Two Women in One

by Nawal El Saadawi

  The hired father would then sell the corpse to the cemetery guard, who would sell it to the undertaker, who would sell it either to the dean of the medical school or to some rich student who wanted to study it at home without bothering to show up at the dissecting room every day. Bahiah looked closely at the skull. She saw the long crevices between the bones, resembling deep wounds, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep eye-sockets and the tapering jaws above the deep gaps between the teeth.

  It was like the face of the child in tattered clothes who climbed onto the tram one day. He carried boxes of pins, matchboxes and a few combs. He called out his wares hoarsely, hopping from one tram to another on his one leg. He looked at people with his deep sunken eyes, searching among the faces for one with the features of a mother or father, who would reach into his pocket for a piastre or two and buy a comb or a box of pins.

  But the faces on the tram were not those of fathers and mothers; instead they were those stunningly similar faces stamped out by the government like coins, sitting shoulder to shoulder in silence, their lower bodies immobile and fixed to their seats, their upper parts shaking slowly and rhythmically with the motion of the tram. Their huge skulls swung back and forth like pendulums. Their broad, padded shoulders were stuck to each other, their ties wound round their necks like hangmen’s ropes. When the tram stopped, their heads jerked back violently. They leapt from their seats, holding their heads and staring around them, their yellow eyes wide and fearful. Suddenly a child’s scream filled the air.

  Round yellow eyes turned to the body, mangled under the wheels of the tram. Pins, matchboxes and combs lay scattered on the ground. The red spot shone on the asphalt, and the red circle widened like the sun, while the hollow eyes gazed out under the iron wheels like two deep holes in the belly of the earth.

  They all ran their hands anxiously over their heads, necks, arms and thighs. Reassured that their heads were still on their shoulders, their bodies on the seats and their blood still coursing through their veins, they parted their lips and let out long, deep sighs. And their eyes gleamed with concealed delight. Some of them shook hands, congratulating each other on their escape and praising God for His great mercy, for the torn body under the wheels was not theirs but someone else’s. They raised their hands to heaven and murmured a prayer of thanksgiving, under the illusion that they were bribing Allah with those recitations (for He might destroy them at any moment), so that their necks would remain on their shoulders for ever and ever.

  Bahiah turned the skull so that its hollow eyes faced the wall. She closed her anatomy book, reached behind the bed, pulled out the white painting and stood it against the wall. She sat on a small mattress on the floor, her brushes and paints beside her.

  Her room was in total darkness except for a spot of white light shining on the painting from a small lamp. It was dead of night, her father was sound asleep. No voices and no movement except the rustle of the brush, criss-crossing the smooth surface. With a light motion of her fingers she willed her hand in whatever direction she wanted. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, warding off sleep. She gazed at her lines and at the coloured spot for hours.

  Sometimes her hand would slap all those similar faces with purposeful brush strokes. She tore away the stretched mask of flesh with her fingers, dragging the torn body out from under the wheels and filling the slender skull with flesh. The two sunken holes became a pair of black eyes like her own.

  In the morning she woke to the sound of her father’s voice, shrill as an alarm clock. She put on her black trousers and white blouse, picked up her bulging leather satchel and walked towards the tram, striding along confidently, moving her legs freely. When she saw the sameness of the faces on the tram, she pursed her lips angrily. When she saw the other female students, walking with that strange mechanical gait, their legs held tightly together, she realized that they belonged to one species and she to another. She stood in the dissecting room, one foot propped on the marble table, the other leg, long and straight, of sound bone and muscle, planted on the floor. From the corner of her eye she saw the legs of the male students, their swollen red noses and their backs hunched over the corpses. She looked around astonished, as if she had lost her way. But there was the lancet between her fingers. The blue anatomy book bore the familiar white label: ‘Name: Bahiah Shaheen. Subject: 1st Year Anatomy’, which never failed to astonish her.

  As she worked her way down through the block of flesh immersed in formalin, her lancet hit a hard object, which she managed to extract. It fell onto the marble table, sounding like a piece of gravel. The lancet cut it in half, and it turned out to be a dark clot of congealed blood. One of the female students said, with that suppressed feminine laugh, ‘Goodness, I thought it was a bullet!’ Another girl craned her neck to see, staring at the open heart in amazement: ‘A bullet in the heart!’ A third gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth: ‘How sad!’ A fourth sighed audibly: ‘If only it was me.’

  None of the familiar ideas about death could be found in the dissecting room. Here death was unreal. The corpse was not a dead man. The blood clot, congealed like a bullet in the heart, might stir a suppressed desire buried deep in the soul, like a heart rent apart, like blood arrested in its absurd cycle and congealing in the veins. It was death, both feared and desired; sought after, evaded and imagined everywhere, anywhere, in the mortuary.

  Bahiah turned to the girl who had said, ‘If only it was me’ and asked, ‘Do you want to die?’ The girl gasped in astonishment and disapproval: ‘Death? God forbid!’ Bahiah now understood the tragedy. She knew why human beings hide their real desires: because they are strong enough to be destructive; and since people do not want to be destroyed, they opt for a passive life with no real desires.

  Bahiah grasped this end of the thread and set out to seize the other, then realized that there was no other end, only the bottomless abyss itself. She gathered up her lancets and dissection instruments, put them in her leather satchel and left the room. She strode out into the college grounds with her long quick steps. With each stride her feeling of imminent danger mounted. She wished she could go back to the dissecting room, but a hidden feeling drew her towards that very danger, to the brink of the bottomless abyss.

  ‘Bahiah’. The name rang in her ear and she jumped. As she did, she realized that she had a body of her own which she could move and stir without the world moving with it, and that she had a name of her own the sound of which would make her jump. Every time she heard her name called, she was astonished. What an extraordinary power, which could distinguish her name from all other names! What a miraculous power that picked out her body from among the millions of other floating bodies!

  When she stopped, she discovered that she was still in the college grounds, standing in front of a large painting hanging on a small dark green door. She stopped no longer than thirty seconds, and was about to head back towards the dissecting room to continue her work, to remain at it for ever. But thirty seconds can change the course of a life; in thirty seconds a bomb can explode, transforming the face of the city and the earth. Life’s crucial events happen all of a sudden, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. Insignificant things occur slowly, taking their time, sometimes even dragging on for a lifetime.

  When she looked up from the painting she realized that someone was standing in front of her. Not just anyone. He was the sort of person you have to look at, even if only for a few seconds. But that brief moment is enough to freeze those features before your eyes for ever. When the first moment had passed, she managed to stifle her surprise and return the stare. With her natural inquisitiveness, she scrutinized the unusual features, trying to understand what made them so extraordinary. The forehead was commonplace, the eyes ordinary; she wondered how such ordinary features could make up such a strange, extraordinary face.

  He was directly in front of her, his right foot on the threshold of the door to the exhibition. He would have bumped into her had he not happened to look up and see her. Th
en their eyes met and she realized that the secret behind this extraordinary face lay in the way his eyes moved. It was strange, different from the other male students. Their eyes seemed not to see or do anything. They just opened like mirrors in which things were reflected. The eyes of the male students did not really see, or rather, they did not see things as they really were.

  When his eyes moved in front of hers, she felt as if he were seeing her. It was the first time she had ever been seen by any eyes other than her own. Only in a mirror had she been aware of being seen by a pair of black eyes — her own. In the street, on the tram or at college, she realized that eyes were incapable of seeing her or distinguishing her from thousands of others, that she was lost among the sameness of bodies and that nothing could save her from being lost, except her own hand when it touched her body, reminding her that she had a body of her own; or when it took to drawing on the white canvas, making its motion visible, with clear lines distinct from the outside universe by their own external boundaries and their own roundness, thanks to a strong deliberate motion, with which she would destroy other wills, destroy the body, unmask the features, tear away the white label on the blue cover bearing the false name.

  She saw his unusual eyes examining her face as she herself examined it in the mirror, piercing her eyes through long, narrow corridors leading to her very depths. One more moment was all he needed to reach the end. But she jerked her head away. She was afraid of reaching ends. She feared arrival, the impossibility of returning to where she had been; she was afraid that by a magic touch she would become somebody other than Bahiah Shaheen, somebody who was her real self.

  She had never known exactly who that real self was. But she had always been sure that she was not Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, the girl with the light brown skin standing hesitantly before the door.

  The word ‘hesitant’ does not apply here, however. For in fact she did not hesitate for a moment. She was drawn by a mysterious desire to press ahead and not to stop until she had reached the dangerous end. She was aware that she was heading there inevitably: it was her destiny. She was going there in no ordinary manner; rather, she was drawn by the strength of her desire to know her own destiny and by the intensity of her fear of that knowledge, a fear so great that it helped to drive her there.

  If she were really Bahiah Shaheen, she would have turned, taken a step backwards and gone into the dissecting room. Today would have been like yesterday, and like tomorrow. She would have fallen back into the whirlpool of everyday life and everyday faces. But she was not Bahiah Shaheen, she was another diabolical being, born of neither her mother nor her father. Her features resembled those she saw in the mirror, but they were more intense. Her eyes were darker, the tilt of her nose more pronounced. Her complexion was not pale, but brown — burning and red, the colour of blood.

  She did not like Bahiah Shaheen. She could see her defects all too clearly. She hated that polite obedient voice. She was irritated by that placid look which did not see things, but allowed them to be reflected from her, like a watery surface. She hated that nose which was not sufficiently upturned. She despised that paleness, whose real cause she knew. It was the paleness of a complexion drained of blood by fear, a fear that people seek to hide.

  Bahiah Shaheen was afraid of her real self, of that other self dwelling within her, that devil who moved and saw things with the sharpest powers of perception. Her nose had a strange sharp tilt, like the edge of a sword. With that blade she cut the world in two and pressed ahead mercilessly and without hesitation, to meet the end, the end of the end, even if that meant the bottomless abyss itself.

  But Bahiah Shaheen was hesitant. She would stop half-way, for she was afraid of ends. The end, she felt, was final, it was the high frightening summit, the point suspended in space with nothing before or behind it, the destructive summit, after which there is only extinction. She stood in the middle of the road. She knew she would stop there, but felt safe at that middle resting-point, in the centre of the tightrope, where the two split forces were equal. She was weightless, her resistance nil. It was the point of total stillness and complete unthreatened security. In other words, it was the point of death.

  Bahiah Shaheen did not know that she stood on the brink of death itself and could not escape it. Her mind could not grasp that truth. In her funny naive way, she believed that she would somehow find safety by avoiding danger, by steering clear of any dangerous situations. Her mind could not see that she already stood at the heart of danger itself, and that any movement was a step towards safety, towards life. But she did not know how to save herself, or even why she had to do it. In other words, she did not know the purpose of her life.

  When she moved her head to one side, he smiled that strange smile. At that moment she did not see it. He whispered softly, ‘Bahiah Shaheen?’

  The question surprised her and she stammered. But she quickly realized what was wrong, saw the name on the white name tag and answered hesitantly, ‘Yes.’

  He put out his hand: ‘I’m Saleem Ibrahim.’

  It was the first hand ever to envelop hers. His palm was the same size as her own, so were his long thin fingers. A real flesh-and-blood hand whose warmth spread through her palm, asserting its reality, for it was the same temperature as her own. The blood coursing through the veins of his hand beat with the pulse in her own wrist, like the earth beneath her and the air around her. He gazed into her wide black eyes, now full of that panic which surfaces only when danger is sensed. Panic widened his eyes too, but he checked himself and brought his gaze under control. In thirty seconds they knew each other in a way that would have taken another man and woman fifty years.

  ‘I congratulate you on the exhibition.’

  Overcome by sudden shyness, she blushed and stammered, ‘I’m still just starting out.’

  There were only three or four students at the exhibition. There were thousands of them at the medical school, but why should medical students be interested in an art exhibition? What good was a painting, a story or a piece of music to them? The dissecting room and the lectures, learnt by rote, parrotted back in examinations, and then forgotten for ever — nothing else mattered.

  They stood before the painting, shoulder to shoulder. He was the same height as her. They stood side by side. His leg was just like hers. Only a small distance separated them, just room enough for a little air to pass between their bodies. A distance as long as she was tall, but hair-thin. It was an insulating distance, made of air, a substance other than that of their bodies. And it was very fine, like the blade of a sword separating one body from another and cutting through the flesh.

  She was struck by a sense of amazement as in a dream, when momentous events happen in seconds; when you meet a stranger and know him, when you meet the dead and shake hands with them, when you can fly, arms, legs and all, or sink to the bottom of the sea without drowning, or walk a tightrope without falling, or see a house destroyed and rebuilt in seconds, and suddenly everything becomes possible in the twinkling of an eye.

  She was used to that sense of amazement in her dreams. But now she was wide awake. She tried to make sure she was really awake, but failed. The only way was to touch her own body. But she had done that in dreams too, when she was not sure if she was asleep or not. This failure frightened her, for she could never be sure of anything in her life. Any attempt to make sure only increased her doubts.

  His black eyes were fixed on the painting, which was black as night; the white dots looked like stars, but they were not stars, more like tiny diamonds. No, not really diamonds either, but small eyes, glittering with transparent tears. No, not eyes but a pair of small eyes in the face of the thin pale child walking alone in the street, tiny fingers red and swollen from the sharp end of the ruler: twenty strokes on each hand for losing the bag. At the bend in the street the big man with the handlebar moustache grabbed the child by the arm. The bag fell to the ground. With puny arms and legs, the child struck at the big l
egs, but they were strong and gaped like destiny’s jaws. The child lay between those legs, face down on the asphalt near the wall. A fine trickle of blood streamed from her nostrils down her face; it would clot before her father saw it. But her father had looked into her eyes and known from the paleness that she was still bleeding. He searched between her arms and legs for the wound. When he saw the red circle as clear as the sun, he raised his big palm and slapped the child’s face.

  She glanced at the quick gleam in his eyes, and at a tiny muscle that twitched under his left eye. She gestured to the other painting, but he asked her in a low voice, ‘Did you cry when you were a baby?’

  She stuttered in amazement. Thinking back to her childhood dreams — the mythical god, her father, the policeman, the school and the sharp end of the ruler rapping her small fingers — she answered, ‘They used to hit me on account of someone else called Bahiah Shaheen, who was obedient and well-behaved.’

  He gave a short laugh and looked at the other painting — medical students with their thick spectacles and angular elbows crowding round a lecturer pulling a cart, crying his wares like a salesman, selling copies of his lectures, which he had printed on a hand duplicator. At the college gate were women in black gallabiahs and headcloths they had tied round their necks. They were following a corpse out of the dissecting room. At the tram station, a blind man was being led by a lame woman. Behind them were children with bare bottoms. Large heads, alike as coins struck from the same mould, looked on from inside the tramcars. On the corner lurked the policeman with the black moustache.