By Nawal El-Saadawi The heroine of Al-Ruwaya is a young Egyptian girl who confronts the difficulties of life in Cairo, without privileges or defences, and without beauty or femininity in the conventional sense. But she does have the will to survive, combined with a vague literary ambition. She wants to write a novel, she does not know what it is, where it starts or where it ends. This interest in writing is the reason behind her attending some literary seminars held at a publishing house in Heliopolis, where she meets the owner of the company, Samih, and they start having a quiet, somewhat stable love affair. She also makes the acquaintance of Rustum and Carmen, two writers well known among the cultural elite in Cairo. Carmen is a full-time novelist, but her husband Rustum works in politics as well as writing. He is a member of the Shura Council, and receives important literary awards, for he knows the rules of the game in the world of politics and literature. He lives divided between his true self and a false self. It is Rustum's true self that is drawn to the girl, with whom he has an erratic, contradictory love affair. Carmen is nonetheless sympathetic to the girl, whom she befriends, their relationship resembling that of a mother and her daughter or rather a mentor and her protégé. Their friendship survives well into Carmen's crisis and her being institutionalised as part of the punishment she receives for writing a novel. Carmen is given psychotropic drugs to help cure her of the will to create by depressing her mental activity. At the asylum Carmen's health deteriorates until she begins to die, and now the girl is her only visitor. The girl manages to release the ban on Carmen's novel despite being followed by the police, and Carmen manages to save the girl from the forces that lie in wait for her before breathing her last. Consumed by regret, Rustum eventually kills himself. Taking place in the period 1999-2004, the action opens with the girl going through the experience of pregnancy outside of wedlock, and so escaping to Barcelona not only to write her novel but to give birth to her child there, where Catalan law provides for children legitimately bearing their mothers' names. This latter aim she achieves, but she fails to write the novel and suffers from economic difficulties in Barcelona the way she suffered in Cairo. She is forced to return to Egypt, leaving her baby girl in the care of her Catalan boyfriend's mother, who insists on taking custody of the child in the belief that she is her grandmother. Samih travels to Barcelona to retrieve the child in the belief that he is the father. In the meantime the girl returns to the Sayeda Zeinab flat she shares with the journalist Gamalat, its owner, a woman who is miserable despite her apparent high spirits, and irresponsible despite her loud religiousity; she embodies all the prevalent contradictions. She too has had a child out of wedlock, but her daughter killed herself after being abandoned by her mother and suffering the difficulties of life as an illegitimate child in Cairo, leaving Gamalat debilitated and in need of the heroine's company. Thus the girl inherits the flat, and befriends Gamalat's friend Mariam, a strong-willed poet who supports and encourages her... (Synopsis by the author) **** The girl is 23 years of age, fatherless. She has neither family nor university degree, nor a stamped identity card. It was her first novel, and she was writing it down without being a writer. She had not read the myths of the prophets, nor poets and authors. Her name was not included among women writers. Walking in search of daily bread has given her a slim figure, supported by a solid spine. Her facial features, prominent and sharp from being so thin, are moulded into rock hard bones. The election season is imminent, and the sex and corruption scandals of the nominees precede it. Of these the women have the greater share, naturally. There is a council of the elderly called the Shura Council. It embraces wise old men and women. The hero of the novel is a member of that council. At 54 he is the youngest of its members. He looks like an athletic young man, plays golf every day. His skin is sun tanned, his eyes glowing. He wears an elegant suit and a colourful tie. His face is shaven, with neither mustachio not beard, giving off the scent of lavender shaving cream. His pace is wide and quick. He works in a major press institution and has published eight novels. He is busy writing the ninth. His name is Rustum. **** Rustum ambled down the Nile corniche on warm moonlit nights, stopping before the kiosk at the corner. They call it a boutique. Its owner is a young man, the son of a martyr. He wears a white jilbab and a long black beard. Rosaries hang over the façade of the boutique, accompanied by gilt-cover Qurans, incense burners, Ramadan fasting calendars and women's amulets. The young man's face beams as usual when he sees Rustum approaching: "Welcome, Pasha." The young man hands him a small portion of what is smoked in a shisha or placed under the tongue, a novel wrapped up in thick paper that does not show the title and a fasting calendar. Ramadan was imminent, and the electoral battle would accompany it. "What's the news, Mohamed?" Rustum's voice has a rough, masculine inflection, full of manliness and thick smoke. It attracts the young women who read his popular novels. "The dollar's going up, Pasha, and the pound's plummeting." Rustum passes him a brown envelope with an eagle head printed on it, sealed with a piece of cello tape, which the young man holds very carefully in both hands, as if it were a bird that might flap its wings and fly away. He then disappears behind a wooden vault inside the boutique. Minutes later he returns holding a black plastic bag. "Count them, Pasha." "But I trust you, Mohamed." "How many calendars do you need, Pasha?" "That depends on the voters. Two thousand, three, four thousand..." "Everyone's with you, and God is with you." "God above all." **** At night, before he goes to bed, Rustum peels the wrapper off the novel, as if he were tearing off a woman's clothes. He loves to read while smoking and drinking. It moves his lust for the forbidden, like other men and women. The forbidden is desired, as they say. On the back cover lay the picture of the young woman author, inside a small square. His eyes focussed on the character of her face, the prominent stone features, her eyes fixed on his, penetrating, cutting as the edge of a knife. At 23 she is 31 years his junior. She was born in the spring of 1981, the year in which his eighth novel, the winner of the grand prix, appeared. He was handed the prize in a grand ceremony, by the president himself, five months before the latter was assassinated. The picture of the girl started appearing to him in his dreams while he was asleep. **** Chapter 1 The girl escaped to a far away place in which to write the novel. She took along only a bag containing her clothes and papers, and the foetus she carried in her viscera. She travelled to the faraway beach to be close to the open sea, seeking to escape from the darkness of walls, injunctions to arrest and to execute. She wanted to give life to her child, the fruit of sacred love, the divine sperm in the womb of the virgin. At night, when the wind calms and sea water sleeps, the unborn child lies in her depths. A child of unknown parentage, like her first novel. She does not know its name. People live in terror. The unknown and things that have no name terrify them the most. Even the devil's name they know, Iblis, and the names of the gods, whose veils have already been removed. The girl presses the light switch near her bed. Her memories take her back to her city. She crossed the breadth of the sea from the south to the north to be away from it. Vision requires distance. Away from noise and shouting voices, away from the dust of the alleyways and the torridness of summer, she tears off the coils coiled around her head. She looks at her face, exposed to sunlight. Her body swims in the sea like a silver fish. Her eyes are open to a horizon without ceiling. A buzz in her ears reminds her of flies in the neighbourhood of Sayeda Zeinab, and the ticking of the old alarm clock next to her pillow, the supplications of beggars before the mosque gate, calling on heaven for mercy and justice, in vain. Heaven stays stretched over their heads in its eternal silence, except for those rare moments of winter prophesied by the sound of thunder, when a light drizzle no sooner falls than dries. They used to sit in the small café near Tahrir Square sipping wine. After the first glass she is overcome by a melancholy intoxication. By her side sits Samih in a grey suit, without a tie. A pale, thin face with green eyes. In front of her sits Carmen in a colourful dress. Her thick brown hair moves with her head and her unbridled laughs. Next to her is Rustum, with his sun-tanned face, in a sky blue suit with a red tie patterned with blue circles, his eyes wandering as he refills empty glasses. He hands her her glass, and their eyes meet momentarily, then he goes back to his wandering. Her eyes stay fixed in his, even in her absence, persistent, penetrating, cutting as the edge of a knife. Two large pupils, their blueness almost black, like an ocean's depth, in which colours and races dissolve. This gives them a unique attractiveness that rises above sex. Cairo (Al-Qahira) by night has a feminine name, but its unconscious by day believes in the masculine god. In its unconscious lives the female goddess, wandering through the streets on foot, or inside a Mercedes the colour of the suit, with Rustum driving. The first time he asked her out alone, Carmen was in New York participating in a conference on the post-modern novel. Samih was in Assuit giving a lecture at the university on the biology of culture. On Haram Road her eyes clung to the summits of the Pyramids. They caught Rustum's face in profile, his nose raised proudly, his lips full and coarse like Africans'. His large hands, covered with yellow, sun-tanned hair, manipulated the steering wheel with firmness and confidence.
