Zeina Read Online Free PDF

the wheel looked like Nanny’s fingers when she rubbed her head with warm water and soap in the bathroom. They were markedly different from her mother’s chubby white fingers.
    Mageeda hid her fingers under the covers. She closed her eyes to sleep, but the light of the bedside lamp revealed to her the large room. She could see the delicate pink drawings on the walls, the pink cupboard in the corner, her little desk with her books and notebooks, the color pencils, the big copybook with the pink cover in which she recorded her dreams, and the small table covered with a blue tablecloth on which jasmine flowers were embroidered.
    Her nanny sat in her loose dark gown on the colorful Persian rug next to her bed and told her bedtime stories. She had a long muscular neck holding a head wrapped in a white shawl. Her face was pale and lank, and the black pupils of her eyes looked tiny inside the large, reddish eyeballs.
     
    By the time Mageeda turned twenty-five, she was a columnist at the
Renaissance
magazine, which was published every Thursday. Her father proposed “Honoring Our Word” as the title of her column, in keeping with his own column called “Honoring Our Pledge” in the daily newspaper. He was always careful to articulate every letter of the word “pledge”, as though fearful that one of the letters might get lost, or the whole word might slip away or vanish into thin air.
    Since the age of eight, Mageeda hated writing, for, like her short, stout body, it was imposed on her. She inherited writing from her parents like the five prayers every day, the fasting of the month of Ramadan, and the shape of her fingers and toes. There was no way she could get rid of it.
    On top of her desk lay a big fat copybook full of blank pages. It was as fat and white as her own body, and its blank pages eyed her with derision. The scorn continued throughout her childhood, her adolescence and her adulthood. A voice hissed in her ears, speaking in the tones of Satan, or perhaps of God, telling her, “You have no talent, Mageeda. I gave all the talent to Zeina Bint Zeinat because I took away her father and mother.”
    In his column, her father wrote that God was just and that the head of the state in Egypt wielded his power fairly. If God deprived a child of family or wealth, He might bless him with intelligence, music, or the love of God and the homeland. A poor person might still be morally rich.
    Her mother, Bodour, wrote on literary criticism. She gave lectures at the university on literature, poetry, novels, the theater and the cinema. People sent her letters and parcels containing books, magazines, and tapes of music and film. She received taped literary discussions on radio and television every day by mail. Writers, both women and men, sent her gifts in order to curry favor with her, for a single article written in the literary criticism magazine could bring a writer out of the darkness and into the light, and might move an obscure writer from oblivion to the limelight of literary or artistic stardom.
    Although Bodour didn’t enjoy the same political or journalistic status as her husband, her own literary and artistic position was supreme. She received invitations to attend meetings with the president, ministers, and ambassadors, as well as literary and artistic conferences abroad.
    Deep down, Bodour al-Damhiri didn’t want to be a literary critic, for she considered the work of a literary critic to be inferior to that of a novelist, poet, playwright, or scriptwriter. She would whisper in the ears of her friend and mate, Safaa al-Dhabi, saying, “Literary criticism is parasitic on real literature and art, like tapeworms living off the human body. Literary critics like us are failed creative writers. We make up for our failure by criticizing the works of others. We are ordinary, mediocre people who have no talent, but we try to reach the limelight by highlighting other people’s creative work. We are like shoe polishers,