Zeina (7 page)

Mageeda’s little heart was filled with a combination of admiration and envy. Although Zeina was Mageeda’s senior by one year only, she seemed to be a hundred years older, for she seemed to have known life and death, God and Satan, and was no longer scared of them.

Mageeda’s heart, in contrast, was filled with fear, for she was terrified of the everlasting fires of hell after death, and of her father’s fist when it rose high and fell on her face or her mother’s. She suffered the blow, like her mother, without uttering a word or shedding a tear. She couldn’t lift her hand high and bring it down on his face, for her hands were plump and slow like her mother’s. She’d look down in shame, as her mother did as she walked.

On that Friday, Bodour went to visit her only friend, Safi, accompanied by her daughter, Mageeda. Safi lived alone in a small apartment on al-Agouza Street. In her early youth, Safi was married to a Marxist university colleague. She abandoned God and the Prophet for the sake of love. Her husband vowed undying loyalty and fidelity. But he broke his vows to her, for she caught him with the young housemaid in her apartment. He told her that men were polygamous by nature and that change was a constant and unchanging natural principle. Infidelity for him was the residue of feudalism and private property. A wife didn’t own her husband because human beings were free, and freedom was the highest ethical value, only paralleled by love. After her divorce, Safi got married to a man who believed in God and the Prophet, a man who held a yellow rosary in his hand. On his forehead was the dark prayer mark gained from frequently lying prostrate with his forehead touching the ground in obedience to God. When he vowed love and fidelity, Safi gave up Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. She wore a scarf round her head to hide her hair. She was married to him according to God’s law and following the Prophet’s example. Two years later, as she was walking along a street at the other end of town, she read the name of her husband on one of the houses. The exact name was engraved on a brass plate nailed to the door.

She hesitated for a moment. Before ringing the bell, she told herself that full names were identical in many records, including election lists and police registers. An innocent man could be detained because he had the same name as a criminal, or a dead man might even rise from his grave to cast his vote for the president.

She rang the bell three times before the door was opened. At the door stood her husband, in the flesh and with the dark prayer mark on his forehead. He wore white pyjamas adorned with pink flowers. His trousers were loose and unbuttoned and his penis peeped through the opening. She couldn’t mistake it. Her nostrils were still filled with his odor from the night before. She raised her hand high in the air and was about to bring it down on his cheek when a little girl appeared from behind him, pulling at his hand and yelling “Dad!” He pushed the girl inside and said to her, as he lifted his face toward the sky, “You believe in God and the Prophet, Safi. God’s law gives me the right to marry another woman. The law of the land gives me the same right. Go to court if you wish!”

It was Friday when Zakariah al-Khartiti left the villa in Garden City and headed to the mosque on the adjacent street. Mosques proliferated on streets, pavements, and alleys. Tiny mosques sometimes sprouted inside houses, in courtyards, or in entrances. A little minaret might emerge from a wall, and a loudspeaker might be attached by nails to it to turn the structure into a mosque for men to go for Friday prayers and listen to the imam’s sermon.

It was a warm spring morning. The warmth of the sun seeped through the body after the chill of winter. Zakariah al-Khartiti had abandoned the heavy woollen suits and the scarves around the neck. He wore instead a silk suit over an open shirt without a tie. The soft breeze tickled his short, fat neck and moved to his hairy chest whose little black hairs grew thinner year after year.

After reaching the age of sixty, the black hairs on Zakariah al-Khartiti’s chest and head became interspersed with white hairs. He had a large bald spot in the middle of his head which gleamed gold in the brightness of spring. His narrow, sunken eyes had a sly look about them. Whenever his eyes fell on the column of his newspaper colleague, he’d turn his face away.

No street or alley was devoid of a newspaper kiosk or a pavement covered with magazines and newspapers, especially the distinguished daily
Sphinx,
which was everywhere. It was displayed in kiosks at the corners of streets and squares, and spread on the pavements near mosques, churches, schools, law courts, nightclubs, theaters, and cinemas. On its front page the picture of the president loomed large. Laid out on the street around the paper were charms, the Qur’an, rosaries, censers, Ramadan fasting schedules, prayer times, photographs of candidates for parliament, the consultative council, presidential elections, or village and city councils. There were also pictures of theater, cinema, and television stars. All the photographs were placed side by side: the photographs of the Great Imam with his turban, beard and moustache, and the rising star, Zizi, who took the torch of dancing and singing from her mother, Zozo.

Zakariah al-Khartiti moved the beads of the rosary with his short, lean fingers. He felt relaxed after finishing writing his daily column and after his wife and daughter had gone out. He was particularly relieved to see the back of his wife. Her observant eyes, like God’s, knew his infidelities before they even happened. She detected them before they even became an idea in his brain cells or a passing shiver down the hidden member beneath his belly, when his eyes fell on the thighs of a little girl jumping on the street or an adolescent girl wearing a miniskirt.

After prayers, Zakariah al-Khartiti was relieved of the weight of his conscience. He used to visit Mecca on an annual basis to wash clean his numerous sins. In the mosque he whispered to the man squatting next to him, “Good God, brother! God shows His mercy to human beings. Man by nature is sinful, but God is merciful nonetheless. If it hadn’t been for prayers, fasting, and pilgrimage, we wouldn’t have been able to bear the weight of our guilt, we would have died of a guilty conscience!”

“Very true, brother! God forgives all sins except the sin of worshipping other gods besides Him. Even adultery may be forgiven as long as we worship Him alone.”

“But this adultery subject is controversial. We haven’t been introduced, brother, have we?”

“I’m one of God’s worshippers, a small employee at the government archives. And you, sir?”

“I’m Zakariah al-Khartiti.”

“What do you do?”

Zakariah al-Khartiti felt a pang in his throat. He had imagined that everybody knew who he was. He thought everyone read his daily column in the paper, saw his picture inside the square frame on the pages of magazines, or recognized his face on television screens during interviews and discussions.

“Don’t you read the papers, brother?”

“Not really, sir. I used to read them when I was younger and I believed every word they published. As I grew older, I came to realize that they were all liars, beginning with our own president to the American, British, and French presidents. Even my son lies to me, and so do my wife and daughter. But my wife is the greatest liar of all. She covered her head with a scarf and is pretending to be a saint. All the women have put on scarves to cheat us, sir, or what do you think?”

“What?”

“What do you mean by ‘what’?”

“It means there are people who fear God and the fires of hell, doesn’t it?”

“Right or what?”

“What!”

A laugh escaped the two at the same moment. It sounded like a jarring note in the middle of the murmurs of holy verses in the mosque. It rang shamefully inappropriate as the heads were bent in holy fear and the foreheads touched the floor in total submission.

“Tell me, sir, does God really exist?”

“Of course, sir. May He forgive us for all our trespasses!”

“My son is an intelligent boy and he has read many books. He tells me that the science of the cosmos proves that God doesn’t exist!”

“Your son is an ignoramus, a half-literate human being. Lower your voice so that no one hears you. Concentrate on prayers, for God exists, no doubt. Let your son read my daily column in the daily
Sphinx
so that he can unite science with religion.”

“Do you write in newspapers, sir? Are you a journalist?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Then you are a liar as well?”

Another laugh escaped, this time not from the lips of Zakariah al-Khartiti. He pouted his lips, got up slowly and rubbed his back. He left the mosque, walking slowly, his thin legs curved a little and his back arched somewhat. He tottered as he walked, vacillating between misery and joy, between virtue and vice, between religious belief and science. He was no different from the words of his column, swinging like a pendulum between the government and the opposition, between sincerity and lies. His column had the title “Honoring Our Pledge”. He borrowed some of his terms from Karl Marx and others from the verses of the Holy Books, quoting freely from the Qur’an, the Bible and the president’s speeches. His readers were puzzled about what he was trying to say. Was he for the war or against it? For peace or against it? For faith or for apostasy? Bodour, his wife, called him the mercury man, while her friend, Safi, described him as the mirage that ignorant eyes mistook for water.

As Zakariah al-Khartiti walked along, the movement of his legs produced a titillating sensation that ran through his veins, invigorated by the warm sun and the soft breeze coming through the opening of his shirt onto his chest and belly, and tickling the lower part of his abdomen containing the hidden body part. With the movement of the thighs as he walked, and the friction of flesh, the hidden body part began to feel some ecstasy, to tremble with some pleasure or the promise of pleasure which his wife could not give him. The reason, perhaps, was that her clitoris had been cut off in childhood. Since the day she was born, she had been repressed and oppressed. She was oppressed by her military father, who became miraculously metamorphosed into a great writer overnight. Or perhaps because she was in love with another man, a fact he realized from their wedding day, and even earlier, when he saw her framed photograph. Her sleepy, downcast eyes radiated an elusive femininity, and revealed a whorish glance that hid behind the veil of literature, art, culture, and dramatic and cinematic criticism.

Zakariah al-Khartiti often forgot his numerous transgressions, which he wiped clean by going on pilgrimage, praying and fasting. He married Bodour without love and without sincerity, a marriage of convenience. From the moment he saw her father’s picture in the paper alongside top government officials, and from the moment her father became head of the great cultural and literary establishment concerned with art and journalism, his subconscious mind told him to pay heed, for this was his last and only chance to achieve his dreams in journalism.

From the first moment Bodour saw him, her subconscious mind told her to watch out, for he was an opportunist, an upstart who was using the chance to arrive at the top before any of his peers. She realized that he was the product of the school of the revolution, like the other young people of his generation. It was a lost generation that fell between a corrupt monarchical system and a republic that was even more corrupt, between Karl Marx and the Prophet Muhammad, between British imperialism covering itself with fig leaves and American imperialism shamelessly flaunting its nakedness, between women wearing headscarves and others parading in miniskirts. Between these were the young women who hid their hair with scarves but wore extra-tight jeans revealing their bellies.

Zakariah al-Khartiti gazed at women’s legs as he walked down the street. His narrow, deep-set eyes would move up the long slender legs until they got to the plump thighs. Girls stomped with the heels of their shoes on the ground like wild mares. When a girl’s round buttocks moved, his finger reached out in his imagination to the deep cleavage between them, each buttock hard and round like a rubber ball. From the back, one couldn’t tell a girl from a boy. In his adolescence, he used to desire males with their firm, tiger-like haunches. A senior teacher once took him to the lavatory and violated his virginity. He later did the same to a younger orphan boy with no father or mother.

Zakariah al-Khartiti banished these old, deeply buried memories from his mind. He moved his head with the rhythm of the dance music on the radio or television. He felt relieved because he had just finished writing his daily column. It was a heavy load that weighed down on his mind until he finished writing the last page. He had a whole day without his wife and daughter. Whenever his wife was away from the house, a secret ecstasy overtook him and the invisible chains fell from his mind and body. During her brief absence, the house became his own. He would extend his arms and legs until the discs of his spine creaked. He would bring out the small green notebook from the secret drawer at the bottom of the desk. This was where he kept his old secrets: secret pamphlets detailing political actions, his secret sexual activities, pictures of prostitutes, love letters sent to him by women or written by him but never sent, lines of love poetry, decent expressions, vulgar expressions by street children that he found exciting and sexually arousing. Vulgarity was essential for him to reach sexual arousal. But his wife was decent, like all women from good families. If he whispered a vulgar word in her ear during lovemaking, she’d pout her lips in disgust and a cold chill would run down her body, from top to toe. If he pressed on her with all his might, or if he pricked her with a knife in the sole of her feet or the folds of her flesh, not a cell in her body would move and neither would she bat a single eyelid.