Read Online Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal El Saadawi - Free Book Online Page B

snakes, rats and cockroaches. I’d save her and they would crucify me if the idea appealed to them, stone me to death, take me to the scaffold. I’d accept my fate and meet death with a satisfied soul and an easy conscience.

    All society’s tragedies came into my surgery. All the results of deception and deceit lay before me to be examined. The bitter truths which people constantly deny were stretched out on the operating table under my probing, cutting hands.
    I felt compassion for people. Hadn’t this man who’d butchered his erring sister done wrong himself with other men’s sisters? Wasn’t the wolf who’d deceived the innocent girl himself the father of a daughter whom he’d kept imprisoned in the house...? the man who’d been unfaithful to his wife also the husband who’d killed his wife to defend his honour...? the unfaithful wife the woman who spread rumours about other women...? this society which broadcast songs of love and passion the same society which erected the scaffold for all who fell in love or were swept away by passion?
    I felt compassion for people, all people: they were both wrongdoers and the victims of wrongdoing.

    My surgery filled up with men, women and children and my coffers with money and gold. My name became as famous as that of a movie star and my opinions circulated among people as though they were law. Strangers suddenly claimed a relationship with me, enemies became friends and confidants. Men swarmed round me like flies and their attacks changed into a defence of my position and gestures of support. The drawers of my desk filled up with testimonials, requests and pleas for help.
    I sat on my lofty peak looking down on society at my feet. I smiled at it pityingly. Society — that mighty monster which seized women by the scruff of the neck and flung them into kitchens, abbatoirs, graves or the filthy mire — was lying in my desk drawers, weak, subdued and hypocritically begging for mercy! How small mighty society looked now!
    I sat alone at my desk after the last patient had left and the duty nurse had gone home. It was still only nine in the evening, the beginning of the night, and the streets were at their liveliest. I stood up and began to pace the room distractedly. I went up to the window and the warm dreary night air touched my face. In the street outside, people were clinging to one another, talking, laughing, scowling. I looked at myself and found that I was looking down on them from a great height.
    I felt a chilling cold as though I was sitting on a snowy mountain top. I looked above my head and saw only clouds and sky. I looked down at my feet and saw the great distance separating me from the soft gentle valleys and the low-lying plains warmed by the breath of humanity. I could see people waving at me from afar but no one climbed right up to where I was. They played tunes for me but the sounds didn’t reach my ears. They threw flowers at me but the perfume vanished in the air.
    I rested my forehead on the window-sill. How cold solitude was, how hard the silence! What should I do? Jump from the peak? But then I’d break my neck. Retrace my steps? But my life would pass and I’d never achieve what I wanted. My struggles were over and the time had come for me to sit doing nothing.
    How terrible it was to have time lying on my hands!
    Why had I bounded up the ladder of my profession instead of drinking from the cup of life sip by sip or savouring my time in small mouthfuls? Why had I jumped and panted over the course, leaving my proper place in the line and going over the heads of those in front of me?
    People were moving along the street in their lines, advancing with all the speed of a tortoise, but they would arrive one day. Life was moving forward slowly but would inevitably get wherever it was going. Millions of years had gone by before atoms became air, and air became water and water became solid matter; and millions more had passed before the solid matter became