by Fadia Faqir
In this way, Safiyya returned to prison with no particular feelings of despair, unlike previous occasions. She was well satisfied with herself for fulfilling her ultimate aim to send the two boys to university; the first was doing extremely well in agricultural studies but like many others abandoned agriculture after graduation to join the world of tourism, property dealing, middlemen and people who call themselves “businessmen”. Safiyya managed to secure a reasonable income for the two boys, enough to enable the second boy to get engaged to a university friend whom he loved and was determined to marry.
Another reason why Safiyya was not particularly upset about returning to prison on this occasion was that she had converted most of her gains from drug dealing into gold jewellery. Some time before her arrest she had bought a plot of land in which she buried the jewellery safely beneath two graves, erected specially for this purpose and which she surrounded with high walls. The entrance was made secure by a huge wrought-iron gate, the key of which she resolved never to entrust to the gravedigger as a precaution against government interference. She had been warned that they intended to confiscate her possessions, fixed and moveable, thereby eroding everything which had been built through the sweat of her brow, through legal and illegal means.
Safiyya was sentenced to life imprisonment but she thanked God since shortly after her case the death penalty was imposed for drug pushers and smugglers. However the rigour of prison life began to take its toll and time weighed heavily on her, hastening her entry into the fellowship of the aged. She was tormented by the thought that she would die alone, far from her two boys and that she would never be able to live with them again. She spent her nights thinking about them and shed many tears for them; even when she was overcome by sleep she continued to talk to them in her dreams – the happiest moments in her prison life – as if she were still living with them. She cautioned her second son against spoiling his fiancée too much lest she become full of herself and create problems for him. She helped the first one, who was colour-blind, choose his clothes, particularly as he was unable to distinguish between blue and green. As for her second husband, she remembered him with affection because he was the only man in the world who had taken her into his arms and protected her. She had met him by chance when she wrote to her mother one day in the far off village where she lived, at a time when she was out of prison and was carrying on a lucrative business. Her mother replied with the news of her first husband’s death, giving her the address of a relation in Cairo with whom she went to stay. When he found that she was generous, would not be a burden on him and that what was hers would also be his, he told himself that he could only gain by marrying her and that given his difficult circumstances, it was unlikely he would find a better wife.
As time dragged by in prison, Safiyya became increasingly exasperated and angry with the Government which she saw as the cause of all her problems and unhappiness and her separation from her family. She didn’t understand, and nor would she ever understand, why someone like her should suffer all this unhappiness. She was aware that the Government intervened in matters relating to picking pockets, stealing and murder but drugs … why drugs? People bought drugs willingly and taking them made them feel better and revived their spirits. Safiyya decided that what people said on television about drugs was nothing but stupid exaggeration because even food could be very harmful if people did not control how much they ate. She was equally convinced that everything in the papers was a pack of lies because those who pontificate in them about drugs were the very same people who told lies about everything else in the country. As the circumstances of her life had become confused, perhaps she could not be blamed for consistently defending and glorifying evils of this kind. The feelings of injustice which she believed were inflicted by the Government were directed towards the Faculty of Law which she cursed vehemently, invoking God to curse it after each call to prayer, especially the dawn and the evening prayers, because she believed that her curses at these times would be more effective. Her favourite curse was “May a goddess destroy the Faculty of Law” because, in her opinion, it was from the Faculty of Law that the oppressive judge, who had passed the unjust and abominable sentence on her which decreed that she would be separated from her boys for twenty-five years, had graduated. For this reason she continued to hurl abuse in every possible direction, including the Leadership of the Republic and the Council of Ministers, on the basis that the sentence handed down under their law was inappropriate and unneccessary. These complaints were also one of the threads which tied Safiyya to Mahrousa because Mahrousa, who was friendly with Safiyya’s family, oversaw writing and sending the complaints for her. There was also a bond because of their close proximity in age and the common experience of bearing children but it was Safiyya’s overwhelming generosity which was at the heart of the solid relationship between the two women. Safiyya gave generously to Mahrousa from gifts that her boys brought her on their visits to prison. This might be food, clothes and shoes – even medicines – which Safiyya shared with Mahrousa, especially medicines for rheumatism and colds. These were always in short supply at the pharmacies, especially during the winter months when there was a run on them, for reasons best known to the senior managers in the companies of the public sector. On top of this, Mahrousa considered Safiyya her private bank, often borrowing money from her from resources outside the prison. Inside prison the only currency which circulated was cigarettes. These were in such demand that you could get anything in exchange for them; the proportion of prisoners who smoked had reached at least ninety-nine per cent and the number of packets consumed depended on the individual prisoner’s financial situation and the extent of her addiction. Naturally the amount consumed by those who were hooked on drugs, and by the prostitutes was more than the other prisoners. Mahrousa was in the habit of taking interest-free loans from Safiyya’s sons when they came to visit their mother in prison or when she went to see them at home. No cloud hung over the relationship between the two “sisters”; Safiyya’s husband even began to work in the video shop which Mahrousa’s daughter, who now had a diploma in commerce, allowed him to run in return for a reasonable monthly income. He also became a conciliator in disputes which broke out over the car mechanic the girl wanted to marry. The mother flatly refused his proposal of marriage, swearing that none of her daughters would marry as long as she was alive. She considered men evil, created from the devil’s rib, and her remaining daughters were in total agreement with this view perhaps because they were, both in looks and speech, exact replicas of their mother. The only exception was this youngest daughter, who had soft fair hair, made even finer by the force of gravity since it stretched down to the middle of her back. Her hair opened new prospects for her as regards men when the car mechanic, who had been bald since he was twenty-four, fell madly in love with her. She also used all kinds of beauty preparations on her face – red, blue and green – in order to stimulate his desire and encourage him to propose to her.
In deference to Safiyya’s beloved husband who had intervened in this matter, Mahrousa finally agreed to the marriage after making over a large down payment for the bridal dower. She hoped that the marriage would end quickly and that her straying daughter would return to the pen, secure from Satan’s rib and would rejoin her daughters’ squad which was hostile to men.
For many years, Aziza watched the relationship between Mahrousa and Safiyya grow stronger and observed every minute aspect of the rope of love which stretched between them. As she spent long nights thinking about these women, she became obsessed with the desire to achieve justice and mercy on earth. She sipped her imaginary wine, inhaling deeply on the cigarettes which she smoked incessantly and which mingled with the smoke already in her chest. Her deep experience acquired in the women’s prison had taught her that whenever she came across a true, caring relationship based on love and sincere devotion, like that which had sprung up and grown between Mahrousa and Safiyya, this kind of relationship was what really counted in deciding who
to include amongst the passengers of the golden chariot ascending to heaven. She came to this conclusion despite the fact that she had never liked nor respected Safiyya because, as far as she was concerned, she was a tramp with a criminal nature and time had shown that, even if she were to live for a hundred years, she would be incapable of mending her ways. However, she would take her to heaven for the sake of Mahrousa, the warden with the angelic soul and devilish face who had shed so many tears of pain and torment and whose pure spirit and body was that of a true saint who could only be venerated in heaven. Aziza did not want to separate her from Safiyya’s caring heart since she was the only person she had ever loved. She would give Safiyya one more chance and perhaps, if she ascended to this celestial world amongst angels which would be awaiting her and all the other women on the golden chariot, all the evil she had been tainted with in her earthly life would be erased. In any case, as her experience with Mahrousa had confirmed, she was not wholly devoid of good and her heart was not all black; there were some patches where light shone through which, given the chance, might spread and dispel all the darkness inside her. However, time was to extinguish any such hope. About two weeks after the day when Mahrousa’s face was covered in honey, she found Safiyya lying in her bed one morning, in the final repose of death. Her glass eye stared ahead, in a way which made all the prisoners who had gathered around the motionless body, feel as if it was a real eye expressing sorrow and unhappiness as it fixed on the piece of blue sky which could be seen through the bars of the cell window nearby. Her expert hands, which had stolen for so long with ease and dexterity, now firmly gripped a photo of her two sons, resting on her chest. They smiled happily without fear for the future.
6
There Once Lived a Queen Called Zenobia
Doctor Bahiga Abdel Haqq had the rare distinction of being respected and liked by everyone in the prison, including the authorities. The latter were feared by most of the prisoners who submitted to their orders and avoided any contact with them unless absolutely necessary. This demarcation between ruler and ruled follows an old Egyptian tradition which history has taught us and which, time and again, has cost much blood and many lives. Beginning with the building of the pyramids, the tradition persisted throughout the period of anarchy which followed when the sixth dynasty and other later dynasties ruled and were periodically destroyed by the despotism of the Pharoahs. The latter’s arbitrary system of rule, in which some were privileged at the expense of others, persisted during the period of the Persians, the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Arabs, the Mamluks, the Turks, the French and the British and re-emerged during the hunger riots in the winter of 1977. What history tells us is that any form of complaint and protest is bound to be suppressed and fail unless it has recourse to power and is able to challenge and undermine the ruling authority. This observation is borne out by the fate of those who failed to understand this lesson. It is personified by tragic heroes such as the Pharoe King and religious philosopher Akhenaten, or Hamam Al-Sohagi, whose dreams of national independence ended when a Mamluk military unit from Cairo descended on his house in the Saïd.
Bahiga Abdel Haqq did not command respect because she was a particularly nice, well-brought up young woman who belonged to the harmless world of innocence rather than to the world of deceit. Nor did she subscribe to the confrontational tactics which one encounters in every aspect of life. People respected her quite simply because she was a doctor. All doctors are revered the moment they join the Faculty of Medicine in a country where medicine is historically tied to wisdom, and where most of its inhabitants are poor peasants who elevate doctors to the ranks of the revered prophets, not because they relieve their tormented souls which rarely find any consolation, but because they relieve their bodies from the chronic pains and illnesses which they believe to be ordained by fate. As far as the prisoners were concerned, the crime Bahiga had been accused of was not dishonourable. If the authorities are to be believed, she caused the death of a young child, no more than nine years old, when she administered the wrong dose of anaesthetic during a tonsillitis operation in one of the private hospitals. Since the death of children in both urban and rural areas is a daily occurrence – like that of chickens – the prisoners believed that the matter should be kept in perspective instead of inflating it out of all proportion as the Government had done with Bahiga Abdel Haqq. It is also true that any woman who is blessed with being fertile can replace each child that dies, whether it be as a result of medical negligence during an operation or because of dehydration, stomach problems or diseases brought on by a lack of clean drinking water, traditional diets, bad health habits and the ineffectuality of the Ministry of Health in the provinces. Perhaps this ability to breed in large numbers explains why we have managed to survive as a people for seven thousand years and still do, despite the oppression and injustice we have suffered as well as all the occupations, plagues, the Nile droughts, the dehydration of children and the famines, on a par with the disasters suffered during Muntasir’s reign.
The bitterness that Bahiga Abdel Haqq felt against humanity and the whole world was in no way alleviated by her short sentence of only three years. Nor was she consoled by the considerable respect she enjoyed in prison and the many favours she received from the prisoners in return for the health care and medical advice she gave them. She spent every moment of her life in prison consumed with hatred for life and was constantly contemplating suicide, although she never managed to go through with it. She resorted instead to biting her fingernails right down to the skin and their sorry, mangled state baffled anyone who saw them. She had the habit of fiddling nervously with strands of her hair, gazing with a sad, grave, defeated look in her eye. Her stomach kept a rare and involuntary pace with her agitated feelings, aggravated by the use of hydrochloric expectorant which allowed inflammation to settle in comfortably as well as an ulcer which was soon to take up residence in the lining of her stomach.
Bahiga was someone who demanded a great deal out of life but she gave lavishly in return. She was correct in her belief that the abilities she possessed earned her the right to a share of love from life which she never denied others. This basic equation was fundamental to the word ‘justice’, something Bahiga never stopped thinking about, despite her considerable intelligence. But she saw it as an elastic word which had lost its original, accessible meaning in law as defined by the legislator Hamurabi, who wrote “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Now ‘justice’ had entered the celestial world of incomprehensibility. Perhaps this scepticism was partly behind the tragic aspect of Bahiga’s personality. Ever since she could remember, she had strived to be a model of perfection because she believed that as such she could expect to receive her portion of justice and secure a favourable position in life. In order to achieve this she had to struggle in order to be different and transcend the constraints of her surroundings. Her first step in this direction was to seize the opportunity to attend school which her two elder sisters had been denied and so were permanently consigned to the bottom of the social ladder. She took maximum advantage of her amazing ability to understand and retain her lessons, despite the suffering she underwent in the depths of winter, clothed only in a thin linen uniform over a winceyette kaftan, handed down from one of her elder sisters, and despite suffering chronic hunger and near starvation because her father was so poor. Her meagre allowance of food was not sufficient to combat the dampness and cold which stopped the blood circulation in her limbs as she lay on a mat on the floor of her room to write her homework with a broken pencil. Nor was it enough to fight off the mild inflammation on her scalp caused by the kerosene her mother rubbed into it as a preventative against lice. Yet none of these disadvantages prevented Bahiga from coming first in her class from the time the magic world of learning first opened its doors to her. She was top in the first year and the second and third until she finished secondary school.
Bahiga was fortunate to go to school at the time she did. Ever since the age of the first Egyptia
n priesthood learning had been a privilege reserved for an élite minority which maintained its position in society in a number of ways, one of which was education. In this rare time of opportunity in our miserable history Bahiga, daughter of a nightwatchman, shared the same school seat with the daughter of a minister in the Government and both of them received the same dose of learning. But it is also true that the apparent justice associated with the policy of free education was a fallacy because the daughter of the nightwatchman could never, for a single day, be on a par with a minister’s daughter when she was denied the same quality of food and did not sleep in a soft cosy bed. Neither was she lucky enough to have private lessons from the teachers at their school. However, thanks to competition, the daughter of Abdel Haqq, the nightwatchman, was able to make use of her ambition, her strenuous efforts and considerable intellectual abilities to get higher marks than any other secondary school pupil, including the minister’s daughter. When Bahiga joined the Faculty of Medicine she entered a new and difficult stage in her struggle because, apart from her obvious motivation, she also concealed a burning ambition to fulfil her father’s dream. Her father worked as a nightwatchman in one of the drug companies and, according to prevailing circumstances, he idealized doctors. He took up the hobby, albeit an enforced one, of giving injections in the muscle and vein to his sick neighbours who could not be moved to the clinics or were unable to get hold of night nurses. With the small sum he received in return, Abdel Haqq was able to go some way towards meeting the ever rising family expenses which arose from the failed economic policy of the state and the resulting inflation.
