Zeina (27 page)

Ahmed al-Damhiri woke in the middle of the night to read the three Holy Books, starting with the Torah, the Bible, and then the Qur’an. His conscience was uneasy, for he hated the image of the god and his voice. It was a god who revelled in scenes of destruction and war, and in the sight of bloodshed all over the earth, a god who took revenge for the sins of the fathers on innocent children. Ahmed al-Damhiri shivered to think that God might crush him as He crushed Pharaoh and his slaves. His bed might be attacked by lice, locusts, frogs, cockroaches, and beetles. Since his childhood, he had been afraid of insects. He couldn’t sleep in the same room as a cockroach or a mosquito. He heard his mother scream when she saw a cockroach running on the floor or a mosquito coming from the window to hover around her head. She screamed out so loudly that he quivered and fell off the bed. She carried him in her arms and rocked him in order to calm him down.

“Don’t worry, my darling, I’m here with you. I don’t know why God has sent us all these cockroaches? All these mosquitoes? Although I’ve sprayed the whole house with insecticides.”

Ahmed al-Damhiri fell asleep. He saw the people of Egypt win the battle of the locusts, the cockroaches, and mosquitoes over God.

God hadn’t discovered insecticides yet, but the people of Egypt had an old civilization. They built the pyramids and the obelisks. They discovered the sciences of medicine, astronomy, and engineering. The children of Israel worked as servants and slaves in our homes. The Torah was full of lies.

When he was a child, he heard his father say, “The Torah had been altered, my son. The words of God got confused with the words of human beings. But the Qur’an is a hundred per cent God’s words, no changes and no distortions. The state of Israel was built on lies, deceit, killing, and bloodshed. The Palestinian people are being exterminated, son. Israel is a country of killers and therefore deserves extermination, not us Egyptians. We could have thrown Israel into the sea had it not been supported by imperialism, son.”

“Is imperialism stronger than God, then, Dad?”

“No, son. God is stronger than all. But God is angry with us, son.”

“Why is He angry with us, Dad?”

Ahmed al-Damhiri arose from sleep, having forgotten his dreams and his childish questions. He forgot the faces of his father and mother. Nothing remained in his memory but the face of Zeina Bint Zeinat. If her face appeared from behind the clouds, all the other faces would disappear, including that of God. The black clouds crouching over the city would vanish as though her face were a piece of the sun and her eyes two stars sparkling in the horizon. Her eyes energized him and inspired joy and hope in his heart. He quickly jumped out of bed and stood under the shower, vigorously rubbing his chest and belly. Warm blood rushed to his heart and he felt the accelerating heartbeats pulsing in the palm of his hand. He repeated her name with the pulse, “Zeina Bint Zeinat, Zeina Bint Zeinat”. He put on his elegant new suit and shaved his moustache and beard.

“But what’s the connection between body hair and faith in our heart?” Satan whispered to him.

He shaved his pubic hair, sprayed eau de cologne under his shaved armpits, and gargled some mouthwash. He placed a mint or cinnamon tablet under his tongue to refresh his soul and dispel his hesitation and despair. He filled his chest with the smell of mint and cloves as he imagined her in his arms, smelling his fresh breath as he bit her lower lip with his teeth. He encircled her slim waist with his arms, descending to her firm, recalcitrant buttocks. They were the buttocks of a wild mare that would not be mounted or subdued. She united masculine strength with feminine gentleness, and danced like an unruly horse without an owner or a bridle. The earth shook under her feet. Her voice flowed softly and gently like the whisper of a heart, and strongly and angrily like the rumbling of waves. Contradictions existed in strange harmony in her heart, in a balance which came close to imbalance, in a kind of self-love that amounted to self-denial.

He drove the car to her house, hoping to be alone with her without his driver or his guards. Darkness fell while he was still on the way. The sun set early and a cold breeze crept into his body and under his clothes. He trembled with a vague kind of fear, and a tremor overtook him in anticipation of pleasure. Fear and pleasure coexisted in his heart. The moon appeared from behind the clouds. It was connected in his mind with love and dreams. He stopped the car, uncertain whether he should go forward or retreat. Going forward implied the anticipation of those pleasures that had been suppressed from childhood, while retreating implied going back to safety and peace. His car moved forward with more determination toward happiness. He wished to melt in a bigger presence than his own, a larger spirit, a better body. He wanted to shed hot tears in her arms, the tears of dying at the height of pleasure, and the tears of regret because he hadn’t known anything in his life except his own misery.

He opened her door and tiptoed inside, fearing that any noise might take him out of his state of ecstasy. A faint light shone and a dreamy melody filtered from her bedroom. Everything was ready for the descent into the bottomless pit of pleasure. The door of the bedroom stood ajar. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the ceiling, and the dark book covers gave a kind of solemnity to the prospect of love-making. She sat playing the piano. He lifted her with his arms from the chair until their lips touched. Then he descended with her and, after placing her on the bed, he removed her white cotton dress. When he looked at her naked breasts, he saw that they were neither dark nor fair, but a transparent color that almost revealed her soul. As in his dreams, she didn’t give in to him but resisted him as a strong fort, a fort that nobody had invaded before him. He went into the battle with her in complete silence except for the noise of his hot breaths. His hands reached down to the center of lust in the folds of her flesh. He restricted her movement on the bed, like a trainer stopping a ferocious bull with a single gesture or an angry look. But the bull jumped up in one instant and dug its teeth into the flesh of his naked shoulder.

Ahmed al-Damhiri sprang out of bed drenched in sweat, feeling the pain in his left shoulder. A stubborn mosquito had bitten him. It had buzzed around his head before he fell asleep. He tried in vain to kill it but it evaded him and eluded his swatter, before disappearing into some corner beyond his reach. He sprayed it with insecticide, which had no effect. Insecticides had become inadequate in dealing with the new species of mosquitoes, which acquired heightened characteristics and challenged the will of God, like the new generation of loose girls. At the underground meeting of the group, the decision was taken to carry out God’s commandment without argument or question. The name of Zeina Bint Zeinat was added to the death list, which included other names violating religious principles and threatening public order. These were women and men poets who wrote against the regime and called for love, justice, and freedom. There were young students and workers who went on demonstrations, calling for the eradication of corruption, bribery, and neo-imperialism. They shouted against poverty, war, and the abuse of religion. More names were added to the death list with the rise of unemployment, the growth of slums, and the spread of drugs and rape crimes. There were three million children living on the streets. Fathers refused to acknowledge their children born after they had raped young girls on the pavement.

Bodour al-Damhiri sipped her black coffee as she always did before getting ready to write. She took a warm shower, washed her hair and head from the residues of literary criticism, and brushed her teeth with a refreshing toothpaste. For Bodour al-Damhiri, writing was a ritual which was akin to love or prayers. She looked up to the sky with her eyes half open, receiving inspiration, smacking her lips, enjoying the taste of the black coffee. Its bitterness felt strong and refreshing in her stomach, banishing the remnants of sadness and chronic depression. On her desk were the pages of her novel, smudged with stains of black and blue ink, yellowing drops of tears and red blood turning dark brown. There was the odor of sweat between the lines and beneath them. But she was prevented from writing by tiredness, intense sorrow, and a more intense kind of fear. She couldn’t tell the difference between truth and lies, fact and fiction. She stared at the dissolving lines between things, for faith melted into apostasy, ugliness and insolence into beauty and civility. Honesty and integrity had turned into theft, treason, and disgrace.

Faces looked at her from between the pages. She couldn’t distinguish her father’s face from the faces of her grandfather, uncle, and cousin, for all male faces became one, a double-sided face with a devil and a god on each side. The faces of women also merged into one: the tender-hearted and the killer, the pious and the atheist, the sincere and the unfaithful, the woman wrapping her head but at the same time baring her belly and wearing tight jeans around her taut buttocks like a tiger’s. Her hips shook as she took long strides. Her walk seemed rather crude and indecent to women of good families, and her voice rang high among their muffled, repressed voices.

She whispered in her ear as she stared scornfully at her novel, “You’re too mediocre to be a novelist, for you’re clean and innocent and virginal and incapable of creativity. You can’t write a novel, Bodour, until you have known evil and until you have drunk the cup of pleasures dry. You need to forget first of all about this world and the afterworld, about punishment and reward, about hell and heaven. Honesty and disgrace will become identical after you remove the mask from your face and see yourself naked. Only then will you realize that loneliness is far better than an obnoxious companion. Divorce, Bodour, is the solution. You need to free yourself from this abhorrent marriage.

“When injustice reigns, loneliness becomes the only civilized option, the warm motherly breasts. Lust and virtue are as inseparable as day and night. Virtuous women like you, Bodour, are obsessed with their desires, while lustful women only dream of chastity.

“Why did you leave your newborn baby on the pavement? Was it for Zakariah al-Khartiti, your husband, the man obsessed with his mutilated phallus which he uses to rape orphan children? The man obsessed with his column that nobody reads? How many years have you shared your bed with him and lain helplessly underneath him? Can you still dream of writing a novel? Are you dreaming of writing a novel without having to pay the price? The price of creativity? Freedom comes at a price, and so does courage. But when we pay the price, Bodour, our lives change for the better. Our souls soar high and become cleansed. The woman novelist never finds the man who deserves her. There is no tender heart to soothe her except her own. Her only companion is her pen. But the woman literary critic like you enjoys all the privileges of this life and the next, including having a great writer for a husband, the honor of belonging to a distinguished family, state prizes, a palace on earth and another in heaven. A woman novelist, Bodour, doesn’t taste happiness. And if she does, happiness will come from within her, from her writings. A woman novelist has no country, family, religion, native city, or tribe. Her homeland is the street, the open road without four walls. Her life is a journey into the unknown. You’ve inherited writing as you’ve inherited your religion. You’re driven by the desire to receive accolades and not by the desire to write. That’s why your novel has been as evasive and as slippery as an eel. A novel, Bodour, is like living fish swimming against the current, and is very different from the dead fish floating on the surface and moving with the current. A chaste woman like you, Bodour, is a dead fish floating with the current. And you still want to write a novel?”

Bodour shook her soft white hand in Badreya’s face, chasing her terrifying black spectre, raising her pen to gouge her eyes out and stop her voice. But Badreya had no eyes and no tongue. She was a roaming spirit, appearing at night on the walls like a phantom, peering like Satan’s finger from between the pages of the novel, like God’s finger, and as real as God and Satan. She was the great truth of her life. Bodour might doubt the existence of Satan or God, but Badreya was the only irrefutable truth in her life. She was authenticity itself, and everything else was untrue, unimportant, unnecessary, and unreal.

Bodour’s fingers quivered as she held the pen. It moved uncertainly on the blank page, and her scrawl was like a child’s. A question persisted in Bodour’s head: why should the most truthful things in our lives remain hidden? And if they happen to come out, they are stolen by those closest to us.

She lifted her head from the desk. Her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, was standing right in front of her in his white silk pyjamas, fiddling with the sparse white hairs on his chest and under his belly, and rubbing his eyes. His mouth reeked of dead fish as he opened it wide and yawned aloud.

Before he could ask her anything, she burst out, “Why do you swim with the dead fish, Zakariah?”

Their daughter, Mageeda al-Khartiti, was sound asleep in her room far away. Their loud voices pierced her ears as they quarrelled. She had been hearing their squabbles since childhood. The noise was faint at the beginning, then the volume rose gradually and she heard the sounds of slapping and smacking and kicking. She had no idea who dealt the blows or who received them. In the morning, they sat at the breakfast table, reading the papers and talking as if nothing had happened the night before. They exchanged talk, smiles, tea pots, the salt, the toasted bread basket, and the plates of butter, honey, and white cheese with olive oil.

Mageeda slammed the door shut behind her. She drove her car to her office at the
Renaissance
magazine. She ordered a cup of coffee and called the unknown writer, Mohamed, in the editorial hall.