She paused for a moment, looking around distractedly, then gulped, then went on, speaking quickly:
‘Yes, only passed my exams for your sake. It used to torture me, yes, torture me, because I loved science and I could have passed by myself…’ She put her head in her hands and pressed it hard.
Her mother was silent for a moment, then said sadly:
‘You’re depressed tonight, Fouada. What’s been happening these past few days? You’re not your usual self.’
Fouada remained silent, clutching her head in both hands as if fearing it would snap. A sharp pain split her head in two, while somewhere at the back something pointed made itself felt. She didn’t know what it was exactly, but it seemed to begin to disclose the true reason for the mysterious sadness which sometimes came over her just when she’d had a happy moment.
And that reason was none other than her mother. She loved her mother more than anything else, more than Farid, more than chemistry, more than discovery, more than her very self. She was incapable of freeing herself from this love even though she wanted to, as though she had fallen into an eternal trap whose chains and ropes bound her legs and hands – from which she would never in all her life be able to release herself.
Unconsciously, she moved her little finger, ran it over her upper lip, then put it in her mouth. She began to chew it like a child whose teeth have emerged but who is still sucking its mother’s breast. A long time elapsed as she sat on the sofa in the living room, her head between her hands, the tip of her little finger between her teeth. Her mother seemed to have left the room and she didn’t know where she’d gone, but after a while she returned holding a small glass of yellow liquid. She extended the slender, veined hand that held the glass to her daughter. Fouada raised her eyes to her and the pent-up tears fell from them into her lap.
* * *
Fouada took great delight in washing the tubes, preparing flasks of alkalis and acids, checking the chemical analysis equipment and the spectrometer. She lit the burner, poured a sample of her mother’s urine into the test tube and held it in a metal clamp over the flame. Standing like this, she realized why she had suggested that her mother give her a sample: she had wanted to use the new laboratory equipment.
The sample was free of sediment and since the heat solidified nothing, she turned off the burner, poured a drop of cold urine onto a slide, which she placed under the microscope, and looked down the lens. She saw a large circle inside within which moved small discs of different shapes and sizes. She moved the mirror to adjust the light and turned the knob of the magnifying lens. The large circle widened, increasing her field of vision, and the small quivering discs became bigger and looked like grapes floating on water.
She focused on one of the discs. It had, she thought, the form of an ovule. It was shaking like a living creature and inside it quivered two small dark discs, like a pair of eyes. As she stared at them her conscious, scientific mind was suspended and it seemed to her that they stared back at her with her mother’s familiar look. Like an ovule – it was her mother’s … perhaps she herself was this ovule thirty years previously … only her mother had not put it into a test tube and closed it with a stopper. It had attached itself to her flesh like a louse to the scalp and had eaten her cells and sucked her blood.
She remained, unmoving, like a dreamer, staring into the lens, time and thought lost as her imagination ran riot. She pictured, with shock and disbelief, her mother lying on a bed with her father beside her. She had never before imagined that her mother performed those acts that women did before having children, although certainly her mother had performed them, the proof being her own existence. She imagined her mother’s form in such a position and pictured her the way she knew her, with a white scarf wrapped around her head, a long galabeya over her body, long black socks on her feet and woollen slippers too. Yes, she saw her in all these things lying on the bed in her father’s arms, her lips sternly closed, a grave frown on her wide forehead, performing her marital duty – slowly and with the same dignified movements with which she performed her prayers.
The door bell was ringing. It had been ringing ever since she saw the ‘ovule’. Dazed, she thought at first it was the bell of the next-door apartment or of a bicycle in the street. But it went on ringing. She left the microscope and went to open the door. The dark discs were still quivering before her eyes when she saw a pair of bulging eyes inside which darted two prominent black pupils. It seemed to her she was still looking down the microscope and she passed her hand over her eyes saying:
‘Come in, Mr Saati.’
His massive bulk followed her into the waiting room with hesitant steps as if he didn’t know why he had come. Looking around at the new metal chairs, he said:
‘Congratulations! Congratulations! What a very nice laboratory.’
He sat down on one of the chairs, saying:
‘I thought about calling in on you several times before today to congratulate you on the new laboratory, but I was afraid…’
He fell silent for a moment, his eyes uncertain behind his thick glasses, then he went on:
‘I… I was afraid of disturbing you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
Looking up, he saw the copper plaque and exclaimed:
‘Research Room!’ He got up, put his head round the door of the room and saw the new materials, test tubes and bowls and said admiringly:
‘It’s wonderful, wonderful! It really is a chemical laboratory!’ She looked around somewhat surprised. She hadn’t yet felt that she really possessed a laboratory or that it was a real chemistry laboratory. It seemed incomplete to her, many things were lacking. In genuine surprise she exclaimed:
‘Honestly? Does it really look like a chemical laboratory to you?’
He looked at her in surprise.
‘And you? Doesn’t it look that way to you?’
Regarding her laboratory with new eyes, she said absently: ‘We don’t always see the things we have.’
He smiled, drawing back his upper lip and again revealing large, yellow teeth, and said:
‘That’s true, especially in the case of husbands and wives.’
He gave a short laugh, then sat down again on his chair while she remained standing.
‘You seem to be busy. Am I holding you back?’ he asked.
She sat down on a chair near the door.
‘I was doing some research,’ she said.
She smiled for no reason, perhaps remembering the shape of her mother’s ovule. His intimate glances devoured her face and he said:
‘I’ll tell you something. Do you know you look like my daughter? The same smile, eyes, figure, everything…’
Fouada felt his gaze on her body and looked down in silence. To herself she whispered:
‘He only wants to chat.’
‘When I saw you for the first time,’ he said, ‘I felt that curious resemblance, felt I knew you … maybe that’s why I decided to give you the apartment.’
Yes, he just wanted to chat. Now he was talking about the apartment. What had brought him here? He had ruined her pleasure in analysing her mother’s urine.
‘In the past few days,’ he continued, ‘I thought about coming to help you prepare the laboratory, but I was worried that you might think badly of me. Women here think badly of a man who shows a desire to help, don’t they?’
She was silent, suddenly preoccupied with something else, recalling an incident from her childhood when she played in the street with other children. There was a foolish old man who used to wander the streets and the children ran after him chanting: ‘The idiot’s here!’ She would run with the other children and chant with them. One day, she ran faster than the others, leaving them behind and catching up with him. The old man spun round and gave her such a fearsome look that she turned on her heels and, imagining that he would chase and catch her, ran like the wind. From that day, she stopped chasing him with the other children and hid when she saw him, for it seemed t
o her that his fearsome, terrifying glance was for her alone.
Fouada couldn’t think why she now remembered that distant incident, except that the eyes of the foolish old man had bulged like these in front of her. She looked around the laboratory as if suddenly discovering that she was alone with Saati in the apartment. Feeling frightened, she got up and said:
‘I must leave now. I’ve just remembered something important.’
He got up saying:
‘Sorry for interrupting you. Would you like a lift somewhere in my car?’
She rushed over to the door and opened it.
‘No, thank you, it’s not far.’
He went out and she locked the apartment and went ahead of him to go down by the stairs. In surprise, he said to her:
‘Aren’t you waiting for the lift?’
‘I prefer to walk,’ she replied, rushing down the stairs.
* * *
She walked along the street looking in the shop windows. Darkness was falling fast, the street and shop lights were already lit and she had no wish to go home. Walking alone, she peered searchingly into the faces of those who passed by, already addicted to this strange habit, the habit of comparing men, their features, their movements, their size, to Farid. She was also addicted to something even more bizarre: making predictions and then being convinced of the possibility of them coming true. As she walked along the street, she might tell herself: ‘Three private cars will pass followed by a taxi. I shall look into the taxi and see Farid sitting there.’ Then she’d start counting the passing cars and when the prediction was not borne out she’d bite her upper lip and say: ‘Who said it would come true anyway? It’s nothing but an illusion.’ She’d go on her way and in a while, another, different prediction would occur to her.
At the end of Qasr al-Nil Street, a crowd had gathered around a car. She heard a voice say: ‘A man’s dead.’ She found herself pushing through, panting and trembling, until she reached the man lying on the ground. She looked at his face. It was not Farid. Slowly, heavily she made her way out of the crowd.
She left Qasr al-Nil Street and headed for Suleiman Street. It was bustling with people, but she saw no one. Her thoughts were far away, perceiving the bodies around her only as part of the exterior boundaries that separated her from the vast, pulsating mass of the world, and knowing instinctively that such a body occupied such a sector of the street and that she must avoid colliding with it.
Then it seemed that some obstruction stood in her way. She raised her head to find a long queue of people across the street; and so she stopped too.
The queue gradually moved forward until she found herself in front of a ticket office. She bought a ticket and with the others went towards a large door in a dark hall. Torchlight was shone onto her ticket and she followed its circle of light until she reached a seat.
A film had just begun. On the screen, a man and a woman were embracing on a bed. The camera drew away from them to a man’s foot showing from beneath the bed, then returned to the man and the woman who were still joined in a long kiss. Something crawled up Fouada’s leg and, without taking her eyes off the screen, she brushed it away.
On screen the kiss ended and the man dressed and left. The woman said something, the other man came out from under the bed and the embracing began anew.
She sensed the crawling again. It didn’t feel like a fly, more like a cockroach, for it did not flit around but crept slowly up her leg. Eager not to miss any of the film, she kept her eyes on the screen, reaching out in the dark to catch the insect before it climbed above her knee. But her fingers closed around something solid and in terror she looked at her hand to find that she had grabbed the finger of the man sitting next to her. She held on to his finger, glowering at him angrily. But he didn’t turn to her, just kept looking at the screen in total absorption as if he did not see her, and as if his finger were nothing to do with him. She threw his finger into his face so that it almost jabbed him in the eye, but he continued to stare at the screen as though sleeping. She stumbled quickly to her feet and left the cinema.
* * *
Stretched out on her bed she stared at the ceiling, at that familiar, small, jagged circle where the layer of white paint had fallen. Feeling cold, she pulled up the covers and closed her eyes to sleep, but did not sleep. She considered reaching for the telephone … to dial those five numbers as she did every night before going to sleep, but she kept her hand still and pressed her head into the pillow, saying: ‘I must stop this habit.’ But she didn’t stop. She knew there would be only that cold, shrilling bell, which had ceased to be a sound or air waves and become barbed fragments of metal that penetrated her ear, that scarred like fire.
And yet she had grown used to it. At the same time every night she dialled the same five numbers, pressed her ear to the receiver and invited that searing pain as if it comforted her, like a sick person cauterizing their body with fire to stifle another, more intense fire, or like an addict grown dependent on the taste of a poison who demands it every day.
The sound of the bell, the sound of her sobs, her sighs and heartbeats intermingled, indistinguishably. A conglomerate that manifested itself as one continuous, penetrating whistle like that which rings in the ears when there is total silence.
Very well! She waited for the bell every night as if it had become a new lover. She knew it was only a bell, but it came from Farid’s telephone, rang in Farid’s house, vibrated on Farid’s desk at which they had often sat beside each other, reverberated against the divan on which they had often lain together, and moved the air which they had breathed in together and exhaled together.
The bell stopped. Farid’s voice whispered in her ear. She felt his arm around her waist, his warm breath on her neck. She had not forgotten that he had been away from her so long, and yet she seemed unaware of everything, could remember nothing, not even that she had a head or arms or legs. All her senses had flowed away and all that was left of her were two swollen, inflamed lips.
She opened her eyes to look into his. But it was not Farid. It was another man with small blue eyes and thick eyebrows. The first man she had ever loved. She was a young child, she didn’t recall how old she was at the time, but she did remember that as she grew older, she would open her eyes every morning to find her bed dry. She had hated being wet and thanked God that it was over. But God was not deceived by her thanks and soon afflicted her with another type of wetness, even more serious, for it was not colourless like before and had no sooner dried than it soaked the white bed sheet again. No, it was deep red and could be removed only by scrubbing so hard that her small fingers burned, and then, even after washing, it did not disappear completely but left a pale yellow stain.
She didn’t know the real reason for it, for it was a haphazard wetness that appeared and disappeared as it pleased. She believed that somebody attacked her small body while she slept or that on her alone had fallen some malignant disease. She hid the catastrophe of her body from her mother and thought of going to the doctor on her own to reveal her secret. But once, her mother caught her washing the bedsheet at the sink. She was so ashamed that the earth spun and she tried to roll the sheet up.
She saw her mother’s eyes looking at her from under a shadow she had never seen before. She reached out for the sheet and took it from her and saw the red patch on the white fabric, lying there like a dead cockroach. She tried to deny her disgraceful crime but her mother seemed to collude in it with her and was neither shocked nor angry, nor even surprised. It was as if she expected this misfortune to befall her and accepted it calmly and completely.
Fouada mistrusted this calm. It even terrified her, so much that her body trembled. So it was not a catastrophe. So it was not a unique, temporary sickness. It was something ordinary, quite ordinary. Her terror increased as her sense of its ordinariness grew. She had hoped it was something unique since unique things are bearable precisely because they are unique and not permanent.
Her small body began to chan
ge. She felt the change flow through her like a soft snake with a long, thin tail that flicked and flickered in her chest and stomach, stinging different parts of her body. The stings were both painful and pleasurable. How, she wondered, could these physical sensations be painful and pleasurable at one and the same time? But her body seemed to be wiser than she and was content with the pain and with the pleasure, happy with both side by side, embracing both with neither wonder nor surprise.
Her body changed suddenly and yet gradually. She felt and did not feel the change, like warm air entering her nose, or tepid water quietly pouring over her, which she bore without feeling its warmth since it was the same temperature as her blood.
She was surprised one day when she saw her naked breasts in the mirror. There was no longer the smooth chest she was used to seeing but instead two peaks, tipped by two dark raisins, that rose and fell with every breath, that jumped when she jumped as though, were it not for that thin layer of skin, they would fall off like oranges fall from a tree.
When she jumped, she felt something else jump behind her. She turned before the mirror to discover two other rounded humps held taut by fleshy skin at the lower part of her back. She remained studying her body for a while. It seemed to her to be that of some other girl, not Fouada, or that of an adult woman. She felt ashamed to look at those curves and protrusions that flaunted themselves disgracefully with every breath. But there was something besides shame, something deep and buried, something that wrapped itself in a thick mist, something like hidden pleasure or wicked pride.
Why did these old images stay in her mind alongside the image of the first man? Why did they persist when other more significant and more recent images had gone? But she believed that a chemical reaction happened in the memory cells, dissolving some images and highlighting or distorting others so that some parts remained whilst others were effaced. Yes, parts were eliminated. The lower half of the body of the first man in her life was effaced. Why? She didn’t remember him having a lower half. He had a large head, small blue eyes, shoulders and long arms. How did he walk without legs? She didn’t remember ever seeing him walk, for he was always at the window of his room. Taller people might have been able to see inside the room as they passed by in the street but she was small and could see only if she jumped up.
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels Page 23
