Two Women in One Read Online Free PDF

mouth: ‘How sad!’ A fourth sighed audibly: ‘If only it was me.’
    None of the familiar ideas about death could be found in the dissecting room. Here death was unreal. The corpse was not a dead man. The blood clot, congealed like a bullet in the heart, might stir a suppressed desire buried deep in the soul, like a heart rent apart, like blood arrested in its absurd cycle and congealing in the veins. It was death, both feared and desired; sought after, evaded and imagined everywhere, anywhere, in the mortuary.
    Bahiah turned to the girl who had said, ‘If only it was me’ and asked, ‘Do you want to die?’ The girl gasped in astonishment and disapproval: ‘Death? God forbid!’ Bahiah now understood the tragedy. She knew why human beings hide their real desires: because they are strong enough to be destructive; and since people do not want to be destroyed, they opt for a passive life with no real desires.
    Bahiah grasped this end of the thread and set out to seize the other, then realized that there was no other end, only the bottomless abyss itself. She gathered up her lancets and dissection instruments, put them in her leather satchel and left the room. She strode out into the college grounds with her long quick steps. With each stride her feeling of imminent danger mounted. She wished she could go back to the dissecting room, but a hidden feeling drew her towards that very danger, to the brink of the bottomless abyss.
    ‘Bahiah’. The name rang in her ear and she jumped. As she did, she realized that she had a body of her own which she could move and stir without the world moving with it, and that she had a name of her own the sound of which would make her jump. Every time she heard her name called, she was astonished. What an extraordinary power, which could distinguish her name from all other names! What a miraculous power that picked out her body from among the millions of other floating bodies!
    When she stopped, she discovered that she was still in the college grounds, standing in front of a large painting hanging on a small dark green door. She stopped no longer than thirty seconds, and was about to head back towards the dissecting room to continue her work, to remain at it for ever. But thirty seconds can change the course of a life; in thirty seconds a bomb can explode, transforming the face of the city and the earth. Life’s crucial events happen all of a sudden, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. Insignificant things occur slowly, taking their time, sometimes even dragging on for a lifetime.
    When she looked up from the painting she realized that someone was standing in front of her. Not just anyone. He was the sort of person you have to look at, even if only for a few seconds. But that brief moment is enough to freeze those features before your eyes for ever. When the first moment had passed, she managed to stifle her surprise and return the stare. With her natural inquisitiveness, she scrutinized the unusual features, trying to understand what made them so extraordinary. The forehead was commonplace, the eyes ordinary; she wondered how such ordinary features could make up such a strange, extraordinary face.
    He was directly in front of her, his right foot on the threshold of the door to the exhibition. He would have bumped into her had he not happened to look up and see her. Then their eyes met and she realized that the secret behind this extraordinary face lay in the way his eyes moved. It was strange, different from the other male students. Their eyes seemed not to see or do anything. They just opened like mirrors in which things were reflected. The eyes of the male students did not really see, or rather, they did not see things as they really were.
    When his eyes moved in front of hers, she felt as if he were seeing her. It was the first time she had ever been seen by any eyes other than her own. Only in a mirror had she been aware of being seen by a pair of black eyes — her own. In the