God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (46 page)

‘Gunpowder!' The pickaxes rained down, breaking apart the earth, turning over the soil, inverting the very fissures they had made. They stumbled on the gunpowder stores, one and all. (History has celebrated the victory of x-rays over cancerous protrusions in the body.)

But cancer is a sly disease, more cunning than history, and the tumour continued to grow deep inside the earth. When Hamida placed her hand beneath the womb, she felt the tumour, warm to her hand, giving off the heat of her body, and was reassured. She sniffed the familiar fragrance on her fingers – a scent reminiscent of the dung heap, the garbage bin or the lump of dead flesh. She breathed it in fully: for it was the odour of her life.

Hamido turned his head in her direction, attracted by the odour they shared. Conceivably, he could have distanced himself and fled, but instead he approached her, by virtue of their shared lot. He halted beside the corpse, unrolling his tall frame and sketching the long, thin, crooked outline of his shadow on the asphalt. The white blade hung visibly alongside his thigh, its black, blood-like stains in evidence. He filled his chest with the night air, and realized that he had been born motherless, that his paternal grandfather had been a soldier
in the army of Muhammad Ali
^*
and that he had been slain in prison.

He knew suddenly – and as if it were an ancient verity as certain as death – that prison was his destiny. He offered no resistance, but let his body go limp in the iron grip. During the years of captivity, he had been drilled in the principle that relaxing the body lessens the strain it must undergo. Indeed, the tension had drained from his opened pores, from his eyes and ears and nose and anus. Now, nothing would seem quite as brutal, whether it was the beating, or the feeling of his body puffing up, or the branding by fire (at least, prior to the discovery of electricity).

His body falls limply to the ground, and he stretches out as fully as he is able. From beneath him stream thin trails of blood that slip into the crevices in the ground. The walls bear black stains that look like blood, every one in the shape of five fingers and a palm. Millions of stains, left by every age, every race, every sex: children, men, women, old people, white and
black, yellow and red. And every one has his own particular, distinguishable stain.

Hamido rose from the floor, supporting himself against the wall, and imprinted his mark on the cement like a personal signature. (Those convicted – the likes of Hamido – seal police reports this way.) Black, bloodstained fingers reach out to imprint their seal on the police reports – millions of reports, stacked and heaped like corpses on Judgement Day (before the discovery of buses made such a crush of bodies an everyday occurrence). These bodies were aligned horizontally and arranged side by side in alternate directions – head next to rear and rear next to head – and so closely packed that they covered every inch of floor and ceiling. They were tightly compressed and so congealed together that no air could possibly penetrate, and no one could stretch out an arm or leg.

Hamido closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and moaned. The others followed his example, and millions of voices rose in the gloomy vastness, manufacturing the silence of night. The silence was so dense and heavy that it created a pressure on his ears, causing him to open his eyes. A pair of feet, the soles badly cracked, were almost touching his face. He recognized them at once and whispered, imitating her voice: ‘Hamida.' But she did not answer: she was dead, her body sprawled on the ground, her face to the sky, the white moonlight falling upon it to give it the round and swollen aspect of an inflated bladder.

She opened her mouth and moaned (due to the pressure of urine). Millions of moans rose in the dawn and created the national dirge (which they used to call the national anthem).

Hearing the anthem, Hamido realized that morning had come. He dragged his legs out from under the iron girdle and walked to the latrine – the only place in the world where he felt optimistic. From behind the wall, he would exchange a few words with others, while his lower half would send out a thread of urine, as thin and bowed as his frame, its odour as piercing as his. At this, he would feel suddenly and surprisingly mirthful; observing the yellow threads of water around him, glistening in the light like victory arches, he would let out a great roar of laughter.

The loud guffaws would ring out from the latrine, millions of them, for the numbers increased day after day. And in those days, all equipment was susceptible to breakdown, except that of reproduction and the wireless, of course. The sound would spread as any sound does, and at the same speed (by means of one of the instruments available at the time), to enter the large pair of ears like a sharp pebble. A clean, manicured finger would poke itself into those ears, and the sharp pebble would fall into his chubby, fleshy palm. Gazing steadily at the designated civil servant, he would inquire:

‘Are they laughing?'

The civil servant would lower his eyes, as civil servants usually did in the presence of the big chief, Hamido's master:

‘No, milord, they're just urinating.'

Hamido was still standing in the latrine. The thread of water had not yet expended itself when he saw the civil servant coming to carry out an inspection. He felt afraid; and fear, like death, is an organic being, composed of flesh and blood. He sensed the blood draining from his head, limbs and internal organs, seeping downwards to collect at the pit of his stomach, in a single point that swelled to become as distended as his bladder. The civil servant still stood before him, legs planted apart insolently, eyes fixed steadily on him with the courage of civil servants in the absence of their master, mouth open to show ulcerous gums, afflicted with pyorrhoea (like his master's gums).

He felt a sharp pain low in his belly. He turned around. They were tightening their grip, and bodies were pressing in on him from every side, leaving no open space, yielding no room at all. The only empty space he could see was the ulcerous open mouth, so he aimed the ribbon of water at it and emptied all the fear from his body.

Hamido opened his eyes. He could feel the pool beneath him, its warmth like that of his body and its piercing smell akin to that of his life. He realized that he was still alive and was quite hungry. He reached out, extending his hand into the shallow bowl. Millions of small black insects swarmed out, buzzing around him gleefully, some flying, others scuttling, still others crawling. A few clung to the ceiling and perched on the walls; others disappeared inside the cracks, and one alighted on his open palm.

He looked between its legs. Seeing there the old, scabbed-over wound, he knew it was a female, and that she was dead. He clapped his other palm over her, and she died again. He cracked her dead extremities and the recorder picked up the sound. (A tape recorder of the latest model, the size of a chickpea, had been fixed inside one of his body parts.) He cracked the toes of his own right foot with pride and self-esteem. His passage through history had significance, and this was why, when lenses were trained on the state's employees, he saw terror shading their eyes. For any movement they made would enter history instantaneously – even a mere cracking of a knuckle (due to the brittleness of one's joints after the age of forty) or a finger raised to brush away a fly that has perched on one's nose.

He gave his toes an innovative, creative shake. In spite of everything, he loved authenticity and originality, and despised imitation. What an accumulation of imitative, inauthentic, ape-like movements history has recorded! Identical faces, identical fingers and toes, one imitation after another, one imitation over and over again. An accumulation that grows ever vaster, higher and higher, just like a pile of manure. Every day the cow lies down, and every dawn his mother collects the dung, dumping it in a sunny place. By the next day it is dry, and on its way to becoming firmly rooted in history.

Finally, the treacle appeared, a congealed mass at the bottom of the bowl, which settled at the base of his stomach
like a lump of tar. He chewed at a bit of onion, offsetting the sour taste of the bitter cucumber. He lit a wad of tobacco and filled his chest and stomach with smoke. Now he felt something akin to fullness, and belched in a loud voice that intimated self-confidence. (At that time, only males experienced this.)

Hamida heard the sound, and in it she recognized the smell of tobacco. After all, she used to buy tobacco from the shop for her father or brother or uncle or some other man from the family. The shopkeeper would hand her a sweet, which she would pop into her mouth, hiding it under her tongue. When he demanded the penny from her, she would open her hand and find nothing; she would open her eyes and find the lamp, like a wisp of light, flaring up only to die out at a single gust of wind. And darkness would fill the door, like a tall, huge body, solidly dark except for two round holes at the top of the head from which pierced a red light, the colour of the pre-dawn.

‘Who are you?' she whispered, in a frightened, nearly inaudible voice.

He answered in the same tones. ‘Hamido.'

She closed her eyes so that he would not recognize them; she let his long arms enfold her, and his hot breaths warm her. It was winter, and her ears, so soft and small, were like shells of ice.

He whispered, expelling a hot breath into her ear.

‘Who are you?'

She remained motionless, her ear still below his mouth, and gave no response. She pretended to be asleep; she hid her head in the thick hair on his chest. When she felt the large fingers raising the garment from her body, she held her breath. Her chest no longer rose or fell. She had turned into a corpse.

But in the morning, the slanting sun fell on her eyes. She saw the lank form beside her, noted its thin and crooked shape. His shoulders were uneven, resembling hers; his fingers were swollen and festered from washing dishes, like hers, and the fingernails were just as black. She knew at once that it was her own body, so she hugged him with all her strength, and pressed her chest to his, and felt the outlines of the leather wallet just beneath her left breast. She was hungry, so she slipped the wallet from his pocket quickly, before anyone could see her.

She hid behind a wall and opened the wallet. She saw her portrait: encased in the black
tarha
, she resembled her mother on the night of her wedding. She found a directive in her father's handwriting, reminding him to wash away the disgrace, and four pounds and a
bariza
^*
.

The
bariza
bought her a meal, and with two pounds she purchased a mini-dress (the sort of shrunken dress popular in those days among chaste and virtuous wives, since the only parts of their sacrosanct bodies exposed by such garments were the arms, shoulders, bosom and thighs). With the remaining
two pounds she bought a pair of open-toed shoes with spike heels. (The emergence of open-toed shoes in that era was aimed at revealing the blood-red nail varnish worn by women; but these shoes had backs so that the cracks in women's feet resulting from domestic service would be hidden.)

Hamida walked down the street, teetering on her high heels, her arms, thighs and throat bare, her dress cut low to reveal her breasts. She had come to resemble her mistress, and although she walked right by the
shawish
(the widespread term for policemen in those days) he did not arrest her. In fact, as she passed before him undeterred, he lowered his head, and kept his eyes on the ground. (This was called ‘averting the glance' and was practised before matrons of unblemished reputation. He had learnt the manoeuvre during his years of training.)

Holding her head aloft, she moved on with swaying, tottering steps. She swung her bare shoulders, the left one appearing to be higher than the right. Her left breast was higher than her right breast (due to the swollen wallet concealed beneath her left breast) and her buttocks, one higher than the other, shook as she continued on her way.

She drew a few steps away from the policeman and ran her hand over the wallet. Its leather had the soft feel of saliva trickling over one's fingers after eating a sugared pancake. A stream of warm blood was moving from her left breast to her belly and on to her thighs and feet, and then ascending to her head, ears and
nose, and falling once again to her heart, following its normal, repeating circuit and sending into the motionless cells a new impulse that gave her a pleasurable sensation.

She worked her jaws, and chewed the pleasure until it melted into her saliva and she swallowed both. The pleasure mingled with her blood and circled from head to foot, from feet to head. Her head began to spin, and she leant back against a lamp-post. Her lids drooped, so that the street grew dark and the sky turned black and moonless. The circular blue light fell over her face, and she recognized it at once. (Her master always painted the headlamps of his car blue to avoid being seen or recognized by anyone during his nightly rovings.) He opened his door and got out, walked round and opened the door for her, waited until she was seated, shut the door and circled round the car again, reached his own door, opened it, sat down, and shut the door. (Her master had been trained in this circular motion in the Faculty of Arts and Protocol.
^*
)

Her spike heels were plunged into thick carpeting, soft as dough, and her shoes came off, revealing her cracked heels. She hid them under the silken coverlet. Her body had settled into a horizontal position on something soft – softer
than dough – and she relaxed the muscles in her buttocks, which her long period of standing behind the lamp-post had strained. Her body began to sink into the dough: feet, legs, thighs, chest, all the way to the neck. Only her head remained visible, sticking up over the surface.

Her head began to sink gradually: chin, mouth, nose. Her eyes dilated with terror as she realized she could get no air. And terror is an organic being, composed of flesh and blood. It was personified before her now in the shape of a strange, misshapen creature with the head of a human being and the body of an ape. Its head was bare, shaven to sleekness, its chest a forest of hair, its buttocks as bare and smooth as its head, the skin on its backside showing the same transparent blood-redness as the face. The creature had reddish lips, parted to show a long, sharp tongue, just like a white blade with a hard metallic edge, at its tip a darkened hole in which death was lying in wait.