Zeina (2 page)

In my dream while I lay fast asleep, I saw the image of Zeina Bint Zeinat. This image had never left me since I was a child. I wished I could be in her place, even if they called me the child of sin.

They called her “duckling”. She wore high pointed heels and walked through the university corridors to get to her office next to that of the dean. She was a little out of breath as she walked, carrying her short, stout body, swaying slightly over her pointed heels. Her neck was short and fleshy and it upheld a small, square-shaped head surrounded by short black hair. The hair was sparse and shot through with some white that quickly disappeared under the sophisticated hair dye applied with special care. She wore a blue skirt suit, with white collars that looked like the collars worn by little girls before they got married or lost their innocence.

She was in her middle years, just before the menopause. Although she was her husband’s junior by nine years, he looked younger by a year or two. This was perhaps because he was a man. Women’s lives, in contrast, are often consumed more quickly, for men do not bear children or give birth, and never carry the responsibility of home, children, or ill repute. No part of their bodies carries the stamp of virginity and they don’t have to deal with the menopause or senility later in life. Nothing, in fact, detracts from a man’s honor or worth except his empty pocket, not even consorting with prostitutes.

Ever since she was a child, Bodour had always been mindful of her reputation. She had the responsibility of upholding the family honor. Her father, Ahmed al-Damhiri, was a general in the armed forces. When the 1952 revolution took place, he was an officer in the army, and although he wasn’t among the revolutionary commanders, he had a family connection with one of them. He was later appointed as the director or the secretary of the New Cultural Organization. As an adolescent, he read novels on platonic love. In his mirror, he saw himself as the hero of
Romeo and Juliet.
He wrote love poems to the neighbor’s daughter. In his dreams, he imagined himself a well-known poet or novelist. Some of his dreams seeped through to his daughter, Bodour, when she was a child. She read the books she found in her father’s library. Her heart beat hard as she read in bed before going to sleep, tempted by the image of Prince Charming, who made love to her until she orgasmed. Her body trembled under the covers with the sinful pleasure. She woke in the morning, her cheeks flushed and her eyes swollen. She took a bath with warm water and soap, cleansing her body of its sinfulness, but her heart remained heavy with vice.

Six months before the revolution, the fires blazed throughout Cairo. Bodour al-Damhiri had already obtained her
BA
in literature and criticism. Her body trembled with intense pleasure whenever she heard the acronym
BA.
A pleasure akin to sex overtook her wholly, body and soul together, in one wild moment of ecstasy. Her short stout figure swayed above her pointed heels. She wished she could jump in the air, dance, and sing. Had it not been for the earth’s gravity which pulled her down forcefully, she would have flown. But her voice was muffled and she struggled to keep her feet on the ground. Her father saw the tears in her eyes and mistook them for tears of joy for having obtained her degree. Totally ignorant was he of his daughter.

Deep down, Bodour had an overwhelming sense of sadness, especially in moments of joy. It might have been her short, stout body, her narrow, lustreless eyes, her suppressed mind, despite her literature degree, or her soul imprisoned inside the confines of literature.

Her chains were never loosened except during sleep, when her mind, soul and body dozed off, when her parents and everyone else went to sleep, when God shut His wakeful eyes, and when everything and everyone dissolved into darkness. It was then that a secret cell buried in the deep recesses of her mind arose from sleep, yearning for love and for the sinful pleasures of the body.

Before the great fire of Cairo, huge demonstrations had broken out. Strong patriotic feelings passed from the father to his daughter, Bodour. He recited for her the clumsy, artless lines of poetry he used to read out to his colleagues in the army. He sang of martyrdom for the sake of the homeland, provided that neither he nor his own daughter were the martyrs in question. He was as certain of his love for his country as he was that Bodour was his own flesh and blood and not somebody else’s. He was confident of the existence of God, the angels, the Devil, and the Day of Judgment.

Since childhood, Bodour had absorbed all his ideas. At school, she sang patriotic songs alongside her schoolmates. At the age of seven, she began to pray five times a day, fast during the month of Ramadan, and chase away the phantom of Prince Charming from her dreams and wakeful moments.

Bodour succeeded in controlling her subconscious mind, which sometimes awoke during her sleep. With the power of her will, she sent it back to dormancy. She surpassed her father in loving God and the homeland, and became a model student with limitless faith in God and the nation. Her convictions ran through her veins and dominated her being from head to toe.

But sleep often won the battle and pulled her down like the earth’s gravity. Her whole body succumbed to the coma of sleep, except for the sole of her left foot, which was smooth and white like her mother’s. It stayed awake and fully conscious, even while the whole universe slept. In her sleep, Bodour would feel something tickling the sole of that left foot. She would kick it with her right foot, thinking it was the Devil’s finger defying God’s will, prickling the sole of her foot while she lay unconscious and urging her to commit transgressions.

In the morning, she would wake up and regain control of her conscious mind. She would ask herself why the Devil always stood to the left of people during prayers, urging them to defy God. She would argue with herself that communists were heretics because they always stood on the left side.

A secret pleasure passed from the sole of her foot up through her leg, reaching her thigh, belly, and chest. Her breasts were two small buds that protruded slightly and were immensely painful when the Devil’s fingers pressed on them.

During her childhood, she thought of the Devil as a pure spirit without a corporeal presence, the same as God. But after she had grown up, she realized that the Devil possessed a finger, perhaps even a body, along with all the other organs, including the sinful part which he used in challenging God’s commandments.

At eleven, she saw the Devil’s face for the first time. As a child, she was always afraid of opening her eyes while asleep. When she was a little older, she became more curious and wished to see the features of the Devil: his nose, head, forehead, ears, and mouth. She sometimes felt the Devil’s breath on the nape of her neck while she lay prostrate. But she never had the courage to open her eyes to see him.

At the age of eleven, she was stunned to realize that Satan had a moustache and a beard just like elderly men. He looked very much like her paternal and maternal grandfathers, and the old man next door, and the elderly man in the movie “Love Among the Elders”, which she had seen in the cinema the year before.

She fell into a state of drowsiness as Satan tickled the sole of her foot. She feigned sleep so as to allow him to continue his flirtatious act. But by keeping this event a closely guarded secret from her parents, she became Satan’s partner in sin. She would bury her head in the pillow, stop her breath and pretend to be dead, thus encouraging him with her feigned death to continue, reaching the focal point buried in the folds of the flesh, deep inside the womb of existence. As she lay in a deathly state, a sensation of pleasure that was free from any sense of guilt would pervade her whole being.

One night, Satan didn’t come as usual. He remained absent for a long time. Bodour imagined that God had punished him with death. But she heard from her mother and father that he had gone to London for a prostate operation. The word prostate sounded uncannily feminine to her ear, and she had no idea where this feminine-sounding part might be located on Satan’s body. She wondered why God should insert a feminine organ in a male body. In any case, Satan never came back from London, having perhaps died there. So Bodour drove him out of her dreams, whether during her sleep or her wakeful moments. At eleven, Satan was gone completely from her memory. He survived, however, in the sole of her left foot, tickling her until she fell asleep and telling her the tale of Clever Hassan and the Ogress. In the morning, when she performed ablution and prayers, Satan no longer stood on her left side. She developed into a chaste young woman who was cleansed of all sinfulness.

Bodour had already obtained her
BA
degree by the time of the great demonstrations. She was a model young woman whose whole life was consumed by the love of God and the nation. Only her heart felt overburdened, for it still carried the imprint of Satan’s finger on her body. What a burden it was for her heart to keep God, the nation, and Satan all in the same space!

On the day of the great demonstrations, she found herself squeezed between the bodies of thousands of women and men, young and old. The masses poured forth from the alleys and the boulevards, from Bulaq, Maadi, and Helwan. They were a mix of workers, government employees, farmers, and school and college students of both sexes. With bare, chapped feet, or wearing slippers, sandals, or shiny leather shoes of the best quality, the crowds marched at a single pace.

Bodour walked along with them, stomping on the ground with her leather shoes, energized by the strength of the thousands, or perhaps the millions, who screamed in one breath, “Down with the king, long live free Egypt”. The word “free” stuck in her throat like a pang. Although she was moving with the crowds, she felt herself enchained. In vain, she moved her arms and legs to liberate herself from the chains. She cried out, but her stifled screams dissolved in the general noise. Her tears merged with her sweat, and her dress stuck to her body underneath her blue jumper. Next to her walked Nessim. His tall body was gracefully erect, and he trod strongly and steadily on the ground, his blue eyes looking straight ahead. Not once did he look in her direction, although she kept furtively glancing at him. His profile showed his proud pointed nose and his pursed lips. He wore a grey jumper that was tatty at the elbows and made of coarse wool. The white collar of his shirt was creased and his old shoes dusty. The soles of his shoes had a piece of iron like a horseshoe. In her dreams, his thick frizzy hair brushed her fine, smooth face.

Bodour was hugely attracted to men who were masculine and rough, men who wore their lives on their sleeves for the sake of God and the homeland. These men were very different from her cousin, Ahmed, who was scared of cockroaches, mice, and the frogs leaping in the garden, whose fingers were short and fat like hers and whose build was as short as that of his father and of his uncle, General Ahmed al-Damhiri. He inherited their square-shaped head and the square chin underneath thin lips, the upper thinner than the lower. He pursed his lips whenever he fell into deep thought, a gesture he inherited from his father and his grandfather, Sheikh al-Damhiri, who was the deputy or the vice deputy of the great al-Azhar Mosque.

Bodour met Nessim while in her freshman year at university. From the first moment their eyes met, something trembled deep inside her. He wasn’t her colleague in the Faculty of Arts, but he came to university on the days demonstrations were to take place. When she saw him from afar, her heart fluttered wildly against her ribs. Her short figure swayed and swung over her pointed heels. She pressed with her hand on the strap of her bag slung over her shoulder, holding on to it to regain her balance. He often passed her without looking or smiling at her the way the other colleagues did. He sometimes nodded in greeting but continued on his way without looking back. She peered at his straight back, his taut muscles, and his lean body. She admired the way his arms moved in harmony with his legs and the way his tall, spear-like figure cut the air as he walked.

For two years she saw him in her dreams. In the third, when she saw him at one of the meetings, she initiated the conversation. The seat next to him was empty. She smiled at him and sat next to him saying, “Good morning, Nessim.” They met again inside the university or in the Orman Garden nearby, and sat on a wooden bench talking and exchanging revolutionary books. Bodour was at heart drawn to the idea of rebellion. She revolted against everything in her life, including her own parents, uncles, and grandparents, perhaps God and Satan as well. Since the age of seven, her fear of God bordered on hatred, but she never had the courage to admit her fantasies or dreams to herself. Ever since her childhood, she had been committing many sinful acts in her sleep.

She studied Nessim’s profile as she walked side by side with him during demonstrations. The harsh, acute contours of his face looked as though they were carved out of stone. His nose was so pointed that it seemed to cleave the air, and his tall thin body seemed to be made of something other than flesh. As he walked, he carried his body as though it were weightless.

From the moment the Devil’s finger started stroking her, Bodour wished to be free of the weight of her body, the load of plump flesh that she carried each and every day on her arms, chest, belly, legs, and the soles of her feet. She dreamed of a force that would lift this weight off her shoulders. She dreamed of two strong arms reaching down from heaven to crush her body until the flesh dissolved and vanished completely.

After the demonstration ended and the crowds dispersed, she continued walking beside him, wishing she could walk on and on with him until the end of her days. She wanted him to carry her in his arms and march ahead until the moment of death. They walked silently, side by side, through one street after another, until Nessim stopped in front of the basement of a huge building. He stood there for a moment, silent and thoughtful. Then, raising his eyes to her face, he spoke, his voice slightly hoarse and the blue irises of his eyes sparkling with what seemed like choked tears. His words were fitful and broken as he said, “I don’t know what I should say, Bodour! But I feel ... I feel you ... I have strong feelings like you ... but you come from a different class, Bodour ... I live here in this basement flat ...”