She reached out with shaking, panicky fingers as though thrashing in the water for a lifeline. When her hand touched the edge of her pocket, her fingers curled around the metal key and gripped it firmly, as if to make sure it was really there; its solidity seemed to reassure her that something in life was tangible, something could be grasped in the fingers.
With the speed and force of a drowning woman gripping a solid object, her body was driven, her feet strode steadily and quickly over the asphalt, and her eyes searched the jungle of streets for that protruding arm stretching between the horizon’s heart and the blue sky caught between the buildings and the mountain. As she ran, she glanced at her watch: half past four. Her heart pounded and her chest rose and fell as her feet flew after each other, as if they were racing her breath.
A small door with a green branch of ivy hanging above it. As it opened, she saw his long, thin face with its deeply etched features, tense and exhausted. It was as if he never slept or ate, as if his head bore the world’s burdens, as if his deep blue-black eyes with their penetrating gaze pierced all masks to reach inner depths.
‘Hello, Bahiah.’
His voice surprised her. The name ‘Bahiah’ had acquired great intimacy. It was unlike any other Bahiah’s name. It was hers to the exclusion of millions, she with her special being standing here on the west side of the room.
There was almost no furniture, just a big sofa in the corner, a table with a vase of roses, and the wide window with the towering mountain beyond. She sat on the sofa; he turned to close the door. His back was to her and she could no longer see his face, eyes or gestures. He seemed a stranger. When she heard the door close, she suddenly remembered that she was Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, and now she had turned up at the house of a strange man with a back just like other men and with no connection to her. She was amazed, as in a dream when you find yourself in a strange place for the first time, meeting strangers you have never met before.
Her brain started churning at dream speed, hurling up image after image. She imagined her father in his bamboo chair in the sitting room, sipping his morning coffee. He opens his newspaper, and finds that the naked body of his daughter Bahiah has been found in a bachelor’s flat in al-Muqattam. Her father thought the road between home and the college delineated Bahiah’s world, that she said her prayers, fasted, and studied four hours a day, that when a love song came over the radio she would turn it off, and that when any boy in the family teased her she would scold him. He thought she was unlike other girls, that her body was unlike others girls’, in fact, that she had no body at all, no organs, especially no sexual organs liable to be aroused or stirred by someone of the opposite sex.
Her mind baulked at imagining her father’s shock on seeing his polite, obedient daughter’s body naked, not in her own bedroom but in a young man’s flat. Not only he would see her, but so would thousands of others who read the morning paper, including the members of her vast family scattered across the country from Aswan to Alexandria (especially the peasants and the ones from Upper Egypt). Not to mention all the employees at the Ministry of Health: her father’s superiors and subordinates, who had been convinced over thirty years that he was an efficient superintendent with close family ties and an honourable reputation, that his sons and daughters were diligent and well-behaved, especially his hard-working medical-student daughter Bahiah.
She shuddered as in a dream: she knew she would willingly sacrifice all the years of her life to spare her father that shock, that she did not mind dying or being seen naked if only her father would never see or know. She loved her father in spite of everything, and when he handed her an old ten-piastre note every day, her heart sank. When she folded her fingers around the note which carried the smell of his sweat, she wanted to bury her face in her hands and weep, for she knew that he worked so hard for her and her brothers and sisters. Sometimes she saw him pushing his way through the crowds with his thin body and bowed back; and when he crossed the street with its swirling traffic she would shiver with fear that a car might hit him. Once she saw him standing on the steps of the monstrously overcrowded tram and she imagined that the steps would collapse under the hundreds of feet and her father’s body would be crushed under the wheels. Once she had been to her father’s office at the Ministry of Health. She spotted him walking along the corridor behind his boss. His back was bowed, his neck muscles slack, and his head hung in submission, while his superior walked in front, his back straight, his neck muscles taut, his head tilted back arrogantly. She longed for the earth to swallow her up. Later when he sat near her on the tram and smiled, she did not smile back. She avoided his eyes until the next day, and when he handed her the sweaty, old note she nearly refused it. But finally she took it, feeling humiliated. When she managed to raise her eyes to his she saw an invisible, translucent tear.
As she jumped up he turned and there was his face directly before her, his eyes on hers. She was overwhelmed by that magical current, instantly felt that anything outside that moment was devoid of meaning and reality and that her whole life, past and present, was not really hers but belonged to some other person. She had no connection with the world she had lived in, with the people she had known, or with anything other than this face, with its blue-black eyes fastened on her, asserting her existence.
‘Saleem.’
Her voice in the room sounded strange, like the voice of somebody else. So did the name ‘Saleem’ sound strange, like someone else’s name. She repeated it several times in silence, to get used to its vibrations in her ears, and it sounded stranger every time. His name was Saleem and hers was Bahiah. His name sounded no stranger than her own. Names are so far from the reality of things. The senses are so hopeless in understanding feelings. What she felt for him went beyond the ability of her ears to hear, of her eyes to see, her nose to smell, and her fingers to touch. She realized that people have other senses, as yet undiscovered, that they lie latent in the inner self. But these other senses are more capable of feeling than the senses that are known to us. They are the real, natural senses, but they have never been developed by our upbringing, or by education, regulations, laws, traditions or indeed by anything at all. They are like a river flowing free without dams, or the rain pouring down from the sky, facing no barrier or obstacle until it is soaked up by the soil.
Now she sat on the sofa, he beside her, the window opposite and the mountain behind. Beyond the mountain the blue sky was tinged with the red glow of the late afternoon sun. The sunlight was reflected in her eyes like a radiant smile and she laughed with abandon, pointing to the window and saying, ‘What a wonderful view!’
She expected him to take his eyes off her and look at the view, but he did not. His eyes remained on hers. She stammered as she said, ‘Why don’t you look? Isn’t the scenery wonderful?’
His eyes still on hers, he said, ‘You are even more wonderful than the scenery!’
She looked away from him and he seemed surprised. ‘Why do you look away?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know’, she replied, confused, ‘but your eyes sometimes seem not to belong to you.’
‘Whose eyes are they, then?’
‘Someone else’s.’
‘Who do you prefer: him or me?’
‘You.’
They both laughed. Then he asked, ‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘No.’
‘Something to eat?’
‘No.’
She laughed again, for no reason. When she heard the sound of her laughter she wondered whether this was happiness and whether happiness meant that the whole world with everyone and everything in it would disappear, leaving nothing but the small area of the sofa and its two adjacent bodies, not yet touching but divided by a space no greater than a millimetre.
She tried to retain that moment of happiness, to savour its taste. But it was thin and transparent, like a breath of air: if she raised her hand to touch it, it would be torn apart. Her hand was near his on the sofa a hair’s breadth away, but neither of them moved so much as a finger. Both were afraid that if one of them moved, the hair’s breadth of distance would die, and with it that fragile, veil-like moment of happiness.
But they were both frustrated by this moment. They wanted it driven to a conclusion: for no one can stand more than a moment of happiness, suspended in time like a floating particle of air, suspended, neither attracted by the earth nor drawn by the sky. How difficult it is for people to be suspended between earth and sky! How strong is their desire to put their feet on the ground, or on the surface of any solid object whose familiar weight reassures them that they really exist.
Like the force of gravity that attracts the body to the earth, his arms moved round her. They embraced with a violent desire to dissolve into the world, to lose all consciousness of the body and its weight, and to be annihilated and vanish in the air, like death, if you could manage to die and then come back to life and describe it. Yet it was not exactly like death, for in death people lose all feeling. It was like losing feeling yet not losing it, as though his body vanished while he was still there, and as though the world around him had been obliterated while he remained alive. As if the sky had become the earth and the earth the sky. It was all things intertwining, merging in a single point at the centre of the head, throbbing perceptibly like a heartbeat, but stronger.
She heard the violent pounding of his heart. It sounded like her own heartbeat. Everything of him that reached her senses became like the touch of her own body. Only with great difficulty could she distinguish her body from his: temperature, smell, complexion, the flow of blood in the veins — all were as similar as if they were in one body. She wanted to whisper something in his ear but she could not find the words. Would she say, ‘I love you’? Before the words came to her lips, they seemed inadequate and fell far short of what she actually felt. What do the words ‘I love you’ mean?
Only silence could express what she really felt, because silence could convey something momentous: that words between people were no longer adequate, that she must coin new ones, a whole new language. He too was silent and absorbed, as if searching for the key to the moment of eternal contact when the body would no longer feel separated from the world but would become one with it, an enormous entity filling the space between sky and earth.
When she looked up and saw the mountain through the window-pane she slowly realized that she was returning to her definite position on the sofa. She ran her hand over her body and found that she had a body of her own, separate from his. Her eyes opened in astonishment, but she saw him in front of her and smiled. She laughed and said, ‘Isn’t this strange!’
‘What is?’
‘What’s happening between us.’
‘And what’s happening between us?’
‘Something strange.’
‘Why so strange?’
‘So fast, and without a word spoken!’
‘In real life there’s never any time and people invent words to justify their unreal lives.’
They both laughed.
‘But how can we communicate with other people?’ she asked.
‘It’s impossible to communicate with other people, Bahiah. People don’t want a real person. They’re used to faking everything, including themselves, and in the end they forget what their real selves are like. When they see a real person they panic and may even try to kill him. That’s why such a person will always be hunted down, killed, condemned to death, imprisoned or isolated somewhere far from other people.’
‘In a flat in al-Muqattam.’
‘Yes, in a flat in al-Muqattam.’
‘I love you, Saleem.’
His blue-black eyes were staring at the sky and the mountain and he was quiet for a long time, as if absorbed in something far off. She wanted to ask him: ‘Do you love me, Saleem?’ and to hear his voice saying, ‘I love you, Bahiah.’ But the question itself seemed meaningless, so what was the point of the answer? She loved him and whether or not he returned her love would change nothing in her feelings for him.
‘What are you thinking about, Saleem?’ she asked.
‘In nine months we may have a baby.’
She shuddered. Her hand, lying on the arm of the sofa, began to shake and when she glanced at her watch she saw that it was half past seven. With a sinking feeling, she remembered her home, the college, her father, the dissecting room, her anatomy books, her fellow students, Dr Alawi, the tram, the streets, the people, and the whole world she had walked away from and to which she thought she would never return.
‘A baby?’ she asked in astonishment. The idea had never crossed her mind. She had never believed that children were created so fast and in such a trance, completely separated from earth and all sense of reality: can a body which dissolves in the universe create in that vanishing-point another body attached to the earth? Is it possible for a non-existent moment to create a concrete moment that can be touched and held?
She felt the new pulse deep within her like magical life born out of nothingness, as if a rock fixed firmly to a mountain suddenly moved and throbbed like a heartbeat. Her lips parted in astonishment and joy and she shouted, putting her hand on her belly, ‘Look, Saleem, it’s moving.’
He saw her looking at the mountain and asked in surprise, ‘What is?’
‘The mountain’, she answered, laughing.
He laughed with her but she soon stopped, realizing that her joy was unreal: the mountain was not moving, nor the earth, the wall, the window, the sofa nor anything near her. All that was moving were the two hands on her wrist in their idiotic, slow, monotonous turn; they reminded her that time was ticking on and would never return, that the moments of her life were pouring into nothingness, and that nothing would remain but the absurd vibrations of two metal hands in a small metal box, piastre-sized and covered with glass.
‘Saleem’, she said sadly.