one occasion, after it had happened several times, she told Busayna as she got up to leave the room, “Your brother and sisters need every penny you earn. A clever girl can look after herself and keep her job.” This sentence saddened and puzzled Busayna, who asked herself, “How can I look after myself when faced with a boss who opens his fly?”
She remained in the same state of puzzlement for many long weeks, until Fifi, the daughter of Sabir the laundryman, who was a neighbor of theirs on the roof, appeared. She had heard that Busayna was looking for work and had come to tell her about a job as a salesgirl at the Shanan clothing store. When Busayna told her about her problem with earlier bosses, Fifi let out a great sigh, struck her on her chest, and shouted in her face in disbelief, “Don’t be a fool, girl!” Fifi explained to her that more than ninety percent of bosses did that with the girls who worked for them and that any girl who refused was thrown out and a hundred other girls who didn’t object could be found to take her place. When Busayna started to object, Fifi asked her sarcastically, “So Your Ladyship has an MBA from the American University? Why, the beggars in the street have commercial diplomas the same as you!”
Fifi explained to her that going along with the boss “up to a point” was just being smart and that the world was one thing and what she saw in Egyptian movies was another. She explained to her that she knew lots of girls who had worked for years at the Shanan store and given Mr. Talal, the owner of the store, what he wanted “up to a point” and were now happily married with kids, homes, and husbands who loved them lots. “But why go so far afield?” Fifi asked, citing herself as an example. She had worked in the store for two years and her salary was a hundred pounds, but she earned at least three times that much by “being smart,” not to mention the presents. And all the same, she had been able to look after herself, she was a virgin, and she’d scratch out the eyes of anyone who said anything against her reputation. There were a hundred men who wanted to marry her, especially now that she was earning and putting her money into saving co-ops and setting money aside to pay for her trousseau.
The next day Busayna went with Fifi to Mr. Talal at the store. He turned out to be over forty, fair- complexioned, blue-eyed, balding, and stout. He was snub-nosed and had a huge black mustache that hung down on either side of his mouth. Mr. Talal was not at all handsome, and Busayna found out that he was the only son, among a bunch of girls, of Hagg Shanan, a Syrian, who had come from Syria during the Union and settled in Egypt and opened this store. Once he started getting on, he had handed his business over to his only son. She learned too that he was married and that his wife was Egyptian and pretty and had borne him two sons, though despite all that his predations on women never stopped. Talal shook Busayna’s hand (giving it a squeeze) and never raised his eyes from her chest and body while he spoke. After a few minutes, she started her new job.
In just a few weeks, Fifi had taught her all she had to do: how she had to take care of her appearance, paint her fingernails and her toenails, open the neck of her dress a little, and take her dresses in a bit at the waist to show off her backside. It was her job to open the store in the morning and mop it out along with her colleagues, then set her clothes straight and stand at the door (a way of attracting customers familiar to all the clothing stores). When she had a customer, she had to talk to him nicely, comply with his requests, and persuade him to buy as much as possible (she got a half of one percent of the value of all sales). Naturally, she had to put up with the customers’ flirting, however obnoxious.
That was the job. As for “the other thing,” Mr. Talal started in on it the third day after she came. It was the time of the afternoon prayer and the store was empty of customers. Talal asked her to go with him to the storeroom so that he could explain to her the different items they had in stock. Busayna followed him without a word, noting the shadow of an ironic smile on the faces of Fifi and the other girls.
The storeroom consisted of a large apartment on the ground floor in the building next to the A l’Americaine cafe on Suleiman Basha. Talal entered and locked the door from the inside. She looked about her. The place was damp and badly lit and ventilated and was stacked to the ceiling with boxes. She knew what was coming and had readied herself on the way to the storeroom, repeating to herself in her head her mother’s words, “Your brother and sisters need every penny you earn. A clever girl can look after herself and keep her job.” When Mr. Talal came close to her, she was struck by strong and conflicting feelings — determination to make the best of the opportunity and the fear which despite everything still wracked her and made her fight for breath and feel as though she was about to be sick. There was also a sneaking, covert curiosity that urged her to find out what Mr. Talal would do to her. Would he woo her and tell her, “I love you,” for example, or try to kiss her right away? She found out quickly enough because Talal pounced on her from behind, flung his arms around her hard enough to hurt her and started rubbing up against her and playing with her body without uttering a single word. He was violent and in a hurry to get his pleasure and the whole business was over in about two minutes. Her dress was soiled and he whispered to her, panting, “The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor on the right.”
As she washed her dress in the water, she thought to herself that the whole thing was easier than she’d imagined, like some man rubbing up against her in the bus (something that happened a lot) and she remembered what Fifi had told her to do after the encounter. She went back to Talal and said to him in a voice she made as smooth and seductive as she could, “I need twenty pounds from you, sir.” Talal looked at her for a moment, then quickly thrust his hand into his pocket as though he had been expecting the request and said in an ordinary voice as he took out a folded banknote, “Nah. Ten’s enough. Come back to the store after me as soon as your dress is dry.” Then he went out, closing the door behind him.
Ten pounds a time, and Mr. Talal would ask for her twice, sometimes three times a week, and Fifi had taught her how from time to time to show her liking for a dress in the shop and keep on at Talal until he made her a present of it. She started making money and wearing nice clothes and her mother was pleased with her and was comforted by the money that she took from her and tucked into the front of her dress, uttering warm blessings for her after doing so. Listening to these, Busayna was overwhelmed with a mysterious, malign desire to start giving her mother clear hints about her relationship with Talal, but her mother would ignore any such messages. Busayna would then go to such lengths with her hints that the mother’s refusal to acknowledge them became obvious and extremely fragile, at which point Busayna would feel some relief, as though she had snatched away her mother’s mask of false innocence and confirmed her complicity in the crime.
As time passed her rendezvous with Talal in the storeroom had an impact on her that she would never have imagined. She found herself no longer able to perform the morning prayer (the only one of the required prayers that she had performed) because inwardly she was ashamed to face “Our Lord,” because she felt herself unclean, however much she performed the ablutions. She started having nightmares and would start up from her sleep terrified. She would go for days depressed and melancholy and one day when she went with her mother to visit the tomb of El Hussein, no sooner had she entered the sanctuary and found herself surrounded by the incense and lights and felt that deeply-rooted hidden presence that fills the heart than she burst into a long, unexpected bout of weeping.
On the other hand, since retreat was not an option and she could not stand her feelings of sin, she started to resist the latter fiercely. She took to thinking of her mother’s face as she told her that she was working as a servant in people’s houses. She would repeat to herself what Fifi had said about the world and how it worked and often she would contemplate the shop’s rich, chic, women customers and ask herself with spiteful passion, “I wonder how many times that woman surrendered her body to get to where she is now?”
This violent resistance to her feelings of guilt left a legacy of bitterness and cruelty. She stopped trusting people or making excuses for them. She would often think (and then seek forgiveness) that God had wanted her to fall. If He had wanted otherwise, He would have created her a rich woman or delayed her father’s death a few years (and what could have been easier for Him?). Little by little, her resentment extended to include her sweetheart Taha himself. A strange feeling that she was stronger than he was by far would creep over her — a feeling that she was mature and understood the world, while he was just a dreamy, naive boy. She started to get annoyed at his optimism about the future and speak sharply to him, mocking him by saying, “You think you’re Abd el Halim Hafez? The poor, hard-working boy whose dreams will come true if he struggles?”
At first, Taha didn’t understand the reason for this bitterness. Then her sarcasm at his expense started to provoke him and they would quarrel, and when he asked her once to stop working for Talal because he had a bad reputation, she looked at him challengingly and said, “At your service, sir. Give me the two hundred and fifty pounds that I earn from Talal and you’ll have the right to stop me showing my face to anyone but you.” He stared at her for a moment as though he did not understand and then his anger erupted and he shoved her on the shoulder. She screamed insults at him and threw at him an outfit in silver he’d bought for her. In the depths of her heart, she
