Free Zeina by Nawal El Saadawi Page A

bereft of two thirds of his mind and a little girl whose mind was much bigger than her years. He tore off her white dress and her petticoat made of Egyptian cotton. He removed her little white panties and pulled one leg away from the other, forcing his male organ between her thighs. But he couldn’t enter her. His erect phallus couldn’t find its way through the folds of her flesh.
    The route inside was completely blocked, as though there was no aperture there and no vagina. She wasn’t like other females.
    He couldn’t imagine that a young girl could have such strength or those muscles. In his experience, even after resistance and fighting, women gave in in the end. Strong young women often stopped the fight and lay powerlessly underneath him. A student might weep and plead with him to let her go, but her tears only increased his appetite for rape. Deep down, he was a schoolboy that had been raped himself. The pleasure of sex became therefore connected in his mind and body with violence and the desire to take revenge on the senior teacher who had violated his virginity, on his father who had caned him, and on the university guards who had chased him during demonstrations and beat him with batons. But he sang defiantly along with the others, “You can beat us but you cannot break us!” He also sang the love songs of deprivation, abandonment, and unrequited love. Love was connected in his mind with pain, and sex was inseparable from violence and cruelty. The more cruelly a woman treated him, the more head over heels in love with her he became. He only cared for the women who deserted him and made him suffer, women who fought with him and beat him up so hard that he moaned like a child in front of them, a child being disciplined by his cruel parents, or a worshipper being punished by God Almighty.
    In the long fight that ensued, he imagined that she would relent and give in, deprived of her will and overpowered by her feminine weakness. Throughout his life Zakariah al-Khartiti knew only one type of femininity. He was only familiar with women raised in submissiveness. If these women withheld themselves, it was only part of the game. A woman’s tears were also a part of the game, even if she left him or thrashed him with a leather belt until he whinged. It was all a childish game.
    But Zeina Bint Zeinat had no home and never played games. She grew up on the streets and the sidewalks like a tree of cactus figs with prickly skin. If you held the figs in your hand against their will, they’d cut your skin with their thorns until you bled. With teeth as hard as nails, she dug into the flesh of his shoulder, neck, belly, and into the tip of his penis, which she tore off. Blood ran profusely onto the decorative patterns of the Persian rug on the floor of the study.
    For a few moments, Zakariah al-Khartiti was completely unconscious. He lay on the floor moaning in a suppressed voice that turned, in seconds, to a sound like snoring.
    Zeina Bint Zeinat reached out with her slender, pointed fingers and drew the key from his pocket as he lay prostrate. She tiptoed to the door, turned the key twice in its lock, and crept outside noiselessly, locking the door behind her. Zakariah al-Khartiti became a prisoner in his own study until his wife came home at the end of the day.
    Zakariah al-Khartiti lay in bed for three days, nursing his wounds with iodine and cotton. On the fourth day, his sexual desires returned. He stretched his hand across the wide bed to touch the back of his wife, Bodour, who was fast asleep. The sound of her snoring was muted, because even during her sleep she tried to suppress it, fearing that her husband might hear it. Women from good families didn’t snore. Women with perfect femininity had soft breaths that produced no sound.
    He shook her softly by the shoulder saying, “Bodour, sweetheart, are you sleeping?”
    “I am sleeping, Zakariah!”
    “And can you talk in your sleep, Bodour?”
    “Yes,