Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“You’ve taken an amulet that belongs to me, Detective.”

Nasser resolved then and there that he wasn’t going to let anyone rob him of his dream of getting a medal for solving this case. But in the darkness of the cold corridor he felt an eye watching him and reading his thoughts, and without turning to look he realized who the man who’d led him to that spot must be. The faint smell of mastic strengthened his suspicion that it was Mushabbab. Just hearing the name in his head pulled him out of the cloud he’d been floating in. In a panic, he patted his clothes, but he couldn’t find the amulet anywhere, and his heart sank at the thought he’d lost it. Suddenly, Yusuf tossed the amulet onto the ground in front of him. “No need to look very far,” he taunted, then snatched it up again.

“So how far did you get with your reading?” he went on mockingly, holding up the parchment as if to read aloud. “It’s pretty easy following you, by the way. I was right next to you in the mosque. The state you were in and the way you were so engrossed in reading had everyone staring at you.”

R AFI FOLLOWED NORA AND HER ASSISTANT AS THEY APPROACHED THE TINY restaurant, Casa Gades. None of its three floors was more than a single room, and all were filled with small tables, cigarette smoke, and conversation. Diners greeted Rafi left and right as he led Nora straight to the cellar room. Before they’d got out the car, he’d explained to her, “This brilliant restaurant was Señora Mirano’s idea. She runs it for a group of art patrons; she’s very respected in Madrid’s young art circles. She puts on exhibitions here of unusual experimental work by up-and-coming artists.” Over the past several days, Rafi had ventured to suggest several places Nora could go to get to know the real Madrid, and this restaurant was one of them.

The cellar was a small room with niches in the walls for paintings, and it led to a small office where an eclectic collection of contemporary artwork was exhibited, abstract paintings and stone and bronze sculptures. Nora felt totally out of place, though she in fact did fit in with the clashing incongruity of the collection, and felt a kind of tacit mutual comprehension with its dissonance. It was like walking through an artist’s brain amidst the crackling static of their visions.

Señora Mirano, the ninety-something restaurant owner, was thin with short platinum hair, and she overflowed with energy. She led them up to the third floor, which was the quietest, drawing Nora’s attention as they climbed the wooden stairs to the strange works of art that hung on the walls. “Young artists regard this as a place many different trends and movements can meet and interact,” she explained. “It’s vital for a developing artist to spend time in a place where debate is encouraged.” She pointed out the photos of the celebrities who’d dined in her art den. “That’s Joan Miró … And Picasso, and a Russian ballerino …”

The top room looked over the room below it. Nora chose the furthest table for herself and her assistant, while Rafi made for a seat in the corner. On one side of them was a window looking onto the street below and on the other a wooden screen separated them from the other diners. When the owner reappeared, stopping at Rafi’s table, he murmured to her, “Señora Mirano, this is the woman whose sketches I showed you …” From where she stood, Señora Mirano gestured at a drawing on the wall, which looked like a Picasso nude. “Your sketches bear some of Picasso’s influence,” she said, directing her words at Nora.

Nora almost laughed out loud. What would this art lover say if she found out that in the twenty-first century there were people who’d never heard of Picasso? “The lines convey a charged energy,” the woman went on, oblivious to Nora’s self-deprecating expression. “You speak to the world through these lines.”

Nora felt uncomfortable under the woman’s gaze. “You’ve only seen one or two sketches.”

“That may be so, but they are interesting,” Señora Mirano replied. “And I say this with some authority, since I was born into the art world and I’ve spent nearly a century around artists by this point. It isn’t just my personal opinion—” she came closer to Nora, and leaned over the table. “I showed the sketches Rafa gave me to my critic friend at the Fundació Joan Miró. She was very taken with them. You’re what, twenty-four? Twenty-six? You could go on to achieve a lot from where you are now. Did you study art?”

Nora was caught off balance, tongue-tied. Rafi took the spotlight off her by drawing Señora Mirano into a conversation in Spanish. By the time the waiter arrived with the Italian salad she’d ordered, Nora had regained her composure. The four looked like any other group of friends out to dinner. “Bon appetit!” Señora Mirano said.

Nora reveled in the rhythm of the artworks on the wall, the conversations of the regulars around them, each with their distinct, individual features, and in the fragrance of herbs, the taste of thyme, virgin olive oil, bread freshly baked in a wood-fired oven, and seafood. When the plates were cleared, and cups of coffee and Nora’s chamomile tea appeared, Nora took her folder of papers out of her bag. Señora Mirano found her glasses and began to look through the papers with interest; Rafi translated for Nora.

“Your lines are very mature, it’s like you’ve spent a lifetime struggling with these greedy pen strokes, almost tearing the paper. Look at this violence, Rafa, how the lines dig and scratch… The force of the retreat, the spontaneity of the movement. This is lust, appetite, desire, veils being torn off all over the place! The human torso is spread out here like a thunder-filled sky, exploding as if in lovemaking …” Rafi was too embarrassed to translate the last part for Nora. The woman eventually stopped exulting, but a look of surprise remained on her face.

A gypsy appeared on the narrow street, playing the violin in a red dress that was partly covered by her black shawl, its tassels trembling every time her bow slid over the strings.

“Ah! Madrid’s night moves in time with the ebb and flow of the second movement of Bach’s violin concerto … Music is like Arabic: poetic but highly disciplined. The structure of harmony is like the system of patterns in Arabic, like the verbs composed of three letters which form the roots of the whole language. Chords are made up of either three or four notes, you know, and they can be arranged to create infinite variations, just like Arabic letters. The mysterious secret behind Bach’s compositions is just like alif-lam-ha , the letters that make up the word ‘God’; Bach thought his compositions proved God’s very existence …” Sinatra, Picasso, Bach: these were names that struggled desperately to steady themselves, but could find no foothold on the slippery walls of the empty water tank that was her mind.

“Bach wrote forty-eight preludes and fugues, using all twenty-four major and minor keys, just to prove that it could be done. He wrote so much, and for so much, like a real Sufi, convinced that numbers mattered. The Goldberg Variations were written for an insomniac prince who wanted Bach to compose a piece that he’d never get bored of listening to on nights when he couldn’t sleep …” Nora realized at that moment that her own insomnia was not the product of an overburdened memory but an empty one. It stemmed from the aridity of the place she came from, a place that was becoming amnesiac even though it knew that the rest of the world was testing and examining and rebuilding itself through debate and criticism, that there were places like Madrid where arts and sciences and architecture and music collided with people going about their everyday business in a civilization that had managed to retain its noble exterior. All those names and their achievements, of which she knew nothing, caused Nora to feel a sense of loss.