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

crossing the street, a bullet tumbling randomly through the air.
    To die in such a way, by chance and without her consent — that would really be a crime. But death would be legitimate if she were its deliberate target, if she were its choice and it hers.
    When she looked up, she didn’t see him. Turning quickly, she saw his back disappearing round a bend in the street. She shouted, ‘Saleem!’
    But there was no reply. She shouted louder, ‘Saleem!’
    Her quavering voice bounced back and forth off the mountain, but no one answered.

 
    She stretched out on the bed in her small room. Her black eyes glittered in the dark like diamonds, absorbing the darkness and turning it into white rays of light. Millions of tiny particles floated in the rays, spinning in systematic circles, like the eternal motion of the universe, like the regular hum in her ear, and swept through her, down through her neck and legs, producing a light tickling sensation like the flow of blood through her hands and feet, gathering like pin-heads at the tips of her fingers and toes. It was like the tiny feet of ants crawling under her skin and bones. She could almost hear their continuous faint buzz, like the millions of noises that make up the stillness of the night.
    As she got up and her bare feet touched the cold floor, she lost her balance and would have fallen, had it not been for her strong legs and taut muscles, which kept her body straight. She pulled the canvas from behind the bed, turned the light onto it and sat on the floor on the small white mat, gazing at the cornelian-red particles floating in the light. As she squeezed her brush she felt pain, like the prick of needles. But her hand would not stop. It shuttled over the painting, with that deliberate movement, that urgent sweeping desire to experience the pain to the full, to press until her fingers bled and were crushed, putting an end to her pain.
    A mysterious sweeping desire shook her body and seemed to stir the earth under her. It travelled from her fingers down through her arms, neck and head, as if along a taut electric wire, so that her fingers became stiff, her neck tense, and her head immobile.
    Anyone seeing her at that moment would have thought she had been crucified. Were it not for the movement of her hand, she could have been thought to have died in her chair. But she was fully awake.
    Her wide open eyes could detect the faintest of lines, even a dot. Her fingers could cut the black universe into two with the tip of her brush, making a white line, a hair’s breadth, like the horizon separating the earth from the sky and day from night: a white line tinged with a dark deep red the colour of blood.
    When she saw this deep red, her eyes widened, full of the dread of eyes before real blood. What was it about the colour of blood that frightened her? She gazed at the blue veins under her skin and felt the regular pulse in her wrist, one beat after the other. Some mysterious hidden feeling told her that the next beat would be the last and that the sound would stop, that she would breathe no more. She strained to listen. The final moment was still far off, but her ears could already detect it — faint and drawing nearer, just like the beat before and the next one, a continuous buzz that she fervently wished would cease. She strained to hear, waiting for the next beat and fearing that it would never come.
    The alarm woke her in the morning. Her father’s great eyes loomed over her bed, drawing her up, out of her room and out of the house. They followed her to the tram and the college. Then his thick palms shoved her into the dissecting room.
    She stood on one foot alongside the marble table, lifting the other high as if to kick someone, then put it down with all its weight on the table’s edge. A forbidden posture for man or woman. Dr Alawi, who would sweep past the tables in his white glasses and his short white coat, was the only man who could stand like that, alongside her