Two Women in One by Nawal El Saadawi Page B

leaving her body on its own. Sometimes when she felt the need for it she would try to summon it up, but it refused to respond and never settled in her body. The cries of her sister Fawziah still rang in her ears: there was a red pool of blood under her. Every day she waited for her turn. The door would open and Umm Muhammad would enter with the sharp razor in her hand, ready to cut that small thing between her thighs. But Umm Muhammad died and her father was transferred to Cairo and that small thing between her thighs remained intact.
    Sometimes she was afraid of it, thinking that it was harmful, that it had been forgotten or left inside her body by mistake. She would long for Umm Muhammad to rise from her grave and come with her razor. But the image of her sister Fawziah, limping and moaning as she walked, would flash through her mind. When the wound healed Fawziah could no longer run as she used to. Her steps became slower and when she walked her legs remained bound together: one leg would not dare to part from the other.
    Bahiah came to hate bath-days. When she undressed she looked with loathing at her sexual organs. She even hated God for creating them. She had once heard her father say that it was God who created our bodies and sexual organs. One day she told her mother that she hated God. Her mother gasped and slapped her face: ‘How can you say such a thing?’
    In tears, she replied, ‘Because he’s created bad things.’
    Her mother hit her again, saying, ‘God creates only beautiful things.’
    ‘But who created those bad organs?’
    Her mother looked at her wide-eyed and did not reply. That night she heard her whispering to her father, ‘The girl is not normal.’
    Since she did not know what was normal, she imagined that sexual desire was abnormal. So she was disgusted when she saw men’s sexual organs bulging under their trousers; she wanted to throw up when a man dug his elbow into her chest as she waited for the tram. She hated men with their trousers, their ugly protruding organs, their greedy, shifty eyes, their smell of onions and tobacco, and their thick moustaches which looked like black, dead insects flapping over their lips.
    She knew that her father was a man and so she hated him all the more. At night when his snoring stopped she would imagine that he had died. She did not love her mother, nor did she love women with their low-cut dresses, revealing breasts swollen with hidden desire, and their eyes made up with kohl, like slave maidens burning with lust. But their flat, closely-bound legs and their beaten eyes betrayed their everlasting frigidity.
    But to them she was an adolescent. When she stood on the balcony to enjoy the sun her father would imagine that she was within sight of their bald neighbour. If she was late, absent-minded, drawing, thinking, having a bath, or looking in the mirror, the reason was all too obvious: a man. She later realized that parents thought of nothing but sex and imagined that their offspring were just like them.
    At a big family party they sold her to a man for three hundred Egyptian pounds. Musical instruments played, dancers’ bodies shook, men’s eyes glowed with lust and bellies were filled with food and drink. Her face was surrounded by flowers and lights but it looked pale. Her mother made shrill cries of joy in a sharp voice that was stifled just at the end, like a suppressed sob. Her father paced up and down in his new suit. From time to time he put his hand in his pocket, feeling for his wallet, bulging with money for her dowry. Children were playing and running about, but whenever their eyes fell on the bride they touched their genitals under their clothes in fear. Men walked about in their trousers, their bent legs striding back and forth, exhibiting a flabby and insatiable virility. Women wore their shiniest dresses, and their soft eyes were veiled by memories of sad weddings.
    Her white silk dress stretched tightly over her chest, smothering her