from The Golden Chariot

from The Golden Chariot Salwa Bakr (bio) Translated by Dinah Manisty Anyone who set eyes on Azima, the giant, would have been shocked by her strange appearance. Even the head of the women’s prison was astonished when he took responsibility for her as an inmate of the prison and saw her for the first time; in fact he abandoned the customary reticence of an official in his position and began to ask her about the secret of her amazing height. Naturally Azima did not give a clear answer, because she never knew the secret of her awesome height; she was over two metres tall—heads taller than other women—and even a quarter of a metre taller than her father, who was considered tall. Until Azima was twelve, she was a normal child who seemed slightly tall in comparison to her peers but not remarkably so, nor in a way which caused alarm to her family who were preparing her for marriage like her older sisters, like any ordinary young girl looking ahead to the day she would find a suitable match. When Azima failed to obtain her primary certificate—quite usual for most pupils at this stage, given the state of the schools—she became free to complete her education in domestic affairs considered a priority in grooming girls for marriage. However, not long after this signs of Azima’s problem appeared. She began to shoot up with startling speed, made more obvious by her remarkable thinness and the lack of proportion in her physique: her lower half was extended in contrast with the short upper half and her long neck ended in a small head with big, rather bulging eyes so that when you looked at her you thought she might be a giraffe in a human form. By the time she turned sixteen, she had grown so much that she seemed far taller than any other human being around, and was exposed to a great deal of ridicule in the street and even at home; this put a severe strain on her just as it would on any adolescent girl who wanted to be loved and accepted by people generally, and by the opposite sex in particular. She began to feel so bitter that she attempted suicide, but her attempt failed because when she threw herself from the balcony of her home, which was on the fourth floor in a block of flats, she fell unexpectedly onto a cement cart which was crossing the road. She suffered nothing more than a broken front tooth which she banged against the metal edge of the vehicle as it proceeded, carrying her with it to the end of the street. The broken tooth was a lasting memorial to this abortive attempt. If this incident did not scar Azima, another was to change the course of her life completely. A few months later an uncle of hers died in the flower of his youth. It was a tragic death which shook everyone who heard about it. One night, out of the blue, the building [End Page 1123] where he lived began to fall down. After he had saved his mother, father, and his three sisters from certain death, a neighbor asked him to help save her paralyzed mother. He rushed to carry the old woman, who had crawled out to one of the balconies, and threw her down to the crowd which was waiting to catch her below. However, after the woman was saved, a huge piece of stone fell on the young man and squashed him flat. Then the quarter in which the event took place witnessed a funeral ceremony of the kind which had not taken place since the funeral of the martyrs of the 1919 Revolution, when the people clubbed together to set up the biggest mourning tent possible and hired the best man they could afford to recite the Qur’an. A large crowd paid their respects at his final resting place at the end of an amazing funeral procession which everyone joined in and brought the traffic to a halt for half an hour in Mohamed Ali street, leading to the Citadel. The traffic jam...

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