Read Online Two Women in One by Nawal El Saadawi - Free Book Online

blown back and forth. It may have seemed as if she had abandoned herself to the sensation of being lost, as though she relished her own dissolution and annihilation, but inwardly she resisted, tensing her muscles and fending off the random motion. She refused to submit to it; she forbade her feet to move; with all her might she fought to stop.
    She found herself standing like a wild pony, her tall slim body erect, her black eyes looking up, her black hair falling over her forehead, ears and the nape of her neck. Her nose was straight and sharp, her lips pursed in anger. She looked round to see where she was. But she had never been here before. Nor had she ever seen the house, nor the people around her, who came and went in a never-ending stream. Nobody knew her and she knew no one. The blood pounded through her heart. Her breath came in great gulps as if she were drowning. Life around her had turned into permanent liquidity, water above and below, and her hands and feet found no solid purchase.
    She reached out with shaking, panicky fingers as though thrashing in the water for a lifeline. When her hand touched the edge of her pocket, her fingers curled around the metal key and gripped it firmly, as if to make sure it was really there; its solidity seemed to reassure her that something in life was tangible, something could be grasped in the fingers.
    With the speed and force of a drowning woman gripping a solid object, her body was driven, her feet strode steadily and quickly over the asphalt, and her eyes searched the jungle of streets for that protruding arm stretching between the horizon’s heart and the blue sky caught between the buildings and the mountain. As she ran, she glanced at her watch: half past four. Her heart pounded and her chest rose and fell as her feet flew after each other, as if they were racing her breath.

 
    A small door with a green branch of ivy hanging above it. As it opened, she saw his long, thin face with its deeply etched features, tense and exhausted. It was as if he never slept or ate, as if his head bore the world’s burdens, as if his deep blue-black eyes with their penetrating gaze pierced all masks to reach inner depths.
    ‘Hello, Bahiah.’
    His voice surprised her. The name ‘Bahiah’ had acquired great intimacy. It was unlike any other Bahiah’s name. It was hers to the exclusion of millions, she with her special being standing here on the west side of the room.
    There was almost no furniture, just a big sofa in the corner, a table with a vase of roses, and the wide window with the towering mountain beyond. She sat on the sofa; he turned to close the door. His back was to her and she could no longer see his face, eyes or gestures. He seemed a stranger. When she heard the door close, she suddenly remembered that she was Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, and now she had turned up at the house of a strange man with a back just like other men and with no connection to her. She was amazed, as in a dream when you find yourself in a strange place for the first time, meeting strangers you have never met before.
    Her brain started churning at dream speed, hurling up image after image. She imagined her father in his bamboo chair in the sitting room, sipping his morning coffee. He opens his newspaper, and finds that the naked body of his daughter Bahiah has been found in a bachelor’s flat in al-Muqattam. Her father thought the road between home and the college delineated Bahiah’s world, that she said her prayers, fasted, and studied four hours a day, that when a love song came over the radio she would turn it off, and that when any boy in the family teased her she would scold him. He thought she was unlike other girls, that her body was unlike others girls’, in fact, that she had no body at all, no organs, especially no sexual organs liable to be aroused or stirred by someone of the opposite sex.
    Her mind baulked at imagining her father’s shock on seeing