Golden Chariot Read online

  The first fiddle tried to take the place of the lover whose treachery had been so recently avenged and offered to marry her immediately, despite the fact that he was already married with children. But Azima considered his offer as a form of pity for her and an attempt to restore her damaged self-esteem and even to silence people’s accusations against her. She rejected his request tactfully for these noble reasons and for other reasons not so noble. The first was that the first fiddle was conspicuously short which meant that he hardly came up to her waist and secondly she was still in love with the flute player despite the fact that he was a lost cause. He was the lover whose beautiful memory she wanted to preserve without thinking about another man, or embarking upon marriage. Indeed her hopes in men generally were shattered and she considered what had happened as a lesson to her and an experience which had alerted her to the fact that she had been enticed by fame and money and had thought she was able to buy love just as she bought anything else from the souk.

  Thereafter, life for Azima might almost have reverted to how it was before the flautist entered her life, had he not resolved to avenge himself for the hellish operation which had targeted his most cherished possession. After he discovered what had happened to him he chose to remain silent because he did not want to be the subject of mockery, particularly from those to whom he had divulged the secrets of his love affair with Azima. He decided not to complain to the police or involve them in this disaster, preferring to deal with it in his own way in order to save time: a day is like a year with the authorities, and the police would draw the whole thing out transferring the matter to the prosecution and the court. This would have meant him harbouring a sense of burning hatred for a long time, perhaps for years. For that reason he decided to exercise his right to revenge on his own and to deal with the matter in hand in stages. The first step concentrated on the first fiddle in his capacity as the mastermind of the castration operation and the second concerned Azima for whom he would slowly prepare a dish of revenge on a gentle heat until it was ready to be eaten; the first ingredient would be to fling concentrated sulphuric acid over Azima’s face to disfigure her so badly that her artistic future would be ruined. She would be unable, after that, to stand before her beloved audience with a horrific face, she would be like the frightening man with the skinless leg with whom his mother used to threaten him when he was small in order to get him to go to bed. After that he would make her kneel down in front of him and make her crawl towards him on all fours, after forcing her to eat the dust which he had trodden on; he would make her beg for forgiveness and mercy.

  However, the flautist’s plan failed at its first stage when the attempt of the hired murderers to kill the first fiddle merely left him badly wounded. This occasioned his urgent removal to the Hussein University Hospital, with the police investigating the matter accompanying him. Although the victim did not accuse Hussein the flautist, nevertheless he identified his attackers. They had tried to kill him as he walked through the cemetery on his way back from visiting Azima in her home in Bab Al-Shaariyya where he had been sorting out the wages for the new fiddle players who had joined the group, one of whom was a young student from the Arab Institute of Music.

  At the investigation the failed assassins acknowledged, after each received a slap on the face by way of opening the investigation, that they carried out this attempt on the instructions of Hussein the flautist, who was to pay them a thousand pounds to be shared as they agreed. When Hussein was called up before the prosecution, he confessed that he had instigated this plot as an act of revenge, and they ordered a medical examination which established that he really had been castrated a short time ago. The finger of suspicion then pointed at Azima after she decided to absolve the first fiddle from their line of enquiry, and swore that he had nothing to do with setting up the flautist’s castration either directly or indirectly. She was desperate that the group should go on and that there should be someone to look after its interests with loyalty and devotion. The court found her guilty of the offence of grievous bodily harm for which a financial penalty was insufficient. They sentenced her to imprisonment and a fine of twenty-five thousand pounds, of which Azima did not pay a penny, preferring to spend the necessary years in prison after handing all her jewellery to the first fiddle for safe-keeping as a security for the future when she finally got out.

  Azima faced up to the years in prison with patience and resignation, she considered it as simply the penalty she paid for having dedicated herself to her great love; indeed she was even prepared to face death on his behalf. She lived in prison with her beautiful memories of Hussein the flautist, which were constantly with her, those memories which made her soul overflow with all of that love which had come to her by chance. Her only consolation in the long days and nights in the prison, which time forgets, were the old songs of Umm Kalsoum which kindled the fire in her heart, in which the spark of love had not been extinguished, the songs she never tired of repeating all the time she was alone with herself at night. These were songs which made Aziza review the nature of Azima, after finding her distasteful and irritating. She had believed her to be a demon, who sprang from the earth, who did not even belong to the human race and had lost her way, ending up in prison, when her real place was in some old pit. But hearing the humanity in Azima’s voice which had been suppressed as far as her public was concerned but which often still intoned those wonderful songs of Umm Kalsoum, Aziza discovered her true value, nobility and decency as someone who could only be a real angel.

  For that reason, Aziza decided to seat Azima next to Hinna in the golden chariot. A measure of Azima’s nobility manifested itself in her sympathy towards the wretched Hinna, especially when Hinna was continually ill for a period of two weeks, confining her to bed. Azima waited on her like a daughter would wait on a mother, even carrying her to the toilet to see to her needs, and returning her to bed in the ward for the weak after washing her. She spent ages coaxing her to eat which required a great deal of patience; Hinna had been refusing to eat the awful black prison bread because her false teeth had begun to work loose in her mouth after losing so much weight and becoming much weaker. Azima soaked the bread in water and broke it into little pieces and fed it to her while singing cheerful songs which brought a smile to Hinna’s lips.

  In addition Azima was a wonderful performer and the passengers in the chariot might need some singing to entertain them on their long heavenly journey. This meant including Azima, which was exactly what Aziza resolved should happen.

  Aziza informed Azima of the important and secret decision in two words, and no more, while they were washing their faces one morning in the bathroom. Azima gave Aziza a friendly morning greeting while she was scrubbing her face with soap which meant that she did not notice the silent nod with which Aziza replied, only hearing her voice mingled with the splashing water coming from the tap, without understanding what she meant by the words:

  “Get set!”

  3

  The Cow Goddess Hathur

  It took no time at all – not even the time it took to soft boil an egg – for Aziza to decide that there was one person who simply must be included on the voyage to heaven. This was the peasant woman, Umm El-Khayr, for whom Aziza felt a warmth which was close to love. Ever since she first saw her in the prison, Aziza had clung to Umm ElKhayr and unburdened her heart to her. She first saw her squatting, with her sleeves rolled up, crumbling bits of bread into a blue tin dish onto which she poured a little powdered milk and water to give to the favourite prison cat. It had just put down four kittens with tightly shut eyes after a difficult birth which lasted the whole night. Two of them had inherited features from the unknown father, since they were dark grey streaked with black, unlike their mother, who was the colour of a ripe apricot and so known as “Mishmisha” by the prisoners.

  At this moment, Aziza was leaning against the edge of the window of the geriatric ward overlooking the long corridor which led into the rest of the wards. She smiled to Umm El-K
hayr and said: “God give you strength!” Then she watched Mishmisha lap up the bread and milk in the dish and added: “Praise be to God, little Mishmisha, God willing they will grow up in your glory.”

  Umm El-Khayr’s lips parted to reveal beautiful old teeth, rarely found in a sixty-five year old peasant woman. She spoke as if Mishmisha was a real woman who had suffered greatly giving birth: “D’you know love, I didn’t sleep a wink all night because of her – I felt the pain rip me apart as if I was going through it myself. I pleaded with God to let the birth go peacefully then daybreak proclaimed the glory of God and the first kitten came out.”

  Umm El-Khayr invited Aziza into the ward to drink some tea with her, tempting her by adding a little dried milk from the tin her middle son had brought her on his last visit a few days ago. He knew that his mother was fond of milk with her tea and she would always tell them, when she saw them drinking it black, that they should add milk to dilute the poison.

  Aziza sat next to Umm El-Khayr to drink the milky tea and to gain access to Umm El-Khayr’s heart whose openness and generosity made her the most eligible person to make the voyage to heaven. She sat, mesmerized, and listened to her story without showing the slightest trace of boredom despite the traditional peasant style which characterized her narration. It was a slow process which involved repetition, additions and embellishments full of description and simile and a great deal of darting from one story to another. But Aziza who was perpetually peevish in prison, did not find Umm El-Khayr irritating and found no cause to despise her. Nor did her origins – which were inescapably those of a peasant – arouse Aziza’s scorn despite the fact that she herself came from an old city family who looked upon peasants as boorish, coarse and dirty with an unbearable smell like that of Sabiha who used to come from the country to sell butter and cheese to Aziza’s family. Sabiha would stay overnight with them to boil and clarify the butter into ghee in those far off days when her mother would store nearly fifty kilograms of ghee each year in the huge clay pot which was lost, amongst all the other things in the house, during the fire. But Aziza had noticed another, strange, elusive smell which was not the coarse peasant smell of dung. She remembered smelling the rancid odour coming from Sabiha when she annointed her hair with her dirty fingers covered in butter after she had finished weighing it out – all in an attempt to soften her dishevelled locks and to refine her appearance a little. But now Aziza thought about the strange smell which distinguished Umm El-Khayr from any other woman in the prison, and she guessed that it strongly resembled the smell of suckling babies – that is the smell of milk mixed with an innocence, gentleness and frailty. Perhaps its unusual combination accounted for her fascination with this smell in the same way that she had been captivated by the perfume her stepfather would sometimes secretly give her in that beautiful past. Aziza had never experienced this baby smell before because she had never been a mother. She had been unaware of the beauty of motherhood until she came to prison and witnessed the mothers’ thirst for their little ones and watched those little wretches who were sentenced to suck from the breast of their mothers behind the high prison walls until they were weaned.

  Perhaps one of the extremely limited benefits of prison was that the seclusion imposed long periods of contemplation and the possibility of discovering aspects of life which were inaccessible to all but those who had tasted the bitterness of banishment. The forced isolation within the boundaries of the prison walls separated them from all the daily trivialities of life in the vast ocean of humanity.

  Aziza’s enthusiasm for Umm El-Khayr was such that she was determined to seat her next to herself in the front of the chariot, which was a pretty compassionate decision bearing in mind what had happened between the peasant woman and young Aida. Aziza informed her of her decision when she was sitting alone in her cell sipping her mock wine and smoking. She fetched another glass for Umm El-Khayr so that they could drink a toast to the heavenly ascent together and to her honoured place in the golden chariot, but Umm El-Khayr never lifted her glass, just as she never heard Aziza announce her important decision because, at that time she was busy in the ward for the elderly adjoining Aziza’s ward on the right, cradling and rocking the little girl belonging to Halima, the warder. At this moment the child was nestling against her huge milk-coloured breasts, as dry of milk as the breasts of any woman aged over sixtyfive – not yet even a year old, she was unable to suck her natural mother’s milk which had dried up over the years. Instead she was comforted by the tenderness and old country songs, lodged in the recesses of this old peasant’s memory, that poured forth as a reminder of all the love Umm El-Khayr had given to her ten children, whose four children she had in turn raised, giving a helping hand to their mothers. Her married life had begun only six months after the red sign of puberty had first appeared to announce the readiness of her female apparatus for the task of pregnancy and childbirth, and these ten children were the surviving fruit of fifteen confinements.

  Umm El-Khayr did not hear Aziza’s secret decision about the ascent to heaven, since her mind was completely taken up with happy thoughts about her children: her eldest son was successfully investing his money in new land to add to his existing property while the youngest was working hard to get into university; she thought about her son who had gone into the army and her daughters who were all happily married. If any of them came to her complaining of their husbands, she would ensure that she soon returned to the marital nest, reinforced and with peace of mind restored. Her heart beat furiously and the blood rushed to her head each time she thought of her fourth son and imagined that he might have been in this dreadful place instead of her, sleeping as she did now on the rotten foam rubber mattress on which so many others had been fated to sleep. She begged protection from the Devil and praised God as she imagined how her son would have been forced to eat the awful food and scraps which she was offered in prison. The horror of what he was spared was made more vivid by the sight of the black iron bars at which she was forced to gaze and which gripped her tortured soul.

  Her voice broke into a trembling song to the suckling infant, lying contentedly in her lap. She praised God because she had been able to spare her son, the apple of her eye, from twenty-five years in prison which was the sentence she received for a drug offence which always carries the maximum sentence. When the police raided the house she rushed to the scene and took responsibility for all the drugs they had discovered, hidden in the large basket kept for rice which stood by the oven, thereby absolving her son from the whole affair.

  She felt such joy fill her heart as she remembered her success in saving her beloved son that she lifted the little prison baby onto her lap and began to kiss her tenderly, effusively. Then she threw her gently into the air and brought her down again and the baby, who was delighted with these amusing acrobatics, opened her mouth wide with what seemed to be a smile. Umm El-Khayr left off playing with the child and her strong voice, which had so often broken into song at weddings in her rural village, fell silent following shouts from Lula the hair stylist which were raised in objection to the din she was making with the warden’s baby. The baby’s mother often left her child to spend the night with Umm El-Khayr to save bringing her to the prison every morning. Her home was more than an hour away on public transport which, in the morning rush-hour, was crammed full of passengers in an inhuman way. At this moment Lula was busy looking at her stars in the paper as Umm abdul-Aziz, who was reputed to be able to see into the future, wanted to sleep and had refused to read her palm.

  Aziza stayed awake throughout that night thinking about Umm ElKhayr and marvelled at the abundant vigour and good health of her body, despite all the children she had given birth to year after year. She was the only inmate in the ward for the old and disabled who did not suffer from high blood pressure and whose heart remained completely healthy, as confirmed by the prison doctor who had examined her. Her eyesight was so strong that she was able to extract a tiny piece of glass, hardly visible to the naked eye, fro
m Aziza’s fingertip using a pair of eyebrow tweezers. This happened when the window pane in the surgery broke one day and even though Aziza removed the largest piece of glass she didn’t realize as she rested her hand on the ledge that it was still full of little pieces which were difficult to see.

  What amazed Aziza about Umm El-Khayr more than anything was the incredibly high morale she maintained most of the time, as well as her peace of mind and composure which made her virtually the only prisoner Aziza had seen during her long stay in prison who was not addicted to smoking, and drinking tea, which she only drank occasionally with a little milk.

  As Aziza was busy thinking, her eye fell on that strange face which she had carved out, during one of the many tedious nights in her solitary cell, on a black wall which had not seen a coat of paint for many years, using rusty nails which she had picked up one day in the prison courtyard. She never knew why she had drawn this face with its unfamiliar features, which did not resemble anyone she had known before, but looking at it at this particular time, she recalled an incident which had taken place years ago and had remained buried in her memory. This process of calling up old memories was not unusual either for her or, almost certainly, for all those other weak and feeble inmates locked behind the high walls and cut off from the accumulation of new memories in the outside world. In this respect it was as if they were dying, cut off from hope and unable to hold on to life, through regenerating the images in their minds.

  Aziza remembered an incident in her childhood when her beloved stepfather took her on a trip from Alexandria to Cairo during which they wandered round all the sights of the city. They went to the ancient part of Cairo where the conqueror Amr landed, and they went to the Hanging Church and the Synagogue which were a lasting proof of the fortress’s surrender and the conquest of the city which has long been used to paying taxes to its conquerors. They visited the verdant area of Helwan, its Japanese garden with the four statues, and made a tour of all the city’s gardens, now lost amongst the crowds and general neglect for everything which is green, natural and beautiful. They went to the Andalusian garden with ponds full of ornamental fish and dark, secret caves where her lover had surprised her with sweet kisses she would never forget. They visited the Azbekiyya garden and the zoo where she saw a zebra for the first time. She saw amazing peacocks and wanted one of her own, a wish that came only too true when time was to prove that for her stepfather she was nothing but a peacock herself.