Zeina Read Online Free PDF Page B

nothing more, Safi!”
    She called her friend, Safaa, Safi.
    “I tell you Safi, in all honesty, although I never admit it to anyone, that I don’t feel any pride or pleasure when I write a critique. In fact, I feel rather humiliated, because I feel I’m shining the shoes of a person who is more talented than myself.”
    Inside the drawers of her desk, Bodour concealed a large fat folder filled with handwritten papers. On its yellow cover was written
The Stolen Novel.
She had begun writing this novel many years earlier, specifically on a night that passed like a terrifying nightmare or an ephemeral dream of paradise when she had eaten the forbidden fruit.
    In her novel, she gave the heroine the name of Badreya instead of Bodour, and called the hero Naim instead of Nessim.
    In the dead of night, after both her daughter, Mageeda, and her husband, Zakariah al-Khartiti, had gone to bed, after the house had become empty of servants and the nanny had taken her black leather bag and left, after the loudspeaker of the adjacent mosque, the drumbeats and the cymbals of the neighboring nightclub overlooking the Nile had all become silent, after the police cars, the sirens, and the hooting had stopped, after the screams of the patients at the old al-Qasr al-Ainy Hospital had subsided, after the funerals coming out of the huge wrought-iron front door with bereaved and widowed women wailing and following the procession had ceased, after the universe had gone to sleep and Satan had forgotten his prey, and after God, out of His infinite mercy, had closed His watchful eyes, Bodour would get out of her wide bed where the body of her husband lay and tiptoe barefoot to her study. She switched on the small lamp, extended her short fat hand to the locked drawer and opened it with a key concealed in her clothes. With her white fingers, she brought out the small folder, and her throat felt dry as she looked at the hundreds of pages before her, some of which were filled with words and others still blank. Night in night out, day in day out, one month following another, and one year after the other, there were hundreds, even thousands of pages, which she wrote and rewrote countless times with her own hand and with pain, sweat, and tears. As she read, she felt her throat parched and the blood escaping from her face to her feet. She would pout her full lips as she often did when she read a mediocre novel written by a writer who lacked experience or talent.
    Her daughter, Mageeda, was eight years of age then. She lay in bed in her bedroom with her eyes closed except for a thin slit between the eyelids. A faint light filtered through the chink underneath the door. Waves of light moved in the stillness of the dark night, coming from her mother’s distant room or perhaps from her father’s room on the other side of the hall. The light waves were as imperceptible as the movement of the air or as faint as the gritting sound of a pen on paper. Papers were torn and thrown into the bin, hot air rose from the chest along with the breath, and a deep sigh escaped with the act of inhaling and exhaling.
    The light seemed to disappear and give way to silence. But other noises started coming through the wall. Those were the voices of her parents talking loudly in bed, her father’s voice rough, hoarse, husky, and her mother’s as sharp as the sound of a jingling bell. They fought until they both fell asleep.
    In the morning she imagined that that they would break up, that her mother would prepare her bag and leave, or that her father might take his bag and go. But they both stayed. And they didn’t pack any bags. Actions only happened in dreams.
    At the breakfast table, they would sit together as usual, sipping their tea and coffee, reading the papers, exchanging a few words about events in Egypt or around the world, or reading in complete silence. Mageeda heard nothing but the sound of sipping: her father produced a sharp loud noise as he drank his tea, while her