Karnak Café

Zaynab Diyab

Zaynab was both vivacious and pleasant, a combination that drew me to her from the first. She had a wonderful wine-dark complexion, and her figure had bloomed sweetly and with a certain abandon; she looked both svelte and trim. She seemed well aware that I admired her fascinating personality; in fact that was what allowed us to get to know each other well and eventually to develop a really strong sense of friendship.

She had grown up in the same surroundings as Isma‘il; in the very same building, in fact.

Her father was a butcher, and her mother started out as a washerwoman before becoming a broker after a good deal of effort. She had a brother, who worked as a plumber, and two married sisters. As a result of her mother’s second job the family could afford some of life’s necessities; for Zaynab she was able to provide the bare minimum of clothing she needed. They were not prepared for the way Zaynab excelled in her school work, and it caused both surprise and problems. They could see no harm in allowing her to continue playing this game with education until some nice young man came along. That was why her mother did not welcome Isma‘il al-Shaykh at first. She thought he was a layabout and a distinct roadblock to the future progress of any pretty young girl. Truth to tell, Zaynab’s mother was the real power in the household. Her father worked hard all day for a few piasters and then proceeded to squander it all at the beer parlor. The standard result was a fierce family quarrel. The amazing thing was that her dissolute father was actually very good-looking; his austere face may have had hair sprouting from it and a mass of wrinkles to go with it, but his features were very handsome. It was from him that Zaynab had inherited her looks. Meanwhile, her virago of a mother was just as tough as any man.

The long-anticipated crisis had finally arrived when Zaynab was in secondary school. A chicken seller who was considered to be wealthy in the terms of this poor quarter came to ask for her hand. He was forty years old and a widower with three daughters. Zaynab’s mother welcomed the idea of him taking her away from the tenement courtyard and giving her a happy life of her own. However, Zaynab turned him down, and that made her mother very angry. It was Isma‘il and his family who had borne the brunt of that anger.

“You’ll be sorry!” she yelled at her daughter. “It’ll be too late, and then you’ll regret it.”

Even then the matter did not blow over quietly. The merchant spread a rumor that there was something going on between Zaynab and Isma‘il. This also raised a storm inside the courtyard, but Zaynab’s will was still strong enough to triumph. It also affected the way she behaved. In order to confront these unjust accusations head on, she decided to act in a very conservative fashion. If certain people decided to accuse her of being reactionary, then so be it; she did not care. Nor did her increasingly broad education change her demeanor in any way.

“We represent a conservatism that is deliberately dressed in the guise of progressivism,” she said. “That’s why, within the framework of the revolution, I’ve found things that to me seem both comforting and reassuring.”

She loved Isma‘il very much and fully understood the way he thought as well. She believed that they shared the same set of attitudes. Even though he might pretend to say things that he didn’t really believe in his heart of hearts, she realized that he would never forgive her if she were to look down on him in any way.

“At the time,” she told me, “old Hasaballah, the chicken seller, was eager to get me at any price. When I turned him down, he wasn’t put off. He used an old woman who worked with him to get to me again. But I certainly taught her a lesson.”

“You mean, he wanted to have you out of wedlock?”

“That’s right. And he was prepared to pay a high price for it too!”

She was saying all this in a listless tone that seemed strangely inappropriate to the situation. At the time I had no idea what lay behind it.

“Zayn al-‘Abidin ‘Abdallah tried the same game later on,” she said.

“Never!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“Oh yes, he did,” she replied emphatically.

“But he was crazy about Qurunfula!”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Maybe he was just pretending to be in love with her,” I suggested. “He wanted to hide the fact that he was really after her money.”

“No,” she replied. “He was genuinely in love with her; he still is. He just needed a bit of diversion for consolation’s sake. Maybe the old rogue thought I was one of those girls who fools around.”

“When did he let you know what he was after?”

“Many times, but I’m referring to the first time, immediately after our first spell in prison.”

“In spite of his stubbornness I believe that he’s given up hope about Qurunfula.”

“Why should he give up hope? He’s simply sitting around waiting for the time when he’ll get his dues.”

She decided to put an end to this chatter about affairs of the heart. “There were many others as well,” she said.

“Was Hilmi Hamada — God rest his soul — one of them?” I asked with a great deal of hidden concern.

“Certainly not!” she replied in amazement.

“I must tell you in all candor that I’d thought there was something between the two of you.”

“We were close friends,” she replied sadly. “But Isma‘il’s the only man I’ve ever loved.”

“Are you still in love?” I asked.

She ignored my question.

The story of her attitude toward the revolution was exactly the same as Isma‘il’s. “They arrested me because of my connection with Isma‘il,” she said, talking about her first arrest. “There was not even the slightest suspicion of a case against me, and I told them I’d never been a member of the Brotherhood. I was only held for a couple of days, then released unharmed.” She gave me a sad smile. “The real trouble was at home. My mother told me that those were precisely the kind of difficulties I should have expected to find myself in because of my being with Isma‘il. It so happened that my own arrest came one week after my father had been taken in; he’d been accused of rowdiness and assaulting a police officer.”

“In such circumstances,” I commented admiringly, “the way you have managed to move ahead is remarkable.”

“I asked Khalid Safwan why they were badgering us like this. We were all children of the revolution, I told him; we owed it everything. How could they accuse us of being opposed to it? His sarcastic response was to the effect that the very same excuse was being used by ninety-nine percent of the people who were genuinely opposed to the revolution.”

She talked to me about her former belief in the revolution and about the fact that their imprisonment had done nothing to alter or take away their core belief in its values. “However, whereas we had previously thought that we had all the power in the world, that feeling had been severely jolted by the time we’d emerged from prison. We’d lost much of our courage and along with it our self-confidence and belief in the workings of time. We had now discovered the existence of a terrifying force operating completely outside the dictates of law and human values.”

Zaynab told me that she had discussed with Isma‘il the agonies she had gone through when he had suddenly disappeared. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea,” she had suggested, “for us to keep to ourselves for a while and avoid meeting friends and other groups?”

“It was my fault that they were all arrested,” he had replied sarcastically, “not vice versa!”

I did my best to console her. “This is the kind of thing humanity has to go through,” I said. “It’s part of the price of all great revolutions.”

She let out a sigh. “When will life be really pleasant, I wonder? Will we ever be finally rid of these dreadful miseries?”

She now started talking about her second prison term. I immediately realized that I was about to hear a tale with some truly awful memories attached to it.

“This time we were accused of being Communists,” she said and then went on nervously, “it’s a period in my life that I’ll never forget.”

She told me how she’d been taken to see Khalid Safwan again.

“So here we are again!” he had said sarcastically. “Our friendship is becoming well established!”

“Why have I been arrested?” she asked. “For my part I’ve no idea.”

“Ah, but I do.”

“Then what’s the reason, sir?”

“It all goes back to those two distinguished gentlemen, Marx and Lenin.” He stared at her angrily. “Now answer my questions, but make sure you don’t use that silly nonsense again. You know: ‘Why do you keep on badgering me?’ ‘We’re all children of the revolution,’ and so on. Understand?”

“We’re not Communists,” she replied, totally despairing of ever being able to persuade him.

“That’s a shame!” he uttered cryptically.

She told me that she had been thrown into a cell and subjected to the most humiliating forms of torture, the pain of which only a woman could possibly appreciate fully.

“I had to live, sleep, eat, and carry out my bodily functions all in one place! Can you imagine?”

“No,” I responded sadly.

“At any moment,” she went on, “I might look up and see the guard leering at me through the peephole in the door. Can you appreciate what that meant?”

“Unfortunately I can.”

“One day I was summoned to Khalid Safwan’s office while Isma‘il was being interrogated. When I saw how humiliated and hopeless he looked, tears welled up in my eyes. From the very bottom of my heart I poured curses on the world. But I was only there long enough for him to hear the threat of my being tortured. I was taken back to my filthy cell where I cried for a long time. Day after day the torture continued.”

She continued her tale by telling me about another occasion when she had been summoned to Khalid Safwan’s office.

“ ‘I hope you approve of our accommodations,’ he said.

“ ‘Oh yes, sir,’ I replied bravely. ‘Thank you very much.’

“ ‘Our friend’s confessed to being a Communist,’ he went on.

“ ‘Only when you threatened him!’ I yelled.

“ ‘But it’s the truth, however the information was obtained.’

“ ‘Absolutely not, sir. The entire thing’s atrocious.’

“ ‘Oh no, my dear,’ he replied cryptically. ‘It’s marvelous.’

“ ‘How so, marvelous?’

“ ‘We’ll see,’ he replied. With that he gave a specific hand gesture.

“I heard the sound of footsteps approaching. They came closer and closer till they seemed almost to envelop me. What can I say?”

She had to stop for a moment, and the muscles in her jaw visibly tightened. Now I readied myself to hear something even worse than what had already happened.

“We can stop if you like,” I suggested.

“No,” she said. “It makes for good listening.” She looked me straight in the eye. “At this point he decided to put on a titillating and exciting spectacle for himself, something utterly beyond the bounds of normalcy and decency.”

“My dear Zaynab,” I asked, my heart pounding, “what on earth do you mean?”

“You’ve got it right.”

“No!”

“Down to the last detail.”

“Right in front of him?”

“That’s it, right in front of him!”

There now followed a prolonged silence, like a prolonged, mute sob.

“What kind of man can he be?” I eventually managed to mutter, referring to Khalid Safwan.

“There’s nothing odd about the way he looks,” Zaynab said. “For that matter he could just as well be a professor or a man of religion.”

“The entire matter needs further study,” I said, feeling utterly nonplussed.

“Study?” she yelled. “Did you say ‘study’? Do you seriously propose to initiate a research program involving my personal honor?”

I felt so ashamed, I didn’t say another word.

“A few weeks later I was summoned to Khalid Safwan’s office again. He looked as calm as usual, even more so perhaps. It was just as though nothing had ever happened.

“ ‘You’ve been proved innocent,’ he said tersely.

“For a long time I simply looked straight at him. For his part, he gave me a fixed, lackadaisical stare.

“ ‘Were you watching?’ I screamed at him.

“ ‘I simply see what there is to be seen,’ he replied quietly.

“ ‘But now I’ve lost everything,’ I shouted angrily.

“ ‘Oh no! Everything can be put right. We can see to that.’

“ ‘I don’t believe,’ I yelled madly, ‘that the revolution would be happy to hear what went on in this room!’

“ ‘We’re here to protect the revolution, and that’s much more important that the few isolated mistakes we may happen to make. We always make sure to put right whatever needs to be put right. You’ll be leaving here now with a brand new boon — our friendship.’

“With that I burst into tears, a prolonged fit of nervous weeping that I was totally unable to stop. He waited silently until I’d finished.

“ ‘You’re going to see one of my assistants now,’ he said. ‘He’s going to make you an offer beyond price.’ For a few moments, he said nothing, then he went on, ‘I would strongly advise you not to turn it down. It’s the chance of a lifetime.’ ”

So Zaynab had become an informer as well. She was offered special privileges, and it was decided that Isma‘il was to be the pawn in the whole thing. It was made very clear to her that she had to maintain total silence; she was told that the people she was working for had absolute control of everything.

“When I went home,” Zaynab told me, “and had some time to myself, I was utterly horrified by what I’d lost, something for which there could be no compensation. For the first time in my entire life I really despised myself.”

“But …,” I began trying to console her.

“No, don’t try to defend me,” she interrupted. “Defending something that is despicable places you in the same category.” She continued angrily, “I kept telling myself that I’d become a spy and a prostitute. That was the state I was in when I met Isma‘il again.”

“I assume you kept your secret to yourself.”

“Yes.”

“You were wrong to do that, my dear!”

“My secret job was far too dangerous to reveal to anyone else.”

“I’m talking about the other matter.”

“I was too afraid and ashamed to tell him about it. I was keeping my hopes up as well. I told myself that, if I had things put right by surgery, then I might be able to think about a happy life in the future.”

“But that hasn’t happened so far, has it?”

“Small chance!”

“Maybe I can do something for you,” I offered hopefully.

“Forget it,” she replied sarcastically. “Just wait till I’ve finished my story. I may have made a mistake, but in any case I proceeded to take the only course open to me, torturing my own self and submitting to the very worst punishments I could possibly imagine. By taking such action I was relying on an unusual kind of logic. I’m a daughter of the revolution, I convinced myself. In spite of everything that’s happened, I refuse to disavow everything it stands for. Therefore I am still responsible for its welfare and must fulfill that obligation. As such, I am implicitly to blame for the things that have happened to me. On that basis I decided to stop pretending to live an honorable life and instead to behave like a dishonorable woman.”

“You did yourself a grievous wrong.”

“I could tolerate everything about it except the idea that Isma‘il might come to despise me. At the same time I didn’t want to betray him. While I was going through all this, I couldn’t even think straight and went completely astray.” She shook her head sadly. “A number of things happened which made it impossible for me to put things right again or to return to the straight and narrow. It was at precisely that point that old Hasaballah, the chicken seller, saw me again.”

I stared at her in alarm.

“This time he found the path wide open.”

“No!”

“Why not? I told myself that this was the way to lead a debauched life. You couldn’t do that without there being a price to pay.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I took the money.”

With that I felt a sense of revulsion toward the entire world.

“And Zayn al-‘Abidin ‘Abdallah as well!” she continued, giving me a sarcastic and defiant stare.

I didn’t say a word.

“He used Imam al-Fawwal and Gum‘a, the bootblack, as go-betweens,” she added.

“But I always thought they were both decent, loyal people,” I blurted out in amazement.

“So they were,” she replied sadly. “But just like me, they were both devastated. What’s happened to everyone? We seem to have turned into a nation of deviants. All the costs in terms of life — the defeat and anxiety — they have managed to demolish our sense of values. The two of them kept hearing about corruption all over the place, so what was to stop them having a turn too? I can tell you that both of them are acting as pimps as we speak and without the slightest sense of shame.”

“But Zaynab,” I asked, “should we despair about everything?” After a moment’s pause I proceeded to answer my own question, “No! This particular phase we’re going through is just like the plague, but afterwards life will be renewed once again.”

Zaynab paid no attention to what I was saying. “I decided to tell Isma‘il everything,” she said.

“But you said you wouldn’t,” I said in amazement.

“I decided to do it in a very original way, so I just gave myself to him.”

“I must confess that at this point I can’t work out what kind of relationship there is between you and Isma‘il.”

“After the storm that we’ve been through, there’s no point in trying to find some fixed logical process to apply.”

“But do you still love Isma‘il?”

“I’ve never been in love with anyone else.”

“What about now?”

“All I can feel now is death, not love.”

“But Zaynab, you’re a young girl right at the beginning of her life. Everything will change.”

“Will it be for better or worse, do you think?”

“It can’t possibly get any worse than it is now. So change must be for the better.”

“Let’s go back to my story. The only consolation I was getting out of what I was doing was that I could feel the pain involved in the self-punishment. But then I did something that can never be expiated, no matter what the price.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Are you starting to feel disgusted with me?”

“No, Zaynab,” I replied. “I’m actually feeling very sorry for you.”

“One evening Isma‘il and I went to Hilmi Hamada’s home. We found he was planning revolution. He confided in us that he was distributing secret pamphlets.…”

The sheer force of the memory was so great that she had to stop talking for a while. For my part, I welcomed this break that had arrived like some kind of truce period in the midst of a prolonged saga of torture.

“His frank admission came as a total surprise to me. I dearly wished that I’d not gone to his home.”

“I can well understand your feelings.”

“I immediately thought of the force that was in control of everything. I was overwhelmed by panic and started worrying about Isma‘il.”

Aha! So there was Isma‘il assuming they had used special methods to find out that he had failed to communicate with them, when all the time it had never even occurred to him that it was Zaynab who had given Hilmi away. So she was the one who had revealed his secret, assuming that by so doing she would be sparing him even greater agonies.

We stared sadly at each other.

“So I’m the one who killed Hilmi Hamada,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I replied. “He was killed by whoever it was made the decision to torture all of you.”

“I’m the one who killed him. And they arrested Isma‘il even so. Why? I don’t understand. This time he spent even longer in prison than the two previous times. When he came out, he was even more crushed than before. Why? I don’t know. In my report I’d put down that he’d argued with his friend and advised him to abandon the project. But any appeal to logic in these circumstances is obviously futile.”

“At the time you were out of prison, weren’t you?”

“Oh yes. I was free to enjoy my liberty to the full, along with all the suffering and loneliness that went with it. And then, along came the precursors of war, bringing their threats to our very existence. Like everyone else, I had a limitless trust in our armed forces. Everything would go on and on, I told myself, both good and bad. But then came the disaster and.…”

She fell silent; her expression was one of total dismay.

“There’s no need to explain,” I assured her. “We all went through it. But did you support the demonstrations on the ninth and tenth of June?”

“Yes, I certainly did, and to the maximum extent possible.”

“So your basic faith has not been shaken then?”

“Quite the contrary, it has been completely uprooted from its foundations. I’ve come to believe that it’s a castle built on sand.”

“I have to tell you that I don’t understand your attitude.”

“It’s all very simple. All of a sudden, I found I could no longer tolerate having to shoulder responsibility. After relying on a laissez-faire attitude for so long, I found that I was actually afraid of genuine freedom. How about you? Were you for or against the demonstrators at the time?”

“I was with them all the way, clinging desperately to a last spark of national pride.”

“When I heard that Isma‘il was going to be set free,” she went on angrily, “I told myself that I had the defeat to thank for letting me see him again.”

As I thought about what she had just said, the entire idea made me feel utterly sad and miserable.

Then she told me about her first meeting with Isma‘il after his release, and the confused babble of their conversation.

“You know, when we first graduated and got jobs, we talked all the time about getting married, that being a requirement enjoined by traditional notions of modesty. We talked about it over and over again. It’s not so strange for me to have changed and abandoned the dreams of the past, but what has caused such a change in Isma‘il? What really happened inside that prison, I wonder?”

So, at this point, each one of them acknowledges that they have changed, but keeps asking himself or herself about the other one. They’re both convinced that they can’t live a normal life now; on that score I tend to agree with them — at least, with regard to this wretched period we’re now living through. All of us need time so we can bandage our wounds and purify the collective national soul. In fact, the process may even involve a recovery of self-confidence and self-respect as well. But by the very nature of things matters like that could not be discussed in this particular context.

“If humanity simply gives up or waits,” I commented, using generalities as a smoke screen, “it will never change — for the better, I mean.”

“It’s so easy to philosophize, isn’t it!” she retorted angrily.

“Maybe so,” I said, “but these days Isma‘il seems to be edging toward the fedayeen.”

“I know.”

“And what about you?” I asked after another pause. “What are your thoughts?”

She said nothing for a while. “Before I give you a reply,” she said, “I must first correct something that I said about Imam al-Fawwal and Gum‘a. Actually they knew nothing about the details of the arrangement they made between Zayn al-‘Abidin ‘Abdallah and me after our second period in prison; they had no idea what was going on.”

“Do you mean they’re innocent of what you accused them of doing?”

“No, I don’t. But they’ve only given in to temptation recently, not before. Things are still really confused in my own mind, and I want you to keep in mind that I’m telling you my own story from memory. I can’t guarantee that all the details are accurate.”

I nodded my head sadly. “What are your thoughts now?” I repeated.

“Do you really want to know?”

“I assume you’re not still.…” I stopped in spite of myself.

“Being a prostitute, you mean?” she said, completing my sentence for me.

I said nothing.

“Thank you for thinking so well of me,” she said.

Again I did not comment.

“At the moment,” she said, “I’m living a very puritan existence.”

“Really?” I asked happily.

“Certainly.”

“And how did that come about?”

“Quickly, through a counter-revolution, but also because I still feel a sense of utter revulsion.”

“Where, oh where have those former days of innocence and enthusiasm gone?” I asked affectionately.