“NO IT ISN’T!” I shouted angrily. I took a step towards her and she jumped back in shock. I was ready to pummel the young nurse. I was breathing – more like panting - hard with my hands clenched into fists. My body was preparing to fight. At the last moment, I managed, barely, to bring myself somewhat under control, by recognizing that this nurse wasn’t at fault … at least not directly. Besides, I couldn’t’ risk going to jail in Egypt, especially when Dyana would need me.
“It is the way of things here in Egypt,” she said, defending her statement. “I have a full Pharaonic, myself, since I was twelve. If I were in America, I would be subjected to American laws. Here, in Egypt, all are subject to Egyptian laws. I didn’t ask you or your friend to come here.”
My head was swirling and I thought I might pass out like Dyana. “How could you do this without her permission?”
“The new law in Egypt, from just before your friend came to us, is very clear. All women who are najasa, unclean, must become tahara, purified or cleansed, if they have surgical procedures in an Egyptian hospital. Even if the authorization papers had not been signed, the surgeon would have been required to make the patient tahara, based on precepts in place a day or two before she arrived here.”
I was aghast! “But … but … but … but no one told us!”
“It is written in the government dictates. It is addressed in the permission documents, though no permission is required for this to be done. The surgeon probably assumed you knew …”
I was almost out of my mind. I hadn’t had to handle a true horror since my Tia died in that mass shooting seven years ago. And even then, the horror was caused by a deranged killer, not by something a human doctor had purposely done that didn’t need to happen! Something that a nation crazy with misdirected religious and cultural zeal perpetrated on the uninvolved and innocent! It was all unnecessary and totally unexpected!
“This is a nightmare!” I said aloud in English.
The nurse was staring at me, perplexed. It was obvious that the she fundamentally, at her very core, didn’t understand why I was reacting so strongly against what had been done to Dyana.
“Most every woman in Egypt is tahara, and now so is she. I am tahara. Honestly, I want all my sisters to be tahara.”
“She is an American! It’s not our custom!”
“Yet she is in Egypt, subject to our laws and customs.”
I just stared at her as though she had two heads and six arms.
A fifty-something, woman doctor entered the room right then in answer to the nurse buzzing the station down the hall. As I would realize later, she had been the chief surgeon when Dyana had gone under the knife.
“What is the matter?” She asked in Arabic.
“The patient, I believe, fainted when she was told that she had received the Pharaonic circumcision. She had just awakened from her induced coma and we were all talking. She had not known that she was now najasa.”
“How could you do that to her without her explicit agreement?” I asked in Arabic. “She was here because of an accident, not to be circumcised!”
“Female purification is the custom, the normal procedure in Egypt for as long as we know,” the doctor replied in English, somewhat perplexed at my shock, I think. “It has been our way since the time of the pharaohs. It predates Islam; it predates your Western culture by 2500 years! Now, of course, it is the law of the country, a law instituted merely a day or two before your friend arrived here.”
I felt like I had fallen into Wonderland. This was so unbelievable that it couldn’t be real. For ten minutes or so I felt completely disconnected from the real world around me.
The doctor ministered to Dyana, who started to stir. In a couple minutes, she was awake again. I looked at the monitor and her heartrate was 138. “We need to get you to calm down,” the doctor told her in English, as she injected something into Dyana’s IV.
Her eyes started to droop and then opened suddenly. “You cut me!” She shouted with a strained voice, apparently using all the force she could muster.
“Yes, of course,” the doctor said. “You were given the customary open Pharaonic circumcision, as per Egyptian custom and the new government’s regulations. We had no choice, and neither did you. I would have done it even if we had a choice. No woman should be najasa.”
I wanted to shout that I was what they called najasa, or unclean, but I was afraid of what they might do to me! I could see that Dyana was shaking and tears were forming in her eyes.
“Exactly what did you do to me? I want to see. Release my arms.”
“I can’t release your arms, Dr. Berkley. Though you are externally healed, your wound and your circumcision are still in a delicate state. We can’t have you aggravating them, either on purpose or in your sleep. You may see yourself when we change the bandages tomorrow.”
“I want to know what you did to me.” I could tell, because she was drugged, that it was taking all of Dyana’s concentration and energy to even talk at this point. I was simultaneously appalled at what they’d done to her, and in awe at her incredible fortitude, her strong, evident force of will.
“I did what the law required me to do, and what conformed to Egyptian statutes. I excised your clitoral hood and inner labia.”
That was when I discovered this woman had been Dyana’s chief surgeon.
She continued. “Then I removed your clitoris and the subcutaneous, attendant nerves and blood vessels, the clitoral crura, to an extent of two centimeters on each side, with vaginal, upward pressure and stretching to get everything that fed into your bud. In that way future stray sensations – either pleasant or most likely painful - are avoided, yes? I then excised your outer labia and stitched the two sides together from the top of your mons to the vaginal entrance, along the vulvar slit, both internally and externally, leaving only the opening for urination. The vaginal entrance is now an anus-like orifice suitable to male penetration. I placed a catheter in you to allow the urethra to form and heal within a new exit. The catheter will remain in you for another seven to ten days.”
Dyana, who’d been leaning forward to look down at her bandaged groin, let out the most heart-wrenching moan of anguish that I have ever heard and began to cry. She laid back and stared at the ceiling, abject despair etched onto her face.
I took her strapped-down hand in mine and bent to kiss her forehead.
“Sagi and I looked at the forms, we evaluated every paragraph, we questioned what was to be done. I swear we didn’t know,” I whispered to her.
“Yes, Love, I know,” she whispered back and closed her eyes.
I stayed with her the rest of the day and slept in a chair in her room all night. I couldn’t leave her alone, knowing what she would have to face whenever she awakened. What WE would have to face together.
I did call Sagi and told him what had happened. He was shocked, clearly distraught. We yelled at each other for several minutes. Finally, he seemed to wrap his mind around it, apparently trying to take it in stride. I suppose to him, as an Egyptian who grew up with the knowledge that female circumcision was so deeply rooted in the society as to be essentially universal, this wasn’t as huge an event as it was to Dyana and me. I suppose all of the women he knew in this country had almost certainly been cut. As Sagi pondered this, I tried to advance arguments against doing anything similar to foreign women. He had nothing else to say. I think he was honestly embarrassed for his country. He wasn’t at fault, any more than I, as an American, was at fault for the poor decisions of my country.
I told him I would stay in El-Agamy until Dyana was released next week. I’d bring her back with me. He understood and would cover parts of my work as necessary.
Chapter 7 – The Way We Were
Dyana slept fitfully and so did I. I woke up several times on my own, and at least twice more when she stirred and bolted upright – or tried to. The medical staff insisted on keeping her restrained. I talked to her and rubbed her head and kissed her until she calmed down an
d fell asleep again.
The doctor and a different nurse came in early. I was awake and Dyana was awakening when they entered. The doctor asked me to step out while they changed the light dressings on her leg and pussy.
I told her there was no way I was leaving Dyana alone to face what they’d done to her. I was staying. She shrugged and asked me to stand out of the way at the head of the bed.
That nurse, who didn’t seem to speak English, unwrapped Dyana’s leg. Considering how nasty and deep the cut on her thigh had been, I was surprised to see that there was only a thin, slightly jagged scar. It was still an angry red though. The doctor said it had already started to fade, and would eventually be hard to see, without close examination. The nurse rubbed a moisturizing and antiseptic cream gently into the essentially healed wound. The doctor then wrapped a few layers of gauze around Dyana's leg, and taped it fast.
The dressing over her pussy was held in place by what was essentially an oversized, disposable G-string that had a slot to fit it around the catheter. The nurse snipped the waist strap in two places and started to carefully slip it off from behind my lover.
“Sit me up, I need to see it,” Dyana demanded. I held her strapped-down hand. The doctor pushed a foot pedal and Dyana rose to about half-way sitting up.
The nurse pulled the G-string from behind Dyana and slid it sideways and off of the catheter. Dyana’s pussy, down to behind her crotch, was covered with what looked like a gauze pantiliner, also slotted to wrap around the catheter. It appeared to be specially made for covering that area. I realized with revulsion that this would be in continuous demand in a country that cut almost 100 percent of their females, well over 800,000 per year!
“The scar will be prominent now, but will fade completely away with time,” the doctor told us. I guess that was a big deal to her. That was farthest from my mind right then. Dyana’s too, I was sure.
The doctor carefully removed the gauze pad; she said she wanted to make sure it didn’t adhere to unhealed spots, but didn’t think there were any, anymore. She lifted the pad and Dyana and I stared at her new pussy.
Except that it wasn’t a new pussy.
What I was staring at with wretched, anguished dismay and outrage had no resemblance to a pussy. If you took a Barbie doll, drew a faint red line from where the top of her vulva would be, if she had one, to a larger dot in front of where her anus would be, that’s what Dyana looked like. Except for the fading scar, there was a perfectly smooth surface from her lower abdomen, all the way to what I thought at first was her asshole, and then realized was some newly-created orifice that was her vaginal entrance! Her original anus was behind it. The seam, if I could call it that, was uninterrupted, save for a slightly puffy, red-looking opening where the catheter was, and through which she would eventually pee, more-or-less normally.
I fought not to puke. I felt the bile rise in my throat and I was about to lose the battle when Dyana screamed.
“WHAT THE HELL! WHAT … WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?” Dyana shouted, more horrified than I’d ever seen or heard another human be. Her face was beet red and the veins at her temples were standing out like worms on the side of her head. Holding her hand, I could feel her pulling against the restraints.
“YOU MUTILATED ME!” Dyana screamed at the top of her lungs. I was having trouble maintaining consciousness. I could feel myself hyperventilating, my vision narrowed, darkened and my head started to swim. Nothing in my 25 years of life had affected me like this, or prepared me for it. I needed to throw up, at the same time I needed to be here for my lover and friend.
“Your life was saved and you were treated like every other woman in Egypt, including me and this nurse,” the doctor said sternly. “Pull yourself together and start acting like the professional that you’re supposed to be.”
Her words incensed me. I let go of Dyana’s hand and rushed around the bed, intending to inflict bodily harm on the doctor and her nurse. I’d never felt this way anytime in my life, before this.
Dyana saw me grab the doctor by the lapels of her lab coat and position her for what I intended to be her execution. I started to shake the diminutive physician and Dyana called out, her voice surprisingly strong and level, “Don’t. Leave her alone. There’s no point anymore. You’ll just get into trouble, and I will be no better off.”
If anything, I thought those words were even more poignant than Dyana’s scream of mutilation. I turned to her, a hand still griping the doctor’s coat, with tears in my eyes.
The anguish on her face was beyond any human emotion. It was a consuming sorrow overlaid with a monumental despair. They had destroyed my lover. And they’d only done it because of misguided, contemptible, unreasonable cultural inertia, reinforced and fortified by a misguided religious belief. Islam does not teach female circumcision.
I remembered the submerged statue we’d uncovered. Though certainly duplicated elsewhere, this had been an Egyptian practice for 3000 years!
The pussy I stared at bore no resemblance to a woman’s intimacies. It was blank, empty, neuter.
“Dyana?” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“I fear I am lost, lover,” she said to me, and I lost it. I crumpled to the floor in some hitherto unknown state between reality and oblivion.
“No, no, no,” I sobbed.
“Your reaction is unwarranted and groundless, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding,” I heard the doctor say.
“No, I understand completely,” Dyana said as I tried to rise to my feet. “I understand what you’ve done to me physically, and the social context in which it was done. That is what horrifies me all the more and casts such a deep, unforgivable pall over the culture you purport to represent.”
Somehow, I was able to stand and look into the eyes of the woman I was so intimate with. I tried to say something, but no words could come to me.
“Please surrender your dread, your despair for me,” Dyana told me. “What’s done is done. I am what I am. I am what they made me. Please just stay and hold my hand.”
Of course, she was right. There was nothing to be done. They had circumcised her. They had closed her pussy, save for a second rosebud, a second asshole that now marked the entrance to her vagina. Everything else was gone. Everything else ... everything …
EVERYTHING ELSE WAS GONE!
Dyana held my hand but turned her head away from me, saying nothing else. She only emitted a faint “uh” when the doctor inserted a new catheter. Her eyes closed as the nurse applied a new pad, and barely stirred as another G-string gauze pad was positioned to hold the dressing in place.
**********
The next week passed. They insisted on keeping Dyana restrained until the new shape of her body, which they had forced upon her, was cemented both outside and deep within her. It didn’t matter, as Dyana said, there was nothing to be done now.
I stayed with her all day and all night, every day, even though she asked me to leave so she could take a break from me. I wasn’t willing to leave her alone yet, and I told her so. She finally gave up and said no more about it.
Sagi called me several times to check on Dyana and me. I’m afraid I was more than a little terse with him. He was Egyptian, after all. In some unkind, freakish way, I blamed him for this because he was Egyptian.
For the first several days after we saw what they’d done to her pussy, there was mostly silence between Dyana and me. As the week progressed into the last few days that she was in the hospital, we began to talk more. I tried to control the despair I was feeling, because I thought it would do her no good, and because I thought she might be coming out of her melancholy a little. Maybe that wasn’t it, exactly. Maybe her despair was simply rising to the level of melancholy.
“I will always love you,” I said to her later in the week. “I will always be your lover.”
“I will always love you,” she said. “I don’t know if we can be lovers now. We shall see.”
“We can be lovers,” I said with a confide
nce I didn’t feel.
She looked at me with tragically sad eyes, but said nothing.
A day later, she told me, “There’s a strange nothingness, a profound emptiness between my legs. I suppose that’s to be expected, but lying here, I don’t feel right. Even if they hadn’t told me, I’d know they’d done something to my intimacies.
“I suppose that’s not even a good term anymore. I don’t even have intimacies now.”
“Don’t say that. Of course you do,” I said automatically.
“Seriously?” She looked at me with an expression that said in no uncertain terms, “Don’t humor me.”
“I don’t know, Dyana. I don’t know. We’ll see. It may not be as awful as we think at this point.”
I wasn’t sure if I should have said that, but she responded in a level voice, “Perhaps it won’t be.”
We left the hospital on her 23rd day. She was fully healed externally, and her leg was fully healed inside too. Her groin was still reforming, healing, and recovering inside her, but it was completely healed where the wounds were visible, and nearly healed within.
Actually, neither the wounds nor her lost pussy were much visible. There was just the thin scar, and the new orifice, which was unlike anything I’d seen before. It was mostly like a second asshole in appearance. Very much like that. They had apparently reformed her muscles there, her Kegels perhaps, and she could actually open and close it somewhat under her own control, using a Kegel-like squeezing.
There was no sign that she had ever had a clitoris or minor and major labia. Her not-pussy was completely nondescript, featureless. My lover had no, visible intimacies.
We left the hospital numb and with little idea of what the future, our future, was going to be like for us as a couple.
**********
By the time we got back to the ship, all three domes had been submerged, secured, and the water within them displaced with a continual supply of air from the surface ship. Teams were working in the second and third domes. The first was awaiting Dyana and me; we had selected that site for our own exploration, and no one on the expedition team was inclined to usurp that decision.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 11
