God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (25 page)

She walked rapidly, her feet taking her from street to street. She jumped on to a bus whose number she recognized, got off at a stop she knew only too well and turned right into a small street, knowing that at the end of it was a white three-storey house with a small wooden door.

The dark-skinned caretaker was sitting on his bench at the entrance to the stairs. She was just about to ask after Farid when she caught that inquisitive glance common to all caretakers. He knew her, had seen her time and again going up to Farid's apartment, but each and every time he gave her the same searching look, as if not recognizing the relationship that existed between herself and Farid. She bounded up the stairs, then stood panting in front of the dark-brown, wooden door. The kitchen window overlooking the stairs was open. So Farid was in, hadn't had an accident as she had imagined, hadn't been carried away by the sky. Her heart beat painfully and she considered leaving quickly before he saw her. He had missed their date on purpose, not by accident, and had not telephoned her to explain why. She would have turned on her heel and left except that she saw no light behind the glass peep-window. The apartment was in total darkness. Maybe he was reading in his bedroom and the bedroom light did not reach that far?

She pressed the bell and heard the high-pitched ringing in the flat. She kept her finger on the bell and the sound rang loud and hard in the living room but no one came to the door. She took her finger off the bell and the sound stopped. Again, she pressed it and again the loud, harsh sound reverberated through the living room in the apartment without anyone opening the door. She put her ear to the door hoping to hear the sound of movement or stifled breathing or a sigh, but
nothing. Then suddenly, the sound of the telephone ringing came from the study and she leaped backwards, imagining that it was herself calling him from her house. But she was standing in front of the door so it couldn't be her phoning him now. The telephone continued to ring for a few moments, then stopped. Her ear to the door, she heard nothing to indicate the presence of a living being in the apartment. Hearing the clatter of stiletto heels coming up the stairs, she moved away from the door a little and pressed the bell again. From the corner of her eye, she saw a fat woman climbing the stairs. She kept pressing the bell, looking ahead until the woman vanished around the bend of the staircase. She waited a few minutes more until the sound of the thin, clattering heels stopped, and then slowly and heavily made her way downstairs.

She let her feet take her where they would. Thoughts raced through her head almost audibly. Farid had failed to meet her on Tuesday, had not telephoned her and was not at home. Where could he be? He could not be in Cairo or in a nearby town. He must be somewhere far away, where there was no phone or post office. Why was he hiding the reason for his absence from her? Didn't their relationship make it his duty to say? But what sort of relationship was it that made it a person's duty to act in a particular way towards another person? What was it that made it his duty? Love?

The word weighed in her mouth like a stone. Love. What did love mean? When had she first heard it? From whose
mouth? She did not remember precisely, but the word had been in her ear all her life. She used to hear it often and because she heard it often, she did not know it, like the feminine parts of herself which she often saw attached to her body and washed with soap and water every day without knowing them. Her mother was the cause. Perhaps if she'd been born without a mother, she would have known everything spontaneously. When she was very young, she learned that she had been born from an opening beneath her mother's stomach, perhaps the same opening through which she urinated or another one nearby. But when she told her mother of her discovery, she scolded her and said that she'd been born from her ear. With this explanation, her mother perverted her natural feelings and many of her intuitions were blocked for a long while. For a time, she tried to create a relationship between hearing and birth, sometimes doubting that the ear was for hearing but rather, perhaps, that it was made for married women to urinate from. She did not understand why she always linked birth to urinating and felt that the two must be related. She continued searching for the site of the opening through which she had emerged into the world and thought she might find out in the history or geography or hygiene class, but they taught her everything but that. She had a lesson on chickens and how they laid and hatched eggs, a lesson on fish and how they reproduced, a lesson on crocodiles and snakes and every living creature
except humans. They even studied how date palms pollinated each other. Could the date-palm be more important to them than themselves? Towards the end of the year, she put up her hand and asked the hygiene teacher; but she considered the question to be rude and punished her by making her stand against the wall with her arms up. Staring at the wall, Fouada wondered why plants, insects and animals impregnated each other and this was considered one of the sciences, whereas in the case of humans it was considered something shameful that merited punishment?

* * *

Fouada found she was walking along Nile Street. Heavy darkness covered the surface of the water, the lights of circular lamps reflected on both sides. As it slid along in the darkness, the long and slender Nile looked like the flirtatious body of a woman in black, mourning for a hated husband, beads of imitation pearls dotting the sides of her black gown. Looking around her in the dark, everything seemed dreamlike, surreal. Even the door of the small restaurant overhung with cheap coloured lights projected an eerie, ghostly shadow. She passed by the door without going in, but then retraced her steps and entered. She walked down the path under the trees and at the end turned to look at the table. It was not empty. A man and a woman were sitting there. The waiter was laying glasses and plates in front of them, giving them the same smile that he
gave herself and Farid. She turned quickly before he saw her, and left the restaurant.

She walked down Nile Street, head lowered. What had brought her here? Didn't she know that these places were in collusion with Farid, declared his absence and hid him? Hypocrisy and contradiction engulfed her like a dark web. She stamped her foot in anger. What had got into her? Farid had left her and vanished, so why was she hovering around his places? Why? She must banish him from her life just as he had banished her from his. Yes, she must.

The very thought seemed to calm her and she looked up at the street. But her heart lurched violently for she had seen a man coming towards her who walked like Farid. She hurried towards him. His shoulders were hunched slightly and he moved slowly and cautiously. The same movements as Farid! They came closer and closer. He swung his arms in a particular way, not like Farid did. When he was a few steps away, she opened her mouth to gasp: ‘Farid!' but the light of a passing car swept the shadow from a face that was not his. Her heart fell like a lump of lead and she shrank into her coat. The man nodded his bald head suggestively. She turned away and hurried off, but he walked behind her, whispering half-formed, incomprehensible words. She turned off Nile Street into a side road and he followed, continuing to stalk her from street to street until she reached the front of her own house.

She opened the door panting. Not hearing her mother's voice, she tiptoed across the living room to see her mother through the open door of her room asleep in bed. She was lying on her right side, her head wrapped in a white shawl and raised on two thick pillows, her thin body hidden under a folded woollen blanket.

Fouada went into her room and closed the door. She stood motionless in the centre for a while, then began to get undressed. She put on a nightdress, took off her watch and put it on the shelf beside the telephone. As her hand touched the cold telephone, she shivered and looked at the time. It was midnight. Was Farid at home? Should she try and call him? Shouldn't she stop this pursuit? She could always dial the number, and if he answered she could hang up. Yes, he would not know who was calling.

She put her finger in the dial and turned it five times. The familiar ringing sounded even louder in the quiet of the night. She covered the earpiece with the palm of her hand, thinking that the loud ring might awaken her mother. The bell continued to screech in her ear like a hungry animal, its echo pounding in her head and bouncing off it as though it were a wall of solid stone.

She replaced the receiver to stifle the screeching, threw herself on the bed and closed her eyes to sleep. But she did not sleep. Her body remained outstretched on the bed, her head on the pillow. She opened her eyes and saw the wardrobe,
the mirror, the clothes-stand, the shelf, the window and the white ceiling with the jagged patch from which the paint had fallen. She closed her eyes and let her chest rise and fall with deep, regular breathing. But still she did not sleep. Her body remained, with all its weight and density, on the bed. She turned onto her stomach, burying her face in the pillow, pretending to lose consciousness. But she remained conscious, her body stretched out under the coarse woollen cover. She rolled over onto her left side and opened her eyes, seeing nothing except the darkness. She imagined that her eyes were still closed or that she had lost her sight, but a faint strip of light presently appeared on the wall. She pressed her head into the pillow and pulled the cover over her eyes, but still could not sleep. The familiar weight of her head remained on the pillow. A soft hum began, very softly at first, then it gradually grew louder until it became a sharp continuous whistle like the ringing of an unanswered bell. She imagined that the telephone receiver was by her ear and put her hand under her head, but found only the pillow. The humming stopped when she took her ear off the pillow, then began again. She held her breath for a moment and the source of the sound became clear. It was those familiar repeated beats of her heart, but on no previous night had they been as strongly audible as a hammer nor so continuous. On any other night, she put her head down on the pillow without hearing anything and in a few moments was fast asleep. How did she used to fall asleep? She tried to find
out how she slept every night, but suddenly discovered that she did not know. Her body felt heavy, as if shackled with chains, and then she lost consciousness. She remembered that once or twice she had tried to find out how she lost consciousness in sleep and had opened her eyes before drifting off, hanging on to the very last moment of consciousness to see what was happening to her, but sleep always overcame her before she found out.

Really, she knew nothing, not even the simplest things. She did not know by intuition and did not learn from repetition. How many nights of her life had she slept away? She was now aged thirty, every year had three hundred and sixty-five days, so she had slept ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty nights without knowing why.

She pressed her head into the pillow. The humming echoed in her head, a head as solid as stone, a head that knew nothing, did not know where Farid had vanished, did not know why she had gone to the college of science, did not know why she was working in the biochemical research department of the Ministry, did not know what chemical research to do, did not know the old, deep-seated discovery which had to be found, did not know how to sleep. Yes, an ignorant solid head of stone that knew nothing and was only able to repeat this empty echo, like a wall.

It seemed to her that a heavy, high wall had fallen on her and that her body was being crushed into the ground. She felt
water surround her from all sides as if she were swimming in a deep and wide sea. Although she didn't know how to swim, she swam with the utmost skill as if flying through the air. The water was deliciously warm. She saw a huge shark glide under the water, its great jaws open, in each jaw long, pointed teeth. The beast came nearer and nearer, its mouth opening into a long dark tunnel. She tried to get away but couldn't. She screamed in terror and opened her eyes.

* * *

Daylight was filtering through the narrow slats of the shutters. She lifted her head from the pillow and, feeling dizzy, put it down again. Then she reached out and took the watch off the shelf. Glancing at it, she jumped out of bed and dressed quickly. She gulped down the cold cup of tea her mother had prepared and went out into the street.

The cold air struck her face and she shivered and moved her arms and legs briskly, but suddenly felt a pain in her stomach and slowed down. She pressed her fingers to the soft triangle beneath her ribs and located the pain, deep inside her flesh, gnawing at the wall of her stomach like a worm with teeth. She didn't know the reason for this strange pain which attacked her every morning.

She waited at the bus stop, but when the 613 to the Ministry came, she stood still and stared at it. As it moved off, she realized that she ought to be on it and ran after it, but
couldn't catch it. She went back to the stop, feeling a sense of relief. She would not go to the Ministry today. All her leave had been used, but what would happen if she didn't go today … would it change anything in the world? Not even her death or flesh-and-blood absence from the world would change anything, so how important would be her absence from the Ministry today? One blank space in the old attendance register with its tattered cover.

The world around her brightened at the thought. She looked at the people contemptuously as they ran panting for the buses, blindly hurling themselves onto them. Why were these fools running? Did any one of them know how they slept last night? Did any one of them know that if they fell under the wheels and died or if the whole bus overturned with them and everyone inside and was submerged in the Nile, did they know that this would mean nothing to the world?

Another bus stopped in front of her. There were some empty seats, so she got on and sat down beside an old man. He was holding yellow prayer beads between his trembling fingers, softly muttering ‘Oh Protector! Oh Protector! Lord protect us! Lord protect us!' from time to time peering from the windows up at the sky through encrusted, lashless eyes. It seemed to Fouada that some catastrophe had just that minute befallen the man so she smiled at him gently to console him, but he took fright and cowered into his seat away from her, his thin body pressing up against the
window. ‘How much fear there is in the world!' she said to herself and turned away.