Love in the Kingdom of Oil by Nawal El Saadawi

secret. Another woman had taken her place in the department. You would see her sitting in her office looking around her in curiosity. She would not stop looking until she knew the secret. She opened her drawers and searched through her papers. She latched on to an old love letter. Some verses of poetry that she read repeatedly. Between every verse her breathing would rise in a long sigh. In the secret dossier she came across her date of birth, and a picture of her aunt with a scarf around her head. Her eyes would rest on the house. A room without a toilet in the alley. Curiosity pushed her to look through the crack in the door. She saw the room lying in darkness, bare of furniture. She would cast a sideward glance at her husband sitting reading the newspaper. He would move his head a little and you could see his nose from the side. Big and beak-like, it resembled His Majesty’s. But his picture was not published and his name was unknown. Sitting motionless and completely silent. The silence betrayed her absence. Her soul was full of envy because she had been able to flee. How had she fled? She had gone on leave and not returned, had she? She nursed the secret in her heart and then it burst out in spite of her. The rumour spread through the archaeology department. Male and female colleagues whispered together and a look indicating jealousy would float into their eyes.
    This jealousy was not an irrational thing. It was totally natural in the eyes of the employees. For there is nobody more envious than the employee. Especially in the archaeology department. He sees people moving around him and he is imprisoned behind his wooden desk. People speak about the future and he lives in the past with his archaeological digs. Life passes him by. Nothing will change in the universe whether he lives or dies. There is nothing before him apart from the slumber that overcomes him as he reads the newspaper or searches for gods in the bowels of the earth. A type of divine love, which leads him to long for death, or to go on leave.
    * * *
    ‘Did you ever have a row?’
    ‘Never,’ replied her husband in the interrogation room. The policeman swung his body round in the chair.
    ‘Do you think that she could have committed suicide?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘Didn’t she ever long for death?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘How do you explain her disappearance then?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Nothing?’
    ‘Yes, nothing.’
    Her husband said ‘Nothing’ through pursed lips. He yawned until the bones of his jaws cracked. He turned his face towards the journalists. A camera flashed and burnt the surface of his eyes. His picture had appeared on the inside page. His jaw was square and his face was longer than it should be. There were no distinguishing features except a black mole above his left cheek. A smile escaped from between his clamped lips.
    From his childhood he had imagined seeing his picture beside His Majesty’s. His mother raised her arms to heaven beseeching the Lady of Purity that her son might become like the King. Why not, our Lady of Purity? Was he not born from a stomach like the one from which the King was born?
    The panting of the women had disappeared along with their black shadows. Dogs began to bark in the distance. Dogs do not bark without reason. Are those women planning some move? There had been a look of rebellion in their eyes under the clouds of particles. A counteraction always on the point of being launched.
    She opened her eyes and felt the burning of the sun. She was chattering deliriously. The word ‘counteraction’ drew around her clouds of fantasies. She saw herself ensconced like a jar on the heads of the women. They were carrying her along the alleys of the village. Their eyes were looking down on her from the roofs. They were kicking the ground with their feet and the picture of His Majesty was shaking at the top of the pillar, then it fell under their feet and they trampled on it.
    She rubbed her eye with her fingertip.