Zeina (22 page)

Zeina Bint Zeinat became a phantom chasing him day and night. Her voice streamed into his ears in his sleep like the voice of God or the Devil. He began to believe that music came from the Devil and not from God. Her music took away his equilibrium and his faith in God. His body became as light as a feather, a body without flesh or bone, a body of pure spirit. He flew as freely and happily as pure spirits unshackled by the body. It was as if he was dying and his soul was rising to heaven. Then he woke up to find himself among the living. Death and resurrection, then death and resurrection, ad infinitum ...

Miss Mariam called her the Egyptian Mozart. She introduced her before every show saying, “This is Zeina Bint Zeinat. She’s our Egyptian Mozart. But Mozart lived with his father, the great composer, who trained him to play music three hours a day from the age of two. When Mozart was eight years old, he composed his first symphony. His genius wasn’t just talent or inherited genes, but long arduous hours of training amounting to ten thousand hours between the ages of two and eight. Genius requires long hours of hard work. But when industry is combined with natural talent, it becomes extraordinary, unstoppable.”

From the moment Miss Mariam saw Zeina for the first time at primary school, she was certain that this girl had an extraordinary talent. Zeina learned tunes by heart on first hearing them. She was self-confident to the degree of vanity, as though she was the daughter of a god in heaven and not a child born on the street.

Zeina Bint Zeinat sang her song, which began with the following lines:

Her words were simple and spontaneous, like breathing in and breathing out. It had no rhyme or meter, but only the cadence of her voice which resounded in the large hall, strange to the point of familiarity and familiar to the point of strangeness, like the dusk born out of darkness and the sun falling into the night.

Ahmed al-Damhiri came out of the coma of ecstasy. The word “sky” struck a jarring note in his ears and his hypnotized mind was alerted.

“Why does this woman challenge heaven? What does she mean by her poor servant mother is dearer to her than the sky?”

But the moment of epiphany soon vanished when Zeina Bint Zeinat began to sing:

All eyes in the hall stared at her, and the ears were attentive to her simple words that were as free of embellishment as a face without make-up. Her unique face knew no compromises and did not solicit admiration. It didn’t consciously draw attention to itself, and yet it attracted eyes with its mysterious power.

Her face seemed empty except for the two large eyes, the black eyes that burned with a blue light and blazed like a piece of the sun. Her eyes penetrated barriers and masks. They penetrated the surface and plumbed the depths, seeing what others could not see.

Ahmed al-Damhiri fidgeted in his seat, his short plump body moving from one side to the other. He stretched his short legs under the chair in front of him and his foot hit the foot of the man sitting in front of him.

The man turned to him whispering, “Yes, dear sir. Do you need anything?”

“Nothing, Mahmoud. Lower your voice.”

It was the driver sitting in front of him, the chauffeur of his black stretch limousine with blue curtains and tinted glass which made it possible for passengers to see out but kept them invisible inside. Ahmed al-Damhiri relaxed on the back seat of this luxurious car, his tired flabby backside sinking into its soft plush upholstery.

Zeina wasn’t singing at one of the state theaters, nor at either of the auditoriums at the elegant opera house. She was in fact performing at a rundown theater in an old slum neighborhood. The theater was a tent made of some thick cheap fabric which looked like linen or gabardine, and the seats were made of wood, bamboo or braided palm leaves. Their backs were straight and hard. They were painful for people with weak backs and for people used to softer seats. The show continued for two or three hours, and every time Zeina Bint Zeinat stopped singing, there was cheering in the large hall, “Encore, Zeina, encore ...”

Mahmoud, the chauffeur, was also one of the emir’s bodyguards. He carried a gun which was licensed by state security authorities. He walked behind the emir wherever he went, and sat in the seat right in front of him during public events. The emir’s personal bodyguard sat right behind him. This was the way the emir was protected from the front and the back. On his left, a third guard was stationed, and a fourth on his right. Three able-bodied guards surrounding the emir with his diminutive figure were like four pillars around the short mausoleum of a sheikh who was buried a thousand years ago, or of a priest buried underneath an old cloister. They called the emir “the Eminent Sheikh”, “his highness the Prince”, or “the Pasha”.

The title of pasha had been abolished following the overthrow of the king. It came back, however, with the open-door policy, the multi-national corporations, the turban, the prayer marks on foreheads, the rosaries, the loudspeakers attached to mosques, the church and school bells, the police sirens on the streets, the water hoses, the tear gas, the proliferation of illegitimate children on pavements and in slums, the death lists, the religious rulings accusing thinkers of apostasy, the burning of cinemas, theaters and churches, the practise of women following funerals wailing and striking their faces, adolescent girls covering their heads and revealing their bellies and their bottoms in tight American jeans, the hamburger and cola shops, the red nights along the Nile Corniche and the black cloud overhanging the city day and night.

Ahmed al-Damhiri was elated to hear the driver address him as “Your Greatness, al-Damhiri Pasha”. He remembered that when he was eight, he was immensely proud of the greatness of his father, the eminent Sheikh al-Damhiri, and his uncle, the celebrated general. At school he was proud to write his name in full: Ahmed Mohamed al-Damhiri.

He descended from a long line of men stretching back to his great grandfather, who were all educated at the religious establishment al-Azhar or at the army and police academies. Gold stars and medals shone bright on the chests of some of them and on their wide shoulders padded with straw or cotton. Others had large turbans wrapped around their small heads and velvet sashes around the waists of their kaftans. In their hands they either held the rosary and the stick, or carried batons, guns and pistols, according to their distinguished position in the hierarchy of the state or religion.

Mahmoud the chauffeur turned, pursing his lips. He knew, like the other guards, that his greatness the pasha would not leave his seat until Zeina Bint Zeinat’s singing and dancing came to an end.

“Yes, dancing, by God. It’s the most hateful of arts for God and the Prophet, as his eminence the sheikh in charge of the cultural section of the group has asserted. Dancing means moving the body with the aim of arousing lust. Singing comes second on the list of abhorrent activities after dancing, because a woman’s voice, like her naked body, is forbidden and must be concealed, even if we have to use the force of arms if necessary, or the power of words. Keeping our objections in our hearts would indicate a weak faith.”

The driver remembered one of the sayings of the Prophet: “Whoever of you sees an evil, he should change it with his hand; and if he cannot do that [he should change it] with his tongue; and if he cannot do that [he should change it] with his heart and that is the weakest of faith.”

Was it possible that the faith of his greatness, the emir, was weak? The question vexed the driver, who didn’t have the courage to move his head either to the left or to the right because the emir’s head was right behind him.

The driver preferred sitting behind his master to sitting in front of him. But the head of the military wing decided where each one of the guards should sit. The most experienced among them sat behind the emir to protect his back from any gunshots, since they usually came from behind. Stabs, on the other hand, rarely came from the front. But if they did, they would be intercepted by the driver’s head, no doubt.

The driver drove the question out of his mind without moving his head, lest the emir should realize what was going on inside it, for the emir was in constant touch with God. And God knew what went on inside human minds, hearts and bellies. But the question persisted in the driver’s mind and almost flowed with his blood. He felt certain that his master, the emir, was enthralled by this whore, who was herself the daughter of a whore.

“Women’s cunning is great,” as God has said. This whore has sullied the clean reputation of the emir, because a good, pious man can only be tainted by a woman. Cleanliness is godly and dirtiness is womanly. If he had his way, he would bring out his gun and shoot her. But it was all in the hands of the emir, who was, after all, a man like any other. When aroused, he lost two thirds of his mind.

The head of the cultural section of the group was unhappy about the emir’s conduct. He warned him against attending public events related to politics or religion, let alone theater and opera performances.

But the emir’s rank was higher than that of the head of the cultural section, for he was responsible for the military wing. He was in charge of arms and money. The head of the cultural section controlled nothing more than words, spoken or written. Only the words of God had weight. And the words of God followed the military wing and not the cultural section. The logo of the group contained the images of the Book and the sword. Every follower of the emir hung a tiny golden Qur’an on his chest, and in the back pocket perched on his right buttock he kept a black revolver. It was to keep up with advances made in the field of weaponry at the hands of the infidels that the revolver came to replace the sword. Each of the emir’s followers fiddled with the yellow beads of the rosary, and on his forehead the black prayer mark appeared. He wore a thick beard and a thick moustache that concealed his face like a black veil. The tiny black pupils of the eyes rolled inside two empty, bottomless holes.

The emblem of the group changed from the Book and the sword to God’s Law and the revolver, for religion always needed military might to protect it. No religion in history had become stronger without the support of military power, while military might always needed a god or a religion to protect it. The emir walked among his soldiers strutting like a peacock, calling them God’s army. He was God’s deputy, chosen for the sacred mission of upholding God’s words above human words, and of applying God’s rules and laws gently or violently as necessary.

Ahmed al-Damhiri inherited his faith in God from his father, the eminent Sheikh. From his uncle, the army general, he inherited faith in arms and the police. From both of them, he inherited the short stature, the fear of rats and cockroaches and the weakness in the face of lust and whims, slave girls and concubines.

The emir had as many women as he wanted. He had the virtuous, chaste ones as well as the whores and prostitutes. He had the inexperienced virgin as well as the woman with extensive experience of men and the games of sex. At his beck and call he had an assortment of divorced women, ripe women, adolescent girls, and pre-menstrual female children. If he fancied a married woman, her husband would voluntarily give her up for the sake of God so that she might be free to offer herself to the emir. God, after all, had made it lawful for the emir to have all the women he desired, for the emir stood one degree higher than other men. By the same token, men were placed one degree higher than women. God created people according to a hierarchical system, at the top of which stood the Prophet, followed by the emir. For this reason, the emir had the right to have his fill of women.

Bodour al-Damhiri jumped out of bed terrified. She saw her cousin, Ahmed al-Damhiri, sitting transfixed in his wooden seat, staring in front of him at the moving circle of light on stage. She knew him well from childhood. If he wanted one of her dolls, he would grab it. If he couldn’t, he would steal it. But if stealing wasn’t possible, he would break it. One day he fancied one of her little dolls, a doll with large blue eyes made of two sparkling blue beads set in her fair, round face. Her mother had sewn for the doll a lovely lace dress, a silk petticoat and transparent rose-colored pants revealing her soft belly. She placed the doll’s small feet in a pair of green velvet shoes. Bodour hid her doll underneath the clothes in her cupboard to keep her from the eyes of other children, particularly those of Ahmed al-Damhiri. She turned the spring mechanism found on the left side of the doll three times. Music came out of the doll’s belly and the doll began to move its arms and legs with the rhythm. It danced and sang “Dance, little bride. Dance, lovely bride ...”

The doll shook and moved with the rhythm. With the movement of the spring mechanism on its side, it rolled and tumbled in the air, opening its arms and legs in successive somersaults.