Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (7 page)

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 insult 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 maternal 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.