So the hooves are lodged inside one of the daily newspapers, to enter history under the rubric of ‘alms’.* Hamido carries them off under his arm, and walks along the street, visibly proud of them. From time to time, he peeks under his armpit, and there he sees the thick, black coat parting to reveal a white, bloodless face, and the dead eyes dilated and turned skyward.
With an instinctive curiosity, Hamido stared into the sky. He noticed a lone, fiery star, as its long, thin tail moved shining over the blackness like a line of fresh blood which has not yet coagulated. Then a breeze came up and dried the blood, and the star turned black, and the sky became one motionless and impervious mass.
Hamido’s head sank onto his chest; from his eyes trickled a hot thread, which descended to slip into the corner of his mouth, running beneath his tongue with the familiar, salty flavour of pickling juice.
He clamped his jaws together and swallowed the bitter fruit. There was nowhere he could take sanctuary from the loathing he felt. It was attacking him through all the passages and outlets of his body, injecting its bitter, salty taste through the cracks in his skin and the orifices of his body, accumulating in his recesses day after day, year after year, so that his insides took on the putrid sliminess of a jar that has long stored old, fermented cheese. Filling his mouth with black smoke, he would expel the air from his lungs and swallow nothing but smoke.
Hamida knew the smell of smoke, as she used to buy tobacco from the shop. But this time the smell was different, mingling with another, unfamiliar one. It reminded her, though, of the smell of the toilet after her master had shaved his beard. As her small fingers handed him the towel, she could see his eyes in the mirror: white and black alike dilated and radiating a brassy yellow light.
The light finds her and comes to a stop, even though she is hiding behind the kitchen door. Her small body shrinks inside her damp galabeya; her shoulders are uneven, the left one higher than the right. Her torso sags to the right from the weight of the vegetable basket, pulling her right arm down.
The toes of her left foot barely graze the blazing asphalt, while her right foot just brushes it with the back of her bare heel. An observer would think her lame. But Hamida is not lame: she is just hungry. So she reaches into the basket; her slim fingers slip under the greens until she feels the touch of the fresh meat. She tears off a strip of flesh and crams it between her teeth, quickly, before anyone can see her.
Hamida’s teeth are tiny and white, but they are sharp, able to cut through raw meat and crunch the bones. These are primitive teeth, grown centuries ago, before the invention of knives and forks and other modern implements. (It was because of these implements that her master’s teeth had lost their strength and his gums had been stricken with pyorrhoea.) Her eyes, too, are primitive and strong, able to spot objects from a great distance, and her ears can pick up any sound, no matter how far away. (Her master had also lost this ability, due to the secret police’s discovery of modern hearing aids.)
Hearing a voice, Hamida raised her eyes, and saw her mistress’s head peering out of her heavily decorated window high in the towering edifice. Because of the great elevation, her mistress’s head was the size of a pinhead. Yet Hamida could see it clearly, and she took note of the fleshy muscle contracting beneath wide, hairy nostrils. She realized, from the way the hairs were trembling, that her mistress had picked up the smell of the meat she’d ground under her teeth. Hamida denied it, of course, but unfortunately for her, a tiny piece of meat had lodged between two teeth. Her mistress’s tender-skinned fingers snatched it out with a pair of tweezers. In the full blaze of the sun, she donned her prescription spectacles, and examined the minute scrap as it lay on her open palm.
On this particular day, her mistress did not beat her. After a heavy lunch, a quarrel had broken out between master and mistress. It ended in agreement on the principle of women’s equality to men in the supervision of servants. Thus, it fell to her master to carry out the beating this time.
Hamida lay down on the kitchen floor. Hearing heavy footsteps, she shut her eyes and waited. She felt the long fingers with their carefully trimmed nails lifting the damp galabeya, baring her small legs and thighs and buttocks, as far as the middle of her back and belly. Giving off a brassy shine, the yellowish eyes stared at the belly, throwing their citrine light over it: a belly stretched taut, its muscles contracting forcefully, falling to primitive thighs that could move in any direction, resisting and kicking out with full force. Her little foot propelled itself forward into the stretch marks of his flabby, protruding stomach. He grabbed her foot, and for the first time actually became aware of the shape of a woman’s foot. This one had toes, five toes, each separated from the other. Her mistress’s foot lacked toes; or, to be more accurate, her mistress’s toes were stuck together, like a camel’s hoof, in a single soft mass of flesh.
His hands crept over the legs. He felt the strong movement of the muscles pulsing under his palm. Her mistress’s muscles never moved. Still and silent, they offered no resistance, as if his fingers were plunging into a sack of cotton (which wasn’t surprising, as her mistress had already died, some time before, in the bedroom).
The movement of this living flesh dazzled him, as if he were a hog who suddenly comes out of a waste area in which it has existed on the remnants of carcasses for years. He shuddered deliriously, and his clothes fell from him. His warm body brushed the cold tile floor, still wet from being mopped. His lax, flabby muscles contracted, and an electric current flowed along his spinal column. Life stirred in all his senses; the broad nostrils of his trembling nose stole a whiff of garbage from beneath the basin. He inhaled as deeply as he could, filling his chest with the putrid odour. The smell ran through his body and with it ran an old memory, from the days of childhood, of the first time he had experienced sexual pleasure.
But Hamida was cowering in the corner, clinging to the wall, a tremor spreading over her body, and along with it an old memory of her first beating. Her panic-stricken black gaze was fixed on the stout bamboo stick. He had hidden it beneath his clothes, or perhaps behind his back, and now he whipped it out and raised it in her face, erect and hard. In a flash, he aimed it at the fixed point halfway between her eyes. And pulled the trigger.
Hamida screamed. Her voice reverberated through the dark, silent night like the sound of a bullet being fired. Her mistress tossed from side to side inside her silken shroud. A few light sleepers bounded out of bed and turned on the lights. Closed windows and doors were opened, and necks were craned.
But the commotion led to nothing. The kitchen comprises four walls, a ceiling and a door; on the door is mounted a steel lock and chain. Everything returned to normal. Lights were extinguished, windows and doors shut and locked. All things were closed and locked. Stillness prevailed, and the darkness collected over the kitchen tiles, growing denser in the corner behind the door, in the shape of a naked little body beneath which ran a long, thin, thread of blood, as a pair of tearful, wide eyes shone childlike through the darkness.
* * *
Since early childhood, Hamido had been able to recognize this particular glow from a distance, and, like starlight, it had always drawn him. A solitary star lies wakeful and vigilant in a uniformly black, impermeable sky, while Hamido marches alone over the asphalt road, through the darkness, eyes uplifted towards the star, arms folded across his chest so that the old, black splotches of blood on his hands are visible. The sepia tones of tobacco stain his fingers, darkened under the nails to the colour of soil. His coughing fragments the night, and his white spittle bisects the darkness, landing on the asphalt in a ball, like a lump of white flesh streaked thinly with blood that comes to rest next to his feet.
They picked up his bloody trail, seized him, and returned him to service. The doctor lifted his calico drawers with fastidiously groomed fingertips, averting his face as the dead body’s odour wafted through the room. He wrote out the diagnosis with his Parker pen: ‘Suitable only for domestic service.’ So Hamido became a house serv
ant in the old style.
They took away the things in his custody: the iron-cleated leather boots, the suit and its cotton- and straw-padded shoulders, the yellow brass buttons – five across each shoulder and ten over the chest – and the wide leather belt from which hung his sheath, sheltering the blade that was sharp as a knife.
Hamido probed at his body in the darkness. He discovered that he was wearing the old, full-cut galabeya, which now fell over his thighs loosely as would a woman’s galabeya. His shoulders, now bony and no longer perfectly horizontal, were like the pans of an unevenly weighted balance. His right hand hung lower than his left, dragging with it the whole right side of his head and body. There’s a simple and well-known explanation for this infirmity: house servants used to hoist vegetable baskets with their right hands. These baskets were always heavy, for they were filled to the brim with potatoes and tomatoes and artichokes. And in the bottom lay the slaughtered flesh, its warm, red blood seeping through the white waxed paper, its heart still quivering with an imperceptible movement, its ebony-coloured eyes open and looking upwards, tearful as they shone out in the darkness like the eyes of a child.
Bewildered, Hamido stared at the child’s eyes. They didn’t have the characteristic glow of children’s eyes; their shine was brassy, more like that of adults’ eyes. The child clambered onto Hamido, thighs hugging his back and knees perched over his neck, one calf to each side, the heels of his shoes against Hamido’s stomach.
The little one swung his legs as children do when riding donkeys. Hamido moved forward on hands and knees, the child on his back quivering in delight, a bamboo switch held tightly in his hand. The sun sat exactly halfway between the eyes, and the street was a mass of blazing red asphalt, overlain by fiery, crimson pebbles. When a flame-coloured pebble penetrated his right knee, Hamido paused to cough; the muscles of his chest were unable to contract and expel the pebble.
He hung his head, so that it nearly met his chest and he truly came to resemble an infirm donkey. The toe of the child’s shoe, sharp as the tip of a knife, punched him in the belly, and he let out a cry. But his stomach muscles were unable to contract and expel the scream. He wrapped his arms around his stomach to protect it from the shoes, but then the child attacked him, biting him in the calf.
The fangs entered his flesh, and seemed to pierce his bones all the way to the marrow. He clenched his jaws and swallowed the pain. The agony accumulated in the bone marrow, hard and jagged like a piece of gravel. The child shrieked in delight and swung the toe of his shoe into the chip of gravel; it flew into the air and came to rest inside Hamido’s belly, which was as warm as his blood-filled chest, or as his shaven head, which carried not a single hair to shade it from the sun.
The fire moved through his body. He submitted to it completely, letting it attack him from all openings. Assuming once again the bearing of a sickly donkey, he crawled forward, the burning taste of hatred invading him through the pores of his body to accumulate in its cavities, hardening and growing crimson, until it would have looked like a live coal. He reached down to pull out the killing tool, and his fingers bumped against his inanimate thighs, their muscles hanging lax beneath the galabeya. He hid behind the kitchen door and raised his galabeya. Rather than finding the hard implement alongside his thigh, he was startled to see the cleft, black and scabbed-over, just like the old wound. His head fell over his chest.
The peremptory voice boomed out her name. Hamida extracted a hammer from behind the kitchen door. Her damp galabeya clung to her body, and a mark in the shape of a shoe was etched into the skin of her stomach. Under her stomach wall, hatred was growing like an embryo, rolling into a dough-like ball, rising day after day, swelling with water, fermenting and giving off its own particular scent.
The security apparatus picked up the smell, for there is always a security apparatus with watching eyes and sniffing noses somewhere nearby. Hamida held her breath and wiped the palms of her hands before stretching out one small hand to offer the glass of water from as far away as possible. Her master’s neat, manicured hands closed around the crystal goblet. He averted his face from the smell, but it was so penetrating that it reached the dead nose of her mistress in the bedroom, causing the relaxed hairs in her nostrils to stiffen until they were sharp as pins.
Hamida denied it, of course. But her body was the crime. They took the body away and left her the crime. Like bees sucking at a flower blossom, they take draughts of the nectar and then reject the sucked-out remains. They tossed away the remains with a strong fling of the hand. The hand thrust into her back, feeling more like a kick. The road was dark, the night black, and she stared into the gloom. She recognized her mother’s fist in her back, so she lifted her gaze to meet her mother’s, and was on the point of calling out to her. But her mother was standing there motionless, even her eyelashes frozen in place.
Hamida walked by the stone statue and left it behind. Silence spread through the night and she realized that she was alone. She sat down on a stone bench by the Nile and filled her chest with the river’s sad and sluggish air. The sadness entered her chest with the night-time gloom, and she knew that she had been born motherless, that her paternal grandmother had been a slave in her master’s court and had died by her father’s knife.
She let her body go limp on the bench, opening her pores to the attack of grief, which poured in to fill her completely and give her strength. Only rarely does sadness give; and then it earmarks a special kind of person for its giving, one who is able to exchange the offering. And Hamida was able to give herself completely to sadness. She could devote herself exclusively to it and live from it: eating and drinking it, digesting it so that its juice ran in her blood, to be sifted by her intestines and then secreted by her pores. It would trickle over her body like glistening threads, which she would lick off and swallow once again, to be digested once more, and secreted yet again.
To any passer-by, her erect stance, alone in the night, would suggest a Ramessid statue. A tongue of water moves over its cheeks, neck, shoulders, thighs and feet, moving so gently that the motion cannot be sensed. The moisture remains on the skin, not evaporating despite the dry night breeze, but rather entering the pores, returning whence it came, to its origins in the mother’s womb. For it is sadness and cannot be mistaken for anything else. She and the everlasting embryo in her womb live for each other, and it comes and goes at her bidding. Whenever she wishes its emergence, it becomes her child – a natural child, not like the artificial children who from birth possess certificates inscribed in ink. In their bodies, black ink runs in place of red blood. Their sexual organs are amputated, their hair is uprooted from their heads, and alongside every thigh hangs a toy pistol.
Her child has no familiarity with pistols, or dolls handmade of rags or straw, or any other toy: playthings are for children, and he is not a child. He is born standing on two feet; scrambling among the piles of manure, by himself, he laughs. It is this laugh which distinguishes him from children, for it is a soundless laugh that produces no movement in the facial muscles. His small eyes, though, are each coated by a tear which gives them a particular lustre. Beneath the tear a point of light diffuses, like a solitary star, wakeful and vigilant in a moonless sky.
Hamida walked through the night searching for her child. She circled the dung heaps. She looked behind the garbage bins. Next to the wall she spotted a little body huddled into a ball. She recognized him at once, and reached out into the darkness to enfold him to her chest. The darkness was cut by a yellow light and the brass eye appeared: always there is an eye watching, round and lidless, like a snake’s eye, while the tail behind it is long and soft. The softness did not deceive her, though; she looked behind the tail. She saw the killing tool, hidden there, hanging alongside the thigh. It was not a male snake. Yet, even though she saw a female viper, Hamida knew that anything which kills must be male, and she screamed out to her child: ‘Watch out for him, he’ll kill you!’
The fangs entered the spindly leg. L
ike a long, thin tail, the blood flowed out, wetting her little toes, and running down to the soles of her feet. She raised her head, and saw her mother’s wide, jet-black eyes fixed on her own eyes, looking at her mutely, the black tarha covering head and chest and belly. She opened her mouth to form her question, but the large palm was clapped over her mouth. Her breathing, the slight breeze, the rustling of the trees: all became a soundless, impermeable, black mass. The black tarha melted away into the night as a drop of water melts into the ocean.
But the legs pounded along behind her, towering above her like a high wave that followed her into the sea, constantly checking her position, plunging with her to the depths, and floating with her, a pair of corpses, on the surface. The wave lost itself with her in the middle of the ocean, then reappeared on shore, colliding with her against the edges of the rock, getting lost in the white foam, swaying with her between ebb and flow.
The flow was weak; the ebb was weaker. For the sea was not a sea after all, but rather the River Nile; its waters lay sluggish in the river bottom, their movement slow and heavy, like a half-paralysed foot that lies immobile once it is lowered to the ground. Hamido pulled the foot upward, though, with all his strength, using all the muscles in his thin, bowed leg. Raised above the ground, the foot became fixed there, and would not descend again. But the ground pulled it back with all its force so that it fell heavily, like a foot carved from stone.
It was early morning; the sun was still slanting across the ground, and his shadow was sketched over the earth: long, thin, as bowed as a rainbow. The head was shaven and the shoulders uneven, one higher than the other. One leg was longer than the other, too: this was the frame of a lame man. Laughing, the children behind him were clambering onto his back.
The children’s voices and screams hurl themselves at him from somewhere above his head, and their feet pound over his back like the wheels of a train. Each one grasps the hem of the next, and they whistle, and the whistling ascends in the air. Each of them runs to hide from the seeker – behind a dung heap, in the animal pen, or behind the lamp-post.
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels Page 34
