Read Online The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi - Free Book Online Page B

love and a greater fear of God. In the children’s home I prayed regularly and God appeared to me in my dreams as a man. He caressed my bosom with a gentle hand and my belly became swollen with the Jesus Christ that was yet to be born. And now in the morning when I prayed, God’s voice resounded in my ears full of anger. He cursed me in a loud voice and threatened to inflict cruel punishment on me. I fell on my knees and bowed my head low to the ground, entreating Him to have mercy on me. I prayed five times a day, and each time I prostrated myself before Him. He would not cease to vent His wrath on me for a single moment, and at night I curled myself under the bed covers and watched Him as He approached. Now His words were no longer angry but gentle and soft-spoken, and His face was as gentle as the moon on a summer’s night. He rocked me in His arms, filling my heart with a love that was pure. My belly rose with a sacred pregnancy and I watched it grow slowly like a ball filling up gradually with air. I called out to Him when He turned His back on me and He swung round and started to come closer to me once more. But this time His face was completely different, a new face, sombre, almost black with wrath, with eyes burning like glowing embers. I opened my mouth to scream. My body seemed pegged to the ground and I could not move. Suddenly I awakened, my body bathed in sweat, and with my pen wrote the first halting words of a letter addressed to no one. I saw God in my sleep and He had two faces. One smooth and gentle as a mother’s face, and the other like the face of Satan.

The First Letters in the Alphabet of Love
     
    We were not permitted to look out of the windows. The balconies of the military hospital overlooked the windows of the nursing school and so the military men could look down on the girls from above. The hospital buildings were huge and obstructed the light of the sun, but at the end of the day when I stood near the window a long slender ray of sunlight would reach me over one of the corners. I could feel the harsh grip of fingers over my back pulling me away from it. They were the fingers of the Head Nurse. She was a short middle-aged woman wearing a white veil and a long uniform reaching down to the ground, like a sister in a monastery. She had a rounded white face and plump hands. Over her bodice she wore three stars which hung from a chain around her neck, as well as the Order of Charity, a golden disc in the form of a brooch pinned over her left breast. Under the fine silk of her uniform, her big breasts jogged up and down. As she advanced with short quick steps over the floor they preceded her, her buttocks like two mounds of flesh bringing up the rear. The right buttock rose up when the left came down and the left buttock rose up when the right came down, as though each hemisphere was not in its place. When she was standing she kept her arms close to her body, but when she walked one arm would swing out while the other remained stuck to her side. During the day her pointed metal-tipped heels struck the tiled floor with a clinking resonance, but at night she tiptoed on soundless bare feet. She made the rounds of the dormitory like a lost soul floating in the night without a body, and when she passed through the doors the flutter of her tunic was like a whisper of air. Her face was all fat without muscle, but it remained completely rigid and never exhibited even the finest of tremors, like a plate of milk boiled with starch. But her eyes were two balls of grey lead that moved restlessly everywhere. Overhanging each of them was a semicircular brow drawn with a fine pencil. Looked at from the side, her nose pointed scornfully upwards into the air. She appeared or disappeared in the dormitories and corridors like a spirit from another world or a being never known to exist before.
    When I slept at night I kept my ears strained to catch the slightest whisper in the air. I could detect the soft trailing of