Classic Short Fiction: Issa Ebeid’s ‘Lady Ihsan’

Lady Ihsan

By Issa Ebeid

Translated by Amr El-Zawawy

Lady Ihsan sat at her desk, forehead resting in her palms, giving free rein to her imagination. She was twenty-five, with a sleek figure and a suntanned face that glowed with a vital warmth and a calm, pleasant nature. She had wrapped her head in a red silken scarf, embroidered with glittering white sequins. A few slender curls had escaped, falling gently and coming to rest like the shadow of a crescent on her temples. She lifted her head, and her dark eyes filled with tears, which slid slowly down her cheeks. She took up a pen and wrote this letter:

Dear Dowlat:

You must be surprised, Dowlat, that I’ve spoken to you, for you know me to be discreet. And you must be wondering, too, what hidden reasons could have led to this catastrophe. To understand them, you must know the old and new influences that shaped my mindset.

Do you remember, my dear, how together, in the dawn of our youth, we used to read the novels of the romantic, imaginative writers who forgot the bitter, harsh realities of life and took to beautiful imagination, soaring high above this wretched world? With a crazy passion, we read these novels full of love stories that followed in the aftermath of tragedy, stories that made love a symbol of happiness and the watchword of the highest ideal. Those romantic novels suggested to me that a family built on love would remain strong, rising up against the storms of life. I believed the causes of divorce—polygamy, and all the flaws that break apart the Egyptian family—were, without exception, due to the absence of affection and love among spouses.

How I longed, Dodo, to marry a man who would love me and whom I would love, so I could be a strong force in his life, affected by what affects him and pained by what pains him. You, too, wished that with me. Do you remember, Dodo? That pure smile I know would glow on your two reddish lips when you spoke of “the noble diseases.” It was a smile of caution and disdain: “I imagine, Ihsan, that the sweetest fate for a wife is for her to live with her husband without mutual trust and shared emotions.”

In truth, Dodo, that lucky woman is not a wife and does not consider herself as such, for today she is with her husband, and tomorrow she will become a stranger to him. Today she is in this house, and tomorrow she will be kicked out of it. This constant, fearful anxiety drains every trace of tenderness and love, and it prepares her for a looming disaster, as all her attention becomes focused on the bedroom and readying herself for a future where her heart’s love will be freed from its insane, traditional blankets.

Then, what does that miserable woman carry with her to her new husband? Isn’t her heart torn wide open, enveloped in the loss she acquired in her early childhood? Does she not live with him as if she were a stranger, in a home from which she might leave at any hour? Is it possible for this woman to love her husband? And is it possible for the husband to love her, when he always sees her burdened with a suspicious, jealous, and watchful eye, without a trace of compassion or tenderness? Does this worry not make him abandon the house and resort day and night to cafes and amusements for his own explosive whims, or else provoke him to seek marital happiness in a second marriage, so he divorces her or marries another? Are these not the reasons for the destruction of the Egyptian family, which is a miniature image of the nation?

Since my childhood, I have looked at the world with a naked, unbiased eye, and I have been horrified by the miseries that marriage brings upon those of my gender. I understood that I would not marry for the sake of domestic happiness. Oh! How I waited for that love that makes the soul overflow with sweet happiness! How long did I search for that young man whom my dramatic imagination had granted me! But our honorable traditions prevent the two genders from getting too close, so I couldn’t find anyone whom I loved and who loved me. My engagement to Ahmed Effendi was arranged, and I could not refuse. Reluctantly, I married him.

Now, Dodo, you have started to write to me, saying: “You should have refused, Ihsan, such a course and stubborn husband, because your father had passed away, and your mother spoiled you, and left you to your fate.” As for me, I am among those who were raised under the burden of oppression and injustice—my mother was shaken at the sight of my father, and she didn’t eat except when he was hungry, and she didn’t sleep except when he got back to the house. He didn’t call her “free” or “a gift,” but rather called her just as he did the servants. And when he wanted to flirt with, he called her “Lady,” and she didn’t answer him except with “I can, Sir” or “At your service, Sir,” or “Yes, my husband.”

And this, Dodo, is that naive young woman, who is in the same shape as a great number of our men, who do not value the quiet growth of love that reveals the human being from beneath their impurities. They do not value that truthful, holy, and pious love that the family resists. They are ignorant of pure love and believe that women are one of their possessions. How often I remember, my dear, the moment someone asked for me, or invited me, as fathers do with their daughters. Yet he pretended, in front of me, to be a hopeful, flirtatious suitor so I wouldn’t fear him and feel a sense of dread for what he claimed. Yet I was afraid of him and did not love him, although I did not say that I hated him. Could I have lived with a man like him who strikes everyone in front of him? I was bold and declared my thoughts with a fleeting, fleeting aim, because love, according to their customs, is a source of vice and degradation.

Oh, how I longed for myself and Zaynab to cry in secret over the poor and wretched who cannot defend their own truth, as they were slaves to their fates. In reality, she was ignorant of the reasons for the pain, and that was what made me share her fear of the mysterious, imaginary thing in her life—except for the tug of motherhood. I often tried to wrench her away, with great pain, from her complete ignorance of her current self.

And he accepted it. “My son, aren’t we all married like this?” And thank God, after this, I lived as a daughter of a family with four and twenty graves.

Then she imagined that she was happy, although pampering did not suit her. Her sad face spoke, and, for a long time, I read on her beautiful face the pains of a fatal ability that would stir in her a new young desire. When I dared to share my observations and make her understand that she was not as happy as she pretended to be, I spoke in a sad tone of the vile and hereditary profiteer who killed in her every revolutionary tendency against the current system of her life.

“A miserable life where men are the kings of the house,” I said.

Oh, for the women of the old era to blame the mindset of the girls of the new era—that spirit of leaping toward freedom that rebels against the old system that dictates a woman’s happiness and independence! Don’t they know our highest ideal, which is the result of the advancement of our upbringing and the erasing of our perceptions and the delicacy of our feelings, which our development and our renaissance have saved for us?

I said, “Dodo, everything was stirred up, but I managed to overcome my rebellious and maddening inclinations by making him the young man I wanted. I established my principles and ideals in him, and I captivated him with the love of the campaign I was drawing for him to ensure our marital happiness—but I was mistaken. I found his emotions had frozen with the sins of the perverted haw’i, to whom our youth resort at puberty.”

To what extent is this, Dowlat, one the greatest and most dangerous of our social diseases? For when the Egyptian young man’s primitive heart awakens and gives birth to a pure emotion like this, then his overflowing, turbulent, clouded emotions are seized. And because he is not limited by the girls of our families to obscenities, Eastern traditions turn him away from pure love against his will, towards the filthy sewers. So instead of sipping from the waters of that sweet river, he sees his thirst quenched by the waters of those contaminated, poisonous swamps. He divides his emotions and stops his senses from transcending, so that his feelings can flow into human perfection, to hope for pure, chaste love, just as he descends to the animal rank. This is the reason why our men don’t love us except with that emotional, animal love that doesn’t praise emotional health or poetic grace, and that is the secret behind why they consider love a vice among the alleged vices.

I found my husband’s emotions were characterized by not knowing any domestic happiness except for that of animal pleasure. I tried to make him aware of the emotions that were overflowing within him, but no matter how much I tried to make him understand that I was a rational creature with a higher and nobler purpose in life than the one he imagined, he refused and insisted on not seeing in femininity the spark that ignites a man’s blood. The result was a mutual aversion that led to divorce.

I faced the divorce from my first husband without quailing; instead, my feeling was one of a vague serenity mixed with a mental contraction. Perhaps the reason was our Eastern optimism, which has always been the reason Eastern women endured the painful blows of divorce with courage. Thus, the future appeared to me adorned with a charming, wavy purple.

And I must confess to you, Dodo, a shameful truth. My soul’s need for love began to weaken little by little with the days, and I would sometimes feel a charming, humiliating lightness that was all my body needed… Is that a result of the ripening of nature? Or is it a habit I acquired during my first married life? Or was it the effect of the sensual whim that seeped from my husband into my body and enjoyed my emotions?

After a year, I became engaged to Muhammad Bey, and I found him much like my first husband in the coldness of his feelings. I didn’t suffer much, because I no longer asked for more from a husband.

Muhammad Bey loved me sincerely—well, the sort of love he was accustomed to—for a full year, during which I was happy. The purity of my life was undisturbed, except by a foolish, hidden jealousy that meant I was deprived of visiting my friends and leaving the house, even to go to the stores to buy what I needed. Instead, he would do himself. I forgave his love and forgot the pleasure of his love for me and his concern for my happiness. But not going out into the open air and civilized places, and staying within the walls of the house, had a bad effect on my health. I began to feel a fighting fever and a pain in my leg and a vague need to cry—those symptoms that modern medicine attributes to the disease of “Egyptian neurasthenia,” which our ignorant women believe is caused by spirits, and which they try to cure with exorcism.

I used to endure all of that because he loved me, but his love, devoid of honor, did not last like the perfect love to which the senses are accustomed. He soon returned to his old ways—the sort he had been accustomed to as a young man—and he would not return to the house except intoxicated and unconscious at the break of dawn.

You cannot know, Dodo, how much I suffered while I was alone in the house, with nothing good for me except for the coarse blanket that drowsiness would bring upon me against my will, as sleep would try to comfort me in my affliction. I realized for the first time in my life how the Egyptian woman tramples on her honor and the reputation of her family to satisfy her own local, bloody, selfish desires… I knew that miserable, accommodating woman who is afflicted such that her mental powers go astray and her will is paralyzed, and she becomes like someone who has lost consciousness. Then, she commits the most horrible social blunder without realizing the meaning of her actions, because she is being driven without power or will by the authority of that blind crisis.

And this was a fatal blow that gave birth to a spirit of revenge in me. Yes, I wanted to take revenge on that man for whom I sacrificed everything—my happiness, my health, my beauty—after I gave all that was in my power to please him and make him happy. I don’t know why that crisis didn’t push me to fall into the arms of the first man I met by chance on the side of the road with a hateful look of love, or to force a romance, as many of our wretched, abandoned women do. Was it because the crisis was not as strong and sharp as the factors of jealousy—which only comes through love—and I did not love my husband? Or was it because of my noble emotions and refined principles, or the desires of the highest ideal that I longed for in my married life? Did these save me from falling and surrendering to such a shameful, insane crisis?

So how should I take revenge on him? How could I leave him in the house and make him respect it? How return his dying, fading love? Then I found a way that was consistent with my simple, pure dignity, since my soul, God knew, had not yet been defiled by the defilement of life.

I tempted myself to defy his orders. I began to go out more often and visit my friends, and I instructed my loyal servant, Amina, to discreetly tell him that when he arrived. But instead of reviving the jealousy in his dying love as I expected, it aroused his anger. We argued, and since I didn’t have control over my rebellious self, my words were harsh. So he slapped me, and I cursed him, and he divorced me three times.

And now, my little Dodo, I feel I am a miserable woman who has not yet reached the age of twenty-six, and all my hopes in life have been destroyed, and my bright optimism has died, and a poisonous, fatal pessimism has taken its place. What should I do? Should I get married a third time? Will the new husband be better than the previous one? And what will silence those voices that are seeping with great force into my body? Oh, Dodo, I feel a strong hand pushing me into a deep abyss, and I am trying in vain to stay away from it. . . Advise me… Please help me… because I am in the direst need of advice and a reward.

September 1921

Yours sincerely,

Ihsan

Issa Ebeid was an Egyptian writer and short story author, one of the pioneers of the short story in Egypt and Arabic literature. He passed away in the prime of his youth. His works are considered groundbreaking in their field at the beginning of the last century, and despite his early death, he left behind an important legacy of short stories. The present short story is translated from his first collection published in 1920s.

Amr El-Zawawy is Professor of Linguistics and Translation, Faculty of Education, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. He has also practiced written and simultaneous translation for more than 20 years now. He contributed important articles to different international scholarly journals, including but not limited to Babel (John Benjamins), Journal of Psycholinguistics, California Linguistic Notes and Advances in Language and Literary Studies. He published a number of books and translations, including Studies in Contrastive Linguistics and Stylistics (Novika, USA), Exploring the Cognitive Processes of Simultaneous Interpreting (Lexington Books, USA), Seminal Studies in Linguistics and Translation (Cambridge Scholars, UK), and Selections from Arabic Poetry (Kindle, Amazon).

Other stories in the Classic Short Fiction series, curated by Amr El-Zawawy:

Shehata Ebeid’s ‘Fidelity’

Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s ‘Eve and the Viper’

Muhammed Taymour’s ‘The Eid Whistle’

Muhammad Taymour’s ‘A Boy Who Became a Man’

Marouan Abboud’s ‘Among the Problems of the Village’

Mahmud Taymour’s ‘The Grand Funeral’

Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni’s ‘Mimi’