Maryam’s Maze by Mansoura Ez Eldin

Maryam’s Maze by Mansoura Ez Eldin

Author:Mansoura Ez Eldin [Eldin, Mansoura Ez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617971631
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00


Apricot trees were the only trees that did not grow well in the palace garden. The small trees would grow until they reached a certain stage, then stop. They would not flower, but would remain just as they were, slender stumps laden with dark green leaves, with no branches growing off them.

Maryam had been used to being in first place among her schoolmates right up to secondary school. Her superiority was evident to all. She loved chemistry, physics, and math. Her favorite hobby was to sit for hours at her desk solving problems of mechanics, trigonometry, and differential and integral calculus, seeking out the trickiest problems in physics in order to crack their secrets, or putting together made-up chemical formulas in which she mixed all sorts of elements and substances.

Her chemistry teacher told her that life was nothing but chemistry, that love was the same, and so were the air we breathed and the food we ate. Maryam laughed at the time, but inside herself she believed what he said.

She would sit for a long time in her room listening to Radio Monte Carlo, to the Magic Worlds of Fayiz Muqaddasi and the seductive voices of Antoine Barud and Habib Hammoud, turning the people around her into equations that she consistently failed to solve.

She knew that chlorine plus sodium gave us sodium chloride and that hydrogen plus oxygen produced water but she didn’t know what Yusif and Narges made. She didn’t understand which of their constituent elements prevented interaction between them. She imagined everyone in El Tagi’s palace as elements incapable of interaction with their surroundings— as catalysts, like manganese dioxide, that facilitate a reaction but do not react themselves. Solitary beings, destined to remain like that: Sofia chasing her papers, Narges living with her imaginary ghosts, and Yusif with his solitude. El Tagi too had remained a prisoner, sitting endlessly on the terrace surrounded by jasmine bushes on every side—the same bushes that had given him a chest allergy and led to his death, strangled by their sweet fragrance.

The complex questions that Maryam busied herself solving were, together with the old films of James Dean and Yves Montand, the reason that she paid no attention to her other subjects. She consequently failed to gain enough marks to qualify her to enroll in the Faculty of Medicine or Pharmacy as Narges wanted her to. Maryam betrayed herself when she refused to enroll in the Faculty of Science and decided to study philosophy. She plunged headlong into the study of existentialism and logical positivism. She compared Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, structuralism and deconstructionism, while the laws of mathematics evaporated from her memory. They had become no more than obscure symbols with no precise significance.

At first, Maryam paid no attention to this and dedicated herself to her new world, persuading herself that she would find her true self there. But later she suddenly started to feel depressed. She felt that she was about to fall into a bottomless pit when she read



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