sincerely pray for mercy on his soul as a rare model, almost extinct, of a true educator: in his dedication and integrity, his firmness and kindness toward his students. However, Ustaz Muhammadi's life, like that of all others, was not without setbacks, as providence chose to deprive him of male offspring, giving him three daughters one after the other. After the third one he stopped trying, much to his grave chagrin. But he soon overcame his sorrow by channeling his unbounded love to his daughters and raising them just like his students at school to be straightforward, studious, and confident. The result was dazzling: Shaymaa and Aliya were instructors in medicine, and Nada, the youngest, an instructor in the department of communications in the College of Engineering. Thus the education and upbringing that Shaymaa received played a role in her accepting the challenge and the scholarship in America.
The third and most important reason: Shaymaa is over thirty, still unmarried because her position as instructor in the College of Medicine has greatly reduced her chances, since Eastern men usually prefer that their wives be less educated than they. Besides, Shaymaa lacks the instant qualifications for marriage: her loose garb totally hides her body, and her face is not strikingly beautiful. The most that her plain features leave a man with is that she looks familiar, and that, of course, is not a sufficient incentive for him to marry her. She is not rich; she lives with her sisters and mother on their salaries and the pension of her father, who refused throughout his life to work in the prosperous Arab Gulf countries or to give private lessons. In addition, and despite her academic excellence, she is totally ignorant of methods of seduction—methods that most women are good at and which they use skillfully, either directly by preening and using perfumes and wearing tight and revealing clothes, or indirectly by using titillating modesty, enticing coyness, or awkwardness fraught with meaning and a captivating, voluptuous stammer coupled with meticulously using the weapon of the distant gaze enveloped in sadness and mystery. Nature has provided women all these real techniques for the preservation of the species but, for one reason or another, decided to deprive Shaymaa Muhammadi of them.
This does not mean at all that she suffers a deficiency in femininity. On the contrary, her femininity is overpowering and would suffice for several women to lead a natural life; but she's never learned how to express it. Her feminine desires persist so much that they cause her pain and make her irritable, capricious, and prone to weeping fits. Nothing relieves her tension except her forbidden dreams of the famous Iraqi crooner, Kadhim al-Sahir, and her stealthy bouts of delight in her naked body (after which she repents every time and performs two prayer prostrations in sincere penitence before God; but she soon does it again). The psychological pressures that she's suffered because of her failure to get married thus far were a direct reason for her traveling to the States, as if she were running away from her situation or postponing facing reality. For many months Shaymaa exerted strenuous efforts to complete the requirements for the scholarship: she had to fill out applications and forms and go on endless trips from her college to the university's administration and vice versa. Then there were those violent and complicated negotiations with her mother, who as soon as she learned of her desire to travel, erupted angrily and yelled at her, “Your problem, Shaymaa, is that you're obstinate, like your father. You'll regret it. You don't know what it means to be away from home. You want to travel to America where they persecute Muslims and while you are veiled? Why don't you get your doctorate here and protect your dignity in the midst of your family? Remember that by traveling you lose any chance of getting married. What good would a PhD from America do when you are a forty-year-old spinster?”
The idea that a girl might travel alone to America for four or five years was alien to the family, acquaintances, and perhaps the whole of Tanta. But Shaymaa's diligence and persistence and her resorting to violent quarrels sometimes—and to begging and crying at other times—forced her mother finally to acquiesce to her desire. Shaymaa's enthusiasm kept increasing as the appointed time drew near. Even in the last days she had no fear or anxiety. And when it was time she was not affected by the tears of her mother and sisters. As soon as the plane took off and she felt that little tightness in her belly, she felt quite refreshed and optimistic. She thought to herself that only at that moment was she turning over a new leaf and leaving behind the thirty-three years she'd lived in Tanta.
Her first days in Chicago, however, were contrary to what she'd expected: headaches and exhaustion due to jet lag, insomnia, and interrupted sleep and harrowing nightmares. Worse than that was a feeling of dejection that never left her after she landed at O'Hare Airport. The security officer was suspicious of her and made her wait out of the line, then fingerprinted and began to interrogate her, fixing her with an untrusting gaze. But the scholarship papers she carried, her extremely pale face, and her voice that grew softer then totally disappeared from sheer fright all dispelled his suspicions, and he dismissed her with a wave of his hand. Shaymaa stood on the moving walkway with her large suitcase (her full name and address written in India ink on it, the Egyptian peasant way). The hostile reception made her somewhat dejected. She soon discovered that the walkway on which she stood was moving inside a giant tube intersecting with hundreds of neon tubes, making O'Hare seem like a children's toy that had been magnified thousands of times.
As soon as she left the airport, she was dazzled. She saw streets so wide she could not imagine they existed anywhere and gigantic skyscrapers that spread as far as the eye could see, giving the city an enchanted mythical look like those in comic books. She saw waves upon waves of Americans, men and women, streaming forth from all directions like giant lines of ants moving fast and earnestly, as if rushing to catch a train about to leave the station. At that moment she felt like a stranger, lonely and lost, as if she were a straw tossed about by a tumultuous ocean. She was overcome with a fear that soon turned into a bellyache pinching her guts, as if she were a child lost from her mother in the crowds of al-Sayyid al-Badawi's mulid. Despite her strenuous attempts, two long weeks had passed, and she hadn't yet got used to her new life. At night, when she lay in her room enveloped in a thick darkness penetrated only by the yellow streetlights through the window, Shaymaa remembered sadly that she'd sleep in that desolate place for several years. It was then that she would be overcome with an overpowering longing for her warm room, her sisters, her mother, and all those she loved in Tanta.
The previous night worries had assailed her and she was unable to sleep. For a whole hour she tossed and turned and felt miserable. She cried in the dark and wet her pillow. Then she got up, turned on the light and said to herself that she couldn't possibly bear such a hard life for four full years. What would happen if she were to write a request to withdraw from the scholarship? She would suffer for some time from the gloating and sarcastic taunts of some of her colleagues in Tanta, but her two sisters would welcome her with open arms, and her mother would never gloat at her misfortune. The desire to withdraw from the scholarship took hold of her and she started wondering how to carry it out. Suddenly another idea occurred to her: she performed her ablution, opened the holy Qur'an, and recited the chapter of Yasin, then performed the prayer for guidance and followed it with supplications. As soon as she lay her head on the pillow she was fast asleep. In her sleep she saw her father, Ustaz Muhammadi, wearing his fancy blue wool suit that he wore on important occasions (such as visits to or by the minister or graduation parties at the school). Her father stood in the garden in front of the main door of the histology department where she studied. His face was clean-shaven and without wrinkles, his lucent eyes gleamed, and his hair was thick jet-black without a single gray hair, which made him appear twenty years younger. He kept smiling at Shaymaa and whispering to her in his affectionate voice, “Don't be afraid. I'll stay with you. I won't leave you, ever. Come.” Then he held her by the hand and pulled her gently until she entered through the department door with him.
Shaymaa woke up in the morning at peace with herself, her misgivings totally gone. She said to herself, “This is a true vision from God Almighty to give me strength in my difficult task.” She believed that the dead lived with us but that we didn't see them. Her father had visited her in her sleep to encourage her to continue her studies, and she wasn't going to let him down; she would forget her sorrows and cope with her new life. She felt profound relief now that she had made up her mind. So, she decided to celebrate. She had certain rituals she was used to performing with her two sisters on happy occasions. She began by making the well-known paste of sugar and lemon juice on the stove, and then she went into the bathroom and sat, naked, on the edge of the bathtub and began to remove unwanted hair from her body. She enjoyed