Two Women in One Read Online Free PDF Page B

street, on the tram or at college, she realized that eyes were incapable of seeing her or distinguishing her from thousands of others, that she was lost among the sameness of bodies and that nothing could save her from being lost, except her own hand when it touched her body, reminding her that she had a body of her own; or when it took to drawing on the white canvas, making its motion visible, with clear lines distinct from the outside universe by their own external boundaries and their own roundness, thanks to a strong deliberate motion, with which she would destroy other wills, destroy the body, unmask the features, tear away the white label on the blue cover bearing the false name.
    She saw his unusual eyes examining her face as she herself examined it in the mirror, piercing her eyes through long, narrow corridors leading to her very depths. One more moment was all he needed to reach the end. But she jerked her head away. She was afraid of reaching ends. She feared arrival, the impossibility of returning to where she had been; she was afraid that by a magic touch she would become somebody other than Bahiah Shaheen, somebody who was her real self.
    She had never known exactly who that real self was. But she had always been sure that she was not Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, the girl with the light brown skin standing hesitantly before the door.
    The word ‘hesitant’ does not apply here, however. For in fact she did not hesitate for a moment. She was drawn by a mysterious desire to press ahead and not to stop until she had reached the dangerous end. She was aware that she was heading there inevitably: it was her destiny. She was going there in no ordinary manner; rather, she was drawn by the strength of her desire to know her own destiny and by the intensity of her fear of that knowledge, a fear so great that it helped to drive her there.
    If she were really Bahiah Shaheen, she would have turned, taken a step backwards and gone into the dissecting room. Today would have been like yesterday, and like tomorrow. She would have fallen back into the whirlpool of everyday life and everyday faces. But she was not Bahiah Shaheen, she was another diabolical being, born of neither her mother nor her father. Her features resembled those she saw in the mirror, but they were more intense. Her eyes were darker, the tilt of her nose more pronounced. Her complexion was not pale, but brown — burning and red, the colour of blood.
    She did not like Bahiah Shaheen. She could see her defects all too clearly. She hated that polite obedient voice. She was irritated by that placid look which did not see things, but allowed them to be reflected from her, like a watery surface. She hated that nose which was not sufficiently upturned. She despised that paleness, whose real cause she knew. It was the paleness of a complexion drained of blood by fear, a fear that people seek to hide.
    Bahiah Shaheen was afraid of her real self, of that other self dwelling within her, that devil who moved and saw things with the sharpest powers of perception. Her nose had a strange sharp tilt, like the edge of a sword. With that blade she cut the world in two and pressed ahead mercilessly and without hesitation, to meet the end, the end of the end, even if that meant the bottomless abyss itself.
    But Bahiah Shaheen was hesitant. She would stop half-way, for she was afraid of ends. The end, she felt, was final, it was the high frightening summit, the point suspended in space with nothing before or behind it, the destructive summit, after which there is only extinction. She stood in the middle of the road. She knew she would stop there, but felt safe at that middle resting-point, in the centre of the tightrope, where the two split forces were equal. She was weightless, her resistance nil. It was the point of total stillness and complete unthreatened security. In other words, it was the point of death.
    Bahiah Shaheen did not know that