The Open Door Read online

  Do not worry about me. I am well. I did not collapse when your dry letter reached me, nor when I heard the news of your engagement. I am working and living for the sake of a greater love than my love for you: my love for Egypt and its people. As long as that love fills my heart I cannot be destroyed. And I will not stop working. What is difficult for me now is that my love for my nation has become totally intertwined with my love for you, so that you became a symbol for everything I love in the nation. And now I must try to uproot you from my thoughts, my imagination, my blood.

  Do not feel any hurt on my account, and do not blame yourself. You gave me no encouragement; to the contrary, you did all that a gentle, sensitive person like you could do to dampen my feelings. But what can I do? What can I do about the mad idea that took possession of me? The idea that you were for me and I was for you no matter how long it might take? The only mistake you made was to let me see you, to see how lovely and gentle you are, and that you are . . . you.

  If you wish to make amends for that mistake, let me see you just once, one time, when I return to the nation. Let me fill my eyes with you one last time, as you walk down that road, your face shining, with that wonderful glow in your eyes.

  Husayn Amir.

  Chapter Twenty

  MAHMUD WAS APPOINTED AS A staff physician to the government hospital in Port Said. A few weeks after he had taken up his position he visited Cairo. Sitting at the Friday afternoon meal with his family, he raised his head from the plate.

  “By the way, I’m getting married.”

  Layla’s heart beat fast as she observed one reaction follow another rapidly across her father’s face. Stiff and still at first, as if he had not understood Mahmud’s words, that face seemed to collapse. Both corners of his mouth hung down and a deep sadness came over his eyes, then his eyelids came down over them. He reached for a towel, hiding his face behind it as he pretended to wipe his mouth. When he threw it aside his face had returned to its accustomed rigidity, although a measure of congestion seemed to overlay it. He let a few seconds of silence weigh on those around the table before speaking, his voice artificially calm.

  “What did you say?”

  Layla looked at her brother. His lips were quivering. She waited impatiently for him to say something, as if her future hung on the words that would come from his lips.

  “I said, I’m getting married.”

  Layla slumped back in her seat. Her eyes glistened with tears. She felt intoxicated, as if she were the one who had faced her father with such bold, straightforward simplicity. After all, it was such a simple thing. All she would have to do would be to move her shoulders as Mahmud did and to train her eyes on those of her father, and say . . . What would she say?

  Her father’s voice rang out, sending a shiver through her. “So your excellency has already arranged everything and now you’ve come to inform me? Why? Why are you giving yourself the trouble? I’m just an old fool, anyway.”

  “Please, Papa, please understand me.”

  “I am not your father. I do not know you. I have no responsibility for you.”

  Mahmud lowered his eyes in despair, striking his right hand against the table.

  “All my life—all my life I have been raising you.” Now a strain of resentful blame infused the voice. “I’ve spent my heart’s blood on you so that when you grew up you would be able to stand on your own feet, and to help your mother, and your sister, who is on the point of being married. Now, the minute you become a full human being, you want to kick us in the face. You want to get married.” Their father’s face was red as he listened to the strain of weakness that had crept into his voice. The tone of censure immediately became one of sarcasm. “Instead of helping me, now you want me to help you so you can get married. Right?”

  Mahmud faced his father proudly. “I do not want help from anyone.”

  His father became even more upset; this was a declaration not to be borne! A bitter, bitter sarcasm shaped his words. “So who are you going to marry, esteemed Doctor?”

  Mahmud ignored the sarcasm in his father’s voice, preferring to implore him in a way that might reach his heart. “Papa, the girl I am going to marry is wonderful, and very goodhearted and caring. She’s well-educated and comes from a good family. You can even ask Layla about her.”

  Layla shrunk into her seat as her father’s gaze came to focus on her, harshly inquiring, as if he held her responsible for this catastrophe that had befallen them. Her mother struck her hands together as if she had given up on both of them.

  “It is her friend, ya sidi. Our own Lady Layla here is our beacon of happiness. All my life I’ve said this mixing between girls and boys brings only disasters, now here’s the end of it all!”

  The father pulled his gaze from Layla to settle coldly on Mahmud. “This family, then—on what basis will they accept you? How much dowry will you pay? How heavy a gold bracelet will you give her?”

  Mahmud’s voice was low. “I am going to marry the girl, not the family.”

  His father slumped back in his chair. “That’s what it has come to, then? So she is one of those? One of those girls who let down their hair and do whatever they please?”

  Mahmud covered his face in his hands, trying to gain control of himself. He had expected all of this, and more; and he must stanch the flow of wounding words that were forming in his mind, he must keep them from bursting out.

  “Wallahi, I swear,” his father’s voice rang out, “if this were my daughter I’d kill her! I’d just kill her.” His eyes settled on Layla, sharp, threatening, and she felt another tremor pass through her body under his gaze. Had he guessed something? Impossible. How could he? Maybe . . . his fatherly feelings? What feelings?! A huge wall seemed always to sit between the two of them, as if they did not speak the same language, as if they . . .

  Mahmud took his hands away from his face and in a polite, restrained voice he announced that the discussion was over. “I am sorry, Papa, but it seems, sir, that you will not be able to understand me.” But he could not escape so lightly. His father was determined to continue the discussion.

  “Who can understand you? Who can understand that a person in your circumstances, penniless, graduated day before yesterday, wants to marry and set up a household and raise children and bear responsibilities?”

  Layla felt her muscles relax. No, he had not guessed. He could not possibly guess what was going around in her head, nor could anyone else. Even she could not describe her overpowering feelings of disgust these days in words that would seem understandable and reasonable to people. What would she say? That the mask had fallen, and beneath it lay filth? That Ramzi’s gaze crept like a snake up the chest of . . . ? Her mother spoke in a trembling voice. “Son, there are ways of doing everything, rules, principles. Everything has its rules. He who follows the fundamentals will not suffer.”

  Layla shut her eyes. What would she say? If she told her mother how Ramzi’s eyes had slithered over Gamila’s breasts, her mother would only laugh and say, in all simplicity, “All men are like that. So what did you think they were like?”

  What would she say? And who would understand her when she said that it was Ramzi’s eyes creeping along like a snake that had revealed his depravity and weakness? Indeed, no one was free of immoral behavior, as those eyes had shown her. Consenting to this marriage, she was not free of it; nor was Gamila, nor Isam, willing to play the role of clown, nor Sidqi, searching daily for prey so he could prove to himself that he was a man, and to the outside world that he was a daring hero. And then there was the corruption of Umm Gamila, and of her own mother, who had bowed to living in a state of fear—the dread of what other people would say—and of her father, believing himself ever in the right. And the immorality of all of their principles—their fundamentals! Every last one.

  “Mama,” said Mahmud, “the fundamentals have changed, rules have changed. The times are different, ideas are changing. Please, both of you, try to understand.” But they could not poss
ibly comprehend him. Their father kept to his room, having threatened to cut off all communication with Mahmud. Their mother resorted to tears. Mahmud went to Port Said, and on the following Thursday he came to Cairo, but did not visit his family. He did visit the week after that, and found Dr. Ramzi waiting for him.

  Mahmud’s mother had requested Dr. Ramzi’s intervention to bring Mahmud to his senses. Perhaps Dr. Ramzi would straighten him out. Ramzi and Mahmud sat alone in the sitting room, for the father still kept to his own room. The mother—with her daughter—sat in the front room, waiting.

  Layla paced the front hall, her eyes staring anxiously at the shut door, a shadowy fear constricting her heart. Would her brother give in to the force of this man who sat with him alone? She was gripped by an irresistible desire to hear every word her brother might say, as if her own future depended entirely on what he would say. Still pacing, she veered toward Mahmud’s room. Her mother asked sharply, “Where are you going?”

  “To get a book from Mahmud’s shelves.”

  She entered his room and crept to the glass door that separated it from the sitting room. She pressed herself to the wall and tried to make out the exchange between the two men. Though a sudden embarrassment about her spying seized her, it went away as soon as she distinguished the cadences of Ramzi’s voice. She had never heard him speak this way; she had never heard his voice sounding honeyed, low, pleasantly mellowed—the voice of one friend talking to another. No doubt his features, too, were relaxed, mellow; perhaps the glass box that encased his face had vanished. How many faces did this man possess? With her he acted the god; with Gamila, he was a child, saliva dribbling from his mouth; and now with Mahmud he was an old friend, relating tales of the past.

  “I’ll tell you a story, Mahmud, one I have never told anyone before. But you are my little brother, and I cannot be niggardly about sharing any of my experiences with you. When I was a student at the university I fell in love with a girl who lived in an apartment on the floor below mine. Evenings, I would sit in the dark, listening to Umm Kulthum and weeping. I’d stay up all night, writing a love poem to my darling. I’d go downstairs and find her waiting for me on the staircase in her school pinafore. I’d give her the poem, every inch of my body trembling. The days passed; I started to see more of her, to be with her outside the building. It seemed like my feelings for her were getting stronger every day—the world was so completely beautiful to my eyes. I intended to marry her the minute I graduated. I could not imagine myself living a single day without her.”

  Layla’s eyes widened in astonishment and she swallowed. Ramzi went on.

  “One night, when her family had left on a trip, she opened the door to me . . . And later, when I got up from the sofa, I just looked at her, lying there, and I knew suddenly that my love for her was gone. It went just like that, at that moment. The next evening I found the door open a crack; I shut it, I went out, and I got drunk. I came back early in the morning, packed all my belongings, and left the neighborhood.”

  Layla barely managed to suppress her scream. She longed to flee from the room, from the apartment. But she remained where she was, transfixed, pulled to the closed glass door as if to a huge pit, pulled with a force she could not repel. Ramzi began to speak again. “Since that day I’ve known that there’s no substance to what we call ‘love.’ There’s desire, which is gone the minute you get what you want. Anyway, desire is one thing and marriage is another.”

  A single thought resounded through Layla’s head, a single question that bore into her skull like a nail. The girl? What about the girl? What had happened to the girl?

  Mahmud’s voice was cold. “I do not understand why you’ve told me this story.”

  Layla covered her face in her hands. Mahmud’s words bore no echo of the questioning in her head. The girl’s fate was not on anyone’s mind, not even Mahmud’s. It was as if these two men had some prior agreement that the girl who had transgressed the rules did not deserve any further consideration.

  Ramzi spoke tentatively, slowly, his careful words implying more than he said. “I mean, Mahmud, is it really necessary to get married? Is there no other way? Couldn’t this be a little dalliance which will pass? If you marry her you’ll be paying dearly for it, you know.”

  Layla bit hard on her lower lip. The scoundrel! She wished Mahmud would slap him; his poisoned suggestion deserved no less than that. But Mahmud did not move. Perhaps the intended meaning had sailed right by him. He spoke stiffly. “I am not a child, Dr. Ramzi. I am capable of making my own choices and sticking to them.”

  “It’s clear that our conversation is over,” Ramzi said. “But before I leave I want to tell you about a memory that just came back to me as you were talking.”

  “Go ahead,” Mahmud said politely, his voice indicating not the slightest interest in what Ramzi had to say. Layla, on the other hand, sharpened all her senses like a mouse staring out of a newly sprung trap. Her body stiffened and her face grew absolutely still and hard, as if she were the one who sat there with Ramzi as he spoke and was reacting visibly to every word. And his words did stir up in her imagination a mass of images and expressions, from the past, from the future, from here and there, crowding together, piling up, intermingling until they lost their meaning. A painful sorrow pressed inside her chest as if Ramzi’s words were fingers slowly closing around her throat, her lungs, minute by minute.

  “This is a story about one of my colleagues, who got married five years ago. He was very ardent, very eager, just like you, and he married for love. The woman he married was also intent on it, and rather radical, and they overcame all the obstacles that faced them, stood against all the social pressures around them, and got married, and lived in an apartment with only a table and a bed. And, of course, love and new values. They applied all of their theories, all of your theories: husband and wife are one, no secrets between them, their relationship is based on affection and on sincerity and openness.”

  On fear; I will live in fear of Ramzi. Day after day, my blood will go dry with fear. The fear gone by and the fear to come.

  “And even their theories on sex. Sex and marriage as one, body and soul united. And the more time that passes, the more he loves her and feels she is a part of him and he is part of her. My friend’s eyes shone all the time when he was with us, he was so happy. And whether there was any excuse to do so or not, he was always mentioning his wife. ‘My wife said this, my wife thinks this . . . ’ He was happy and everyone knew it. ‘Well, a new sieve is always strong!’—that is the way they saw it. But a year passed and his eyes were still shining, and he was still saying, ‘My wife this, my wife that.’ People began to feel that something odd was happening, something not in accord with the rules of the society they were living in. Something laughable. They began hiding their smiles in front of him while laughing at him behind his back.”

  Scandals! We don’t want scandals. My mother does not want scandals.

  “So this friend of ours—it was as if he didn’t notice a thing. He took his wife and went to Europe. He was determined to share every experience he’d ever been through with her. And after he came back, he and I, we used to have supper out, in this one restaurant, with a few other friends. And after we’d eaten our fill we’d start talking, about women of course. One would talk and the rest would listen. It might be a true story about something that was going on at the time, or maybe something that was going to happen to one of them, or something that had happened in the past, something of the like.”

  In the kitchen. The darkness, the couch.

  “And one story would draw out another, and we’d take turns doing the talking, and everyone was in tune with everyone else, just as if we all were members of a society and knew and agreed on its tiniest regulations, or the gears of a clock moving at exactly the same pace and in the same direction, all the time, one direction that everyone knows, clear, logical, in sequence.”

  He who knows the fundamentals will not suffer.

  “So o
ur friend’s turn came. His eyes grew soft, and his features, as he told about an experience in one of England’s loveliest wooded spots—with his wife!! And after three years of marriage! We were speechless.”

  Scandals! She doesn’t want scandals! My mother doesn’t want scandals.

  “We were all stupefied, we really were. Something in the clock mechanism stopped; a gear quit, or reversed direction, messed up that logical, clearly understood direction. One of our group summed it up when he said, ‘After three years of marriage? Impossible!’ Another couldn’t stop laughing until the tears were coming from his eyes. We resumed our conversation but our friend there sensed he was an odd man out, not part of our circle, and he got up and left.”

  “Don’t let yourself stay imprisoned in that narrow sphere, my love. That small space will close in on you more and more until it either strangles you or transforms you into a completely unfeeling and unthinking creature.”

  “From that day on, our friend stopped talking about his wife, and began feeling discomfited in our midst, in our sessions, in all sessions. He began to feel that he was unlike us, maybe of a different species or something, and that he was isolated from the larger scheme of things. He became confused . . . .”

  “Okay, Layla, I’ve found a solution. I’ve found a solution, my love.” “The servant? Well, she’s got a crush on Isam. His girlfriend, ya sitti!”

  “And after some time had passed, when he started bringing in his wife’s name again, he found people who would listen to him, who found what he had to say reasonable. He’d started talking about wives and how tiresome they can be. ‘Anyway, what does any woman want besides a house and children and a husband who fulfills the duties of marriage? What?’”

  She dies like Safaa, or . . . does as Gamila has done.