her thighs remained intact.
Sometimes she was afraid of it, thinking that it was harmful, that it had been forgotten or left inside her body by mistake. She would long for Umm Muhammad to rise from her grave and come with her razor. But the image of her sister Fawziah, limping and moaning as she walked, would flash through her mind. When the wound healed Fawziah could no longer run as she used to. Her steps became slower and when she walked her legs remained bound together: one leg would not dare to part from the other.
Bahiah came to hate bath-days. When she undressed she looked with loathing at her sexual organs. She even hated God for creating them. She had once heard her father say that it was God who created our bodies and sexual organs. One day she told her mother that she hated God. Her mother gasped and slapped her face: ‘How can you say such a thing?’
In tears, she replied, ‘Because he’s created bad things.’
Her mother hit her again, saying, ‘God creates only beautiful things.’
‘But who created those bad organs?’
Her mother looked at her wide-eyed and did not reply. That night she heard her whispering to her father, ‘The girl is not normal.’
Since she did not know what was normal, she imagined that sexual desire was abnormal. So she was disgusted when she saw men’s sexual organs bulging under their trousers; she wanted to throw up when a man dug his elbow into her chest as she waited for the tram. She hated men with their trousers, their ugly protruding organs, their greedy, shifty eyes, their smell of onions and tobacco, and their thick moustaches which looked like black, dead insects flapping over their lips.
She knew that her father was a man and so she hated him all the more. At night when his snoring stopped she would imagine that he had died. She did not love her mother, nor did she love women with their low-cut dresses, revealing breasts swollen with hidden desire, and their eyes made up with kohl, like slave maidens burning with lust. But their flat, closely-bound legs and their beaten eyes betrayed their everlasting frigidity.
But to them she was an adolescent. When she stood on the balcony to enjoy the sun her father would imagine that she was within sight of their bald neighbour. If she was late, absent-minded, drawing, thinking, having a bath, or looking in the mirror, the reason was all too obvious: a man. She later realized that parents thought of nothing but sex and imagined that their offspring were just like them.
At a big family party they sold her to a man for three hundred Egyptian pounds. Musical instruments played, dancers’ bodies shook, men’s eyes glowed with lust and bellies were filled with food and drink. Her face was surrounded by flowers and lights but it looked pale. Her mother made shrill cries of joy in a sharp voice that was stifled just at the end, like a suppressed sob. Her father paced up and down in his new suit. From time to time he put his hand in his pocket, feeling for his wallet, bulging with money for her dowry. Children were playing and running about, but whenever their eyes fell on the bride they touched their genitals under their clothes in fear. Men walked about in their trousers, their bent legs striding back and forth, exhibiting a flabby and insatiable virility. Women wore their shiniest dresses, and their soft eyes were veiled by memories of sad weddings.
Her white silk dress stretched tightly over her chest, smothering her breasts. A long tail folded like a coffin around her bottom and legs, and dragged along for her feet, uncomfortable in elegant high heels, to trip over. The bridal stage, surrounded by roses, looked like the grave of the unknown soldier. The drums’ slow, heavy beat sounded funereal strains. Her small cold hand lay in the bridegroom’s large palm. His fingers were strange. They coiled around hers like the fingers of fate. Under the folds of the coffin her legs moved slowly as if she was heading for unknown disaster. Her black eyes were open, gazing forwards, unfocused.
She heard the door slam violently. All noise ceased and the images faded. She found herself sitting in what looked like a police car. On her right was a man, her father; on her left was another, the bridegroom. Their faces in profile were taut. Their muscles too. Their eyes stared ahead, secretly watching her, like a policeman’s.