‘By Candlelight’: Short Fiction by Latifa al-Zayyat
Part of our focus, this Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), is on classic Arabic works by women, especially those at the margins of (or neglected entirely by) critical and readerly attention. Although Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996) is well-known for her novel The Open Door (translated by Marilyn Booth) and her memoir The Personal Papers (translated by Sophie Bennett), her masterful short stories are underappreciated. This short work speaks as urgently to the present as it did to readers fifty years ago.
By Candlelight
By Latifa al-Zayyat
Translated by Alaa Alqaisi
She stood behind the door of the apartment where she lived, impatient to leave, the old desire pressing upon her: to escape this high-rise flat overlooking the Nile and the orbit of her husband’s influence, as he lay in bed, as usual, until late in the day. She waited for her hostess, the owner of the country house in the village of Sannur, and the woman’s playwright husband to stop by and take her to the bus station for Beni Suef. Behind the door, she stood, impatient to be gone. At the last moment, she slipped the draft of her second novel into her small traveling bag. Perhaps… Perhaps what? For two years, she had been demolishing on the left-hand pages of the sand-colored notebook whatever she built on the right, and the shape of the novel refused to come together. The comments of the political being within her, still alive, seethed across the left-hand pages under successive dates stretching from 1960 to 1962. They rejected the attempt to portray one individual’s experience of failure as the universal human condition. They refused to send her out among people bearing a message of despair.
Could a crisis that had dragged on for two years possibly break open in two days? Two years, or ten? she wondered bitterly, still standing behind the closed door. As always, she buried the question when it strayed onto forbidden ground. She resolved instead to give herself wholly to the experience of living in a village, an experience entirely new to her.
***
She boarded the bus to Beni Suef. A friend who was a literary critic had joined the group, along with her sister, a doctor, and the doctor’s husband, a professor of psychology. She felt a certain sense of belonging. The group she was travelling with was closer to her than the circles that moved in her husband’s wake: more genuine, less affected, more honest. With these people, one could drop one’s masks, shed one’s armor, and relax a little, without bracing at every moment for the next blow. They were not the crowd that stayed up all night at the Layl wa Nahar café in the Semiramis, or dined by candlelight in elegant restaurants, or adorned opening nights at theatres, art exhibitions, and public lectures. She and the group shared many interests, even in politics, though their views were not identical. Because of her political past, she remained the black duck in a flock of white ones. The red duck, many would say, though even she had begun to lose track of the distinction.
***
The bus pushed deeper along the agricultural road to Upper Egypt, distinguished from most roads in the Nile Delta by the palm trees lining both sides. The palms thickened into forests, and desert hills appeared on the horizon, while the bus radio played the song, “Who Said Love Was Sweet as Honey? Love Is Sweeter Still.” Its monotonous rhythm repeated in the same suffocating cadence as the sandy hills drew nearer, crouching over the green valley. Gagarin, translated from Russian into Arabic, spoke of humankind’s first journey into space, while the hills strangled the valley. The bus reached Beni Suef to the sound of Abdel Halim Hafez singing, “For You, My Moon, I’ll Climb Up to the Moon.”
The group took a taxi to the point nearest to the village of Sannur, which lay on the edge of the Eastern Desert. After crossing the valley, the car came to a halt. It could go no farther. She and the others plunged into the sand hills, then sat on the bank of the Nile, waiting for the ferry. Only the river had yet to be crossed before they would finally reach an old country house, scarcely used during the ten years since the agrarian reform law had come into force.
***
While they waited for the ferry, she settled on the sand of the riverbank and gazed out at the Nile’s eastern shore. The river curved in a semicircle, cutting off the view on either side. Existence began and ended here, at this shore of fine, soft yellow sand, gleaming beneath the sun like a field of amber; at this turquoise-green bracelet of towering palms, encircling amber and turquoise in eternal stillness. She wished existence truly did begin and end here, and that the stillness were eternal. On the horizon, she saw the sandy hills enclosing the Nile, the shore and the palms, enclosing her as well. She turned the pages of her sand-colored notebook, searching the draft of her novel for a passage that described the choices open to her heroine. But there was no choice: “One of two paths lies open before her. Damaged beyond hope of healing, she must either surrender and live out the rest of her life with the taste of bitterness in her mouth or face the truth with courage.” But those were not two paths, only one. Between death and death lay death, and the truth she was required to face “with courage” was death. She sprang to her feet and gathered her things. The ferry had arrived.
***
The ferry was crowded with peasants returning from an unavoidable journey into the city in their holiday clothes; plus others who worked there and had come home after a long absence for a brief visit with their families; plus the group of Cairo intellectuals; plus two donkeys and a goat. A warm, festive air prevailed. The peasants exchanged greetings after their time apart, asked after each other’s families, and carried messages of longing to loved ones scattered along both banks of the Nile in search of a livelihood. She sat listening to the conversation between the ferry captain, who connected the isolated village to the outside world, and the peasants. The captain spoke of a prophecy the Cairo newspapers had been circulating for the past week, announcing that Judgement Day was near. The white donkey let out a long, drawn-out bray, and a peasant woman returning from the veterinary hospital with her goat laughed and said: “For the Prophet’s sake, Captain, when death comes, don’t ferry him across. We don’t want him coming our way.”
The struggle to survive remains the truth of truths, alongside which every other truth diminishes, as long as there are people in the world fighting to stay alive. Being and nothingness do not trouble the peasant woman as they troubled Kierkegaard. Nor is she tormented by Sartre’s nausea or Camus’s absurdity. She is not among the privileged. With astonishing ease and simplicity, she deals with death, or the “truth of truths,” as one Egyptian writer calls it. She turns death into a person she can live alongside and defy. She acknowledges its existence, then passes beyond that acknowledgement, as she passes beyond so much else while struggling to survive.
The wind grew stronger, and the ferry tilted to one side until its deck lay level with the surface of the water. She and her companions exchanged questioning glances and brave little smiles, contrived in the face of the possibility of drowning in the Nile. The peasants and the captain continued their conversation in the same warm, festive spirit, while the water rose level with the ferry’s deck, as though the boundary between life and death had vanished and opposites had been reconciled in one convivial, celebratory moment.
The ferry reached the shore, and she was flooded with the joy of being alive as the captain called for the gangplank. She looked toward a group of men approaching the ferry, carrying a wooden object between them. Instead of the gangplank, she recognized a small child’s coffin. In one concentrated instant, life collided with death. Her eyes met those of the sunny-faced peasant woman, who explained the situation in a flat, matter-of-fact voice: “We haven’t got a cemetery on this side. We bury our dead on the other bank.” She watched the woman tug her scrawny goat behind her and walk steadily down the gangplank onto the sandy shore. And she felt ashamed that, in her long isolation from other people, she had slipped into thinking about the absurdity of existence and the inevitable failure of all human striving.
***
She resisted the idea that everything should proceed according to a prearranged schedule during their brief weekend holiday, and yet the hostess laid out the program. That afternoon was to be devoted to a leisurely walk around the house and the fields it overlooked, as was the following morning. The next evening would culminate in listening to a folk singer whose songs bore the distinctive local character of the region. Sometime between the afternoon and evening of the following day, the hostess and her husband were obliged to visit the home of the estate’s former overseer, now responsible for collecting the rent on what remained of the family’s land. This part of the program was optional: anyone who preferred to rest could remain at the house. It would be useful, however, if the doctor to accompanied them, particularly as the overseer’s wife was ill and there was not a single physician in the entire area.
Still, in the end, the choice was hers. When the hostess had finished setting out the program, she asked: “Where is the village?” From the house’s balconies, nothing could be seen but greenery that ended in sand. The hostess assured her that the village was not far away, and that anyone who chose to visit the overseer’s house at sunset the following day would have to pass through it. The hostess had scarcely finished speaking when a peasant woman from the village entered the house, carrying her dying infant to the visiting doctor.
***
She began with the garden, which ten years of neglect had turned into a wilderness of weeds… until even the weeds had withered. As she wandered through it, it occurred to her that she had long since stopped wandering and reflecting. In her mind, she saw tears stealing soundlessly down the gaunt cheeks of a peasant mother, and she wondered whether misery had reduced her to the point of fearing thought itself. Apart from the thinking she did to order—for a lecture, a seminar, an article, a radio or television talk—she read everything and anything so that she would not have to think. When there was nothing else to read, a medical leaflet lying here or there would come to her rescue. Had she become like a train that would lose its balance and crash if it ever left the rails?
“What matters is the journey, not what the journey yields; that human beings continue to strive, not what human striving produces. There is no green oasis, somewhere in space or time, that one finally reaches. One glimpses the green oasis and inhabits it in the act of striving. The journey itself is the green oasis.”
She had said this once, summing up the central theme of her second novel, back when she still hoped to complete it. Her friend, the professor of psychology, had commented:
“This novel turns failure into a philosophy. It generalizes what ought not to be generalized. Human striving is certainly not doomed to fail.” After a silence, he added: “Are you trying to justify something you cannot bear?”
For the first time, she considered the truth of his remark and realized that she had dismissed it along with so much else people had said, lest the train lose its balance and overturn. A colleague of her husband’s, who stood at the opposite side of the political spectrum from him, had once told her: “People are amazed that you wrote such an excellent novel, in spite of everything.”
At the time, she had dismissed his words as meaningless. Why should anyone be amazed when, despite her marriage, she was still the same person? Her old convictions had not changed, nor had her will to bring about change. As a young woman, she had pursued social change through action; now, as a middle-aged woman, she pursued it through writing. In the whirl of her first novel’s success, she had forgotten a vow she had made to herself and a wager she had struck: If I can complete this novel, I will also be able to free myself from my husband, from this house, from this way of life. She had completed the novel and forgotten both the vow and the wager. Now she remembered them.
She followed the garden paths, paved with sharp-edged gravel, and wondered: Had the stones been worn smooth over the years, or had her feelings grown so numb that she no longer noticed their sting at every step? Was she truly the same woman after a marriage that had stretched on for ten years? She had fled from the child with his wasted legs and swollen belly, leaving him behind in the house to die while she went out for a walk. Perhaps that night she would choke back tears on her pillow, weep for the child a little, then breathe evenly again once the catharsis was complete. And whenever she choked up anew, whenever one form of misery, deprivation, and oppression or another pressed upon her, novels, plays, and films had room enough for them all. Instead of doing what she could to help change things, she would weep in the darkness of theatres, cinemas, and her bed. She would go on playing this game of tears to persuade herself that she had not died, that she was still alive. Was this torrent of tears an act of atonement, or merely catharsis? Feeling the gravel bite into her feet, she murmured: “Something in me is wrongly made.”
Then, appealing for help to people who no longer had any living, daily presence within her, she added: “For God’s sake, tell me where the fault lies.”
“People say you dream on paper, struggle on paper, achieve on paper what you cannot achieve in life.”
An actress she respected had said this to her while commenting on her first novel, as they sat in the radio station cafeteria. This time, the barb struck home, but instead of acknowledging the truth, she had replied sharply, with wounded pride:
“Let anyone capable of writing a novel as good as mine do their dreaming on paper.” The heated remark and swift retort had barely ended before each of them returned to playing her part to perfection: the actress to one of the roles that changed from day to day, and she… What role had she returned to? That of the writer who had suddenly emerged from obscurity into recognition, already in possession of the keys to the game of writing; the artist capable of handing those keys to anyone who wished to play. The worst of it was that the game was no game at all. With her first novel completed, she had become rather like the folktale character Goha, who lost his chest but still had its keys. She possessed all the keys to the craft of writing, yet they could not produce that pure ardor for life which is the very substance of art. Now, she stood far from that ardor, without which art becomes mere entertainment or an ornamental game.
“I wanted to hold on to the way I saw the truth as a young woman, before that vision escaped me altogether.”
The words she had once spoken to an interviewer from a foreign radio station suddenly assailed her. He had asked: “Why this particular novel, and why in 1960, of all years?” At the time, she had been astonished to hear herself acknowledge a truth she had long buried. No doubt she had buried it again, for now the sentence came upon her as she walked through a garden where the weeds had withered, at once old and new: a truth she had known and suppressed. She admitted that the vision in her first novel belonged not to a life still being lived, but to a life that had ended and fallen away from the woman who now played this game of tears. She climbed the worn steps that divided the garden into rises and hollows, then descended them again. No doubt those heights and depths had once meant a great deal, when flowers opened to the sun and air and the trees stood tall, their roots in the earth and their branches in the sky. Now they meant nothing. Ascent and descent had become the same, now that the garden had dried up.
When her first novel carried her into people’s hearts, arriving there had meant so much and nothing at all, as though the woman who arrived were someone other than herself, a creature who had appropriated her own private passion for life. In the eyes of young women, she had seen the gleam of recognition, of her and of themselves; in the grateful pressure of a young man’s hand as he shyly shook hers. One night, she dreamed that she had been invited to a celebration. She stood with the other guests on one of the steps leading to the hall. Some people were ahead of her, others behind, and among them she recognized several well-known Egyptian writers. As she waited in line on the staircase, an electric sting jolted her awake. She wondered whether the other guests had felt it too, or whether she alone had been singled out.
That day, she felt she had cheated a little in order to reach people’s hearts, and that the sting had come because she had done so. From then on, the sense of failure pursued her as she moved among the stars who swept through the corridors of the radio and television building with confident steps and carefully manufactured smiles, only to conclude by saying, “In reality…” when there was no reality in anything they said.
She collapsed onto a stone bench and found herself inside a wooden gazebo on the verge of falling apart. She admitted that its painted wood had faded from green to the color of dust. A note on the left-hand pages of the sand-colored notebook pressed itself upon her, demolishing the unfinished novel on the right. Without realizing it, she began repeating its words: “Flight from confrontation offers no solution. It is equivalent to choosing suicide rather than waiting for the killing to be completed.”
She admitted that the rope of self-deception was long, but in the end, it wound itself around a person’s neck. The admission frightened her, and she fled into the open expanse of a nearby field.
***
She tried to identify the green crop growing in the field. It seemed essential that she did. She reached out a trembling hand, plucked one of its leaves, and held it to her nose, concentrating all her senses into the act of smelling. She still could not identify it. She tore the leaf in two and tasted it, chewing one half and drawing out its juices, trying to recognize the flavor, but she was none the wiser. She spat out the pulp and went stumbling on through the field. She remembered eating a raw green zucchini straight from the field when she was young, and loving it, in the midst of that passion for life which gave everything, however small or unlike anything else, its own singular taste. As a girl, she had dreamed of running barefoot with her beloved through a field of green broad beans; of lying down with him, enclosed by the green growth and the smell of fertile earth; of eating fresh beans with areesh cheese beside him. Instead, she and her husband had ended up dining by candlelight like lovers, when no love remained between them. Each time he drew her into one glittering circle or another, she wanted to cry out: These candles are a lie. Our marriage is a lie. Every circle in which we move is a lie. But instead of crying out and shattering the lie, she lived it. She wondered whether she too had become a lie, an inseparable part of an institution addicted to palliatives, avoiding confrontation and masking words so that the living, clamorous conflict of life would not erupt.
Instead of crying out, one morning she read her husband a poem about the falseness of the intellectuals who spent their nights in the Layl wa Nahar café. Salah Abdel Sabour had published it in the Friday edition of Al-Ahram. She could now remember only one line from the poem, or perhaps only its meaning rather than its exact words. The woman says to the man sitting with her in the café: “Come, my love, before morning breaks and my make-up disappears.” But she remembered that her eyes had filled with tears as she read the poem, that she had been purged, and that she had gone on living the lie. She remembered, too, that even at the height of her emotion, she had not forgotten to read the poem as good poetry ought to be read by a discerning reader. Somewhere between feeling and the demands of propriety, she lived the lie.
In the elegant restaurant, she sat facing her husband, separated from him by candles, half-truths, the bitterness of truth, the cruelty of deception, their mutual rejection of what the other essentially was, their fear of collision, their concern for appearances and their pretense that a project long since bankrupt was still a success. Between them were words whose claws love had once clipped and, after love, social cowardice, or what he called the civilizing of intellectuals: words that never disclosed anything, that slipped away like mercury, circling and doubling back, disguised along cowardly paths. She wanted to scream but did not. What would be the use? Their candlelit evening was merely another ritual among the rituals that made up their life together, their movement through the world together and among others, one of the rituals that destroyed her even as she never ceased helping to create it.
Their nightly conversation was another ritual, if it could still be called conversation. Once, it had been. No longer. Over the years, she had turned into an ear that listened while her mind grew heavy beneath an accumulation of lies and half-truths, multiplying day after day as he went on talking, spinning still more lies and half-truths. And her mind wandered further each day without her even knowing that it wandered. Under the weight of that accumulation, her mind wandered now whenever she spoke, whether her husband was present or absent. In company, she spoke as other people spoke, then suddenly caught the bewilderment in a listener’s eyes and realized that her mind was slipping away. Yet instead of leaping up and crying, Enough, she fell silent, tongue-tied.
The nightly ritual of rituals took place while she listened. If she was asleep, he woke her; the day could not end without it. He prepared her supper on a tray, sat on the edge of her bed, and recounted his endless daily triumphs. When those triumphs involved women, half-truths entered the story: “Imagine, people are saying I’m having an affair with so-and-so.” At first, she had found it impossible to imagine. The woman in question was, after all, young enough to be his daughter. Then, when the story finally reached her, he said: “Didn’t I tell you?” And emerged innocent, like the wolf falsely accused of the lamb’s blood. Years ago, she had shouted at him: “Please stop lying. Your constant need to lie is degrading to you and to me, a gratuitous insult to us both. I haven’t asked you for an explanation, and I never will.” But he did not stop. He had become incapable of living without a nightly audience for his endless successes and his equally endless grievances against the ingratitude of people and the world. Over the years, she became an ear that listened and a mouth bound shut. She had to sleep so that she could go to work early and still be capable of doing her job. If she disagreed with him, he would keep her awake until she was convinced, or, worse, until she pretended to be convinced so she could sleep. For years, she had stayed up arguing with him in the hope of some meeting of minds. Then she became an ear that listened and a mouth bound shut, after discovering that there was no common ground on which they might meet. Even their encounters in bed became impossible, transformed in turn into a destructive ritual. He would perform his “marital duty” and sleep. Once, when their meeting in bed had not yet become a ritual, he shouted at her: “You despise me.” She looked at him in astonishment, questioning, and he added: “Your body rejects me. It despises me.”
She had not known that the body could sometimes be more intelligent than the mind, more eloquent in its expression. She had not known that the self-deception accepted by the mind could not be imposed upon the body, that nothing could deceive the body about what it felt. She learned this and, having learned it, was no wiser. She expected him to stop, but he did not. She deliberately lengthened the intervals, though she did not put an end to them. The act became a destructive ritual. He reduced her to an instrument of satisfaction, and instead of rising to cry, Enough, she went on, her eyes swollen from futile wakefulness, lying alone in her own bed with an unrelenting sense of nausea and failure.
“But you are not a fighter by nature.” A colleague at work had said this to her a few days earlier, when corrupt conditions had made it necessary to gather their forces for an open and punishing battle with the administration. Perhaps in justification, perhaps in apology, she had replied: “Let us try. I purchase peace of mind with a great many small concessions. But when it becomes a matter of principle, you will find me as stubborn as a donkey.” Lying amid the greenery she could not name, she admitted that the slope was all one slope, and that concessions had no bottom. One small concession delivered a person into a larger one. Over time, the unprincipled concession became indistinguishable from the principled, until one awoke one day to find oneself in a bottomless abyss. She admitted that she had never cried out at her husband because she too had become a lie, playing the same game and abiding by the same rules. Her husband was better than she was because he did not pretend to be other than what he was. And she admitted that she no longer had the right to anger. Anger belonged to those capable of severing and remaking their lives.
***
On the night before their departure, the singer performed after the group returned from passing through the village and visiting the estate overseer’s house, subdued and tense. He sang the story of a village hemmed in by hills of sand and rock, and of people who, over the years, had turned stone into green fields. The people’s sighs and laughter, carried across the years, dispelled the gloom and tension that had seized the group when they returned to the house. She sat listening, dry-eyed, to stories of planting and harvest, hope and hunger, love and death. The game of tears no longer served any purpose.
She had not shared in the moments of gloom, nor in the tension that followed them, after they passed through the village and visited the estate overseer’s house. She had moved beyond guilt, and beyond easing that guilt by shifting responsibility onto unknown forces or onto others. She withdrew from the group with a new awareness that her world in the apartment overlooking the Nile had come to an end. Something had happened at sunset that day and during the evening that followed, bringing that world to an irreversible end. She could not say exactly when it had happened. Had it ended as she passed the village’s mud-brick dwellings, resisting and overcoming the urge to faint? Or had it ended in the estate overseer’s house, at the moment she cried out, choking, “Get me out of here”? What was certain was that it had ended. Brooding over misery by candlelight was no longer possible, nor was dreaming on paper. The certainty of the ending forced her to confront the need to put her decision into action. She withdrew from the group and asked herself: Could she do it? Was there enough left of the young woman she had once been to help her sever what now existed and reconnect what had been broken?
It was not difficult for her to guess what had happened in the house after the group passed through the village and visited the estate overseer’s home. She had lived through similar moments dozens of times, though she had never known any as harsh as those she had endured that evening. The members of the group sat facing one another in the sitting room like strangers, each avoiding the others’ eyes for fear that a glance might expose what was hidden. Before long, as she had expected, the gloom gave way to tension, each of them trying to shed responsibility by casting it onto invisible forces or onto someone else. To acknowledge responsibility would mean the collapse of the glittering, exquisitely fashioned shell each had built around themselves in Cairo in order to live, the shell in which each took refuge in order to go on living. The question, What have I done to change things? had to be evaded at any cost, for too much hung in the balance. As she had expected, tension replaced the gloom. They accused one another of having treated the encounter like tourists who had come to gaze upon the misery of the peasants. In the end, the circle of accusation narrowed and closed around the doctor, the only one who had not merely looked on as the others had. She had bridged the distance between herself and the peasants, speaking with them, treating children in critical condition and children already dying, sending to Beni Suef for medicines and injections, prescribing long courses of treatment that would have to continue after she left the village. She was torn apart by the knowledge that none of the patients’ families possessed enough money to sustain such treatment. She cried out to the very stones in protest against the absence of medical care in the village and throughout the entire region. They said that, like a tourist, the doctor had asked the peasants questions she should never have asked.
***
The village appeared at dusk in a single, unchanging color: the color of clay. Dizziness overcame her. The dimensions of the mud houses dissolved into the gathering dark. People made of clay sat on their thresholds, their bellies swollen, their lips dry; clay-colored blood ran from the mouths of dying children. Others disappeared into the village lanes like dolls molded from mud, while animals stood with anxious, thin, rigid necks, like children’s toys. Nothing broke the silence but a bloody cough and the low, barely audible voice of a woman mourning her infant. She staggered as though drunk with pain. She knew that only the narrowest margin separated her from losing consciousness, and that her salvation depended on holding herself back from that edge and remaining awake. Instead of fleeing once again, she slowed her steps and let herself sway beneath the dizziness. Instead of closing her eyes against the pain that stabbed like a knife, she opened them wide so she could see. She saw, heard, and absorbed. She made herself dwell on every detail, one after another, committing each to memory and feeling so that she would not forget, so that she would not surrender to blind anger. No, this time she had not fled the village or its people of clay. She had returned to them after a long absence. It was the estate overseer’s house she had fled.
There was something false and contrived about that house. The man had wanted to shed the mud-brick house and move into one of red brick, but his means had apparently failed him. He remained suspended without a home, stranded midway up the staircase: belonging neither where the peasants belonged nor among the owners of red-brick houses. The estate overseer’s house was not a house at all. It was a single room on the upper floor, hanging in the air at the top of an unrailed staircase. On the ground floor, there was nothing whatsoever: no rooms for children of different ages, no pen for the animals, no oven for baking bread and cooking food, no lavatory. Only a room suspended in the air above a staircase without a railing, like the set of a play that would soon be dismantled. Climbing to the suspended room had not been difficult. Enough daylight remained at sunset to make the climb easy. Leaving it was what proved difficult, once the last remnants of daylight had vanished. Yet she had to leave, however dark it was and however difficult. The only alternative was to die of suffocation.
As she listened to the village singer recount stories of sowing and harvest, hope and hunger, love and death, she wondered whether they had carried the sick woman there against her will, or whether she had willingly taken part in the spectacle arranged as scenery for guests arriving from Cairo. She judged the second possibility more likely. No one could force another person into something that person did not, in some way, accept. How strange and uprooted the sick woman had looked, stretched out on the black metal bed in a room suspended in the air, with traces of lime still clinging to its tiled floor. How strange and uprooted she had seemed, perhaps sleeping in a bed for the first time, sleeping a sleep that was not her own. Could the sick woman now return to where she belonged, once the performance was over?
***
She never knew exactly what happened to the woman after the black metal bed collapsed. The men, both guests and members of the household, stood at the threshold. Inside the suspended room, she and the other women guests pressed themselves against the wall to make space for the doctor. After greetings had been exchanged, the medical examination began. The doctor removed the woman’s clothes. She had barely bent down to place the stethoscope against her heart when the bed collapsed beneath the naked woman. She fled the room, choking with shame, and whispered to her friend, the professor of psychology: “Get me out of here.” Outside the estate overseer’s house, in the open air, she stood trembling with shame, running her hands over her own body, feeling the depth of the wounds that had cut into her at the instant the bed collapsed beneath the naked woman.
***
After the singer had left, while the hostess slipped the tapes of the recorded songs into her travelling bag in preparation for the return to Cairo, she wondered whether the woman possessed the strength to sever what existed and reconnect what had been broken. She tended her anger as a pregnant woman tends the child within her, knowing that calling for help would no longer serve any purpose. Now that the game was over, the woman would have to stand on her own two feet, return to herself, to her family and her people, to her home after an absence of ten years.
Written in 1985.
Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996) was a prominent Egyptian activist and writer, most well-known for her novel The Open Door, which won the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and became a popular feature film directed by Henry Barakat. Also read: On Latifa al-Zayyat Day: ‘Her Laughter Brought Me Up Short.’
Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.