Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

On the paper was the more recent half of the tree, which showed the descendants of Marid Sabkha born of Arab women exclusively from the heart of the peninsula. The ink was faded, blotched, and smeared in places, varying with the skill of Ayif al-Ghatafani’s many descendants at handling the fine old parchment, and revealing the difficulty they faced in documenting the lineage over fourteen centuries to the present day. Impatiently, the three pairs of eyes scanned the branches passing through Iyad, Qays, Saleem, Ma’ad, Bakr, Mu’awiya, and Awf to the present, where Nasser’s eyes settled on the final entry in the document, which Muflih al-Ghatafani had added to that long branch of Marid’s descendants. The name was clear and unmistakable: Khalid al-Sibaykhan.

Nasser laughed hysterically, while a shudder ran through Mushabbab. “This is Long Belt! Al-Sibaykhan a descendant of Sarah and her son Marid, and right in Mecca!” He sputtered.

A single sentence uttered about that parchment pierced their dream, destroying it and expelling them. A glaring light flooded the hall and figures in khaki uniforms appeared.

“Give yourselves up!” they barked, quickly closing around the tree on the wall. Nasser stepped forward calmly with his hands in the air, but Mushabbab hurled himself blindly and without warning at the source of the light. Hands attacked him and everything became a confused tumult; Nasser hit out in the darkness and was hit back at, and it was impossible to tell who were the attackers and who the prey. In the chaos a shadow slipped out and limped away, vanishing into the darkness.

Cyber Attack

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 90

It scares me sometimes the way you read my thoughts. The last article you sent me was about the legendary game designer Miyamoto, who’s banned by Nintendo, the company he works for, from talking about his hobbies and dreams because they’re worth a fortune. This is the man who has transformed the most banal aspects of his daily life into obsessions that have gripped the entire world. He invented Nintendogs after his family got a dog and he invented Pikmin because he loves gardening.

I’ve been watching break-dancers who walk on their hands and move their bodies as though they’re made of rubber. And I’ve been watching Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who broke the world record for the hundred-meter race at the 2008 Olympics, reaching the finish line so far ahead of six of the world’s best sprinters no one could believe it. All these physical accomplishments make me feel like there’s a new species of humans being created that we’re not part of. My species, physically and emotionally stagnant, ought to just die out.

No dreams worth mentioning, or movement.

Nora set the message down so she could take a look around the military plane that was taking her to Medina. The art exhibition had come and gone and now she was back to the series of sporadic moves that determined her life on the sheikh’s chessboard. She resumed her silence thousands of meters in the air. A few luxurious chairs and a circular meeting table were all there was to the troop-carrier they were flying in. That and the roaring engines, which shook her heart and relieved her from having to speak or listen. She shut her eyes and pictured her paintings hanging on the gallery walls. Beings not male or female, limbs severed, in the paintings and the gallery, visitors were all on a single plane. They held animated conversations. Saying things they’d never dared to say before, or hadn’t been able to fit in, as the sea air salted their exchanges. They missed their missing limbs, or criticized them, or justified their absence. The female university students who’d come to the exhibition on an organized visit were a challenge. They provoked the darkest lines, they dug up the empty canvas and poured their rebellion or apathy onto it. They stood in front of her paintings, laughing and winking to one another, giving the figures a taste of life’s sting, if only for a few seconds. Nora was standing there, facing life’s onslaught, when they dragged her into conversation.

“Are you scared?” one of them asked.

Nora nodded, indifferently. “Maybe. It’s fear that makes us fight,” she said sarcastically.

“Your paintings make me feel beaten down,” another one of them said. “Why are you so cruel to bodies? You should leave them alone.”

Another girl laughed, not bothering to hide her malice or lower her voice as she sniggered. “This is the work of a butcher’s daughter.”

Nora’s skin was tanned for the first time in her life, by the sea air, and it came to life. For a few days, her figures were more than a monologue delivered by her fingers to the canvas. They’d become human in those gazes, but the exhibition was over and at that altitude, she allowed her figures to be wrapped up, like a cinema reel, back to their hiding place, back to the faint El Greco sky on the grave. The airplane banked sharply and when Nora looked out she could see the lava fields spread around Medina, as if a volcano had dipped its giant fingers into the earth’s core and sprinkled its coal around. Another look was enough to transform all that coal into diamonds, like the source of all her paintings. At that moment, she wished she could come back as a line of coal over that land, which had given shelter to the Prophet in his flight, and could be safe. She drove the black lava fields from her mind as, in the midst of a cloud of palm trees, the minaret of the Prophet’s Mosque came into view. Nora had missed those minarets, “which will never cease calling people to prayer until they hear Israfil blow his horn for the resurrection, and they shall be the first, and their dead shall be the first to come up out of the earth to answer the call.”

The thought made her shiver. She was like someone facing resurrection, weighed down with choices.

Nora was alone in her suite at the Intercontinental Hotel, though she was used to her sheikh being away at private meetings by now. Then, just like any other time she was left on her own, she found company in the handful of emails, which she secreted away like illicit drugs. If only she’d stolen the entire file. What might’ve been revealed to her — matters of life and death. Something like this short message:

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 66

Something inside me has broken. My satellite receiver maybe.

But. Here. There’s a signal.

You present it to me with a single orchid. You say, “Orchids remind me of you.”

My body believes you. My body mimics and learns how to be haughty.

My head spins from dancing on the inside.

A

Nora took pleasure in examining the orchid just like she took pleasure in the millions of tiny spiral loops that Aisha laid down in her messages to express herself, carrying herself from the peaks of life down to death. Her reflection had disappeared from the mirror: every time Nora looked she saw Aisha. She flipped through the guestbook from her exhibition for the hundredth time, asking herself who these comments were written for: Nora or Aisha? As de Falla played in the background, she scanned the book word by word to see which of them was the dead Sancho Panza and which of them was the living Don Quixote. How long would it take for one of them to come back to life and for the other to recede into death? She kept reading until the entire universe had shrunk to the size of a man’s head, and then to the size of a thought in a man’s head, and finally to the size of a ray of light in a man’s eye. Was it an Arab’s eye or a Westerner’s? Perhaps the eye belonged to the person who was stoking all these events and turning them into a time bomb. She was the one who’d dropped her name and identity: anything that would cause her to be born out of pre-existing memory, the memory of the woman who’d written these emails, which inhaled and exhaled her in their naked lines.