Zeina (33 page)

Bodour al-Damhiri was not dead yet. She lived the last days of her life with Nanny Zeinat in her basement room. She started writing a new novel. But her life was hard and didn’t make it easy for her to write. She wasn’t used to sleeping in an uncomfortable wooden bed and couldn’t sit on the ground. She also couldn’t sleep in a room swarming with cockroaches. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed around her ears all the time. Her bedroom in Garden City seemed to her like a lost and distant paradise.

She opened the paper one morning and read a news headline: “The new novel by the great writer Zakariah al-Khartiti is now on sale at the bookshop of the great newspaper on Tahrir Street. Reserve your copy now.”

Bodour got up and ran to the street. She kept running, only stopping to catch her breath, and then continued running again. She saw the novel carrying the name of her husband. It was the same novel she had written with her own blood, sweat, and sleepless nights. The same novel, every word, every letter, every comma, every full stop, every dash. Her own novel was published everywhere under the name of the great writer, Zakariah al-Khartiti.

Bodour lay on the pavement, her body stretching under the blazing sun and the freezing cold. Her eyelids were half closed and her chest moved neither up nor down. Nothing stirred except her light cotton dress, moved by the breeze which lifted it up a little from the body lying on the pavement. Around her the street children sang, “Mum is coming back, coming soon, coming with a gift ...”