Zeina by Nawal El Saadawi Page A

and shouted angrily, “Get out of here! Never come in here again. Nobody should enter this room, is that clear?”
    “Yes, Dad.”
    Zeina Bint Zeinat was capable of finding and catching Mageeda in any hiding place in the garden. Her large eyes sparkled with a blue, green, or red flame, reflecting the colors of the flowers. They revealed to her all the hiding places as though they could emit light rays. Her body was light and agile. She was like a white butterfly in her Egyptian cotton dress running among the trees. Her mother Zeinat used to buy three meters of cotton from the al-Mahallah al-Kubra outlet on Tahrir Street for her. Miss Mariam paid for the material, the black leather shoes, and the white ribbon in her frizzy hair that stood like black wires.
    A girl with this kind of hair was the object of people’s scorn, for girls from good families had long smooth hair falling softly down their backs. Their hair submitted easily to the movement of the gentle breeze and the fingers of their husbands after marriage.
    Zeina Bint Zeinat had no family. Her father died while she was still in the womb. She inherited from him the tough, stubborn “gene”, the upright gait and the robust head. She inherited the hair which stood like iron spikes protecting the head from blows, and her large pupils which had the black and blue colors of earth and sea. The pupils of her eyes rolled in their spheres like the earth around the sun, and were surrounded by the clear white color of the waves underneath the sunlight or the mountaintops rising high beyond the sea.
    Through the wall of the womb she heard her mother shouting against injustice and hailing freedom. She heard the irregular whimpers and suppressed sobs, the sound of the whip lashing in the air and falling on living flesh, dripping with blood. Rifle butts kicked him below the stomach, between the firm thighs, on the tip of the male organ they call “the rod” in prison. The prison warden, with his narrow sunken eyes, glanced at the prisoner’s penis. His eyes were filled with envy and admiration, since envy and admiration often went hand in hand. The prison warden’s was tiny, thin and curved, with hardly any blood flowing through it. The little blood that flowed there was yellowish, anaemic, and full of the fear of God and of his superiors. If it had an erection, it would totter and reel, hesitating between going forward and refraining. It stayed shrunk in the marital bed and never had any action except when stimulated by a young jailed prostitute. He lied to his wife that he went to see a doctor about his sexual incompetence. He crept from her bed at night to visit prostitutes after swallowing the blue Viagra pill.
    Admiration and envy were directed at the prisoner’s proud head. Even when crushed under blows, it remained erect, looking up to the sky, challenging both the sky and the superiors. At night, the prison warden dreamed of striking the prisoner’s neck with his sword, removing the proud head and installing it on his own wobbly neck. But this was an impossible dream, for the prisoner’s head could never replace the jailer’s.
    Mageeda and Zeina Bint Zeinat played hide-and-seek in the large garden. Whenever Mageeda disappeared, Zeina managed to find her and to take hold of her arm, pulling her and screaming with joy “Got you, Mageeda!”
    Roles changed during the course of the game, for Mageeda would become the hunter, and Zeina Bint Zeinat would hide. When Mageeda untied the blindfolds covering her eyes, she would look around for Zeina. She would look behind the boxes in the storeroom and underneath the cars parked in the garage. She would inspect the holes in the ground between the trees and the flower basins.
    But Mageeda never managed even once to catch Zeina Bint Zeinat, for the latter was born and bred on the streets. She was experienced in hiding from the eyes of deities and Devils. Satan’s watchful eyes couldn’t find her and God’s sleepless eyes