She craned her neck out the tram window and took a deep breath. When she recovered, she realized how much governments deform people. An adult might be reduced to child size, but the bones of his skull would betray his real age. His suit and tie might suggest that he is of the ruling classes, but his walk reveals that he is one of the ruled.
She saw them everywhere, filling the streets and stuffed into trams. They went in and out of doors, lobbies, and buildings with their small bodies and their wide, padded shoulders, with their large skulls, hunched backs and wide parted lips, grinning as if grimacing, or grimacing as if grinning. Human beings transformed by some potent power, by some terrible non-human force that had turned them into other, inhuman beings.
She got off the tram and walked home. In the distance she saw a man who looked just like other men. Wide shoulders, big skull, bowed back. She averted her gaze and quickened her step, anxious to get home. But the man called her name and when she turned she saw the face of her father. He must have seen terror in her face, for his eyes widened in surprise and he asked, ‘What’s the matter, Bahiah?’
She hid her face in her hands and rushed home.
Although Bahiah was still pale, her mother did not notice when she let her in. Bahiah was always pale. It was difficult for someone like her mother to distinguish between degrees of paleness. That called for an ability to observe closely over long periods. But her mother could not bring herself to look Bahiah in the face. Her eyes could never meet her daughter’s gaze. Bahiah saw this as proof that her mother had deceived her since childhood, just as her father had done. He would turn up at home, with his tall, bulky frame, his straight back, and those big strong hands that could slap her down; but really he was only a government employee among thousands of others.
There were eighteen lighted candles on the white table. Her mother stuffed Bahiah with sweets, and Bahiah spat them out when her mother turned around; her father smiled at her, but she was suspicious of his smile. Everything about her father had become dubious. Doubt is like a candle — it has a red flame and burns needle-sharp: she still remembered how her finger stung. It was the same table, but there was just one candle. She was just one year old.
The bright red flame had seemed like part of herself. Her small, soft body crawled on the floor, sticking so close that she seemed part of it. She had been separated from the universe, though her hand could not yet trace a full circle round her body. Her hand was small, her body big, vast, seeming to fill the tall space between ceiling and floor. When she stretched out her hand to explore her legs, she could not tell whether they belonged to her or to the chair. Did the red flame come from the candle or from herself? Goaded by doubt, she decided to find out: she stretched out her finger and was burned by the flame. Now she knew the difference between the flame and her own eyes. Doubt and pain shaped the outline of her body and every part of her began to acquire its own special form.
From across the white table, over the eighteen candles, she heard her mother’s voice: ‘Happy birthday, Bahiah.’ Sudden astonishment. She could not believe she was eighteen. Had the earth really revolved eighteen times around the sun? She had no idea how she came to ask such a question, but an invisible silken thread seemed to link her own cycle to the world’s. When she gazed at the disc of the moon, those silken, wire-like threads stretched between them and pulled them together. But the earth’s gravity was stronger. Torn between earth and moon, she seemed calm on the surface, but deep inside her was a whirlpool, resisting the pull from all sides. Something small and round, like an inflated balloon, burst within her, and a tiny egg, pin-head sized, came out, its one staring eye seeking the eternal moment of contact in order to vanish into the world for ever.
Her face glowed red in the light of the candles. Her father thought she was blushing, as befits a girl of only eighteen. But she was not eighteen, nor was she a girl. ‘What does it mean to be a girl?’ she asked her parents and her fellow students in the dissecting room. When Dr Alawi heard the question, he dipped his metal forceps into the open stomach of the dead woman whose body lay before him and took out her womb: a small, pear-sized triangle of flesh soft on the surface and wrinkled within. The base of the triangle was at the top and the two sides converged downward.
His blue gaze fixed her black eyes. He smiled, but she did not smile back. Drawing her to the next table, he said in his professorial tone, ‘As for man, here he is.’ With the tips of his forceps, he held up the penis. She saw a wrinkled piece of black skin like old excrement.
When she got home she sat in front of her mother and told her to look at her carefully and then asked, ‘Am I Bahiah?’ Her mother gave an eternally suppressed feminine gasp and said, ‘Oh come on, girl!’ Her mother had never understood her. But she understood her mother. If she stared at her long enough she could see her coiled womb crouching at the base of her stomach. She could see its muscles clenching and unclenching in a quick continuous pulse, like the pulse of the world in the night silence, its motion invisible and imperceptible, like the motion of the earth. She wanted with all her might to squeeze this womb, to halt its secret mad movement, to still it for ever. But her mother lowered her eyes, for she could never look directly at her for long. Somewhere deep in her core she was hiding something, burying it in the folds of her very self and binding it with layer upon layer of her insides, turning it invisible, keeping its motion ever hidden and eternally secret.
‘Eternity’ was a word she had never understood. One day after another, the blood flowing in her veins following the cycle of the moon, the cell swelling within her and bursting at the very same instant. The tiny egg spun madly like the earth on its axis. With one eye, she would gaze at the universe seeking to annihilate herself, but in vain, the same vain frustration every time, with each futile cycle of the moon. Anger mounted within her like warm blood. It gathered, rose, and rotated in a cycle of its own within the domain of her body. She felt it unmistakably in her cells, an insistent, nagging feeling, telling her that one day, one given, fateful day, something momentous would happen to her.
She had never used a diary. Nor did she look at the calendar hanging in her father’s room, the one she always saw him consulting as he peeled off the passing days. Every morning he would tear off a day in the same way and with the same motion, scrunching it into a ball between his fingers, but she would pull it out of his hand, shouting, ‘Stop! Leave it alone!’ This time, before he had raised his large hand from the sheet of paper, she thought she had made a mistake, that the sun was not shining any brighter than usual, that her mother’s eyes were as always, and that the strange feeling that had come over her was just another of her many assorted illusions. She waited for her father to tear off the sheet of paper as usual, but this time he stopped. Instead she heard his voice behind her saying, ‘Happy birthday, Bahiah.’ She turned, saw the figure 4 on the white sheet of paper, and the blood drained from her face.
She looked around her as she walked down the street. When she heard a voice behind her, she stopped and turned as though someone had called her name. Suddenly she realized that the voice was calling a different name, one that happened to rhyme with hers, something like Kufiah, Najiah, Aliah or Zakiah.
On the tram she felt someone riding behind her, following her. When she got out at Qasr al-Aini street she imagined she heard his steps. As she went in through the college gate, so did he.
But she lost him in the spacious, crowded grounds. Voices and features intermingled and she felt as if she were sinking in the sea alone, with no one to see or recognize her; her face had become just like her fellow students’, so that there was no difference between Bahiah, Aliah, Suad and Yvonne.
At that moment she grasped the meaning of death. She had been searching for death in the corpses laid out in the dissecting room. But death is like life; it dwells not in corpses but only in a living brain, a brain fully alive and able to detect the slightest nuance, the most deeply hidden and intimate sensation: like the feeling of loss experienced by a particle of air floating in the universe and resisting being lost among millions of other particles; or the suppressed desire of a drop of water resisting dissolution in the sea, that desperate, insane resistance at the peak of frustration which breeds complete submission like eternal silence. Anyone looking at her face at that moment would have thought her blind and dumb; her body seemed still, even though her feet moved mechanically over the ground. Everything had the same colour and shape to her. All bodies were similar, and all gestures and voices. She found herself running aimlessly, fleeing the college grounds, fleeing the deadly sameness within and without, inside her body and in the outside world.
She had her own favourite, secluded corner, opposite the college fence, behind the huge building. She would sit there on a wooden stool, leaning forwards, gazing at a patch of earth the size of the palm of her hand, where no green grass had ever grown. Unlike the rest of the earth around it, this furrowed patch was always mud-coloured, and between ridges, millions of tiny, ant-sized creatures were always coming and going.
‘Bahiah’.
The name sounded as if it belonged to someone else. She leapt up from her stool. As she did, she realized that she had a body of her own, one she could move and shake without other bodies moving and shaking. She also had a name of her own, and when that name was called she would look up in surprise. She might even ask, ‘Who’s that?’ She got a shock every time she heard her name and a hidden feeling would tell her that someone was calling her own name, selecting her from among millions of other bodies, singling her out among the billions of other creatures floating in the universe.
The blood drained from her face. She became deathly pale, like a ghostly stone statue or the faces of the corpses lined up one after the other on marble tables in the dissecting room. She looked at the colour of her face in the mirror in the women’s room, and when her fingers touched her forehead, they were ice-cold. She knew she was trembling, and she wanted to escape the voice that called her, that summons issued directly and specifically to her, that miraculous power that was able to pick her out among all the others. She wanted to escape. With unaccustomed speed, she ran and hid among the crowd of girl students, her body disappearing among theirs. When their heads moved, so did hers — right, left, backwards and forwards. They protected her like a shield. There she stayed, hidden among them, unable to venture out. For outside was a supernatural force, capable of picking her out of crowds, and of distinguishing her body from others. A dreadfully potent force. The moment her head showed, this force would pull her with a magnetic power stronger than gravity. Once it had drawn her into its electromagnetic field, she would spin madly and helplessly in its orbit until the revolutions destroyed her.
She sensed that danger growing ever greater within her, a danger that threatened inevitably to destroy her. She felt as if a germ lived inside her, eating her body away cautiously and quietly, gradually destroying it; or that her body would suddenly be crushed under the wheels of a bus, or on the tramlines, and no one would come to her rescue. When she heard a cry and leaned her head out the tram window to see a body torn to shreds on the rails, she felt that the body was hers, the pale face hers, the red blood spattered over the tar her own. But the tram moved on again and she found her body where it had always been, intact on the seat. Her blood still flowed through her veins: it had not gushed out. A hidden certainty told her that the day had not yet come, that she was still Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, daughter of Muhammad Shaheen, superintendent of the Ministry of Health.
She entered the college just as she did every day, headed for the lecture hall and took her usual seat, the last in the back row on the left. Anyone would have thought she was fast asleep, but in fact she was wide awake, seeing the male students more clearly than ever before. She watched them push through the door, treading on each other’s feet, their bags under their arms bulging with anatomy books. Left hands clutching their precarious spectacles and right hands stretched out to push other bodies out of the way. They raced for the front seats in the lecture hall. Panting and out of breath, they grabbed their seats and opened their notebooks with fingers red and swollen from the fight to clamber on to the tram. Giving their fingers a quick rub, they thrust them into their pockets. A student might bury his head in his notebook to revise previous lectures, or crane his neck left or right to whisper a joke (usually obscene) to a classmate. When the lecturer arrived, a hushed silence fell over the hall. Each student could hear the rumbling of his neighbour’s empty stomach. The lecturer stepped slowly and quietly to the podium. His voice was quiet and his body too, his limbs relaxed and his cells secure, basking in the kind of reassurance felt by the stomach after a good meal, or the buttocks after relaxing in a comfortable chair. The students closed their eyes and dreamed of this relaxation, this self-assurance. They realized it was the fruit of a childhood dream, born when they first saw the gleam in their fathers’ eyes at the mere mention of the word ‘doctor’.
She would sit in the back row, not seeing their eyes, only their backs, as they pored over their notebooks. She imagined them permanently hunched and doubled over and was almost surprised to see them move about at the end of the lecture. They would jump up and rush for the door, tripping over each other and elbowing each other out of the way. When an elbow edged sneakily into a girl student’s breast, her lips would part almost imperceptibly. With an inaudible suppressed whisper the girl would say ‘Ah . . . ’ and place her bulging satchel protectively over her chest. The touch of the soft breast would pass like a serum from elbow to shoulder to neck. Muscles contracted, features froze and eyes became taut as a rope stretched to its breaking-point: seemingly static, while its inner cells tremble invisibly in a mad, violent movement against the pull. The eye muscles twisted towards anything that had the softness of flesh, whether breast, bottom, or leather satchel. Each male student would unconsciously take a bite of his satchel and chew it. When he realized that it was only leather he would flush and try to hide the holes all over his bag with the palms of his hand. In the tram he could not stand it any more. He would find himself inadvertently pressed against some woman’s breast. At midnight he would close his anatomy books and go to bed, but the body would refuse to sleep, for the stimulant would have congealed like the tip of a boil needing only the slightest touch to burst.