Zeina Read online

  Inside the police vehicle, he sat handcuffed. He saw the image of his grandmother, Zakia, who was tall and proud. Her large cracked hands held an axe and her dark wide eyes could hold the whole universe. One day, she gripped the axe and brought it down on the head of the village mayor. She then lay on the ground and slipped into eternal peace.

  The connection between Mageeda, the writer, and Zeina Bint Zeinat had never been severed. Since childhood, something attracted them to each other, despite the vast gulf separating them. With the help of her parents, Mageeda became a columnist at the Renaissance magazine. Deep in her heart, however, she hated writing, which she had inherited from her parents, as much as she hated her short body and the large villa in Garden City. The name of her father and grandfather was engraved on a shining brass plate on the external door of the villa: Al-Khartiti Villa. The name al-Khartiti seemed to her like a deformed limb affixed to her name and her body.

  Surrounding the huge redbrick house was a large garden, where trees, roses and other flowers grew. An iron fence encircled the garden in which jasmine and bougainvillea trees grew, with their yellow, white, and crimson flowers.

  From the outside, the place looked beautifully cheerful. But inside, there was ugliness in every corner, lurking underneath the colorfully embroidered silk tablecloths.

  Mageeda went to school every day in a limousine driven by a dark chauffeur. Before she went to bed, a nanny took her to the bathroom and washed her with warm water and scented soap. The nanny would dry her with the large white towel and carry her to her bed, telling her the story of Cinderella and the prince until she fell asleep.

  In her dreams, Mageeda saw herself flying like a sparrow in the sky. Her thickset body no longer weighed her down, and her arms moved powerfully and lightly through the air. Her large wings flapped and fluttered, and when the sunrays or the moonbeams fell on them, they assumed an angelic white color. Her fingers were no longer short and chubby, but became long and thin, like Zeina’s. They moved more quickly over the piano keys than the speed of light. Miss Mariam held her hand high for all the girls to see. She spoke with a voice that was so loud that it reached everyone: her parents, her uncles, her grandfather, the neighbors in Garden City, the porters sitting in front of buildings, the barber in the square, the chauffeur who drove the car, and her nanny who told her the story of Cinderella before she fell asleep. She told them, “Mageeda’s fingers have been created for music. Her talent is unparalleled. There isn’t anyone like her in the class.”

  In the dream, Miss Mariam’s voice sounded like a harmonious tune, tickling her ears and sending a titillating sensation from her neck down to her chest. The wave moved to the left breast, just over the heart, and crept stealthily to the belly, then quivered a little when it got to the smooth hairless pubic area. From there it slipped down toward the left thigh and through to the left leg, and thence to the sole of her left foot. It titillated her as it used to do in the past, giving her the well-known but fresh sensation of pleasure together with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.

  Mageeda never knew how music, in her childish dreams, turned into a sinful pleasure, a pleasure that was akin to, though still different from, Satan’s finger, for although music descended from her ears to the sole of her foot, Satan’s finger went up from the foot until it reached the focal point of the universe.

  Before she slept, Mageeda told her nanny about Miss Mariam and how she held Zeina’s fingers up high for all the girls to see, and how her voice rose high saying: “Zeina’s fingers have been created for music. She’s a talented girl like no one else.”

  Mageeda would bury her head in her nanny’s bosom, pushing her nose between her breasts, trying to inhale some motherly love.

  Nanny would stroke her head and whisper in her ear, “Sleep, Mageeda, God has been kind to you and has given you plenty. Your father is a celebrity and your mother, may God protect her, is a great professor at the university. But Zeina, poor heart, has no father or mother ...”

  Nanny’s voice would stop, as though choked. She would raise her large dark hand to wipe the tears with the wide sleeves of her long, loose gown.

  “Are you crying, Nanny?”

  “Not at all, my child.”

  “Do you have a father and mother yourself, Nanny?”

  “Of course, my child, everybody does.”

  “Except for Zeina Bint Zeinat, Nanny?”

  “She had a father, child. He was a real man, a proper man ...”

  “But where did he go, Nanny?”

  “He went to heaven, child.”

  “You mean he died?”

  “Yes, Mageeda, my child.”

  “Why did God take him?”

  “God always takes the best people.”

  “But why didn’t God take my father and mother then?”

  “Stop talking, Mageeda. Not so loud. Sleep my child, may God protect your parents from evils and mishaps.”

  At eight, Mageeda couldn’t understand what her nanny told her, for if God took the best people to heaven, why didn’t He take her distinguished father, Zakariah al-Khartiti, and her great mother, Professor Bodour al-Damhiri? And why did Nanny feel disturbed, and why did she pray to God to protect her parents from evils and mishaps?

  If death was an evil sent from God, why should the best people die and go to God up in heaven while the evil ones stayed alive?

  On the street, she would glimpse Zeina Bint Zeinat playing with other children. They would encircle her, dancing, playing, and singing the folk songs chanted by peasants: “You’ve come to bring us light, oh Nile cotton, how lovely you are!” “The Sun is up, lovely and bright! Let’s go milk the cow!”

  She didn’t enjoy being driven by the chauffeur, because he took her straight home from school without stopping, not even for a little while that she might see the children dancing and singing on the streets. He told her that they were little fiends, the Devil’s children. She didn’t know the meaning of the word “fiends” so the chauffeur told her it meant little Devils.

  Mageeda couldn’t imagine the Devil having children, for she thought of him as childless, like God.

  “They’re illegitimate bastards! They’re little thieves, and you shouldn’t be talking to them, miss.”

  “But Zeina Bint Zeinat was with me at school and she was talented. Miss Mariam said she was the best girl at school ...”

  The chauffeur never listened to what Mageeda said. His sunken eyes would gaze straight ahead of him, fixed on the road. With his dark complexion, he looked like the Garden City porters, although he didn’t wear their white galabeyas. Instead, he wore a khaki suit similar to the outfits worn by soldiers. On his head was a khaki cap called a caskette and made of thick material. His large dark fingers firmly holding the wheel looked like Nanny’s fingers when she rubbed her head with warm water and soap in the bathroom. They were markedly different from her mother’s chubby white fingers.

  Mageeda hid her fingers under the covers. She closed her eyes to sleep, but the light of the bedside lamp revealed to her the large room. She could see the delicate pink drawings on the walls, the pink cupboard in the corner, her little desk with her books and notebooks, the color pencils, the big copybook with the pink cover in which she recorded her dreams, and the small table covered with a blue tablecloth on which jasmine flowers were embroidered.

  Her nanny sat in her loose dark gown on the colorful Persian rug next to her bed and told her bedtime stories. She had a long muscular neck holding a head wrapped in a white shawl. Her face was pale and lank, and the black pupils of her eyes looked tiny inside the large, reddish eyeballs.

  By the time Mageeda turned twenty-five, she was a columnist at the Renaissance magazine, which was published every Thursday. Her father proposed “Honoring Our Word” as the title of her column, in keeping with his own column called “Honoring Our Pledge” in the daily newspaper. He was always careful to articulate every letter of the word “pledge”, as though fearful that one of the letters might get lo
st, or the whole word might slip away or vanish into thin air.

  Since the age of eight, Mageeda hated writing, for, like her short, stout body, it was imposed on her. She inherited writing from her parents like the five prayers every day, the fasting of the month of Ramadan, and the shape of her fingers and toes. There was no way she could get rid of it.

  On top of her desk lay a big fat copybook full of blank pages. It was as fat and white as her own body, and its blank pages eyed her with derision. The scorn continued throughout her childhood, her adolescence and her adulthood. A voice hissed in her ears, speaking in the tones of Satan, or perhaps of God, telling her, “You have no talent, Mageeda. I gave all the talent to Zeina Bint Zeinat because I took away her father and mother.”

  In his column, her father wrote that God was just and that the head of the state in Egypt wielded his power fairly. If God deprived a child of family or wealth, He might bless him with intelligence, music, or the love of God and the homeland. A poor person might still be morally rich.

  Her mother, Bodour, wrote on literary criticism. She gave lectures at the university on literature, poetry, novels, the theater and the cinema. People sent her letters and parcels containing books, magazines, and tapes of music and film. She received taped literary discussions on radio and television every day by mail. Writers, both women and men, sent her gifts in order to curry favor with her, for a single article written in the literary criticism magazine could bring a writer out of the darkness and into the light, and might move an obscure writer from oblivion to the limelight of literary or artistic stardom.

  Although Bodour didn’t enjoy the same political or journalistic status as her husband, her own literary and artistic position was supreme. She received invitations to attend meetings with the president, ministers, and ambassadors, as well as literary and artistic conferences abroad.

  Deep down, Bodour al-Damhiri didn’t want to be a literary critic, for she considered the work of a literary critic to be inferior to that of a novelist, poet, playwright, or scriptwriter. She would whisper in the ears of her friend and mate, Safaa al-Dhabi, saying, “Literary criticism is parasitic on real literature and art, like tapeworms living off the human body. Literary critics like us are failed creative writers. We make up for our failure by criticizing the works of others. We are ordinary, mediocre people who have no talent, but we try to reach the limelight by highlighting other people’s creative work. We are like shoe polishers, nothing more, Safi!”

  She called her friend, Safaa, Safi.

  “I tell you Safi, in all honesty, although I never admit it to anyone, that I don’t feel any pride or pleasure when I write a critique. In fact, I feel rather humiliated, because I feel I’m shining the shoes of a person who is more talented than myself.”

  Inside the drawers of her desk, Bodour concealed a large fat folder filled with handwritten papers. On its yellow cover was written The Stolen Novel. She had begun writing this novel many years earlier, specifically on a night that passed like a terrifying nightmare or an ephemeral dream of paradise when she had eaten the forbidden fruit.

  In her novel, she gave the heroine the name of Badreya instead of Bodour, and called the hero Naim instead of Nessim.

  In the dead of night, after both her daughter, Mageeda, and her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, had gone to bed, after the house had become empty of servants and the nanny had taken her black leather bag and left, after the loudspeaker of the adjacent mosque, the drumbeats and the cymbals of the neighboring nightclub overlooking the Nile had all become silent, after the police cars, the sirens, and the hooting had stopped, after the screams of the patients at the old al-Qasr al-Ainy Hospital had subsided, after the funerals coming out of the huge wrought-iron front door with bereaved and widowed women wailing and following the procession had ceased, after the universe had gone to sleep and Satan had forgotten his prey, and after God, out of His infinite mercy, had closed His watchful eyes, Bodour would get out of her wide bed where the body of her husband lay and tiptoe barefoot to her study. She switched on the small lamp, extended her short fat hand to the locked drawer and opened it with a key concealed in her clothes. With her white fingers, she brought out the small folder, and her throat felt dry as she looked at the hundreds of pages before her, some of which were filled with words and others still blank. Night in night out, day in day out, one month following another, and one year after the other, there were hundreds, even thousands of pages, which she wrote and rewrote countless times with her own hand and with pain, sweat, and tears. As she read, she felt her throat parched and the blood escaping from her face to her feet. She would pout her full lips as she often did when she read a mediocre novel written by a writer who lacked experience or talent.

  Her daughter, Mageeda, was eight years of age then. She lay in bed in her bedroom with her eyes closed except for a thin slit between the eyelids. A faint light filtered through the chink underneath the door. Waves of light moved in the stillness of the dark night, coming from her mother’s distant room or perhaps from her father’s room on the other side of the hall. The light waves were as imperceptible as the movement of the air or as faint as the gritting sound of a pen on paper. Papers were torn and thrown into the bin, hot air rose from the chest along with the breath, and a deep sigh escaped with the act of inhaling and exhaling.

  The light seemed to disappear and give way to silence. But other noises started coming through the wall. Those were the voices of her parents talking loudly in bed, her father’s voice rough, hoarse, husky, and her mother’s as sharp as the sound of a jingling bell. They fought until they both fell asleep.

  In the morning she imagined that that they would break up, that her mother would prepare her bag and leave, or that her father might take his bag and go. But they both stayed. And they didn’t pack any bags. Actions only happened in dreams.

  At the breakfast table, they would sit together as usual, sipping their tea and coffee, reading the papers, exchanging a few words about events in Egypt or around the world, or reading in complete silence. Mageeda heard nothing but the sound of sipping: her father produced a sharp loud noise as he drank his tea, while her mother sipped hers, producing a femininely delicate sound that was hardly audible.

  Badreya was only one of the characters in The Stolen Novel, but she lived in Bodour al-Damhiri’s world as though she were a woman of flesh and blood. Bodour felt her lying next to her in bed or sitting with her in her study, gazing at her in silence as she read or wrote. They often exchanged words, fought together, and made up exactly as Bodour and her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, would. Badreya sometimes crossed out a few sentences she didn’t like from the novel, at times even deleting or adding whole chapters. Sometimes she condemned herself to death by firing squad or under the wheels of a train.

  Being a specialist in the field of literary criticism, Bodour knew that Badreya, like any character in a novel, was capable of rebelling against the writer, of severing her ties with her creator and of revolting against, and triumphing over, her.

  Badreya’s steps were more assured and steadier than Bodour’s, for she never wore high heels. She was taller and more graceful, more daring in breaking rules and more willing to face death without batting an eyelid.

  On that particular day, Badreya made up her mind to get rid of the heavy weight inside her and to become liberated from the painful memories residing within the cells of her brain. She got dressed and went out, choosing a loose, grey gown that hid the feminine curves of her body. It had pleats in the chest, hiding the shape of her breasts and her belly. On her shoulders she slung the strap of her leather bag. In the bag there was an envelope containing a packet of pound notes that she had saved from her daily pocket money or filched from the pockets of her parents.

  She was overcome by a vague kind of pleasure whenever she stole a few pounds from her father and mother. They never discovered the theft, especially her father, whose wallet was always bulging with banknotes. He used to conceal his wallet from prying
eyes by putting it in the pockets of his expensive suits hanging inside the bedroom cupboard. He had a huge number of suits made of expensive English wool for the winter and of silk for the summer. All his suits had internal and external pockets.

  Before placing his wallet in one of the pockets, he would turn furtively around, afraid of being noticed by his wife, the servants, or the nanny, who sometimes cleaned the room, put the freshly ironed clothes inside the drawers, or offered him a cup of coffee. He never noticed the eyes of his daughter, Badreya, perhaps because she always observed him through a chink in the door standing ajar, or perhaps because she wasn’t the daughter of his own loins, but a character in a novel that his wife wrote and lost. Because his daughter was honest and chaste, like all the virgins her age, she couldn’t possibly steal from her father.

  Badreya walked steadily along the asphalt street, stomping on the ground with the square heels of her shoes. On the wall of the building, a clock revealed the time to be 2:45. Her appointment was at 3 o’clock exactly. Another fifteen minutes and she would be transported into a completely different world. A cold shiver ran down her spine despite the end of winter and the heat from the sun. An old man walked in front of her, panting and wiping the sweat away with a large, white handkerchief. He seemed to be murmuring verses from the Qur’an or perhaps talking to himself. A woman in a black scarf dragged a little girl producing muffled sobs behind her.

  She stopped in front of the tall building to catch her breath, and raised her eyes to the sign posted on the ninth floor. She brought out a tissue from her handbag and wiped her face and eyes. A hefty, dark-skinned porter led her to the lift, giving her an artificial smile. She handed him a pound, and a wide grin revealed his large white teeth for a second and then vanished.