God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (24 page)

How many winters had passed, how many Tuesdays! And every Tuesday, Farid had been waiting, had not lied once. If he concealed some things from her, he never lied, even when the question of marriage had somehow arisen. Looking at her with shining brown eyes, he had told her: ‘I can never marry.' If any other man had said that to her, she might have doubted him or have felt it as an insult. But Farid was different, with him everything became different. Even words lost their familiar, traditional meaning and the names of things might suddenly
become inapplicable, meaningless. The word ‘dignity' for example. What does it mean? To preserve one's self-respect? Against whom? Against others? Yes. There must be others before whom one's self-respect must be protected.

But between her and Farid, there were no ‘others', or any such thing as her self against his self. They shared everything in love, even their selves – she became him and he became her. He protected her rights and she his. Something strange, something extraordinary happened between them, but it happened effortlessly, spontaneously – as naturally as breathing.

Hearing her mother in the living room shuffling towards her door, she quickly got up from the bed and began moving around the room. She did not want her to come in and see her looking solemn and staring into space, like a sick person. Her mother stood at the door in her white headscarf and long
galabeya
, saying in a hoarse, faint voice:

‘I see you're wearing outdoor clothes. Are you going out?'

‘Yes.'

‘And lunch?' her mother said.

Fouada picked up her handbag, ready to leave, saying:

‘I'm not hungry.'

Fouada didn't know why she was going out. Only that she didn't want to stay in, but to move, to see movement around her, to hear a loud clamour, louder than that bell that rang, persistently, endlessly in her ear. She left her street and turned right to walk alongside the stone wall to the flower garden.
White jasmine glinted like silver in the bright sunlight. As usual, she reached out to pluck a spray, crushing it between her fingers and breathing in its scent. The heavy weight in her heart moved. The scent of jasmine was for her meeting Farid, his kiss on her neck. But now its poignant scent seemed to epitomize his absence, and confused feelings of nostalgia and reality stirred deep inside her. It was all like an illusion, like a dream, that ends when you awaken.

She let the crushed jasmine flowers fall from her fingers, and walked along the narrow street, turning into Nile Street. Suddenly she knew she hadn't left the house without reason or simply to move; she had a particular goal. A few more steps and she found herself in front of the small restaurant.

She hesitated, then entered, crossing the long passageway between the trees. Her heart began to pound, imagining that emerging from the passageway she would see Farid sitting at the white-cloth-decked table, his back towards her, his face to the Nile, his shoulders tilted forward slightly, black hair failing thickly behind his small flushed cars, long slender fingers on the table playing with a scrap of paper or turning the pages of the notebook he always kept with him, or doing something but never staying still.

Yes, she would see him sitting like that. She would tiptoe up behind him, put her arms round his head and cover his eyes with her hands. He would laugh and grab her hands and kiss each finger one by one.

Her heart was thumping violently when she reached the end of the passageway. She turned to the left and looked towards the table. She felt a stab in her heart. The table was empty and naked, with no white cloth. She approached and touched it, as if looking for something Farid had forgotten, a piece of paper he had left for her, but her fingers met only the smooth wooden surface, the wind battering it from all sides, like the trunk of an old tree.

The waiter came over, smiling, but looked down when he saw the look on her face. She walked towards the passage but before turning into it, spun around to look again at the table. It was still empty. She ran towards the passageway and hurriedly left the restaurant.

She found herself in Doqi Street. Seeing a bus about to move off, she jumped onto it without knowing where it was going. She got one foot on the platform, the other hung in the air. Hands reached out to help her on and she managed to push her foot between the others on the step. Long, strong arms surrounded her to prevent her falling, then she found herself huddled with the other bodies inside the bus.

One of millions, one of those human bodies crowding the streets, the buses, the cars and the houses. Who was she? Fouada Khalil Salim, born in Upper Egypt, identity card number 3125098. What would happen to the world if she fell under the wheels of a bus? Nothing. Life would go on, indifferent and unconcerned. Maybe her mother would write
her obituary in the paper, but what would a line in a newspaper do? What would it change in the world?

She looked around in surprise. But why surprise? She really was one of millions, really was one of the bodies crammed into the bus, and if she fell under the wheels and died, her death would change nothing in the world. What was so astonishing about that? But it still surprised her, amazed her, something that she could neither believe nor accept.

For she was not one of millions. Deep inside something assured her that she was not one of millions, was not simply a moving lump of flesh. She could not live and die without the world changing at all. Yes, in her heart of hearts something assured her, and not hers alone but in her mother's heart, and her chemistry teacher's – and in Farid's heart.

She heard her mother's voice saying: ‘You will be someone great like Madame Curie', then the voice of her chemistry teacher saying: ‘Fouada is different from the other girls in the class', and Farid's voice whispered in her ear: ‘You have something in you that other women don't have.'

But what was the use of these voices, these words? They had resounded once or twice, vibrations disturbing the air, then they were over. Her mother had said it to her when she was young, a long time ago. The chemistry teacher had said it when she was in secondary school many years ago. And Farid, yes Farid too had told her, but Farid's voice had vanished into the air and he himself had disappeared as if he had never existed.

A fat woman stepped on her foot. The conductor tapped her shoulder to pay for the ticket. A large hand reached out from behind and pressed her thigh. Yes, one body amongst others crowding the world, filling the air with the smell of sweat, one of millions, millions, millions. Unaware, she said aloud: ‘Millions, millions!' The fat woman stared at her with large, cow-like eyes and breathed a smell of onions into her face so that she turned away. Through the window she saw Tahrir Square and with all her strength pushed her way out of the bus.

* * *

She stood in the huge square, looking around and up at the tall buildings, their facades plastered with names written in broad lettering: doctors, lawyers, accountants, tailors and masseuses. She particularly noticed a sign on which was written: ‘Abd al-Sami's Analysis Laboratory'. Suddenly, something dawned on her, as if a small searchlight had focused in her head. The idea flashed through her mind as clear as a new light. It had always been there, hidden in the recesses, unmoving, but it was there and she knew it.

Now it had begun to move, to emerge from its hidden corner into the field of light. Fouada could read it, yes, written in clear broad letters on the facade of the building: ‘Fouada's Chemical Analysis Laboratory'.

That was the deep-seated idea in her head. She didn't know when it had begun, for she merely remembered dates
and was not good at calculating time. Time could pass quickly, very quickly, as quickly as the rotation of the earth. Sometimes it seemed to her that it did not move at all, and at others that it moved slowly, very slowly, and the earth trembled as though a volcano was erupting from its depths.

The idea had started long ago. It had occurred to her once when she was sitting in the chemistry class at school. It was not quite so clear but had appeared through a mist. She had been transfixed by a curious movement inside a test tube, colours that suddenly appeared and disappeared, vapours with strange smells, a different sediment at the bottom, a new substance – the result of the chemical interaction of two other substances – with new characteristics, new form, new wavelength. The chemistry lesson ended and she stayed in the laboratory, mixing substances together, observing the reactions with delight, sniffing the gas that rose from the mouth of the test tube, then shouting with joy: ‘A new gas! Eureka!'

The slender, bullet-like body of the lab assistant rushed over and, exploding like flammable gas, yelled ‘Get out!', snatching the test tube from her hands and pitching her discovery down the sink, cursing the day he had become a lab assistant in a wretched girls' school. He could have been an assistant in a college of science if he had completed his studies. She lost her temper when he threw her unique experiment down the drain and she cried: ‘My discovery's lost!' She saw his look of contempt, then turned away and ran from
the laboratory. His contemptuous glance haunted her and hindered her experimentation for a long time, and might have ultimately deterred her from pursuing the idea of discovery, but her mind was obsessed with the chemistry class and the chemistry teacher.

The chemistry teacher was as tall and slender as herself, her eyes always smiled and radiated a deeply thoughtful and confident look. It seemed to her that this look was directed towards her alone and not to the other girls in the class. Why? She didn't know exactly. There was no real proof of it, but she felt it, felt it forcefully, especially when she ran into her in the schoolyard, looked at her, then smiled. She didn't smile at all the girls. No, she didn't smile at everyone. That had been the historic day when the inspector had come and the teacher asked a question that nobody in the class – only Fouada – could answer. That day, she heard the teacher say, in front of the whole class and the inspector too: ‘Fouada is different from the other girls.' That was exactly what she'd said, no more, no less. It was engraved in her brain just as she had pronounced it, word for word, with the same pauses, the same intonation, the same punctuation. The word ‘different' was etched especially deeply, the first syllable emphasized…

Yes, Fouada loved chemistry. Not with an ordinary love like her love for geography, geometry and algebra, but something extraordinary. As she sat in the chemistry lesson, her brain would leap alertly and, like a magnet, everything
around her was liable to stick to it – the teacher's voice, her words, her glances; particles of powdered substances might fly through the air, metallic fragments might scatter over the table, particles of vapour and gases might drift through the room. Every particle, every tremor, every vibration, every movement and every thing – her brain picked them all up, just as magnets attract and hold metal particles.

After all this, it was inevitable that her mind turned to chemistry and for everything around her to take on chemical forms and qualities. It was not unusual for her to feel one day that the history teacher was made of red copper, that the drawing teacher was made of chalk, that the headmistress was made of manganese, that hydrogen sulphide gas came out of the mouth of the Arabic teacher, that the sound of the hygiene teacher's voice was like the rattle of tin fragments.

All the teachers, men and women, acquired mineral qualities, except one – the chemistry teacher. Her voice, eyes, hair, shoulders, arms and legs, everything about her was utterly human, was alive, moved and pulsated like arteries of the heart. She was a living person of flesh and blood with absolutely no relation to minerals.

But her voice was the most remarkable thing about her. It had a fragrance as sweet as orange blossom or a small, untouched jasmine flower. Fouada would sit in the chemistry class, her eyes, cars, nose and pores open to the sweet voice, the words seeping in through all these openings like pure, warm air.

One day, the voice brought her the story of the discovery of radium. Previously, it had brought her the names of famous men who had discovered things. She would bite her nails as she listened, telling herself that if she were a man she would be able to do likewise. Obscurely, she felt that these discoverers had no greater talent for discovery than she, only that they were men. Yes, a man could do things a woman could not simply because he was a man. He was not more able, but he was male, and masculinity in itself was one of the preconditions for discovery.

But here was a woman who had made a discovery, a woman like her, not a man. The obscure feelings about her ability to make a discovery became clearer and she grew more convinced that there was something that waited for her to lift a veil and discover it, something that existed, like sound and light and gases and vapours and uranium rays. Yes, something existed that only she knew about.

* * *

Fouada found her body stretched out on her bed with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, on a small, jagged patch where the white paint had flaked off to reveal the cement beneath. Her feet were sore from so much walking around the streets off Tahrir Square. She didn't really know why she had walked, but it was as if she were searching for something. Perhaps she was searching for Farid amongst the people she encountered,
because she stared into men's faces and examined the heads of people who passed by in cars or taxis; or perhaps it was an empty apartment she was looking for, because here and there she would pause in front of a new building and stare confusedly at the caretaker.

But now she was staring at a jagged patch of ceiling, not thinking of anything in particular. Hearing the sound of her mother shuffling towards her room, she quickly pulled up the cover and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. She heard her mother's panting breath and knew that she was standing at the doorway watching her sleep. Fouada tried to keep still and to let her chest rise and fall with regular, deep breathing. Then her mother's footstep shuffled away from her room. She might have opened her eyes and resumed staring at the ceiling, but she felt relaxed with her eyes closed and thought she might sleep. But then she leaped out of bed, for an idea had struck her. She wrapped herself in a large overcoat and made for the door of her room but then hesitated, walked to the telephone and dialled the five numbers. The ringing was sharp, shrill and uninterrupted. Replacing the receiver, she hurriedly left the house.