Zeina (3 page)

All this happened many years earlier when Bodour was twenty and was still dreaming of love and revolution. She later obtained her
BA
from the Faculty of Arts, although she disliked literature and criticism. She only loved and wanted Nessim, dreamed of him and couldn’t imagine life without him. She would have preferred a life in the basement flat to her life with her parents in the large fancy villa in Garden City.

Bodour couldn’t recall what she told him as they stood in front of his basement room. Did she tell him that she loved him? She might have said it, although her voice was completely silent. The words might have come out of her mouth like warm soundless vapor.

She stood there hesitantly, one hand resting on the cracked wooden door and the other holding on to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled at it as if to keep her balance and resist the earth’s gravity which dragged her down.

He was equally hesitant and quiet. The air was also still. Nothing in fact moved except her breath, while he seemed to have stopped breathing completely and stood there transfixed, almost like a statue.

She couldn’t remember how long it was they stood there, near the closed door. He didn’t produce the key to open the door although it lay there in his pocket. His arm didn’t move, and nor did any other part of his body.

What was he waiting for? Did he expect her to turn and head home? Or raise her hand and slap him on the face before going away? In her eyes, he saw an imprisoned tear that neither fell nor disappeared. Were these the suppressed tears of a young woman feeling mortified, having offered herself to a man only to be rejected by him? Was she a young woman reaching out for help from another human being, but receiving only rejection?

He finally took the key from his pocket and opened the door, and she followed him like a sleepwalker. She stood with her back against the wall, hoping its hardness might provide her with support and strength. But its coldness sent a shiver through her overheated body, and an unnameable fear overtook her whole being.

He held her little white hand in his large palm, and she fell into his arms like a ripe fruit dropping from the tree, or Newton’s apple pulled down by the force of the earth’s gravity.

Bodour was familiar to some extent with the physics of Newton and Einstein, was aware of the theories of relativity and Marxism, and was well read in literature and criticism. Nessim on his part was greatly interested in science and philosophy. He didn’t believe in the story of Adam or the apple that Eve tempted him with, unlike Bodour who still held on to what her parents and teachers at school had always told her.

The mattress on the tiled floor was covered with books, papers and pamphlets. Lining the walls were wooden shelves holding books, magazines, and folders. In the corner stood a bamboo chair on which was spread a washed white shirt. A square iron latticed window opened out onto the asphalt street.

Then the room and all its contents disappeared. As he drew her close to his chest and kissed her hair and eyes, time and place vanished completely. The dream which had been visiting her every night came back to her, although the pleasure she experienced in the dream was much more intense than in reality, for the Nessim of her fantasies was more daring, and much more forceful in invading her body. In the dream, his body seemed harder than a spear that cut through the universe to reach the ultimate point. Reality always seemed pale in comparison with the stark beauty of fantasy.

When Bodour came to, she saw the tiled floor and the latticed window with the iron bars. She could hear the sound of Nessim’s breath as he lay sound asleep beside her. It was almost like she could hear the sound of her father’s snores, and the Adam’s apple on his throat was like her father’s too. Nessim’s muscles were now sagging, passive and unchallenging, like her own muscles and her mother’s.

She got dressed in a hurry, slung the bag strap over her shoulder and tiptoed toward the door. But she heard him calling her, “Bodour?”

She turned. He came toward her with his tall, upright gait, the firmness of his muscles restored and his eyes radiating a blue light bordering on blackness. She felt that she was looking into the depths of the sea or the skies at night.

It was not yet dawn. She wanted to throw herself on his chest and cry, for there had always been a vague sadness inside her since childhood. In his arms, grief vanished and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of joy that shook her whole being and removed all the deep-rooted pains and sorrows. But in her head there was a tiny cell, like a little needle, that reminded her of her father, her grandfather, the family honor, God, Satan, and the blazing fires awaiting her after death.

“Bodour?”

“Yes, Nessim.”

“Shall we go to the Ma’zoun, the marriage registrar, to get married in the morning?”

“Oh my God!”

Her chest heaved with the quickening of her heartbeats. The word “Ma’zoun” had a terrifying, vague, and elusive ring that had absolutely no connection with love. Could she possibly get married in the morning?

Her father was lying in bed sipping his tea, reading the papers, yawning and stretching his limbs, fully at ease and confident that his innocent, virgin daughter was sleeping in her bed or taking a bath in preparation for going to university.

“Is the Ma’zoun necessary?”

“Of course, Bodour. No marriage is valid without the Ma’zoun ... and then ...”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He closed his lips and gave her a protectively paternal look, although she was barely two years his junior. But he felt a hundred years older, for she had never known poverty or hunger and never slept on the pavement. She hadn’t worked as a child apprentice at a mechanic’s shop or gotten kicked by the master mechanic in the stomach. She had never been beaten up at a police station, and nor had she seen her mother die of grief or bleed with every breath she took, or witnessed her father drown in prison.

“I’m older than you, Bodour, and I know how hard life can be. You’re a nice girl and I fear for you if ...”

He stopped at “if” because he wanted to say, “If you became pregnant outside marriage, your father, General Ahmed al-Damhiri, might kill you!” He gave her a sunny smile. The light in his eyes intensified, and he enveloped her in his arms, whispering, “If we could just have a child who is as beautiful as you are!”

She closed her eyes with her head resting on his chest and fell to dreaming. Could she possibly have a boy or a girl who looked like Nessim? A child with the same tall, graceful figure, the sparkling eyes, the lively, rebellious spirit, the defiance and the hardness?

Before the light of dawn appeared, she was shaken out of her reveries by the sounds of police car sirens. Armored vehicles roamed the streets, rifle butts knocked on doors, torch lights fell on the pale, emaciated faces of poor workers and college students who were being pursued by the security police in factories, schools, or universities, because their photographs appeared on the records of the Ministry of the Interior.

Bodour didn’t know how she found herself lying in the safety of her own bed. She closed her eyes under the covers as the warmth slowly engulfed her. The latest events infiltrated her dream as she fell asleep. In the dream, she walked with the demonstrators. Beside her were the two gleaming eyes radiating light like two stars in the darkness of the night. Under the covers, her hands felt her body. Within the folds of the flesh, the dream became a palpable reality, and the fantasy turned into a concrete fact she could touch with her own hands. His voice reached her ears like light waves, “If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Zein, after my father.” Bodour whispered, “And if it’s a girl, we’ll call her Zeina, after my grandmother.”

In the dream, she saw her grandmother’s ghost coming into her room. She was a graceful woman with sparkling eyes. Bodour called her Nana Zizi. When she was eight years old, her grandmother, who was still alive then, sat next to her bed and told her bedtime stories. She also told her the sad story of her life, and how she had wished to become a famous singer, for she loved singing, dancing and writing poetry. But her father took her out of school at the age of fourteen. They dressed her in a white wedding gown, and after the drumbeats and the festivities, she found herself alone, locked in a bedroom with a strange, rough-looking man who was short and hunch-backed. He wore a thick, black moustache on his upper lip.

While Bodour lay warmly in her bed dreaming of her grandmother, an armored vehicle stopped in front of the splintered wooden door of the basement of the tall building. Five police officers carrying rifles surrounded Nessim and flashed a bright light in his face. The pupils of his eyes blazed with bluish black anger. His tall, lean body seemed as hard as a spear, and his head was held high above his firm, sturdy neck. One of the police officers hit him on the head with the butt of his rifle, while another slapped him on the cheek. He stood upright, nevertheless. Not a single muscle in his face moved, and he didn’t bat an eyelid.

One of the police officers grew so angry that he spat in his face and punched him below the ribs, at that point of both pleasure and pain, the source of life and love.

When they dragged him to the armored vehicle outside, his nose and mouth were bleeding, dripping over his white vest which revealed the black hairs covering his chest. The blood streamed to his white Egyptian cotton pants. The smell of cotton merged in his nostrils with the smell of blood, dust and the fertile black soil, where green shrubs grew, carrying spots of white buds. He was eight years old when he sang with the other village children, running all over the green expanse dotted with white buds, “You’ve come to bring us light, oh Nile cotton, how lovely you are! Come on, girls of the Nile, collect the matchless cotton, God’s gift!”

Inside the police vehicle, he sat handcuffed. He saw the image of his grandmother, Zakia, who was tall and proud. Her large cracked hands held an axe and her dark wide eyes could hold the whole universe. One day, she gripped the axe and brought it down on the head of the village mayor. She then lay on the ground and slipped into eternal peace.

The connection between Mageeda, the writer, and Zeina Bint Zeinat had never been severed. Since childhood, something attracted them to each other, despite the vast gulf separating them. With the help of her parents, Mageeda became a columnist at the
Renaissance
magazine. Deep in her heart, however, she hated writing, which she had inherited from her parents, as much as she hated her short body and the large villa in Garden City. The name of her father and grandfather was engraved on a shining brass plate on the external door of the villa: Al-Khartiti Villa. The name al-Khartiti seemed to her like a deformed limb affixed to her name and her body.

Surrounding the huge redbrick house was a large garden, where trees, roses and other flowers grew. An iron fence encircled the garden in which jasmine and bougainvillea trees grew, with their yellow, white, and crimson flowers.

From the outside, the place looked beautifully cheerful. But inside, there was ugliness in every corner, lurking underneath the colorfully embroidered silk tablecloths.

Mageeda went to school every day in a limousine driven by a dark chauffeur. Before she went to bed, a nanny took her to the bathroom and washed her with warm water and scented soap. The nanny would dry her with the large white towel and carry her to her bed, telling her the story of Cinderella and the prince until she fell asleep.

In her dreams, Mageeda saw herself flying like a sparrow in the sky. Her thickset body no longer weighed her down, and her arms moved powerfully and lightly through the air. Her large wings flapped and fluttered, and when the sunrays or the moonbeams fell on them, they assumed an angelic white color. Her fingers were no longer short and chubby, but became long and thin, like Zeina’s. They moved more quickly over the piano keys than the speed of light. Miss Mariam held her hand high for all the girls to see. She spoke with a voice that was so loud that it reached everyone: her parents, her uncles, her grandfather, the neighbors in Garden City, the porters sitting in front of buildings, the barber in the square, the chauffeur who drove the car, and her nanny who told her the story of Cinderella before she fell asleep. She told them, “Mageeda’s fingers have been created for music. Her talent is unparalleled. There isn’t anyone like her in the class.”

In the dream, Miss Mariam’s voice sounded like a harmonious tune, tickling her ears and sending a titillating sensation from her neck down to her chest. The wave moved to the left breast, just over the heart, and crept stealthily to the belly, then quivered a little when it got to the smooth hairless pubic area. From there it slipped down toward the left thigh and through to the left leg, and thence to the sole of her left foot. It titillated her as it used to do in the past, giving her the well-known but fresh sensation of pleasure together with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.

Mageeda never knew how music, in her childish dreams, turned into a sinful pleasure, a pleasure that was akin to, though still different from, Satan’s finger, for although music descended from her ears to the sole of her foot, Satan’s finger went up from the foot until it reached the focal point of the universe.

Before she slept, Mageeda told her nanny about Miss Mariam and how she held Zeina’s fingers up high for all the girls to see, and how her voice rose high saying: “Zeina’s fingers have been created for music. She’s a talented girl like no one else.”

Mageeda would bury her head in her nanny’s bosom, pushing her nose between her breasts, trying to inhale some motherly love.