Woman at Point Zero: Part 2 Summary & Analysis

Firdaus narrates: she states that she will speak uninterrupted, since the men are coming to execute her this very evening. By tomorrow, she’ll be in whatever life comes after. She prides herself on going to this “place unknown.” Firdaus has been searching her whole life for something to be proud of, something that would make her “superior” to men. Every man she has known only makes her want to strike them. Whenever Firdaus sees their pictures in the newspaper, she spits on them. She was a successful prostitute, though she did not know all men. But she knew many. She hid her fear of them behind expensive makeup. Her clothing and makeup are upper class. Her education is middle class. Her birth makes her lower class.

When Firdaus is growing up, her father is a poor farmer. He doesn’t know how to read or write, only how to steal crops, beat his wife, sell his daughter for a dowry, or sell a dying animal as if it is healthy. Each Friday he goes to the mosque to pray, and afterward he walks with his friends discussing virtue and honor and “invoking Allah’s name.” Firdaus sees her father walking with his friends while she carries water, but they all look so similar to each other that she doesn’t know which is her father.

When Firdaus has not yet reached puberty, her mother brings a woman who cuts off “a piece of flesh from between [Firdaus’s] thighs.” Firdaus cries all night. Her mother used to send her to the fields, where she and a young boy named Mohammadain eagerly sneak away to play “bride and bridegroom”—Firdaus lays down and Mohammadain reaches his hands up her dress until she feels a “sharp pleasure.” But now her mother keeps her home to make bread. As Firdaus kneels, kneading dough between her knees, her gown rides up her legs. Her uncle, reading behind her, slowly reaches his hand up her thigh and under her gown, like Mohammadain. Her uncle goes further than Mohammadain, but Firdaus no longer feels the “sensation of pleasure,” though she closes her eyes and tries to remember where it came from.

Firdaus’s uncle visits during holidays from Cairo, where he attends the university, El Azhar. He teaches Firdaus how to read and write and he sings to her, and tells her about life in the city. Whenever he has to leave, Firdaus begs him to take her with him, but he tells her that El Azhar is only for men. When Firdaus walks sadly back to her father’s house, she wonders who she truly is, if her parents are actually her parents, and if she is truly their daughter.

Firdaus thinks about her mother’s eyes, about the first time she sees them. She feels as if those eyes always watch her as a child, always follow her. When Firdaus learns to walk, her mother’s eyes hold her up, and Firdaus clings to them. As an adult, Firdaus cannot remember what her mother’s eyes looked like—what shape they were, whether they had lashes or color. All she remembers is “two rings of intense white around two circles of intense black,” and they look as though “sunlight was pouring into them from some magical source.” Firdaus’s mother tends to her father until her mother is “no longer there.” Firdaus has to “replace[]” her mother for a time until a new woman arrives, whose eyes are not her mother’s. Her stepmother’s eyes seem to dull the light, rather than pour light out.

Firdaus has many siblings, but they often die from disease or dysentery. When a son dies, her father beats her mother. When a daughter dies, he simply eats his dinner and goes to sleep. Her father never misses a meal and always eats, even when there is no food for his wife and children. Often, starving, Firdaus watches her father slowly eat and slap away any child’s hand that reaches for his dinner. Firdaus feels that he is not her father. She is closer to her uncle. When Firdaus’s father dies, her uncle puts her in elementary school. When her stepmother dies, Firdaus’s uncle takes Firdaus with him to Cairo.

When Firdaus enters her uncle’s house in Cairo, she feels reborn. She sees an electric light for the first time and screams. Her uncle gives her shoes and a dress to wear. Firdaus sees a mirror for the for the first time, and stares at her reflection with its large nose and thin lips. She despises what she sees—the features look like her parents—and decides that she hates that mirror.

However, Firdaus loves school and loves her uncle. When she comes home from school, she cleans his house, does his laundry, cooks dinner, and eats with him when he returns from El Azhar in the evenings. She sits next to him while he reads to her, and when she falls ill he sits with her all night, stroking her head on his lap while she drifts in and out of sleep.

When Firdaus finishes primary school, her uncle takes her to the cinema. In the film, she sees a woman dancing with bare thighs and a man kiss another woman on the lips. Firdaus hides her face behind her hand. Her uncle tells her that such acts are sinful, but she cannot even bear to look into his eyes. When they get home, Firdaus hides beneath a blanket, trembling, waiting for her uncle to reach under the blanket, up her thighs, and press his lips on her mouth. Somewhere in her body, Firdaus feels a distant pleasure trying to awaken, but feels that it comes from outside her body, from a part of her that was “severed.”

Firdaus’s uncle eventually grows distant from her. He stays out late into the evening and stops reading to her. He dresses in a suit and tie, rather than a robe and turban. Firdaus begins secondary school and her uncle takes her to live with him and his new wife in a bigger house. Her uncle’s wife is fat and soft-spoken, but the softness seems to hide “cruelty.” Firdaus thinks her uncle does not love his wife, but fears her, since she comes from a higher social class. Her uncle brings a small servant girl to live in their home. She sleeps on the floor in Firdaus’s bed, but when Firdaus invites her to share the bed on a harshly cold night, her uncle’s wife sees it and beats them both.

Firdaus’s uncle seems to grow antagonistic toward her and sends her to live in the boarding portion of her school. Other children’s parents take them home on weekends, but Firdaus’s uncle never does. Even so, Firdaus loves school. She makes a close friend named Wafeya, and at night they lie together and share secrets and feelings. Firdaus only speaks about the future, because there is nothing for her to say about her past. She wants to become a head of state, though she knows that it’s impossible for women.

One night, Wafeya asks Firdaus if she’s ever been in love. Firdaus says that she lives her life without love, but Wafeya thinks that is hardly a life. As Firdaus falls asleep, she remembers Mohammadain and the sharp pleasure he made her feel, that’s now been cut away. She cries for the loss, as if it had only just been taken from her.

To pass the time, Firdaus spends her free hours in the school’s library and develops a love for books. She reads the histories of various Middle Eastern kingdoms and the succession of kings. Every one of them seems evil, obsessed with money, sex, and power. They hide their deeds during their lifetimes so that each makes the same errors, and history repeats itself over and over again. Firdaus reads newspapers as well, where she sees pictures of “rulers” feigning religious piety at the mosques, pretending that they don’t use religion to simply protect their own interests.

When Firdaus tires of reading, she sits alone at night in the playground. One night, as she sits, crying, a teacher named Miss Iqbal finds her and sits with her, trying to console her. Firdaus looks into her eyes and sees white rings around black centers, as if light pours through them from some magical source. She holds Miss Iqbal’s hands in her own, and the contact stirs a distant feeling of pleasure inside Firdaus, “like a part of my being which had been born with me when I was born, but had not grown with me when I had grown.” Firdaus opens her lips to speak, but her voice fails her, so she holds on tightly to Miss Iqbal’s hands.

Whenever Firdaus sees Miss Iqbal, she wants to speak, wants to reach out and touch her, but Miss Iqbal does not seem to notice Firdaus more than any other girl. Firdaus wonders if Miss Iqbal forgot their encounter in the playground. Wafeya notices that Firdaus speaks of her teacher often, and asks if she’s in love with Miss Iqbal. Firdaus denies it, thinking it impossible to be in love with a woman.

Her final examination for school occurs not long after, and Firdaus ranks as the second student in her school and seventh in the entire country. During the assembly to recognize student achievement, the principal calls for Firdaus to come forward with her guardian. However, her guardian is not present and Firdaus feels paralyzed in her chair, unable to move. Miss Iqbal’s eyes reach her through the darkness, and the teacher takes her by the hand and leads her to the stage. The contact stirs a pleasure that feels like pain in Firdaus’s body. Miss Iqbal accepts the award with Firdaus and signs the necessary forms as if she were her parent, then leads Firdaus back to her seat.

The school year ends, and all of the other girls’ parents take them home. A staff member has to telegram Firdaus’s uncle to come retrieve her. The night before he arrives, Firdaus sits alone in the dark, in a courtyard. She thinks she sees a shape moving in the darkness and hopes that it is Miss Iqbal, but when she calls out she realizes it is only a small brick wall that has always been there. When her uncle picks her up the next day, Firdaus frantically looks at every door and window, hoping they will open to reveal Miss Iqbal’s face. None of them do. All she sees is the final closed door as she leaves the empty school.

When Firdaus returns to her uncle’s house, she finds that he and his wife now have children of their own. The only place for her to sleep is on a couch in the dining room, against a thin wall through which she can hear her uncle and his wife—who refers to him as “your holiness”—speaking in their bedroom. Firdaus’s uncle’s wife wants to be rid of Firdaus, to send her to university. Her uncle insists that it would reflect on him poorly as a leader and religious man to have his niece studying alongside men.

Firdaus’s uncle’s wife decides that they should marry Firdaus to Sheikh Mahmoud, even though he is an old widower with a “deformity” on his face. Her uncle’s wife speaks eagerly about what dowry they could get from Sheikh Mahmoud, and both she and Firdaus’s uncle thank Allah for their good circumstances. They think Firdaus would be fortunate to marry such a man. She hears her uncle start to kiss his wife’s body, and though she protests he forces himself on her, saying, “I’m your husband and you’re my wife.” Firdaus feels the wall vibrate and she seems to vibrate with it. Her breathing grows rapid with a “strange frenzy.” After they finish, Firdaus’s breathing returns to normal and she drifts to sleep, covered in sweat.

The next morning, after making breakfast for her uncle, Firdaus packs a backpack with her nightgown, secondary school degree, and merit certificate. She leaves her uncle’s house and walks out into the street, unsure of where she will go. She feels as if the world is opening itself to her and she observes all the different people, separated by wealth and social class, thronging about the city. The rich men are fatter, and look as though they are always about to pounce. She feels a mixture of “wonderment” and fear that she is now a part of this mass of people. She feels like an infant newly exposed to the full breadth of the world.

As night falls, Firdaus has no place to sleep and her stomach aches with hunger. From the darkness, Firdaus senses two eyes watching her, waiting, roving up and down her body. Terror rises within her and she takes shelter in a well-lit shop until she feels the eyes have gone. She runs home to her uncle’s house. She cannot recall what the eyes even look like, but whenever she walks in the street, she fears they’ll return.

Time passes, though Firdaus does not remember it, and she is married off to Sheikh Mahmoud. She is 18, but he is more than 60, and he has a swollen infection below his lower lip which dribbles bloody pus that smells like “dead dogs.” Firdaus sleeps in a comfortable bed, but her husband always appears beside her. When his infection does not run, she lets him kiss her face. He rakes his hands over her body and wraps himself around her, like a starving man wiping his bowl clean, leaving “not a single crumb behind.” Sheikh Mahmoud never eats much, but he hawkishly watches Firdaus eat. If she leaves any trace of food, he scolds her for “wastefulness.”

Whenever Sheik Mahmoud unwraps himself from Firdaus’s body, she slips away to the bathroom and carefully scrubs every inch of herself multiple times, washing her husband off of her. Sheik Mahmoud no longer works, nor has any friends or goes out to eat, because that would require spending money and he is miserly to the core. He spends all day closely watching Firdaus and shouts and beats her whenever he finds anything that could possibly be described as wastefulness, such as spilling a few grains of soap on the floor. Eventually, Sheik Mahmoud beats Firdaus every day, regardless of her behavior.

When Sheikh Mahmoud beats Firdaus with a shoe, leaving her entire body badly bruised, she runs to her uncle’s house for protection. However, her uncle tells her that all men beat their wives; it is common practice. When Firdaus protests that surely religious men like her uncle don’t beat their wives, his wife tells Firdaus that it is especially religious men who do such things—their religion permits it, and their wives must practice “perfect obedience.” When Firdaus’s uncle brings her back to Mahmoud, Mahmoud does not acknowledge Firdaus or give her anything to eat for a night and a day.

Firdaus grows so hungry that she takes some food for herself, and Sheikh Mahmoud shouts at her and berates her for leaving, insisting that he is the only person in the world who will “put up” with her and shelter her. He rapes Firdaus, and though his infection drips pus on her face and lips, Firdaus does not resist, but lets her body go limp like “a piece of dead wood.” Not long after, Mahmoud beats her with a stick so badly that blood runs out of her nose and ears. Firdaus flees, but rather than go to her uncle’s house she wanders the streets, face bleeding. Nobody takes notice of her as she wanders along the street, alone and empty-handed.

Firdaus sits outside a coffeehouse and asks for water. The waiter initially refuses, but seeing that she is injured, eventually relents. The owner of the coffee-house comes out and asks Firdaus why her face is battered and bruised. Firdaus tells him that she has nowhere to go, but wants to find a job with her school certificate. The man introduces himself as Bayoumi and says that she can live with him, in a spare room, until she gets back on her feet. Firdaus thinks that Bayoumi’s eyes seem kind and that his hands are “quiet,” “almost submissive.” On the way back to his flat, Bayoumi stops at a market and asks Firdaus if she prefers oranges or tangerines. She realizes that she’s never been asked her preference for anything before.

When they arrive at Bayoumi’s home, Bayoumi insists that Firdaus sleep in the bed and that he will sleep on the floor, which is the first time anyone has ever put Firdaus’s needs before their own. As Bayoumi guides her there with a hand on her arm, Firdaus feels the memory of an “obscure pleasure” vibrate in her body. She spends several months with him, cooking and keeping his house while he is working. He never strikes her or watches her plate to see if she wastes food.

However, after several months, Firdaus still desires to work and earn her own wage, to be independent, rather than stuck in Bayoumi’s house. When she tells him she is going out to look for a job, Bayoumi becomes enraged and slaps her in the face. His hands seem large and strong. His eyes are jet black, and Firdaus realizes she is truly seeing them for the first time as they wander from her face, down her chest, her torso, and settle on her groin. Firdaus puts her hands over her genitals but Bayoumi rips her hands away.

Bayoumi starts locking Firdaus in the apartment each day and forcing her to sleep on the floor. When he comes home, late at night, he slaps her hard in the face and rapes her. Firdaus withdraws into her mind, leaving her body abandoned like “an empty sock” without desire or pain or pleasure—without any feeling at all. One night, Firdaus realizes the man on top of her is not Bayoumi, though the man tells her that he is the same as Bayoumi. The man asks Firdaus if she feels “pleasure.” She is afraid to say no, so she lies and tells him she does. The man calls her “slut, bitch” and bites her shoulder and breast. She hears the same words (and many others) from Bayoumi and his friends, night after night.

Eventually, a neighbor woman realizes that Firdaus is trapped when she sees her crying through the lattice in the door. The neighbor calls a carpenter who breaks the door down while Bayoumi is at work, and Firdaus flees into the street, which now seems to be the only safe place for her. After walking for hours, Firdaus finds a stone bench in the park where she goes to sit and rest. A woman sits beside her and asks her name. Firdaus looks at the woman and is startled by how powerfully green she is: green eyes, green eye shadow, green shawl, like the powerful green of trees growing along the Nile. The woman asks which man—“son of dog”—hurt Firdaus, and says that she knows them all, “they’re all the same.”

Firdaus tells the woman about her uncle and Bayoumi. The woman introduces herself as Sharifa Salah El Dine, speaking the name with an air of pride. Sharifa talks Firdaus back to her apartment, and Firdaus tells her all about her life. Sharifa’s apartment is lavish and she gives Firdaus soft clothes to wear. After a shower, Firdaus feels that she has been reborn as a soft and tender being. Sharifa watches her, and Firdaus puts her arms around her and “abandons” herself to Sharifa’s powerful green eyes. Sharifa tells Firdaus that to survive, one must be “harder than life,” and that though “my skin is soft, my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.” She tells Firdaus that life is a snake that bites the weak, and they each must also be deadly snakes in order to survive.

Sharifa helps Firdaus to understand the events of her past and re-envision herself in the present. Firdaus realizes that her own eyes are dark and alluring, her nose proud and sultry, her body slender and her thighs muscular. She realizes that she never truly hated her mother, loved her uncle, or knew Bayoumi and his friends. Sharifa teaches Firdaus to set her own worth—everyone has a price, and Sharifa’s is very high. Firdaus is educated and cultured, more even than Sharifa herself, and Sharifa tells Firdaus that her value is twice what Sharifa’s is. When Firdaus says that she cannot ask a man to give her money, Sharifa assures her that she will do it herself—Firdaus does not need to worry about asking.

Firdaus feels changed. Her world is “silvery” and silken. At night she has sex with men, but their fingernails are clean and manicured, unlike Bayoumi’s, whose black and dirty nails raked across her body. Firdaus holds such men’s hands between her breasts, then moves them down between her thighs. Though she feels something, it is more of a distant memory than an actual feeling, like “an organ that had ceased to be mine, on the body of a woman who was no longer me.” Firdaus asks Sharifa why she cannot feel pleasure during sex, but Sharifa tells her they should just work, not feel. Feeling leads to pain. Their pleasure is in the material comforts that money buys.

One day, Firdaus stops finding any pleasure in the soft clothes, perfumes, and view of the Nile from her balcony. She never leaves the house, but remains in bed day and night, “crucified,” while rich married men come to her. They dig their fingernails into Firdaus’s body, and when she lets out a muffled cry of pain they ignorantly ask if she feels pleasure. She starts to spit in their faces, but the men misread her pursed lips and bite them.

One man named Fawzy is not foolish, and asks if Firdaus feels pain rather than pleasure. She tells him she does. He asks if she wants to just sleep in his arms, and she does. Fawzy tells Firdaus that Sharifa is taking advantage of her, making money off her body and pain. He says that he’ll deal with Sharifa. Outside her bedroom, Firdaus hears Fawzy tell Sharifa he’s taking Firdaus away to marry her.

Sharifa protests and remarks that the last girl Fawzy took away fell on bad fortune. They argue, threaten violence against each other, and Firdaus hears Fawzy rape Sharifa, covering her protests with his hand. The sound of them creaking on the bed in the next room, the vibrations on the wall stirs Firdaus out of her daze—she realizes what Sharifa has turned her into. With Sharifa and Fawzy asleep in the next room, Firdaus puts on a dress and sneaks out of house.

Firdaus walks through the pitch-black night alone, naked save for a dress so thin that it’s nearly transparent. However, the night does not scare her; her body feels as if it belongs to someone else, with her own true body safely hidden away. A policeman grabs Firdaus by the arm. He asks Firdaus to come to his house, but Firdaus refuses. He says that he’ll pay her, or else he’ll throw her in prison for prostitution, since as a policeman he must “protect respectable families from the likes of you.” Firdaus tries to shake him off, but he firmly leads her to his house and makes her lie in his bed. He takes his clothes off and Firdaus feels the familiar weight bear down on her body. The policeman digs his dirty black fingernails into her skin. When he finishes, he tells her he has no money tonight; he’ll pay her next time.

Firdaus walks back into the night, but rain pours and turns the back roads into a stinking mud that smells like rot. She walks to a main paved road, shivering with cold. A car stops and a man gets out and asks her to come in out of the rain. In the cold rain, Firdaus’s nipples show through her dress, and the man presses his arm against them as he helps her climb in the car. The man takes her to his house, helps her into the bathtub, washes her body with warm water and soap and then lays her in his bed. Firdaus feels his “weight press heavily down” on her, but his fingernails are clean and white, and his sweat does not smell bad.

Firdaus wakes in the morning in an “elegant bedroom” flooded with sunlight. When she realizes where she is and sees the man standing before her, she dresses quickly and moves to leave. As Firdaus walks past the man, he gives her 10 pounds. Firdaus feels a “veil” lift from her eyes. The money recalls the times she asked her father for money as a child, though he only gave her a coin, a piastre, once. The coin made Firdaus feel empowered to buy whatever she chose—a piece of candy. The 10-pound note feels empowering, too, and Firdaus takes it to a restaurant and orders an entire chicken. She chews slowly, thoughtfully, and notices that the waiter does not watch her plate, does not care whether she leaves food untouched. The eyes that have always watched her, since she was a child, are gone.

Firdaus watches the way her waiter furtively avoids looking straight at her 10-pound note, even when she gives it to him to pay for her meal. She realizes that her father, her uncle, Sheikh Mahmoud, and Sharifa all handled money with a nearly religious observance. All of these people (except Firdaus’s uncle when she was young) kept money carefully concealed from Firdaus for her entire life, as though it were some “sacrilegious pleasure,” a forbidden thing, available to everyone else but her. Firdaus almost asks her waiter who decided money should be so “forbidden,” but instead hands him the 10-pound note.

From that day on, Firdaus walks with her head high. She looks every man directly in the eye. If he handles money, she does not avoid looking at it, but openly gazes at it. When men approach her, she looks them over and rejects them if their fingernails are dirty or she simply doesn’t like them. If she accepts a man’s offer, she demands double what he wants to pay her. At 25 years old, Firdaus feels for the first time that her life and body belong to her. She offers herself only for large sums of money, which men pay. She makes so much that she takes a beautiful apartment and even hires servants and cooks. Her bank account grows, and in her free time she reads, goes to the cinema, or discusses politics.

Among Firdaus’s friends is a writer, a man named Di’aa. When Di’aa first comes to her house for sex, she leads him to the bedroom. He wants to spend time chatting instead, but Firdaus insists he’ll have to pay for his time just the same. Di’aa thinks that the whole thing feels clinical, like a visit to the doctor, though “not respectable.” Firdaus tries to cover her ears and block the words out, but they pierce her mind and echo, drowning everything else out. Even after Di’aa leaves, his words follow Firdaus, keep her from sleeping or eating or feeling at peace as she used to. Another “veil” is torn away from Firdaus’s vision and she sees that, despite her money, she will never be a “respected woman” as a prostitute.

Firdaus decides to become a new person, to leave her old life behind no matter what it costs her. After much hunting, she manages to find a job with her secondary school certificate for an industrial company. She sits in a small office attached to the chairman’s office and manages his schedule for him. With a much smaller income than before, Firdaus can only afford a small room with no toilet, so every morning she must take her towel to the communal bathroom, and then push her way into the bus to ride to work. In the building where she works, low-level employees like herself must walk past a guard, who checks them in whenever they enter or exit and keeps careful watch that each employee is wasting minutes.

The higher officials enter and leave as they please, with no one to watch their use of time. They drive their own cars, rather than take the bus. One day, when Firdaus misses the bus, an official stops his car and offers her a ride, though Firdaus knows that this gesture carries the unspoken proposition for sex. She tells him that her body costs more than a ride or a promotion, and the official looks alarmed and speeds away. After three years, Firdaus realizes she was better respected as a prostitute than a low-level female official. Though Firdaus herself never does, her co-workers have sex with their superiors for fear of losing their jobs and with the slim hope that it will merit a promotion or favor.

Firdaus does not care about keeping such a job and will not let her superiors touch her. Ironically, this makes them see her as a virtuous and proud woman, and they start “vying with one another” for her respect and goodwill. Even so, Firdaus likes her job and office well enough. It is nicer than her own room, and she often stays at the office until late in the evening, or sits in the courtyard alone.

One night, while Firdaus sits alone in the dark, she sees a shape in the darkness. Ibrahim, one of the company’s employees, approaches. He sits next to Firdaus and asks why she sits alone. Firdaus thinks his eyes see straight into her. She inexplicably starts crying, and Ibrahim tries to console her but starts crying himself. Firdaus gazes into his eyes and sees two rings of white surrounding pure black circles, as if light flowed through them from some “mysterious source.” She takes his hand and feels the distant memory of a lost pleasure stir deep inside herself. She tries to speak, to recall the memory, but cannot.

Whenever Firdaus sees Ibrahim, she tries to speak but cannot. She listens to him speak at a revolutionary meeting demanding equal rights for lower-level employees, and she applauds wholeheartedly. During work, she finds herself writing his name on her desk, and her friend Fatheya asks her what happened in her life. Firdaus cannot pinpoint the rekindled sense of pleasure, the distant memory of it from her childhood. She thinks back upon the night with Ibrahim, staring into his eyes. In Firdaus’s mind, images of Fatheya, Wafeya, Miss Iqbal, and Ibrahim overlap and blur into each other until she cannot distinguish between them.

Ibrahim becomes chairman of a revolutionary committee and Firdaus devotes all her spare time to working for the committee’s aims. One evening after work, Firdaus misses the bus, but Ibrahim sees her and picks her up in his car. They admit to each other that neither has stopped thinking of the other since they first met. They tell each other everything about their lives, even the things that Firdaus tried to keep hidden from the world and herself. They do this for two more days, baring their souls to each other. The third day, the go to Ibrahim’s house and sleep together, “a warm embrace.” The world glows brighter for Firdaus, but one of her colleagues tells her that she is a fool—there is no such thing as love and Ibrahim’s virtue is just an illusion.

One day, Firdaus sees Ibrahim across the courtyard. A crowd of people gather around him, and his eyes seem different to her, “estranged.” Ibrahim does not see Firdaus, but someone in the crowd announces that Ibrahim has just gotten engaged to the company chairman’s daughter, which the person says is a great career move Ibrahim him and will ensure that he rises through the ranks. The news crushes Firdaus, and she walks alone into the rain, wandering the streets and sobbing until night falls. She returns to the courtyard and thinks she sees something moving in the darkness, perhaps Ibrahim, but she realizes it is only a brick wall. She leaves through the company gate, turning one last time to check the windows and the doors, to see if one will open to Ibrahim’s face. The door remains closed.

Ibrahim’s betrayal causes Firdaus more pain than she’s ever known in her entire life. As a prostitute, she protected her innermost self and only offered her body for money. As a lover, she laid herself bare, let down all of her defenses and received nothing in return, leaving her more humiliated and ashamed than she’s ever been. She’d wanted to “be saved through love from it all,” but was only betrayed. She considers that her virtue, like the virtue of any poor person, is less an “asset” than a despicable mark of “stupidity” that allows others to prey upon them. Firdaus decides to give up all hope of virtue, since “a successful prostitute was better than a misled saint.” She thinks that marriage, where women sell permanent access to their bodies, is “built on the most cruel suffering for women.”

Firdaus walks the streets at midnight, a prostitute once again. With no ties and subject to no man, marriage, or love, she feels absolutely free. Firdaus does not hope or desire, so she cannot be disappointed. If one man rejects her, she can simply take the next one who turns up. A wealthy man picks Firdaus up. As she lies in his bed, she reflects that men like Ibrahim use their cleverness and virtue to get “what other men buy with money.” She sees Ibrahim several times, years later. On the last time he convinces Firdaus to let him come home with her. After they have sex, Ibrahim starts to leave without paying Firdaus, until she demands it. She realizes that he was never in love with her, “but came to me every night only because he did not have to pay.”

Firdaus realizes that she’s hated men for years, though managed to keep that fact hidden from herself until now. Most of all, she hates the men who try to “save” her from being a prostitute, who use her low position to try to make themselves feel noble. Firdaus decides that “a woman’s life is always miserable. A prostitute, however, is a little better off.” She convinces herself that this is the life she chose.

Firdaus often turns men down, which drives her price even higher. She realizes that men cannot stand being rejected, because their ego tells them it is a rejection of their innermost self. This is especially true for politicians, who cannot stand to be rejected in front of others. One ruler sends his officers to Firdaus over and over, and she always rejects him. They offer money, threaten her with prison, and even try to convince her that having sex with a great politician would fulfill her nationalistic duty. Another ruler has Firdaus arrested when she refuses him, but she hires an expensive lawyer to persuade the court that she is an “honorable woman.” Money buys honor, but Firdaus can only make it by “losing [her] honor.”

Firdaus finds no honor in what she does, but she reasons that men control the world, so all women are effectively prostitutes. She is at least free, while a wife is “enslaved.” Firdaus realizes that just like servants or housekeepers, she can buy honor with money. She donates large sums to charities and the local papers publish her picture and praise her as a model citizen.

Eventually, a pimp named Marzouk approaches Firdaus and tells her he must work for her now, for her own “protection,” though he is the only one to threaten her. Firdaus tries to use her money and connections to get the police to protect her, but she discovers that Marzouk is better connected than she is. When Firdaus finally relents to Marzouk, he rapes her. As he bears down on her, she withdraws into herself and makes her body a “passive, lifeless thing” and remains unmoved, feeling neither pleasure or pain.

Marzouk starts taking the majority of Firdaus’s earnings, and she learns that he is a powerful pimp connected with the police, with doctors, with people in the courts. Firdaus realizes she is no longer free, that her body is merely a “machine” that makes a profit for men. She decides that she will leave, so she packs a bag and heads for the door. Marzouk bars the door with his arm. He says the world is made up of “masters” and “slaves,” and Firdaus as a woman can only be a “slave.” Firdaus glares at him unblinking, filled with hate. For a brief moment, she sees real fear in Marzouk’s eyes.

Marzouk overcomes his fear, raises his arm, and slaps Firdaus in the face. Firdaus raises her own arm and strikes him even harder. Marzouk tries to pull his knife from his pocket, but Firdaus takes it from him first and stabs him in the neck, then the chest, then the belly, and then in “every part of his body.” The knife moves in and out of Marzouk easily, and Firdaus wonders why she never killed any men before now. She realizes that fear had been weighing her down for her whole life, stopping her, until the moment she realized that Marzouk feared her too.

Firdaus leaves the house, walking with her held high like a “goddess.” Her fear is gone, and without its weight she feels “light as a feather.” She walks past policemen in the dead of night, but feels no fear since she carries herself like a powerful upper-class woman. A man in an extravagant car asks her to come with him. She states that her price is too high, but he tells her he is an Arab prince and offers her 1,000 pounds. Firdaus knows he is telling the truth, but tells him that she is a princess and demands 3,000 pounds. In the prince’s bed, Firdaus withdraws into herself. As the prince bears down on Firdaus, he keeps asking if she feels “pleasure,” and each time she confirms he grins like a “happy fool.”

Suddenly, Firdaus shouts, “No!” When the prince hands her 3,000 pounds, she takes the money and furiously shreds it in front of him. As she tears the money, she tears the final veil off of her eyes, and feels that she is ripping apart all the money she ever received from men, ripping every single man she ever knew to pieces: father, uncle, Marzouk,  Bayoumi, Di’aa, and Ibrahim. The prince is shocked, and exclaims that Firdaus must truly be a princess; he’d thought she was only a prostitute. Firdaus tells him that she is not a prostitute, though from the beginning every man in her life raised her to be one.

The prince says that Firdaus’s father must be a king. Firdaus says that he wasn’t a king, though not so different from one. However, she learned to kill on her own. The prince does not believe that she could kill—he thinks her too “gentle.” To prove him wrong, Firdaus raises her hand and strikes him hard on the head. She tells him that stabbing a knife through his neck would be just as easy, and he would deserve it for spending his hungry people’s money on prostitutes. He is no more than an “insect.” The prince screams “like a woman in trouble” and calls the police to arrest Firdaus as a “killer.” When the police arrive and call Firdaus a criminal, she declares that no woman can be a criminal, but that every single man is one. She states that she is only speaking a “savage and dangerous” truth.

The police handcuff Firdaus and take her to prison. Someone tells her that she can make an appeal for her life, but she states that if they let her out, she’ll only kill again. Firdaus knows men fear her because she no longer fears them. When she struck out in violence, she ended her fear and learned that such an action is easier than she imagined. Although she was a “successful prostitute,” Firdaus admits that every man she ever met made her want to strike them in the head. Firdaus does not fear death, but men fear her newfound power to tell the truth, because the truth is “simple” and “savage,” more fearsome than her knife. Armed with the truth, she no longer fears “the brutality of rulers and policemen.”