Golden Chariot

by Fadia Faqir

  The existence of cassettes with suras recorded by well-known readers of the Qur’an accredited by Al-Azhar did not present any real competition to her nor did she fear the Islamic associations who forbade these ceremonies of lamentation and elegy because they considered them contradictory to orthodox religious education. Lately these ceremonies had become more popular for reasons she never knew, but she suspected they responded to a need for something which had been lost through the empty words sung by the poets which inundated the public day and night on the radio and television. Equally, those obscure poems written by poets who fancied themselves as avant-garde writers and which were occasionally published in magazines and newspapers did not in any way address the issues and sentiments which preoccupy the public. Nor did poems by the other outmoded poets who insisted on writing in the old Amudi style, weaving their poetry from worn out threads of a chivalry which no longer existed, for the values of the noble knight were no longer suited to the trials of daily life and the bitter struggle for survival.

  Some years later, when her undoubted mastery as an official mourner was famed, Azima started investing her money in a new way, secured around her neck rather than in the bank: that is, she transferred her earnings from money into gold jewellery. She also began to participate in the Saints’ day festivals with religious poems and poems of praise which were well received and broadcast with the help of modern technology – namely the microphone – capable of giving strength, magic and brilliance to weak voices. Azima’s voice was not particularly distinguished, but because everyone seemed to have taken up singing, not only on Saints’ days but also on radio, television and on the cassettes which had spread like wildfire from the furthermost point in the north of the country to the lowest point in the south, Azima was able to enter the musical arena through a door which was wide open and found herself amongst a public who loved singing. This opening was through the medium of mawal, religious verses, a field in which she became highly proficient. She strove to produce a voice, strengthened by electronic means, which was as powerful as possible, taking advantage of the hoarseness which followed from long years of being a professional mourner and which won her the amazement of all who gathered to listen to her during the festivals. She was driven to swallow quantities of various drugs to produce the sad, rasping quality of her voice, which expressed deepseated emotions of dejection and shattered hopes – hopes which were at the mercy of eternal fate and which were elevated beyond the continuous misery most people endure.

  Hardly a year had passed before Azima had her own music group to accompany her during the nights of the famous Saints’ days of Cairo like Hussein and Sayyida Zaynab and Sayyid El-Badawi in Tanta. Her repertoire had expanded as she responded to her increased popularity as the prime singer of mawal. Her verses were recorded on cassettes with her picture on the cover, smiling broadly, and which did not show the three gold crowns in her mouth. Above the picture was her name and below it: “The Leading Professional Singer of Mawal ”. This was the grand title she gave herself like the other grandiose titles people frequently gave themselves in all other walks of life. Azima won the adulation of the masses through her cassettes because of the clear descriptions of love and passion in her poetry, which also had religious overtones in praise of the famous Prophet and his blessed family. In this way she followed in the footsteps of all the popular eulogists who emulated the greatest and most erudite Sufis of the Middle Ages. Azima often incorporated selections into her poems – slightly altered – from the great Sufi poets like Ibn El-Farid, whose mosque on the Muqattam Hills she had often visited in order to offer prayers and blessings. She also used the poems of Ibn El-Arabi, Dhi El-Nun ElNasri and others who were part of a sect who had experienced the divine light and had attained a special position close to God. Azima got hold of some cheap, popular copies of these poems from the booksellers, in Hussein or Sayyida Zaynab Square, who spread their wares on the pavements.

  Azima’s artistic activities required her to change out of her usual black mourning clothes into fine clothes of coloured silk embossed with pearls and gold and silver spangles, with a veil to match the colour of her dress and a head band embroidered with gold or silver thread to match her wealth. Then she discovered that blue powdered kohl, widely used amongst the peasant women of the Delta, suited her better than the lampblack which she had been using. All this adornment was for the sake of her adoring public before whom she wanted to appear as beautiful as her physique would allow. She gradually began to give up her lamenting activities not only because of her new public but because she had spent enough of her youth being sad. She then stopped going to funerals except in extremely rare cases when the financial return was worth the strain of all this misfortune and sadness.

  However a third event came to play a part in Azima the giant’s life which was to change her destiny completely. Her talents would probably have been sufficient for her to become a popular artist like Zekriyya El-Hegawi, or she might have joined those popular folk singers who spring up on stage like wild mushrooms, promoted by the Government which wants to be seen to be preserving popular culture.

  Her tragedy was not one of those simple events which pass through the life of a talented poet – she had not lived in a time like that of the famous Greek poet Sappho – but her talents emerged in an age which places culture at the bottom of its list so that the word itself has been virtually erased from the dictionary. After Azima reached forty, something happened which had never happened before: she became entangled in a love affair like a dove which learns to fly for the first time and falls prey to a skilled hunter. It involved a member of her music group who affected her entire being and inspired her soul with his passionate poems, which drove people wild. The poems were dedicated to Sayyid Hussein and if they made none of the customary references to other members of the Holy Prophet’s family it was almost certainly to underline the fact that the name of the feckless suitor was also Hussein. He was not very skilled on the flute and had originally joined her group as a player of the one-stringed fiddle. But he got his job after they failed to find a good flautist because most of the musicians preferred to work with groups in the Pyramids Road or the city night clubs rather than join popular groups whose work was tied to the seasons of the saints’ festivals and the feast days.

  This Hussein was one of those men who know how to put their hand on a woman’s shoulder, and once he had scrutinized Azima’s body and was convinced that she was worth a considerable amount of money in addition to the plentiful gold dangling on her arms, around her neck and from her ears, he began to cast mad passionate glances in her direction. Prompted by his many experiences in love, he identified her as a woman who desperately desired a man, whose thirsty body needed to be quenched and whose soul was full of emotions seeking to be fulfilled with love and beauty.

  Azima’s lover not only awakened her soul but also activated her body, which began to fill out for the first time. It must be admitted that she had begun to resemble an enemy barricade – like one of those mud brick walls used for fortification which were set up at the entrance of buildings during each war which our army fought against Israel. But her appearance, in any case, seemed better when she turned around, since her face had filled out making her wide nose less prominent. What had always seemed an impossible dream at last became a reality when she heard tender words of love for the first time from a man. Azima gave bountifully to her lover, giving all a resourceful woman could give to the man she loved. This began with the money she earned through her artistic activities amassed from the pockets of her admirers, peasants from distant country villages and the poor of the city who made pilgrimages to hear her sing, and it ended with her giving him her huge, unfeminine body.

  Not long passed before the flautist became lord of her soul and lord of the music group too, after demoting the first flute to second place. In the end the lover, who was a clever opportunist, took charge of her affairs taking decisions over every aspect of her life and gaining absolute au
thority and power over her.

  Azima’s love for this man was such that she could balance these factors in her mind and was prepared to sacrifice her money and her soul – in fact all that she possessed in the world – for this “pocket” of a man waiting to be filled, whom fate had bestowed upon her, on one condition – that he marry her. In this way she hoped to find the true protection which would come from a legalized relationship with Hussein, this catch, whose children she was hoping to bear. When she explained her position to him plainly, confident that the idea of marriage would not be an imposition but would make him happy and full of good intentions, she was surprised when he evaded her question. She never realized that the flautist, who knew all about the inner workings of women’s hearts, had come to the conclusion that the best way of keeping a woman’s heart was to avoid marrying her; thus he refused her offer which had not come as a surprise. He received the proposal extremely calmly one morning while sitting next to her on the comfortable sofa in her sitting room, drinking coffee and smoking their usual morning water pipe together. He told her, as he fondled her long fingers with filed nails, painted with light red varnish, that his love for her knew no bounds and that he was passsionate about every bit of her beautiful body, especially her long white neck which was plump as a silver jar, but that he could never marry her in his present circumstances. He was employed by her and would be unable to meet the necessary costs of a wedding and of a marital home. For that reason he would rather postpone marriage until his financial circumstances improved when he would be a worthy suitor and could marry her openly and unashamedly before God and the Prophet, for all the world to see.

  At this point in the conversation, Azima was greatly moved and her heart beat furiously since she believed that he was being sincere about everything he said to her. While he spoke he fixed his eyes on hers with a look of inflamed love which melted her heart and aroused her feelings more and more. For that reason she accepted what he said and then proposed that she sell a giant gilded copy of the Qur’an (weighing the same as eleven solid gold bracelets) which she had bought several years ago for about five thousand pounds and whose value had probably increased by two thousand. So that they might become engaged, she would give him the money she obtained from this sale to offer her as a dowry. But the flute player, who was watching her face as she spoke, and particularly her gleaming gold molars, was secretly ensuring that he did not fall into the dangerous trap and did not become hemmed in without hope of escape. He swore by Almighty God three times and begged Him with raised hands to burn him in hell-fire until he was turned into pieces of charcoal like those on the water pipe which burned in front of him, should he ever stretch out his hand and take money from her or further any step towards marriage with her which was not done with money earned by the sweat of his brow, dripping naturally, from the exertion of blowing the flute.

  Azima found it difficult to swallow the feeble pretexts of her hypocritical lover because they were inconsistent. Until now he had been taking money from her whenever he wanted and willingly accepting any gift she offered which enabled him to maintain a slick image. This might be the cash which she slipped into his hand from time to time or the Mercedes which she bought and placed at his disposal whenever he wanted it. The reality of the situation was that his excuses were meaningless for, even if he laid eggs like a hen in a coop for a hundred years he would never be able to collect the necessary money to marry her, since he had absolutely nothing.

  Full of hurt pride, Azima decided to withdraw from a relationship which, as far as she was concerned, could never continue illicitly. She was beginning to get a bad reputation and people were giving her dirty looks. She made do with barricading her great love behind the door of her heart with a bolt and key so that it should remain locked inside, bursting with memories of beautiful days of passion which had passed through her life like a dream, from which she had awakened quickly and whose progression towards a happy end had been disrupted. The flute player, however, did not accept this break in their relationship and began to play on her emotions again, redoubling his words of love and his passionate glances. Although she felt her feelings soften, she insisted on remaining resolute before him and stuck to her decision to break with him since legal marriage was the condition she made, first and foremost, for continuing the relationship. On this basis she refused the new offer he made her of marriage without contract which provided for no legal commitment. She persisted in her view that he should not disregard the legal sanctity of marriage any more than the fickle Government should ignore its pledges to the poor. Azima, on the contrary, reduced her relationship with the flute player to the minimum, restricting it simply to work. She could not actually do without him because of the lack of players in the music market but she managed to withstand the emotional pressure from her faithless lover and to avert her face from him, despite the fact that her heart at that time could have done with ten of Farid El-Atrash’s tear-jerking songs to help her mourn her severed passion and her miserable luck in the world of love. However, when the expert lover failed to resolve the matter peacefully he became impatient with the stale-mate and he began to reveal his other, evil side. He started spreading rumours about the details of his relationship with her, in a most despicable way, insinuating all kinds of things which he left to people’s fertile imaginations. His aim in this was to make Azima submit to him through her desperation to retrieve the scattered details of her love and to make her buy his silence.

  Azima considered this way of carrying on as crude – no better than a hyena who can’t resist tearing the meat of its dead prey to pieces – which is what she considered herself to be after her hopes in him had been shattered. She began to fume with rage, a sentiment shared by the musician who was the first fiddler in her group and a real friend to her. He had become her right hand man in her artistic affairs as well as personal matters, even after she fell in love, because he had absolute faith in her as the best popular singer of mourning songs of her time, after the death of the master of mourning songs, Mohamed Abdel Matalib. This view was partly based on his ability as a fiddler descended from an ancient family of itinerant musicians who sang popular songs and whose profession had been handed down as far as four generations back.

  Azima’s burning anger revealed itself through a small plan of revenge to be inflicted on the perpetrator of treachery. She decided to hire one of the experts who practised various forms of permanent bodily disablement for the beggars who frequented the area around the Al-Hussein mosque and served the rest of the beggars in Cairo, to carry out the castration of her former lover. One evening, after she made him believe that her deep love would resume as before, she lured him to the first fiddle player’s house in the Tarb area for a practice session with the rest of the group in preparation for the coming festival of Sayyida Zaynab. Azima rehearsed her voice and sang a new song of praise to the Prophet, peace be upon Him, over and over again until she sang it well. It was originally a love song by Faiza Ahmed, which Mohamed Abdel Wahhab had put to music for her a long time ago, but Azima changed the words to suit the occasion and to make it a vehicle of praise to the Prophet. Meanwhile she kept to the melody played by the group with a small alteration in keeping with the popular mood of frenzy, customary at saints’ festivals. Most of the playing was given over to the popular percussion instruments and the strings, traditionally confined to the one-stringed fiddle which countered with a tuneful melody while Azima’s husky voice sang the words: “My heart yearns for you.”

  After they had finished rehearsing, all the members of the group left the house except for Azima and the flautist. He sat down next to her to listen to her words of repentance and request for his pardon after he was assured of his success in awakening her heart to his renewed calls of love. But it was not long before he fell into a deep swoon after numerous glasses of rosé wine which had been heavily drugged. When it was certain that he was unconscious he was quickly moved to the large room which belonged to the first fiddle. Here the
castration expert awaited him, in whose veins flowed an ancient gift handed down through the blood of his fathers from the time of the Mamluks. He stood up after he had confirmed his faith in God and the Prophet, rolled up his sleeves and checked that the effect of the drugs had not worn off. Then he made sure that his surgical tools were properly sterilized in a little aluminium vessel of boiling water on a black stove of the kind usually used to prepare coffee; he found the cotton and muslin, tincture of iodine and enough ground sulphonamide which he placed in the boiling water. Then without flinching at the fierce heat, he extracted a straight razor made from the kind of steel which barbers usually use and used it to cut off what was to earn him five thousand pounds, half of it paid in advance. Once the operation was successfully completed and some iodine and sulphonomide had been applied with bandages of cotton and muslin, the flautist was quickly moved to his house, the key to which Azima had kept since before they first split up, and placed on his bed. He was covered with blankets and left to himself until the dawning of the new day when he would awaken from his drugged sleep transformed into a handsome eunuch.