Zeina (6 page)

Her friend, Safaa al-Dhabi, held her little white hands in hers. Her fingers trembled and her palm was moist with sweat.

“Courage, Bodour!”

“May God help me, Safi!”

“Yes, God is great!”

The drumbeats sounded and the music played. A wedding song celebrating the bride and groom was sung. “Oh beautiful bride, fall in the arms of your lovely groom ...”

The words “fall in” sounded in Bodour’s ears as “fallen”. She let out a sigh, a smile, and a little short nervous laugh, which sounded like a stifled sob. Safi gave her a side glance, suppressing her laughter.

In the bedroom, before he took off her wedding gown, he whispered in her ear the words “I love you”. But she knew he was lying. She began to breathe more calmly and the beats within her chest slowed as Badreya’s voice came to her from below the pillow while she lay underneath him. A lie for a lie, and an eye for an eye, Bodour, as God has said.

Bodour believed in the Holy Books, while Badreya, like her friend Naim, believed that the future of humanity lay in science and art, that the universe has been evolving over millions of years, and that Adam wasn’t created out of clay.

Miss Mariam carried on looking for Zeina Bint Zeinat after she stopped coming to school. The image of her walking tall among the girls and sitting on the backless piano stool, her back straight and her thin, long fingers moving with the speed of light over the keys, was engraved in her memory. Her eyes were two blue volcanic stones, two dark blue flames that changed with the movement of the earth around the sun and with her mounting anger at one of the girls. When Miss Mariam smiled at her, she had a bright childish smile like the sunlight in the morning dispelling the night’s darkness. Miss Mariam lived in a two-bedroom apartment on a narrow street off Tahrir Road. Her Muslim mother, Fatima, had married the Christian Mikhail without an official marriage contract. Both Shari’a and civil law forbade the union of a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man. Fatima ran away from her family in Upper Egypt and Mikhail ran away from his in al-Beheira province. They met in Cairo during one of the anti-government demonstrations.

Miss Mariam became a music teacher. Before he emigrated abroad, Mikhail had been an oud (lute) musician in a band. Her mother, Fatima, was shot dead by her Upper Egyptian father.

On a cold, dark night, as Miss Mariam was walking along Nile Street, she saw a little girl lying on a long wooden bench inside a wooden shack, where street children slept in their ash-colored galabeyas. A huge cat with green eyes gleaming in the darkness lay near them, surrounded by her six little newborn kittens, clinging to her for warmth. She licked the dirt and blood from their little bodies.

Miss Mariam wore black leather shoes with thick, square heels. She stomped hard on the ground, one foot after the other, the sound ringing in the stillness of the night. On hearing the sound, the mother cat started to her feet. She encircled her six little kittens, her green eyes burning, and bared her teeth, ready to defend them. Like street children, street cats were always engaged in fights: against stray dogs, gangsters, drug traffickers, unemployed and unhopeful young people, farmers who had deserted their poor, barren land, workers laid off by bankrupt factories, prostitutes with nothing left for them to sell but their bodies, and wives living on the streets after their husbands had pronounced the words “You’re divorced” three times.

Zeina Bint Zeinat was unique in that she was fortified against molestation and rape. No man could touch her, even when she was fast asleep. Her long pointed fingers would stick like nails into the neck of any man, and her strong, sharp teeth would cut into any part of his flesh like knives and would tear it out.

During the day, she sat with other girls on the wooden benches or on the stone or iron fences along the Nile. She recited aloud to them a song she had written in her dream, which she knew by heart along with the music and the rhythm. She tapped with her toes, or with her fingers that were as hard as nails, on the wooden bench, on the iron fence, or on the asphalt of the street. She trod on rocks and digested stones, tapping the rhythm and singing along with the girls who danced in their tattered galabeyas and stomped with their little chapped feet on the ground. The clouds in their eyes vanished, revealing their true color: dark blue or green, like those of newborn kittens. Zeina Bint Zeinat watched over them like a mother, even though she was only a year or two older than they were. She looked as though she was a hundred years older, as though she hadn’t been born a baby but had grown tall inside the womb and come out into the world as a fully formed girl. She was so strong that whenever the world dealt her a blow, she retaliated with equally strong blows. But the child inside her survived and sang until the very end. Her heart beat hard within her chest whenever Miss Mariam or one of the girls on the street or at school smiled at her, and when she stood on stage.

She had no friend at school except Mageeda al-Khartiti, who sometimes invited her to her large house in Garden City. There they played together in the big garden around the house. They also played the piano together in the large lounge, although Mageeda’s plump fingers were extraordinarily slow. She was as short as her father, and when she walked she swayed like a duckling, very much like her mother.

A large room built of red brick stood in the back garden. On its walls grew little bougainvillea shrubs that reached the roof with their various colors: purple, white, yellow, and crimson red. The inside walls of the room were lined with bookshelves up to the ceiling. In the corner, next to the window, stood a large desk. On it there were many items: a big electric lamp, piles of papers, clippings from magazines and newspapers, and handwritten articles by Zakariah al-Khartiti. He sometimes came to this room in search of peace and quiet, when he wished to be away from the house and his wife, Bodour, and her friends with their high-pitched voices, especially her bosom friend, Safaa al-Dhabi. These two were inseparable, whether at university or at home. Bodour would read her critical articles aloud to Safaa before they were published. They would argue for hours on end until night-time. Safaa would then take her handbag and leave.

But before she left, Bodour would call out to her, “Forgot to tell you, Safi ...”

“Yes, Bodour?”

They would stand and talk on the marble staircase, laughing every now and then. Zakariah al-Khartiti could recognize his wife’s laugh from among a thousand, a soft elongated laugh that trailed into an intermittent gasp which sounded like suppressed sobs. He couldn’t bear that laugh and often slapped her on the face in bed to stop her laughing. And if she cried, he slapped her, for her tears were identical to her laughter as he lay on top of her. She never raised her hand to slap him back. She’d look down and suppress the tears or the laughter, stifling the urge to raise her hand and bring it down on his face. She wouldn’t slap him or hit him, and she wouldn’t tell him what she thought of him. If he told her that he loved her, her lips might open to produce the stifled words buried deep inside her, but only a stream of voiceless hot air would come out.

Her husband never slapped her while her father was still alive. He only married her because she was the daughter of the great al-Damhiri, whose photograph appeared next to those of the eminent personalities of the state and whose image flashed on television screens. He travelled around in a stretch limousine driven by a dark-skinned man in a soldier’s uniform. He lived in a villa overlooking the Nile, with a study lined with books on literature, art, politics, history, philosophy, and religion. With a single line, he could transform an unknown, upcoming journalist into a great writer or an editor-in-chief.

In the large garden surrounding the house, Mageeda played hide-and-seek with Zeina Bint Zeinat. Mageeda would hide behind a tree, underneath a car parked in the garage, or in the storeroom behind the big wooden or cardboard boxes, where her mother stored the books and novels she received by post. She usually stacked them on the floor next to her desk, along with the newspapers and magazines she had finished reading. When Nanny cleaned the room, she’d carry the books and novels, still in the packages carrying name, address and postage stamps, in a huge black plastic bag, and would take them across the great hall, down the marble staircase to the garden. She would pass along the stone pathways in between the flower basins, arriving at the long corridor standing between the iron fence and the trees. She would follow the pathway round the house until she reached the back garden, sometimes stopping briefly to catch her breath or to peep inside the master’s room. She would glimpse him through the glass window sitting at his desk, reading in the light of an electric lamp, writing his daily column, or just staring into emptiness with his eyes fixed upward as though waiting for inspiration from heaven.

Mageeda didn’t hide in her father’s room. Only once did she enter that room while her father was engrossed in writing. He raised his head from the paper and shouted angrily, “Get out of here! Never come in here again. Nobody should enter this room, is that clear?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Zeina Bint Zeinat was capable of finding and catching Mageeda in any hiding place in the garden. Her large eyes sparkled with a blue, green, or red flame, reflecting the colors of the flowers. They revealed to her all the hiding places as though they could emit light rays. Her body was light and agile. She was like a white butterfly in her Egyptian cotton dress running among the trees. Her mother Zeinat used to buy three meters of cotton from the al-Mahallah al-Kubra outlet on Tahrir Street for her. Miss Mariam paid for the material, the black leather shoes, and the white ribbon in her frizzy hair that stood like black wires.

A girl with this kind of hair was the object of people’s scorn, for girls from good families had long smooth hair falling softly down their backs. Their hair submitted easily to the movement of the gentle breeze and the fingers of their husbands after marriage.

Zeina Bint Zeinat had no family. Her father died while she was still in the womb. She inherited from him the tough, stubborn “gene”, the upright gait and the robust head. She inherited the hair which stood like iron spikes protecting the head from blows, and her large pupils which had the black and blue colors of earth and sea. The pupils of her eyes rolled in their spheres like the earth around the sun, and were surrounded by the clear white color of the waves underneath the sunlight or the mountaintops rising high beyond the sea.

Through the wall of the womb she heard her mother shouting against injustice and hailing freedom. She heard the irregular whimpers and suppressed sobs, the sound of the whip lashing in the air and falling on living flesh, dripping with blood. Rifle butts kicked him below the stomach, between the firm thighs, on the tip of the male organ they call “the rod” in prison. The prison warden, with his narrow sunken eyes, glanced at the prisoner’s penis. His eyes were filled with envy and admiration, since envy and admiration often went hand in hand. The prison warden’s was tiny, thin and curved, with hardly any blood flowing through it. The little blood that flowed there was yellowish, anaemic, and full of the fear of God and of his superiors. If it had an erection, it would totter and reel, hesitating between going forward and refraining. It stayed shrunk in the marital bed and never had any action except when stimulated by a young jailed prostitute. He lied to his wife that he went to see a doctor about his sexual incompetence. He crept from her bed at night to visit prostitutes after swallowing the blue Viagra pill.

Admiration and envy were directed at the prisoner’s proud head. Even when crushed under blows, it remained erect, looking up to the sky, challenging both the sky and the superiors. At night, the prison warden dreamed of striking the prisoner’s neck with his sword, removing the proud head and installing it on his own wobbly neck. But this was an impossible dream, for the prisoner’s head could never replace the jailer’s.

Mageeda and Zeina Bint Zeinat played hide-and-seek in the large garden. Whenever Mageeda disappeared, Zeina managed to find her and to take hold of her arm, pulling her and screaming with joy “Got you, Mageeda!”

Roles changed during the course of the game, for Mageeda would become the hunter, and Zeina Bint Zeinat would hide. When Mageeda untied the blindfolds covering her eyes, she would look around for Zeina. She would look behind the boxes in the storeroom and underneath the cars parked in the garage. She would inspect the holes in the ground between the trees and the flower basins.

But Mageeda never managed even once to catch Zeina Bint Zeinat, for the latter was born and bred on the streets. She was experienced in hiding from the eyes of deities and Devils. Satan’s watchful eyes couldn’t find her and God’s sleepless eyes dozed off when Zeina Bint Zeinat disappeared in the darkness.

Only once did Satan’s eyes glimpse her as she ran between the flower basins. He reached out with his long, firm arms, which were as hard as steel, and caught her by the hand. He pulled her into the back room in the garden. In one instant, as she ran and sprinted among the flowers like a white butterfly and the air lifted the hem of her white dress, baring her legs, Satan’s eyes fell on the soft thighs exposed to the wind. His eyes moved upward from the legs to the smooth body, until they rested on the soft pubic area where no hair yet grew.

Zeina Bint Zeinat was nine then, a schoolgirl. Miss Mariam held her fingers high for all the other girls to see, saying, “These fingers are created for music. Zeina Bint Zeinat will become a great musician one day!”

Ashamed of her short, stout body, Mageeda shrank in her chair. Her plump fingers couldn’t move smoothly or quickly over the keys of the piano. Her neck, like her short plump body, sagged under the weight of her head when she walked.