Two Women in One Read Online Free PDF Page A

broad, padded shoulders were stuck to each other, their ties wound round their necks like hangmen’s ropes. When the tram stopped, their heads jerked back violently. They leapt from their seats, holding their heads and staring around them, their yellow eyes wide and fearful. Suddenly a child’s scream filled the air.
    Round yellow eyes turned to the body, mangled under the wheels of the tram. Pins, matchboxes and combs lay scattered on the ground. The red spot shone on the asphalt, and the red circle widened like the sun, while the hollow eyes gazed out under the iron wheels like two deep holes in the belly of the earth.
    They all ran their hands anxiously over their heads, necks, arms and thighs. Reassured that their heads were still on their shoulders, their bodies on the seats and their blood still coursing through their veins, they parted their lips and let out long, deep sighs. And their eyes gleamed with concealed delight. Some of them shook hands, congratulating each other on their escape and praising God for His great mercy, for the torn body under the wheels was not theirs but someone else’s. They raised their hands to heaven and murmured a prayer of thanksgiving, under the illusion that they were bribing Allah with those recitations (for He might destroy them at any moment), so that their necks would remain on their shoulders for ever and ever.
    Bahiah turned the skull so that its hollow eyes faced the wall. She closed her anatomy book, reached behind the bed, pulled out the white painting and stood it against the wall. She sat on a small mattress on the floor, her brushes and paints beside her.
    Her room was in total darkness except for a spot of white light shining on the painting from a small lamp. It was dead of night, her father was sound asleep. No voices and no movement except the rustle of the brush, criss-crossing the smooth surface. With a light motion of her fingers she willed her hand in whatever direction she wanted. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, warding off sleep. She gazed at her lines and at the coloured spot for hours.
    Sometimes her hand would slap all those similar faces with purposeful brush strokes. She tore away the stretched mask of flesh with her fingers, dragging the torn body out from under the wheels and filling the slender skull with flesh. The two sunken holes became a pair of black eyes like her own.
    In the morning she woke to the sound of her father’s voice, shrill as an alarm clock. She put on her black trousers and white blouse, picked up her bulging leather satchel and walked towards the tram, striding along confidently, moving her legs freely. When she saw the sameness of the faces on the tram, she pursed her lips angrily. When she saw the other female students, walking with that strange mechanical gait, their legs held tightly together, she realized that they belonged to one species and she to another. She stood in the dissecting room, one foot propped on the marble table, the other leg, long and straight, of sound bone and muscle, planted on the floor. From the corner of her eye she saw the legs of the male students, their swollen red noses and their backs hunched over the corpses. She looked around astonished, as if she had lost her way. But there was the lancet between her fingers. The blue anatomy book bore the familiar white label: ‘Name: Bahiah Shaheen. Subject: 1st Year Anatomy’, which never failed to astonish her.
    As she worked her way down through the block of flesh immersed in formalin, her lancet hit a hard object, which she managed to extract. It fell onto the marble table, sounding like a piece of gravel. The lancet cut it in half, and it turned out to be a dark clot of congealed blood. One of the female students said, with that suppressed feminine laugh, ‘Goodness, I thought it was a bullet!’ Another girl craned her neck to see, staring at the open heart in amazement: ‘A bullet in the heart!’ A third gasped and clapped her hand over her