Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Without thinking, he brushed her hair out of her eyes with his shaky hand and tucked it behind her ear. Her forehead tingled.

“Don’t listen to things you can’t comprehend, just listen to the joy in the music. Don’t try to examine every drop of water, the important thing is for our bodies to be exposed to the pleasure of the rain.” She wanted to laugh. Whenever a man was sweet to her, she giggled like a child. She listened to him, patronizing, protective. She knew he could tell how inexperienced she was the entire time. The shame in her blushing temples receded when he looked as if he were about to say goodbye.

“Don’t force yourself to think about what could never happen. I can’t remember who it was who said: in the limitlessness surrounded by walls on four sides, and within the thick fortification of nuclear reactors, there is a being about to come to life and rise up. The great transformation happens through the greatest of explosions.” The sound of his own words annoyed him as they listened to what sounded like last words, like goodbye.

A little girl got loose of the hand of her mother, a beggar, and ran ahead. She stopped a few steps away from Nora and stared with big eyes. The girl was encouraged by Nora’s smile and came closer. Shyly and in her sweet Spanish, the girl asked Nora, “What’s your name?”

Rafi could sense her hesitation, but he had no intention of translating it for her. He was certain that Nora had understood the question. He watched as a tear rose up out of Nora’s hesitation and slid down her cheek. The name Nora was like a dam keeping the story of her past and present at bay. Rafi didn’t know what to do. He said, “Her name is Bella,” to the girl in Spanish to smooth things over. Nora took off her black leather bracelet and wrapped it around the wrist of the little girl, who surprised her with a quick kiss on her wrist and a “gracias” before running off to show it to her mother. Rafi noticed there was a strip of metal on the bracelet, but he wasn’t sure what was engraved on it. It looked like the peaks of some towers or maybe it was just a brand: A&A.

He caught up to Nora and handed her the two books: the one about El Greco, and Ibn Hazm’s The Necklace of the Dove , between the pages of which she’d slipped the drawing of El Greco’s painting, a gift from the Toledan woman.

“These are yours. Don’t forget them.” His finger stretched out to trace the course of the tear that had run down her cheek; she looked away.

“I’m not sure there’s room for these here.”

His outstretched hand trembled in the air between them. “Maybe for the girl who looks like you?” From the distraught expression she wore as they walked into the lobby of the hotel, he could tell that there was no room there for that girl, nor for him either.

“You know that woman was crazy, don’t you?” His throat felt tight as they rode in the elevator together, feeling like strangers. He knew this was the last time they’d ride in an elevator together and that the doors would soon open and that she would disappear as if she’d been nothing but a mirage all along.

“Nora,” he whispered, stirring the air in the elevator. “Would it shock you to hear that I can’t stop thinking about making love to you? About connecting with you physically? It’s a riddle that occupies the space between imagination and geography. Maybe our imaginations are actually a part of our real physical existence. Something more like a necessity. Without our dreams, we’re left with nothing but our existence to keep us company. And that’s something we can’t get our heads around. We don’t even understand the reasons behind it. Life has no meaning unless we can hone it with our dreams.” Her eyes were fixed on the elevator doors and she was holding her breath.

“You’re a woman now. You don’t have to go back to the sheikh. You can just turn your back on everything that’s happened and come with me. It doesn’t even have to be with me. But … Just get yourself away from all this. Embrace your freedom.”

Not again, said the look she gave him. They parted outside the door of her suite and she disappeared behind it, going to face what awaited her.

Wallpaper Tree

N ASSER HURRIEDLY EXAMINED THE WORN SECTIONS OF THE PARCHMENT. Mushabbab could no longer fill the gaps with what he’d heard the elders say. He could do nothing. He handed the worn parchment to Yusuf, who skipped to the end:

I COULDN’T COAX SLEEP TO COME to me there in the soft mud. Whenever I managed to doze off, I was swept up in a storm. A storm with you at the head, riding on a horse of fire, black. It shot up out of the sand and into the sky, carrying you and your men back from Khaybar. My dreams felt like I was skipping lines and pages in the book of destiny, looking ahead to what awaits you.

Labor came to me. Hand in hand with death. I was in agony for days and eventually I realized that I only had enough life left in me to save one of us. That’s why I sent for al-Ghatafani. I used up the very last sparks of my life writing this testament for you — in the blood of my labor — so that you would know everything there was to know about the truth of your lineage and origin. I slipped it inside my amulet, a silver half-moon that my father gave me when I married. It was made by our best silversmith to symbolize how the moon secretly penetrates our minds and even the rocks around us.

In the morning, al-Ghatafani visited me in my birthbed and deathbed beneath the palm trees. He looked like a ghost. Like one of the sand ghosts we defeated on our journey.

“I’m going to give you this testament, but you must first swear to me that you will protect it, you and your descendants. They must memorize my family tree and all its branches in the different tribes until my people return to Khaybar. Until they regain the Hijazi countryside, which is rightfully theirs.”

Glancing possessively at my round belly, where I was carrying you, he took the silver amulet and promised to store the family tree inside it. He also swore to engrave my lineage on the walls of the fort of my father Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf at Khaybar so that my descendants would be able to recover it even if the amulet were lost or destroyed.

The parchment ended there. The three of them had no way of knowing how al-Ghatafani and his descendants had served Sarah’s son and his descendants over the next fourteen centuries as the amulet was passed from one generation to the next.

Nighttime Arrival

T HE CLOCK READ TEN P.M. AS NORA OPENED THE DOOR TO HER SUITE AND stepped into the gaze that examined her from her damp hair all the way down to her sports shoes. It was as if she’d walked into a cloud; an electrical storm, emanating from where he was reclining on the sofa, battered her face. He was dressed in a suit and he was still wearing his tie, his overcoat even. He’d been in the exact same position since the morning he discovered she was gone and no one had dared to disturb him.

She had no idea how long she’d been standing there, besieged, when he eventually stood up and walked toward her in silence. She froze as he reached out to her and tore off her white cotton dress, buttons flying in every direction. She didn’t so much as blink, not even when the window that overlooked the gardens came into his line of vision and he pushed her toward it, cold and menacing like the sky in one of El Greco’s paintings. He showed her body to the people passing below, her entire torso exposed to the road. Neither of them said a word. There was nothing to hear but his heavy breathing and screaming rage. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to resist, the game stopped being fun. He shoved her toward the door of the suite and then dragged her into the corridor, which stretched before them, holding its breath. She followed passively all the way to the elevator doors. He pressed the button. As they waited for the elevator to ascend, she gritted her teeth and racked her brain. She was trying to think up some way she could defend herself when he threw her out onto the street, naked. She found some steely determination within: she decided she’d pretend to be dead and allow her naked body to be discovered by anyone who chose to. The elevator opened and the brutal air cloaked her naked body. He pushed her into the chilly elevator and she ceased to see. He pressed the button for the ground floor. He seemed to have lost the ability to think — like an animal frozen in headlights. Only one instinct controlled him now: revenge, the need to humiliate her.