Zeina (28 page)
“Where’s the article, Mohamed?”
“I wrote another article, about Zeina Bint Zeinat.”
“But censorship will never allow the publication of this article.”
“Why not, Miss Mageeda? She’s the greatest artist in the country, ma’am.”
“True, but censorship has forbidden anything to be written about her.”
“But this isn’t fair, ma’am.”
“Of course it’s not fair. Life is full of people suffering from unfairness, and they have God to protect them.”
“God doesn’t protect anybody, ma’am. If God protected those suffering from unfairness, there would be no injustice.”
“What kind of talk is this? Have you gone out of your mind to speak so heretically?”
“May God forgive me for all my trespasses, ma’am.”
“That’s better.”
“But this is unfair, ma’am. God cannot approve of unfairness.”
“God approves of unfairness every day of the week. If He didn’t, we wouldn’t have three million children living on the streets, fifty per cent of the Egyptian population living under the poverty line, or thousands and millions of people dying in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan, let alone the injustices everywhere in the world. God approves of unfairness!”
“Are you being sacrilegious here, ma’am?”
“Yes, Mohamed, I am. All this is enough to drive you to heresy. I can’t imagine how Zeina Bint Zeinat’s name came to be on the death list! She’s an honest soul who’s never harmed anyone. She was my schoolmate and friend from primary school. I know her well, a good girl like no other.”
“I must write about her then, ma’am. I have the article with me.”
“Publish it in one of the opposition papers, Mohamed. This magazine is a government publication, and, as you know, the government works with the emir and those groups. And everybody works for America and its allies. As journalists, we all want to earn our living, and the biggest liars are those with columns in that great government paper. My father, Zakariah al-Khartiti, is at the top of that list.”
Her voice quivered through the telephone, and the receiver shook in her plump white hand. Her facial muscles contracted nervously and her voice turned into a hoarse, stifled blubber.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had an outburst of this kind. Though still an unknown journalist, Mohamed was the closest person to Mageeda at the magazine. He wrote her articles and she confided in him, told him some of her miseries and gave vent to her pent-up feelings. They had a special friendship. She might have fallen in love with him had he not been poor and unknown. She might have considered him if he had some of Zeina Bint Zeinat’s pride and refused to hire his pen. Since childhood, Mageeda al-Khartiti had looked up to Zeina Bint Zeinat, comparing herself to her, wishing she possessed that proud head, the tall, graceful stature and the long, elegant fingers moving with the speed of lightning over the keys of the piano. She wished she didn’t have a father who scolded her if she was late, or slapped her on the face if she made a mistake. Sometimes he slapped her for no fault of her own but only as an outlet for his rage. Deep in her heart, she hated her father. She heard people speak ill of him. Her colleagues whispered among themselves about his corruptions and his conquests of girls and whores. She buried the secret deep in her soul and noted in her secret diary: the fiercest of men turn into tame animals in brothels.
A few days later, Mohamed, the unknown journalist, published an article about Zeina Bint Zeinat in the
Thawra,
the opposition paper.
The voice of her mother’s friend, Safaa al-Dhabi, came to her across the telephone line saying, “Great article, Mageeda. You must read it. And tell your mum to read it. But who’s this Mohamed Ahmed? He’s excellent. He also has courage and experience in literary criticism. Do you know him, Mageeda?”
“Yes, Auntie Safi. He’s my colleague at the magazine.”
“Give him my best regards, Mageeda. He deserves encouragement, and Zeina Bint Zeinat deserves a hundred articles like this. Write about her in your magazine, Mageeda. If I had a page or a column in any paper, I’d write about her. But you know that I’m banned from writing since the day I published my article on the first lady in an opposition paper.”
“Yes, Auntie Safi. But you know of course that censorship forbids articles on Zeina.”
“To hell with censorship! Don’t worry about it and never fear the government. It’s a corrupt government and it collaborates with imperialism. People are now fed up with everything, and revolution is on the way. It’s coming for sure. The hungry and the starving will go on the rampage inside, and invasion will come from outside. Those groups will then seize the reins of power. But the hungry will surely revolt ...”
The framed photograph of Zeina Bint Zeinat was published on the front page of the
Thawra
newspaper. The article by Mohamed Ahmed appeared on the third page. Eyes stopped at the photograph before the hands turned the pages. They stared for a long time at the magnetic light radiating from the pupils of her eyes. Even on paper she had an overpowering presence. Innocence and experience were united in those eyes, and wisdom and madness. The whole face was radiant, and her wild hair fell down as though it had never been combed before. Her face was free of make-up and color, and her elongated neck was swan-like and proud. The collar of her white dress was creased, as though she had dressed in a hurry and left without looking again in the mirror.
The article occupied half a page and was signed by Mohamed Ahmed:
Zeina Bint Zeinat is an exceptional artist
par excellence.
Her genius is revealed in the simplest movement she makes. As soon as she enters the auditorium or appears on stage, her presence annihilates everything else around her. Eyes never tire of looking at her. Her spirit lifts our souls to the high heavens. Her ingenious voice assumes a palpable shape in our ears. We can touch it and taste it like red wine, because it can remove distances between hearts. Her tunes throw light on the dark corners of our minds. We become intoxicated with the joy of knowledge and overwhelmed with an unparalleled kind of ecstasy.Zeina Bint Zeinat has created her destiny with her own hand, for she does not admit of the presence of any other will than her own. Adverse conditions have not defeated her, for she creates her circumstances and not the other way around. She has said of herself, “I am the daughter of the streets and I am proud of my mother, Zeinat, the servant who took me from the pavement and nourished me with pride and confidence. Miss Mariam, my second mother, surrounded me with music, poetry and song. She filled my heart with joy, rhythm and harmony.”
What drove me to write about Zeina Bint Zeinat? It was her beauty, her voice, her rhythm, songs, and conversation. She exudes a magic that has no name. Because she is natural, she is in possession of the miracle of nature. She moves in a harmony that is akin to the movement of the earth around the sun, a movement in tune with the rebellions of slaves in history. She has emerged from the bottom and risen to the top, transforming an atrocious tragedy into a rich, joyful victory. She plays the right tune at the right time in this age of mediocrity. She uncovers veiled faces, exposes lies and falsehood, and discloses inconsistencies and disgraceful acts.
Was it to get rid of her that they put her name on the death list? Zeina Bint Zeinat, however, cannot be killed with gunshots, because her body is not made of flesh and bone, but of an ethereal substance that is not susceptible to bullets. Even when she dies, she will not disappear. Her star will rise higher in the firmament because true art challenges death. True artists do not die, because their hands have reached the tree of life after eating from the tree of knowledge. They have tasted the forbidden fruit and have become immortal like the gods.
Umm Kulthum, our great singer, had a tremendous sense of humour and irony. When she cracked a joke, she made the most important men laugh. Presidents, ministers, princes, as well as the person who was the target of her humour, laughed at her jokes. She sometimes even laughed at herself. Laughter takes off the edge and the venom of the criticism, because it purifies the spirit and invites tolerance and forgiveness.
Zeina Bint Zeinat is not just a star. She is a whole constellation. When I heard her laugh, my buried sorrows suddenly vanished. Her laugh rings in the air, revitalizing bodies and minds and saving souls from stagnancy. She is like the secret potion of happiness or love, well known yet mysterious, natural and unnatural at the same time.
By Mohamed AhmedWhen Zeina Bint Zeinat dances, everybody dances with her, men, women, youngsters, and children. The whole universe dances with her, the trees, the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky. Zeina Bint Zeinat possesses nothing except her art. She fears nothing, wants for nothing, and hopes for nothing. She is a free spirit. She has freed herself with her own hands. She has led a life harder than death and is no longer afraid of dying.
The journalist Mohamed Ahmed used to live in a basement room in one of the buildings. His name was known to no one. Suddenly his name was in circulation among people, and his friends and neighbors congratulated him on his article. His mother got up from her sick bed and hugged him. When he was eight years of age, his father died in prison following his participation in demonstrations. Mohamed therefore avoided protests. He had no regular salary or income, but worked in the editorial hall as an unsalaried intern. Mageeda al-Khartiti paid him a small salary in return for the articles he wrote for her. With this small sum, he bought medications and food for his mother, paid the rent for the room and bought himself the occasional shirt, pair of shoes, or book. He dreamed of being liberated from poverty and humiliation. He dreamed of reclaiming his pen and not hiring it to Mageeda al-Khartiti. After publishing his article on Zeina Bint Zeinat, her pride seemed to seep into his soul. When he saw her on stage, his soul was touched, and the voice of his father returned to him, saying, “Death is easier to bear than humiliation. Lift your head high, my son, and don’t be ashamed of poverty. Don’t let the difficulties of life beat you. Those who persist can never be vanquished. To struggle is to be free, even if the result is imprisonment.”
Her pride stirred the memory of his father in his mind, so he stopped going to the editorial hall of the
Renaissance
magazine and stopped ghostwriting for Mageeda al-Khartiti. He continued writing for the
Thawra
newspaper. His name became known and people were keen to read his articles. In a short while he was placed in charge of the artistic page in the newspaper.
Zakariah al-Khartiti sat in his usual chair at the breakfast table, his right hand holding the coffee cup and his left holding the paper. He stared hard at his new photograph inside the frame at the top of his column. It stretched on the page from top to bottom. His signature at the end came as an illegible scrawl next to his email address with his name @
yahoo.com
. During the time he was a member of a leftist party, his column was placed to the left of the page. When he was awarded the official state prize, it moved to the center. But with the rise of free market forces, religious men, and businessmen, it moved to the right. Many establishments carried his name, including a mosque, a charity organization for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and another for the care of orphaned children, an international publishing and printing company, and a satellite channel broadcasting movies and interviews about science and religion, as well as about religious dialogue.
In front of him sat his wife, Bodour, in her usual chair, sipping her tea and glancing briefly at his column. Reading his column was boring, for she knew his written and unwritten words, the words appearing on the page and those lurking behind the lines. For how many years had she read his column every day? Twenty? Thirty? A hundred? She couldn’t distinguish one day from another since her wedding. She knew his column as intimately as she knew his phallus. As soon as she looked at either, she felt sick in the stomach. She wished to reach for the scissors in order to cut off his column and pin it on the wall next to all the other columns by Mahmoud al-Feqqi, the editor-in-chief, and other writers, and next to the photographs of the head of state and the first lady.
Her husband was jealous of Mahmoud al-Feqqi’s column. He noticed her reaction when she read al-Feqqi’s column and read his own. Although Mahmoud al-Feqqi was nothing but a colleague, practically a stranger to her, she read his column before she read her husband’s. It was possible for a woman to have several colleagues, but she had just the one husband, and a husband was like God Almighty, who would not allow the presence of a partner. If a woman took two husbands, she would be arrested and placed in solitary confinement. She would earn the title of whore, fornicator, or fallen woman.
As he read his column aloud to her as usual, he was overtaken by a great sense of joy. His voice streamed to her hearing in spite of the cotton swabs she used to stop her ears. Her eyelids stood half open, and she fell into a coma-like state:
Our country is going through a very dangerous phase. The city of Cairo, dear readers, is no longer the city we have known. Every day we hear of new events referred to as regrettable. These are serious events predicting an imminent explosion. We fear the outbreak of riots by the rabble and the hungry street children. We anticipate a rebellion by the women aping Western women in flagrant defiance of our deep-rooted ethical values, our age-old traditions, and God’s laws laid down in our great religion. God has given men the right to have four wives, according to the true verses of the Qur’an, which state that a man may have two, three or four wives. This is God’s law and human beings have no right to object to this ruling. God also ordained that children be named after their fathers, which makes it clear that a child’s affiliation must be to his father. This is God’s command. Only infidels, unbelievers and renegades will challenge His commands. A new feminist organization is now calling for giving the mother’s name to the child with an unknown father. This organization defies the precepts of religion. It is paid by the West, dear readers, for the purpose of destroying Islam. This organization calls for moral disintegration, and for the same kind of sexual freedom enjoyed by women in the West, where diseases abound such as AIDS, gonorrhoea, illegitimate children, communism, prostitution and atheism.
Islam, my dear readers, is the true religion and it suits humanity everywhere and at any time. Its perfection leads us to uphold its precepts everywhere and throughout all ages. We have no right as human beings to change any of the rulings laid down in the Qur’an or in the teachings of the Prophet, may God’s peace be upon him. In the Qur’an God says: “This day have I perfected for you your religion and completed my favour on you and chosen for you Islam as a religion.” The Qur’an explains everything. We have to keep our religion and hold on to its precepts. We have to keep our faith in God, in the hereafter, in God’s messengers and prophets, and in the three divine religions. We have to perform prayers, fasting, and pilgrimage to the holy places. These are the basic principles that protect our social texture and save us from wrongdoing and delinquency. They will control our excesses and prevent instincts, lusts and Devilish temptations from superseding the word of God and from violating Qur’anic and ethical laws.
I therefore call for the banning of this dangerous organization, because it is made up of women of dubious character who encourage apostasy and the violation of Islamic principles. This organization threatens the peace of our country, which regards Islamic law as the only source of legislation. And Islamic law does not allow sexual freedom for women, for morality and virtue are far more important than freedom.