Free The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi Page B

small change, divested me of my official dress and buried me in a pit dug in the palace gardens.
    But the people continued to clamour out my name unceasingly as I lay in the burial pit, and I stood high up on the elevated platform delivering my speech on the occasion of the Big Feast. No one except my legal wife and my Chief of Security realized that I was in two places at the same time. The rockets continued to shoot up into the sky in celebration of the Big Feast, and the acclamations of the crowds continued to resound.
    It occurred to no one that I was not the Imam. I myself could not believe that I was the Imam and the Leader of these people. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the enjoyable feeling of being the Leader without being the Leader. Thus I could move about freely without needing to wear a bullet-proof vest and without being haunted by the fear of assassination; for I knew that I had already been assassinated before, and it was better for me to be a dead Imam rather than not to be the Imam at all. Now my new name would be the Imam Martyr, and this new name would bestow a new greatness on me. I had become above death and could sit on my throne without fearing my enemies or my friends. As a martyr I had developed the ability to rise up in the air, to fly from the first world to the second or even the third world. I no longer feared either the Great or Small Powers, and I could sit opposite the greatest of leaders with my right leg crossed over my left leg. In the morning I drank my coffee in the Lands of the North and at midday I had lunch in the Lands of the South. Then in the evening, after the day was over, I could spend a quiet night under the ground in the House of Joy with Gawaher. Sitting by my side was my lifelong friend, and we drank toast after toast to love and friendship. I had bestowed a title on him and he had a full page in which to write, with his picture at the top framed in a box. Every Thursday we stayed up all night talking about the memories of our youth.
    ‘Do you remember the girl we fucked together?’
    I slapped his thigh with the palm of my hand and roared with laughter. He slapped me on my thigh in turn and his laughter rang out as heartily as mine. But a moment later he eyed me hesitantly and his laughter subsided, as though he suddenly realized that he had ventured to slap the thigh of the Imam. His hand remained suspended in the air, but I slapped his thigh a second time and burst out laughing just as loudly, remembering all the while how he used to sit beside me in school dressed in his expensive woollen trousers and hit me on the buttocks from behind, right where I held my hand over the hole in my trousers trying to hide it. So I laughed in great hilarity for the third time and slapped him on his thigh again where it lay inside the leg of his trousers, thin and tense like the thigh of a tiger. Then I said, ‘Do you remember the name of that girl?’
    He laughed noisily and in the midst of his laughter I heard him say, ‘Of course, her name was Gawaher. Her body was as white as milk and her skin was so fine that the flesh underneath it showed through. Her eyes were big and black, like the eyes of the maidens waiting for us in Paradise.’
    At these words my mind took a sudden leap out of this world into the hereafter. I saw Paradise like a vast expanse of green. I lay on the sweet soft grass near the river and all around me naked maidens floated in its waters, their bodies shining in the sun. My eyes travelled slowly between their beautiful faces until I was sure that my legal wife was not among them.
    My voice rang out again and again in peals of laughter, and this time I slapped him on the thigh with a resounding whack. ‘How many maidens is each believer allowed?’ I asked.
    ‘Either seventy or seventy-seven, I don’t remember exactly,’ he said. ‘God alone knows the exact number.’
    ‘But how many maidens are allowed if it’s the Leader of the Faithful, the One