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

less.’
    ‘So who was the most important person in your life?’
    ‘It wasn’t a person.’
    ‘What was it?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe my life’s never been full. Or maybe I was trying to achieve something.’
    ‘What kind of thing?’
    ‘I don’t know. Perhaps some great undertaking.’
    ‘Making people better?’
    ‘Maybe something more than that.’

    ‘Would you like to live with me for ever?’
    He asked me this, looking at me like a motherless child. He aroused powerful maternal, humanitarian and altruistic instincts and desires in me, and I felt his need for me pulling me towards him and binding me to him.
    I looked at him tenderly and he asked me again, ‘Will you marry me?’
    The word ‘marry’ thudded inside my head, driving all other thoughts to the back of my mind. What had it meant to me when I was a child? A man with a big belly. In my mind, the smell of the kitchen was the smell of marriage. I hated the word and I hated the smell of food. Without realizing what I was doing, I asked him, ‘Do you like food?’
    He looked at me in surprise and said, ‘Food?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What strange question are you asking me this time?’
    ‘Men get married to eat.’
    ‘Who told you that?’
    ‘Everybody.’
    ‘It’s not true.’
    ‘Why didn’t you think about getting married while your mother was living with you?’
    ‘My mother didn’t just cook for me. She gave me everything else I wanted.’
    ‘So you’re getting married so that someone else can give you everything you want?’
    ‘No,’ he said; and it was as if he was saying, ‘Yes.’

    The old man with a large white turban looked at him with profound respect and listened to everything he said, but he didn’t see or hear me. I seemed to vanish before his eyes. He had a pen in his hand and there was a big lined exercise book on the table in front of him.
    ‘How much do you wish to pay in advance, sir, and what will the balance be?’
    What were these melancholy phrases coming out of his dry lips? Advance? Balance? Was the man who had nothing to give me now paying so that he could marry me? But the man in the turban had no way of knowing which of us was the one with something to give. All he saw was a man and a woman and as far as he was concerned the man was the one with the possessions.
    I looked at the shaikh with a superior expression and said, ‘Write “nothing”.’
    He looked back at me disapprovingly: how dare a woman speak in the presence of men!
    ‘The contract then becomes invalid,’ he pronounced in a legalistic tone.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The law tells us so.’
    ‘Then you don’t know the law.’
    He jumped up from his chair and his turban bounced off his head. He caught it in both hands, shouting, ‘God have mercy! God have mercy!’

    The shaikh moistened his fingers with the tip of his tongue, plunged the pen into the ink, muttered the appropriate religious formulae, pushed back his voluminous sleeve, then wrote out two forms and handed me one of them, saying ‘Sign here.’
    Stubbornly I replied, ‘Let me read it through first.’
    He looked at me irritably but gave me the paper to read. My eyes fell on unexpected words, words that I associated with contracts for renting flats and shops and plots of agricultural land: ‘On this day... in my presence and by my hand... I so-and-so... official attached to such-and-such a court... marriage of so-and-so to so-and-so... on payment of such-and-such a marriage portion by the husband... an amount to be paid at the present time... and an amount to be deferred... legal marriage according to God’s Book and the Law of His Prophet, God bless Him and grant Him salvation... with the legal consent of the aforementioned husband... consequent on both parties being verified as free from any religious or civil impediment and on the wife having no income or salary from the government and no wealth exceeding... in the presence of the witnesses... ’
    I took the document in both