Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

She walked Nora over to a clothes rack with dresses of every color and shape. She grabbed a red and white head-covering like men wore and wrapped it around Nora’s head until only her eyes showed. She pushed Nora forward in her black dress to a section of the studio that was curtained off. Nora was shocked to see drumming and dancing. “Let yourself dance!” urged Nazik.

Swaying gracelessly ahead, she led the girl forward like water down a sluice. When sweat began to run down Nora’s neck to her chest, the head-covering gave off a scent that gripped her by the throat. Her body heaved with passion and desire. Something inside her took over. She tore herself away from Nazik and fled the dance floor. Nazik didn’t follow after her. The girl understood that they sewed together more than clothes, and that the snips went as deep as each of the chosen bodies dared allow. Some stopped at being stripped, while others were content to be consumed and recycled.

“I’m never going back there, no matter what,” Nora vowed to herself.

“NOTHING PROVIDES SECURITY LIKE LEARNING A TRADE. WITHOUT ME, YOUR daughter will starve!”

Her father fell for Nazik’s threats and pleas and allowed her to go up to his daughter’s bedroom alone, where she menaced her.

“Do as I say,” she said, pulling on the girl’s arm as if to make her understand. “You’re luckier than all my best girls, believe me. During that split-second appearance you made, the scepter fell into your hand. Do you understand me, girl? The scepter!” With every word Nazik spoke, the girl could smell the scent in the head-covering that had stirred an indomitable desire inside of her.

“JUST LIKE MY HAIR SMELLS NOW,” NORA SAID, SHRUGGING HER SHOULDERS AS SHE sat in the large bedroom she occupied in the Ritz Madrid. It was only now that she could get her head around the storm that she’d stirred up during her brief presence in that basement studio. “The scepter,” she repeated to herself. “The scepter you refused to take from Nazik all those years ago.”

In a city without any call to prayer, she woke every morning at dawn to the sound of a dove flapping its wings. She knew when it was time for prayer from the gust that rose up out of the silence, a dawn presence, which pulled her out of her deepest sleep. She knew he was coming. The man who loved her started his motorcycle in a faraway courtyard, startling the pigeons that took to the air to circle the length of her narrow alley, like a wave that pierced her and settled in the back of her neck, causing her entire body to quake in anticipation.

Getting There

AL-GHATAFANI WARNED US THAT we would be passing through hell and then suddenly we were being led into the southern simoom wind. The wind dug the sand out from beneath our feet and erected graves above our heads that reached the sky.

The look in al-Ghatafani’s eyes told me that he’d survived all those nightmares only to fall into my trap. It frightened me.

“Wherever they take us, let’s pretend that we’re brother and sister.” He closed his eyes in assent. The oases of the Hanifa tribe lay before us.

We made camp there, and for the first time since we’d set off, the hush of night combined with the exhaustion of hunger, thirst, and desperation knocked us out. We slept as if we were dead. I lay there until I was pulled back by a brutish growling and gurgling, and found the giants sitting in a circle, chewing on camel meat, tearing the limbs and the sandy insides to pieces. It was like they lived off sand. All around us the sand smelled of the previous night’s light rains, and the camels grazed on Eve plants, which had sprouted overnight like green spikes on the dunes. I realized that we had finally left hunger behind us and were now making our way through the heart of the Najd oases.

I LAY AWAKE, IMAGINING THE abyss we’d left behind. The only thing holding me was al-Ghatafani’s night-sculpted, wind-chiseled body lying beside me. I could hear wolves howling inside me, or out in the desert around us, demanding a drink of his blood. When I got up at dawn, he was standing, facing away from me, stroking his camel’s neck. I felt that persistent movement between my ribs. As I drew nearer to him, passionate dawn and the waking universe rose up inside of me. I interfered with his finely honed senses and ability to read the weather or the scent of a place. He was defenseless. He trembled like a slaughtered sand grouse when my body touched his, but he knew to surrender. Our careful calculations, the cause of our people, our mission were all betrayed because of a wolf’s howl. I heard my father Ka’b’s warning: “Choose the best lineage for us so that we may be resurrected!” and was suddenly terrified at what I’d got myself into. I pulled away. He could tell I meant it, so he kept his distance.

Drawing

T HAT NIGHT WHEN SHE GOT INTO BED, SHE TUMBLED INTO A BOTTOMLESS WELL, hands that reeked of beer and garlic groping her body as she fell. She was woken by a metallic clatter against the marble floor, and a man’s voice. When Nora opened her eyes, she saw it was past midnight. She slipped across the marble floor in bare feet — a rude awakening — and peeked through a crack in the bedroom door. She saw a paunchy man who looked a little like a cartoon character: greasy, oozing evil, about to burst. He bent down to pick up a shiny object from the floor and when she focused, she immediately recognized the key that had been taken from the gravestone in the cemetery of outcasts. A sudden terror came over her and she could no longer breathe. She didn’t want him to see her. She knew he could hurt her and the thought made her hair stand on end. The man compared the key to a sketch on a piece of old parchment he was holding.

“A perfect copy,” he said. “The same wide teeth and a bow in the shape of three mihrabs. But you’re right. It’s obviously a fake.”

The man bit down on the thin layer of gold with his yellowed teeth to reveal the cheap metal underneath.

“Of course, it is, you idiot.” The icy look on the sheikh’s face sent a shiver through Nora’s bones. She could feel his rage on the other side of the door. “You’re a bunch of fuck-ups and you’re wasting my time. You brought me all the way out here to watch you screw everything up?” He snatched the parchment and the forged key and stuffed them into a white envelope before bundling the man out of the suite and walking out himself.

The next morning, Nora’s bags had already been taken to the private plane, which awaited her at the airport. The hotel corridors and basement were a beehive of activity in anticipation of their departure, which she’d been informed of the day before. When he opened the door to her bedroom to collect her, the emptiness hit him like a punch in the face and he fell back against the wall. Her silver earrings, the agarwood perfume he drank from her skin, her inhaler, small possessions were scattered here and there on the table beside her messy, empty bed.

A storm roared through the hotel, turning the entire place upside down in search of Nora, who’d disappeared without a trace.

IT WAS HER DEEP FEAR OF THE SHEIKH THAT HAD CAUSED HER TO SNEAK OUT OF THE hotel before dawn, but by the time she’d reached the Fountain of Neptune, Rafi had already caught up with her.

“Let me take you wherever it is you’re going,” he said, getting out of the car. He was tidying up his papers on the backseat so she’d have somewhere to sit, but she simply opened the passenger-side door and got in the front seat. He hesitated for a second before he got in next to her; it felt awkward to be that close to her.

“Where to?”

“Somewhere that isn’t Madrid. I don’t care where.”

“Are you sure about this?”