NAHED EL-QAFFAS WALKS toward us with a big smile on her prematurely lined face. Wearing acrylic nails and glittery fake rings, the woman who inspired the blockbuster movie Al-Maraa Wal Satour (The Woman and the Meat Cleaver), starring Nabila Ebeid and Abu Bakr Ezzat, is 47 years old, but looks like she?s in her 60s.

Fifteen years in prison does that to you. But the lines etched on El-Qaffas? face began to appear long before she was walked through the gates of Qanater Prison for Women.

?I had endured a lot in my eight years of marriage. I was taking it all for the sake of my family, my son, and so people would not talk about me. It was my second marriage, and I simply had to go on,? El-Qaffas recalls, a cigarette holder between her fingers. Her voice is gentle, her accent that of a well-bred upper- or middle-class Egyptian.

?He tried to rape my daughter,? she says in short, direct sentences. ?He tried to sully my honor. And that was the burning match that landed on a big container of gas.?

For eight years, El-Qaffas had managed to keep her daughter and husband separated. ?I noticed how he looked at her when we first got married. She was a beautiful child. So I had her stay with my parents. It was safer that way. He often went to Cairo on business and I got to stay with her then.?

On the day of the murder, El-Qaffas? husband was away, so when her daughter called and asked to come to their villa in King Mariout, El-Qaffas welcomed her willingly.

?She wanted to eat fish,? El-Qaffas remembers, ?so I told her, ?You play with the dog while I go buy fish.? Thank God that day I decided to go to the nearby Ameriyya market, which is five minutes away by car.?

On her way back, El-Qaffas heard the screams even before she reached the garden. ?I thought the dog had bitten her. When I went in, I saw that my husband [who had come back in the meantime] had torn off her clothes and was trying to rape her. The only thing I could think of was to slap my daughter and shout at her. Otherwise, he would have killed us both. Then I drove her back to my mother?s in Alexandria.?

He was sleeping in his pajama pants when El-Qaffas came back two hours later. As she sat in the armchair next to the bed, she picked up a small knife and an apple from the bowl of fruit.

?I was planning to cut the apple, but I found myself stabbing him instead. I couldn?t stop. ?This stab is for what you did to me,? I found myself thinking. ?This stab is for what you did to my daughter. This stab is for what you did to my parents?? I then put him in an old bag he had bought from an auction. Suddenly, Alexandria became smaller than the eye of a needle. I didn?t know where to take him. I drove on with the bag in the back of my car. When I found a dark building behind Victory College, I dumped the bag in it,?


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