Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Middle Eastern Fiction)

by El Saadawi, Nawal

  Had I forgotten… ? I don’t know… But I had forgotten... And now the mystery and wonder of the living human body was restored for me… Perhaps my womanhood had emerged defiantly from its prison, dismantling on its way all the memories stored in my mind. Perhaps the stormy yearnings of my soul had uprooted the ugly images of the body from my imagination, or the violent trembling of my heart had dislodged the knowledge of medical science from my head.

  Dawn no longer broke. The warmth of my bed turned into a blazing furnace and the morning light could do nothing to scatter the dreams of the night.

  4

  The telephone shrilled next to my bed and I half opened an eye to look at the time. It was two in the morning. Sluggishly I picked up the receiver and an urgent voice said to me: ‘Doctor! My mother’s very ill. Please come and save her.’

  I jumped out of the warm bed, hurriedly pulled on my coat, snatched up the little case that stood ready for emergency calls and drove at speed to the patient’s house.

  I listened to her fading heartbeat, the sound of a heart weakened through old age, and from which life was about to slip away. I took the stethoscope away from my ears and looked about me, registering the presence of a tall man standing near me with a look of desperate anxiety in his eyes: ‘Is she very bad, doctor?’

  I went out of the room without replying. He followed me into the living-room and asked me again impatiently, ‘Is it very serious?’

  ‘No,’ I said slowly, ‘it’s nothing serious. She’s just dying.’

  He stared at me in horror and amazement and said, ‘Dying? No! That’s impossible!’

  He buried his head in his hands, flung himself into a nearby chair and began to cry with a stifled, shuddering sound. I waited till his fit of sobbing had passed and he lifted his eyes to look at me, then I said to him, ‘Everybody has to die.’

  ‘But she’s my mother, doctor.’

  ‘Old age has caught up with her. It’s quite normal for her to die now.’

  He wiped his eyes and I reached out my hand to shake his, saying, ‘Let her stay in her own room so that she can end her life in peace.’

  Tears welled up in his eyes again and I opened the door and went out.

  I was sitting in my office with a glass of warm aniseed in my hand — the duty nurse had made it for me as the last patient left the surgery. My tired fingers curled around the glass seeking comfort and relaxation in its warmth. I brought my weary face close to the steam rising from it, inhaling deeply, for I liked the smell of aniseed more than its taste. At that moment the nurse came in and announced that there was a man who wanted to see me.

  The man came in. I recognized him and stood up to shake his hand. As he sat down opposite, I noticed that he was wearing a black tie. I offered him my condolences. ‘Thank you, doctor,’ he replied, looking down.

  He remained with his head bowed and I picked up my glass of aniseed and took a long drink from it. He raised his eyes and looked curiously at the glass.

  ‘Would you like a glass of aniseed?’ I asked him.

  He looked at me in surprise: ‘Aniseed?’

  I laughed at his surprise, and he smiled and said, ‘I came to thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You came out in the middle of the night.’

  ‘That’s a doctor’s job.’

  ‘You told me the truth.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have kept it from you in this case.’

  ‘It’s a very painful thing.’

  I didn’t answer and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you find it painful to look at a person who’s dying?’

  ‘It’s the most bearable form of pain that I come across.’

  ‘What’s harder to accept than death?’

  ‘An incurable illness or severe physical deformity or mental deficiency.’

  ‘Have you had to see all these things?’

  ‘They’re part of every doctor’s life.’

  ‘Forgive me, doctor. I don’t deal with vulnerable human beings in my work. I handle solid rock.’

  ‘Are you an engineer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We were both silent for a moment, then I said to him, ‘But have you never known pain and suffering in your life?’

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen someone dying and the first time I’ve cried since I was a tiny child.’

  This amazed me. Life was hard, much harder than rock! ‘So you haven’t experienced life yet,’ I said.

  He looked me in the eye and seemed about to say something but then decided against it. I thought I saw a strange expression in his eyes: an expression of weakness and need mixed with childishness and naivety, which made me eager to do something for him. He stood up and stretched out his hand saying, ‘Thanks again, doctor.’

  He turned and made for the door but didn’t go out immediately. He looked back at me, apparently struggling to get some words out. Then I heard him say, ‘I’d like to talk to you again some time, but... ’

  He stopped then began again, not looking anywhere near me: ‘I know you don’t have much spare time.’

  I didn’t answer and, still averting his eyes from me, he stammered out, ‘Can I see you again?’

  I stared into his face: there was a look in his eyes which caught my attention, but his expression didn’t convince me; the only death he had seen was his mother’s, and he was unfamiliar with illness and pain. Would he be able to satisfy this old experienced mind or excite the interest of this greedy and totally unrestrained child?

  But he was the first man my eyes had rested on, and I said, ‘You can see me again.’

  I sat beside him on one of the big stones forming the base of the pyramid, straining my eyes to the distant horizon and watching the sun’s red disc as it crept out from behind thick grey clouds.

  ‘What are you thinking about, doctor?’ I heard him saying.

  ‘Why do you always call me doctor?’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘It reminds me of my patients calling me when they’re in pain.’

  ‘It’s a magical title. I feel proud to use it when I’m talking to you. You’re the first woman doctor I’ve known.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘When I sent for you to come and see my mother, I didn’t think I was talking to the doctor when I heard your voice on the phone. And when I saw you coming into my mother’s room I couldn’t believe you were the doctor.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’d imagined that a woman doctor would be ugly or old or both, with thick glasses and a bent back from so much reading and hard work. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s difficult for a woman to combine being beautiful with being clever.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you: because from early childhood a girl is brought up to believe that she’s a body and nothing more, so her body becomes her main concern for the rest of her life, and she doesn’t realize that she’s got a mind as well which must be looked after and encouraged to develop.’

  ‘Why do they do that?’

  ‘Because men, who hold the key positions in life, don’t want women to be anything more than beautiful, stupid animals whose legs they can lie between when they feel like it. Men don’t want women as equals or partners; they want them to be subordinate and to serve them.’

  He laughed and so did I. He came closer and said, ‘I’m not one of those men. I want a woman who’s my partner, not my servant. I’m proud of your mind. You can’t imagine how happy I feel when I go into your surgery and see with my own eyes all those men and women waiting for you to cure them and make them healthy, desperate for your opinion and your expertise. How could a woman with a mind like yours be shut up in a house doing the cooking? Or one with your intelligence and learning waste her life breastfeeding like an illiterate peasant — or worse, like cats and dogs? It would be absurd, an insul
t to you and the whole human race.’

  His words penetrated and quietened my rebellious depths and calmed my confused heart. I felt the conflict between me and the male sex evaporating and leant my tired head contentedly back against the stone of the pyramid. Why hadn’t my mother spoken to me like this, or society recognized the truth of notions such as these? And here was a man doing it, acknowledging that women had minds; that a woman, just like a man, had both a body and a mind. Here was a man uttering the very words I’d said to myself ever since I’d first noticed what was going on around me.

  I looked at him, trying to make out where these just, mature words were coming from. From the hidden depths of him or from his throat? I could see nothing. The gap between his depths and his throat was non-existent. Perhaps I didn’t see any depth to him, or perhaps the sun had dropped into that deep chasm into which it vanishes every night and the shadows had blurred the sharp outlines of things.

  I felt his cold hands and looked into his face. His gentle, submissive smile aroused my maternal instincts, but his weak, beseeching glances failed to arouse my femininity. Was it because he was weak, weaker than me? Or because he hadn’t my experience of suffering? Or because his eyes lacked that profound inner strength which I thought a man’s eyes should possess? Could it be because I still had in my blood the instincts of a wild woman of the forest who loved the man who made her submit to him? But he appealed to something in me. Perhaps his weakness gave me the confirmation of my own strength. Perhaps the look of need in his eyes was gratifying to my mind which still wanted to dominate.

  Smiling, he said to me, ‘Mummy had the same strong expression... but her eyes were green.’

  The word ‘mummy’ sounded out-of-place and incongruous coming out from under a thick bushy moustache which made his features look like those of a small child with a dead black insect stuck to its upper lip.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I heard him say.

  ‘Did you love your mother?’

  His eyes filled with tears for a moment. ‘Very much,’ he said. I was unmoved by his tears. He went on, ‘After she died, the world seemed empty... but I found you and it was full again.’

  ‘That’s strange!’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That the world can seem empty to you after someone’s died.’

  ‘She was my mother, and I loved her tremendously. Everything she did was for my sake. What about you? Didn’t you love your mother?’

  ‘I loved her... but she never filled my life.’

  ‘Perhaps you loved your father more?’

  ‘No more, no less.’

  ‘So who was the most important person in your life?’

  ‘It wasn’t a person.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe my life’s never been full. Or maybe I was trying to achieve something.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps some great undertaking.’

  ‘Making people better?’

  ‘Maybe something more than that.’

  ‘Would you like to live with me for ever?’

  He asked me this, looking at me like a motherless child. He aroused powerful maternal, humanitarian and altruistic instincts and desires in me, and I felt his need for me pulling me towards him and binding me to him.

  I looked at him tenderly and he asked me again, ‘Will you marry me?’

  The word ‘marry’ thudded inside my head, driving all other thoughts to the back of my mind. What had it meant to me when I was a child? A man with a big belly. In my mind, the smell of the kitchen was the smell of marriage. I hated the word and I hated the smell of food. Without realizing what I was doing, I asked him, ‘Do you like food?’

  He looked at me in surprise and said, ‘Food?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What strange question are you asking me this time?’

  ‘Men get married to eat.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Everybody.’

  ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘Why didn’t you think about getting married while your mother was living with you?’

  ‘My mother didn’t just cook for me. She gave me everything else I wanted.’

  ‘So you’re getting married so that someone else can give you everything you want?’

  ‘No,’ he said; and it was as if he was saying, ‘Yes.’

  The old man with a large white turban looked at him with profound respect and listened to everything he said, but he didn’t see or hear me. I seemed to vanish before his eyes. He had a pen in his hand and there was a big lined exercise book on the table in front of him.

  ‘How much do you wish to pay in advance, sir, and what will the balance be?’

  What were these melancholy phrases coming out of his dry lips? Advance? Balance? Was the man who had nothing to give me now paying so that he could marry me? But the man in the turban had no way of knowing which of us was the one with something to give. All he saw was a man and a woman and as far as he was concerned the man was the one with the possessions.

  I looked at the shaikh with a superior expression and said, ‘Write “nothing”.’

  He looked back at me disapprovingly: how dare a woman speak in the presence of men!

  ‘The contract then becomes invalid,’ he pronounced in a legalistic tone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The law tells us so.’

  ‘Then you don’t know the law.’

  He jumped up from his chair and his turban bounced off his head. He caught it in both hands, shouting, ‘God have mercy! God have mercy!’

  The shaikh moistened his fingers with the tip of his tongue, plunged the pen into the ink, muttered the appropriate religious formulae, pushed back his voluminous sleeve, then wrote out two forms and handed me one of them, saying ‘Sign here.’

  Stubbornly I replied, ‘Let me read it through first.’

  He looked at me irritably but gave me the paper to read. My eyes fell on unexpected words, words that I associated with contracts for renting flats and shops and plots of agricultural land: ‘On this day... in my presence and by my hand... I so-and-so... official attached to such-and-such a court... marriage of so-and-so to so-and-so... on payment of such-and-such a marriage portion by the husband... an amount to be paid at the present time... and an amount to be deferred... legal marriage according to God’s Book and the Law of His Prophet, God bless Him and grant Him salvation... with the legal consent of the aforementioned husband... consequent on both parties being verified as free from any religious or civil impediment and on the wife having no income or salary from the government and no wealth exceeding... in the presence of the witnesses... ’

  I took the document in both hands, ready to tear it into shreds, but my husband-to-be took it from me, and the weakness and need that I saw in his eyes made me feel ashamed of my act of rebellion and despise myself for going against him. He said quietly, ‘It’s just a formality; nothing more,’ and I signed.

  I might as well have signed my death warrant. My name, the first word I ever heard and which was linked in my conscious and subconscious mind with my existence and very being, became null and void. He attached his name to the outside of me. I sat at his side, hearing people call me by my new name. I looked at them and at myself in astonishment as if they couldn’t really be addressing me. It was as if I’d died and my spirit had passed into the body of another woman who looked like me but had a strange new name.

  My private world, my bedroom, was no longer mine alone. My bed, which no one had ever shared before, became his too. Every time I turned over or moved, my hand came into contact with his rough tousled head or his arm or leg, sticky with sweat. The sound of his breathing beside me filled the air round about with a mournful lament. Nothing bound me to this man when his eyes were closed. I saw him as a lifeless body like the ones in the dissecting room. But whenever he opened his eyes and gave me one of his weak, pleading glances which aroused my mater
nal instincts but failed to arouse any sexual response in me, I saw him as my own child, sprung from my loins in a place and at a time of which I had no recollection.

  ‘I’m the man.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I’m in charge.’

  ‘In charge of what?’

  ‘Of this house and all that’s in it, including you.’

  The first signs of rebellion were showing themselves: his feeling of weakness in front of me had been translated inside him into a desire to control me.

  ‘I don’t want you going out every day,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t go out for fun. I work.’

  ‘I don’t want you examining men’s bodies and undressing them.’

  The weak spot that a man focuses on in his attempt to gain control over a woman: her need to be protected from other men. The male’s jealousy over his female: he claims to be frightened for her when he’s really frightened for himself, claims to be protecting her in order to take possession of her and put four walls around her.

  ‘We don’t need the income from the practice,’ he insisted.

  ‘I don’t work for money. I love my work.’

  ‘You need to be free for your husband and your home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Close the practice.’

  He’d reached the conclusion that it was my work which endowed me with the strength that prevented him controlling me. He thought that the money I earnt each month, however much or little it was, was what made me hold my head up high. He didn’t realize that my strength wasn’t because I had a job, nor was my pride because I had my own income, but both were because I didn’t have the psychological need for him that he did for me. I didn’t have this need for my mother, my father or anyone else because I wasn’t dependent on anyone, whereas he’d been dependent on his mother, then had begun to replace her with me.