Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“Don’t forget that love, like life, begins as a game but ends gravely. It’s contagious, it can be passed on by voices and scents, so there’s no point in us fighting it. We must open our senses and hone them to receive its assault. We must surrender when it remolds and transforms us …”

A minute that felt like an age passed slowly before the woman led them up the stairs and out. She took a good look around in the doorway to check there was no one spying on them and then leafed through The Necklace of the Dove and took out a sheet of canvas showing a small charcoal drawing of the El Greco painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz .

“This is a copy of a real sketch.”

Darkness ran in a shiver from the woman’s touch to Nora, and they sensed even more strongly the stir of watching figures around them.

“As I told you, al-Shaybi spent a quarter-century in the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, communing with our ancestors in his dreams and his waking hours, hoping they would show him the key. They accused him of disturbing the dead. He used to dream about El Greco. He fell entirely under the artist’s spell and claimed that he was a Don Quixote fighting windmills so as to open doorways to eternity in these peaks. Al-Shaybi spent entire days making copies of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz , looking for the door. He made countless sketches, including this one. He added many details to the scene, but what comes up most often is this.” She looked around, checking again that no one was listening, and then raised her lamp beside the sketch. She traced the strokes of charcoal. “He inserted this key into many of his drawings, perfecting it over time. He would place it on a shoulder, or tuck it into the folds of a gown or the curls of a cloud. But — look — here the key’s in a very prominent position, and it’s almost the size of a man, it dominates the whole scene. See, in the outstretched right hand of the celestial figure reaching up to Mary’s lap. They said the Meccan was possessed by what he called the ‘master of all keys,’ whose bow was shaped like three interlocking mihrabs. It pursued him in his dreams, but he never managed to find it when he was awake; and yet, al-Shaybi never stopped predicting that soon there would come a time when God would close His house and His mercy in the face of erring believers, and no treaty or war could open them back up. Only that key, in the hand of the right man, could re-open the doors of heaven, and the doors between life and death … They say that al-Shaybi was on his way back to Mecca when he was found dead outside the gate of the outcasts’ cemetery in Madrid, completely naked, clutching a forged key to his chest. It had been cast for him by the most famous blacksmith in Toledo to fit the description revealed to him in a dream by Joseph. Al-Shaybi was forty-three or fifty-three when they buried his body in that same cemetery without epitaph or name — without anything at all but a forged key that was fixed to the tombstone right above his heart. That was seventeen years ago now.

Nora knew she was talking about the key that had been stolen from the tombstone in the British Cemetery. But how had the sheikh got his hands on it? Was he connected to the Shayba Clan of keyholders in some way? She remembered the drawing on a piece of paper, which the two men had compared with the key from al-Shaybi’s grave.

“I found this drawing right here inside this book, The Necklace of the Dove , the last thing al-Shaybi was reading before he left.”

Suddenly the woman seemed tired, and she snapped The Necklace of the Dove firmly closed on the drawing and handed it to Nora. With the same firmness she propelled them out the door and closed it silently behind them, but not before pointing a warning finger at Nora: “It’s been waiting for you all these years.”

The moment the door closed and they heard the finality of the key turning in the lock, they woke up with a start. They stood, amazed, in front of the desolate-looking door; the copy of The Necklace of the Dove in Nora’s hand was the only evidence that what had just happened to them hadn’t been a product of their imagination.

They were driving aimlessly when they glimpsed a column of smoke rising from Toledo. Nora felt a tug at her heart. Up in Toledo, crowds were watching the fire consuming the old school and its large library.

She placed a hand on the steering wheel and turned to Rafi. “Listen,” she said urgently, “I’m not interested in war of any kind, not even for the sake of a key that will unlock the four rivers of Paradise. Let’s forget about that story. It doesn’t concern me. Just take me back to Madrid, please.”

“Anywhere but Madrid, I’m begging you.”

“Madrid.” She was desperate.

“I’m sure I can—”

She interrupted him softly. “The sheikh is the only way I’ll get back.”

Amulet

Y USUF PUT DOWN THE SHEETS OF PARCHMENT HE’D BEEN READING AND HANDED them to Nasser. He walked away, limping slightly as he always did, while Nasser eagerly picked up where he’d left off:

THE VOICE OF THEIR AGED PRIESTESS rose up from the very bottom of my fever to confirm that I was pregnant with you. Once they heard that, they took me to the hidden springs where my body was washed and soaked for days before they placed me in the shadow of their tar idol. My skin was humanly supple once more.

When al-Ghatafani appeared, leading my still-saddled camel, I didn’t bat an eyelid; I supposed he was just another one of the hallucinations rising up from my delirium. No one stopped us when we rode past the wall in the mountains by the Devil’s Horns.

“They’re sending you away to give birth in the bed of a chief from an influential tribe.” Neither one of us knew whether I was carrying his seed or that of the Devil’s Horns.

We were received by ecstatic dogs wagging their tails, girls dressed in red, and the gurgle of running water as we approached the Sabkha tribe.

“Sheikh Sa’d is the chief of the most powerful tribe in the desert. They’re descended from Wa’il and Rabi’a ibn Nizar,” al-Ghatafani said to reassure me. The palm trees stirred a longing for Khaybar in my heart. It had been an age since I’d been bathed in the sight of green. Sheikh Sa’d ibn Ibrahim ibn Ka’b’s men came out to meet us and make sure that we were safe and in good health. Najd was in uproar. There were reports that Muhammad ibn Abd Allah’s followers were planning to seize the Najd trade route. Ayif al-Ghatafani and I were taken to the sheikh’s house, which was surrounded by his loyal servants, and we stood by the mud-brick door, which was always open. Sheikh Sa’d was on his way out when our eyes met; a falcon fell from his eyes straight into the trap in my eyes. For nights on end, I’d been gathering my magical powers to carve a cradle for you in the arms of that peerless knight of the desert. I didn’t fail you. The tribe lit torches and married me to their sheikh. I lay in his bed and gave him my body, though he had no idea that you were already inside of me. In seven months, I would give birth to you in that bed and you would carry his pedigree.

Don Quixote

O UTSIDE THE HOTEL, AS THEY WERE SAYING GOODBYE, RAFI HANDED HER TWO CDs. “This is de Falla’s Don Quixote , and this is the one I promised you, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.” She took the CDs from him and put them in her large pocket. She smiled.

“We need to listen to things we can’t comprehend so we can learn to comprehend the things we can’t hear.” She reminded him of Señora Mirano, and he suddenly heard her voice in his mind:

“I once read that people consider St. Matthew Passion to be the most beautiful piece in the history of Western music. They say that Bach was as strict about music as a rabbi is about the Halacha. That’s the law that Jewish philosophers like Spinoza rebelled against because they felt it was too concerned with outward behavior, instead of the faith in one’s heart. They said it made a robot of man and a façade of religion. Bach’s music exists within harsh tradition; an act of obedience, a deep study of pleasure. Through his pure orthodoxy, he builds something greater than orthodoxy, which allows us to plumb aesthetic depths that we can discover within forms themselves. It allows us to find the source within the solid construction. He recreates exhausted possibilities.”