“Those who stole it.”
“Stole what?”
“The baby, doctor.”
“What?”
“I mean the baby novel ...”
The doctor was at a loss concerning Bodour’s case, for he couldn’t get to the source of her pain, and was unable to decide whether it resided in her mind or her body. Her conscious mind was in control of her past memories and stopped them from surfacing. Her unconscious mind was a chain of accumulated fears, one layered on top of another, one generation after another, starting from her mother and going back thousands of years to her ancestral grandmothers and the vilification of Eve and the original sin.
“Yes, doctor, I’m a coward. How can I be more courageous than Taha Hussein? The strongest evidence of my cowardice is the fact that I married.”
“All women say that, Bodour! They always have regrets, and regret is a dangerous thing, for it causes depression. Your husband is a great man, a celebrity. I read his column every morning. Zakariah al-Khartiti’s column is the best in the paper.”
She looked at him sceptically. Hypocrisy had become the hallmark of the age. It was an epidemic that infected all, including doctors. There was no remedy for it except a revolution or a volcano erupting from the earth.
Her short, stout body trembled on the couch. Deep in her heart, she yearned for the revolution. She longed to be nineteen once again, joining demonstrations, shouting, “Down with injustice and long live freedom”. At her side walked Nessim, tall and graceful, his eyes gleaming. He held her in his arms, whispering in her ear, “We’ll have a baby who will change the world.”
Bodour didn’t read her husband’s column, and she didn’t listen when he told her of his glories either, or of the fan letters he received from male and female readers, from ministers, and even from the president himself. The president congratulated him on his column when he met him once during Friday prayers. He stood in the second row, right behind the president. He heard the president reading verses from the Qur’an, heard his breath as he kneeled before God, and the creaking of his bones as his forehead touched the floor. He was exultant as he told the story to his wife, as though the president had awarded him an honorary medal or a great prize.
At the breakfast table, he never tired of looking at his photograph above his column. He would steal a glance at the column of his colleague, Mahmoud al-Feqqi. He’d follow his wife’s eyes as she read the column. Bodour stopped for a while at al-Feqqi’s column, reading it from beginning to end.
Her husband said sarcastically, “You seem to be a great fan of his column!”
“The truth is, his column is truly excellent.”
“Better than mine?”
“I haven’t read yours yet, Zakariah.”
“You read his before mine?”
“Yes, Zakariah!”
“You mean his column is better than mine?”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He seemed draped in the yellow color of jealousy, and his voice rang in her ears as if saying, “My phallus is better than his”. Columns, rods, and pillars were often used interchangeably with the word “penis” or “phallus”.
“What are you laughing at, Bodour?”
“I’m not laughing at anything, Zakariah!”
“I know what you’re laughing at. I know you consider me mediocre and you’ve never liked my writing. From the day we got married, I’ve never seen an admiring look in your eyes for what I write. All your life, you’ve admired al-Feqqi’s column, and he has always admired you. You should have married him. I don’t understand why you married me!”
“And you! Why did you marry me?”
“A mistake, my dear! Youth and inexperience!”
“Yes, that’s right! A mistake, Zakariah!”
“A life-long mistake!”
This was their conversation year in year out, each admitting that their marriage was a huge mistake, but neither trying to fix it.
On the table in front of them stood the tea and coffee pots, for Bodour drank tea in the morning while her husband drank coffee. He took the coffee with skimmed milk and ate fat-free cottage cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, watercress, and olive oil. They were now older and their cholesterol levels and blood pressure were higher. Zakariah played golf at the club with his journalist friends, while Bodour walked in the club with her friend, Safi, or with her daughter, Mageeda. Two or three times a week she walked around the golf course for forty minutes.
Sometimes a university colleague would join her. At other times, after finishing his game of golf, Mahmoud al-Feqqi would join her on her stroll and exchange talk and news about politics, literature, criticism, art, and culture.
Bodour sipped her tea and bit into a piece of toasted bread with white cheese blended with olive oil. She held the small, sharp knife to cut a slice of tomato. The knife glinted in the sun. Bodour looked at him, her white fingers trembling. Since she had gone to see the shrink, the tremor in her hand and her fears had increased. Would the knife creep and cut her own hand? Or would it cut her husband’s hand holding the paper? Or the other hand holding the white coffee?
The knife was moving as if of its own accord. Bodour might have been sleeping and dreaming and not sitting at the breakfast table. Since she had started writing her novel, the lines between reality and dream had become confused. The novel could have been the source of the ghosts chasing her, the voices she heard as she sat writing in her room, the shadows that moved over the walls, assuming human and non-human shapes. The knife rushed across the table and cut through the paper, through the frame of the photograph on top of the column. It penetrated the silk pyjamas and cut into her husband’s chest. Red blood flowed on the white pyjamas and the tablecloth. But Zakariah continued reading his column, never stopping, never taking his eyes off that picture. Hugely frustrated, the knife turned toward Bodour’s white hands. She felt its smooth, sharp edge move over her wrist, slowly cutting into her flesh, making a deep groove in it.
Bodour realized that it was Badreya holding the knife, for Badreya had the courage to commit murder without being found out by the police. She could conceal herself between the pages of the novel, or escape people’s eyes like a phantom or a moving shadow on the walls. Bodour’s husband peered at her as she cut the cheese with the knife, her fingers trembling, her face pale, her eyes downcast. She didn’t raise her eyes to him, fearing that the meeting of their eyes might tell him what was going on inside her mind. He might take the knife and plunge it into her chest before she did. She saw the buried desire in his eyes. In their hearts, the desire for murder was just as strong as that for sex. Her psychiatrist told her that human beings hadn’t evolved a great deal beyond the animal stage, as far as sex was concerned. The instinct for destruction and death went hand in hand with sexual lust. When a man desired a woman, he’d tell her that he loved her to death, and she would say that she’d die for him.
Her psychiatrist assured her that she loved her husband to death, and to the desire to kill him or kill herself. Those who committed suicide did so because they loved themselves to death.
While walking with her friend in the club, Safi said to her, “Your shrink needs a shrink to cure him of his neuroses, for most men are sick. They suffer from schizophrenia, especially those from the upper, educated classes. A man marries a colleague from the same educated class, a marriage of convenience, pure and simple, so that she might appear with him at parties and events. At night, he creeps out of her bed to the housemaid in the kitchen or the secretary in the office. He only lusts after low-born younger women. Such a woman would regard him as a great man, a rare, unparalleled genius, a god or a demi-god, as his mother saw him, for his mother regarded him as a paragon of beauty, even if he was as ugly as sin. From his childhood she would fill his ears with statements such as, ‘You’re smarter than all your mates. You’re unique, you are!’”
Safi, wrapping her head in a white scarf, pursed her lips and swallowed her bitter saliva. She was a Marxist until she left her Marxist husband. After marrying her Islamist husband, she wore the veil and published a book on women’s rights under Islam. Following her divorce from him, she married a liberal writer who asked her to take off the veil and stop ranting about religion. This was when she took off the scarf, wore an elegant turban sprinkled with pearls and published a book on literary criticism. But that husband abandoned her for a university student, with whom he lived without an official or an unofficial marriage contract. She discovered the relationship by chance, and her husband confessed to her that he was in love with the girl and she with him. He was free and so was the girl. Safi didn’t understand this kind of neo-freedom and decided to break it off.
“You’re much stronger than I am, Safi. Each and every day I dream of leaving Zakariah, but I don’t have the courage to do it.”
“You’re scared of loneliness, Bodour, aren’t you?”
“Don’t you feel lonely, Safi?”
“Loneliness is much nicer than a hateful companion. Like you, I feared loneliness and accepted humiliation. I was a prisoner to that fear until I came to know loneliness and found it to be beautiful and inspiring. We are born in fear and live and die in fear.”
“Aren’t you at all afraid, Safi?”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of death, for example?”
“Death, like loneliness, is an illusion, for we don’t feel death when we die. The dying person feels nothing. Imagine, Bodour, that we spend our whole life in fear of something we cannot feel?”
“Do you believe in life after death?”
“I used to believe in it, but I am now free from this illusion as well.”
“And believing in God, Safi?”
“I was a firm believer in God, Bodour, before I studied religion. I wanted to study religion in a profound manner, as a way of strengthening my faith. But the opposite, in fact, happened. The more I learned about God the less I believed.”
Bodour trembled as she walked beside her friend, Safi. Her eyes quivered and she raised them to the sky, fearing that God might shower curses on Safi. She feared that her friend might collapse on the ground, suffering from complete paralysis, or that her heretical tongue might become paralyzed.
“I used to believe, Bodour, in God’s three Holy Books, as the Qur’an instructs us. I gave religious talks at conferences and on the radio. I published articles on faith, piety, and the women’s veil. But something kept me awake at night. I used to get up in the middle of the night to perform ablution and prayers. I continued kneeling and praying. I kept my voice low in order not to wake my husband as I whispered the plea, ‘Oh God, forgive me for all my trespasses’, which I repeated countless times. I moved the rosary beads with my trembling fingers. I thought I was suffering from fever. But I was infected with doubt, and continued to be so until I delved deeper into the study of religions. The deeper I went, the less trembling I suffered from and the less faith I had. We inherit faith from our families, Bodour. Faith infiltrates the cells of our brains and our bodies from birth till death. You can’t get rid of it except through studying science, knowledge, and religion itself. This is a route fraught with perils. I’m opening my heart to you, Bodour, because you are my life-long friend. Please keep this a secret, or they might kill me. We live in a religious state that doesn’t allow freedom of thought, despite the incessant babble about freedom. The free, however, don’t talk about freedom. They live it. People who lack freedom, in contrast, talk about it all the time.”
With her head bent, Bodour listened to her friend. A shudder ran through her whole being and surges of hot blood gushed up to her head then down to the soles of her feet. Something resembling Satan’s fingers of her childhood was working on the soles of her feet, tickling her left foot, for Satan always stood on the left side as people around her, at home and outside of the home, had often confirmed.
“My husband used to tell me that religion was essential for ethics. Without religion, no ethical sense could exist. But I discovered that there was no connection between religion and ethics. My husband was an ultra pious man, but every day he lied to me. He’d tell me that he was going to a meeting or a conference, to see a minister or a deputy, but would go instead to see the other woman in her home or in the brothel. He said that a husband had the right to marry four women, in addition to the women slaves and the concubines. He was a member of the group which held the banner that ‘Islam is the Solution’ and called for the application of Shari’a law and the suspension of the constitution. He was a colleague of Ahmed al-Damhiri, the Islamist prince.”
Bodour shuddered to hear the name of Ahmed al-Damhiri, her cousin. His father was a sheikh who occupied the position of deputy or vice-deputy of al-Azhar. He inherited his father’s turban and his small square-shaped head, as well as his square chin underneath the thin lips, the upper thinner than the lower, which he pursed when he was engrossed in deep thought. Ahmed al-Damhiri became one of the neo-leaders and was addressed with the title of emir, or prince. A number of unemployed youngsters with university degrees and frustrated hopes surrounded him. As their prince, he led them into the fold of religion. He was small and thin, and his fingers were short, supple, and girl-like. His voice was soft and his body flabby. He was scared of cockroaches and rats. Deep down, he had little self-esteem, but he compensated for this sense of inferiority by being extremely vain and grandiose. He puffed out his chest and walked with his head held high. On his forehead was the dark mark of prayers, as big as a peanut. His thick black beard grew profusely down to his chest. His gown was snow-white and so was his turban. He greeted youngsters with a slight tilt of his head accompanied by a faint smile.