Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 77

I gave the baby to Azza.

It’s for her to bury, or bring back to life.

I’m tearing up the sheets of my mind one by one to see where he might have gone. Where he might end up. Can one jump with a baby in one’s heart?

Some nights, I hear him crawling up the staircase to my cubbyhole.

Some nights, I slither down to meet him.

I curl up in a ditch in the bare earth. Not a drop of rain. Oh, how the dead miss the rain!

I used up my entire stash of perfume bottles to get rid of his scent.

But he smells of my insides.

The scent stays hot, my every breath stokes it.

A

P. S. They found the apeman, whom they believe to be the missing link, frozen in a block of ice on the side of a mountain in North Carolina. When they melted the ice, they discovered he was nothing more than a rubber gorilla suit.

What will they find after we’ve melted? I would hate to die in a freezer. Don’t let them put my body on ice.

Aisha

Nora pushed those words to the back of her mind. Toward the hole into which she’d thrown all her memories. And took refuge in the only thing around her: in the autograph book that certified that she was the one who was still alive. Suddenly her eyes fell on a sentence in the book that she hadn’t seen before. The handwriting sent a shiver down her spine.

One day you’ll wake up and bury us all.

The phone rang. She picked up the receiver without thinking.

“It’s for you, ma’am.” The receptionist’s upbeat voice dispelled the gloom of that sentence, but then there was a second voice:

“Azza.” The word hung in the air, as if forever. “Azza.” Azza. The name echoed in her ears as though Yusuf were shouting to her from the roof. The name echoed around her bedroom, against the shut window. It fell on naked Aisha and Jameela at her father’s sink.

“Azza. Azza.” Nora was the name Khalid al-Sibaykhan had bestowed on her — the phone was still buzzing — after he stripped her of the name Azza so that he could own her by his mother’s name. He wanted her to understand the kindness he was doing her, wanted her to understand the name’s significance: “A powerful woman who was worn down by my father’s other wives.”

She couldn’t tell when the buzzing stopped and the knocking started. Was it the knocking of the distant past or the here and now? Not until she opened the door and saw him looking back at her.

“Azza.” His voice had always been warm, but now it trembled: frightened, desperate, cold. She reached for the phantom edge of her veil, to cover her head, to hide from his eyes. From that all-seeing familiarity she knew so well. His voice and his face matched the image she called up from the very depths of her lost memory. She came face to face with her own name: Azza. With that name’s burdened legacy. A burden he’d set on her shoulders. She fell. Yusuf fell down with her and they touched the ground at the exact same moment. She could hear nothing but the name she’d so longed to hear: Azza. A gaping void inside of her hungered for it. For the precise way Yusuf said it. He said it with gravity, like he said Mecca. It gave the name a formidable depth. He said it as though he were bashing against the Meccan ground to unearth the Well of Zamzam or Judgment Day. No one but Yusuf could do so much with just a name.

“Azza. Let’s go. Now.”

Pink

“DO YOU KNOW WHO KHALID AL-SIBAYKHAN IS? HE’S THE BULLDOZERS ON all our mountains. He’s the buyer, he’s the deeds that strip people of their properties, the one eliminating and demolishing. He’s your father, who contracted, annulled, and sold … Sold you, and your house. Al-Sibaykhan is the sin that has possessed us all. The Lane of Many Heads, you, and I are nothing but dots being erased on a map of genocide. We’re dots floating in the dust after a city has been ravaged. Dozing eyes, the moment before a city, many cities, are razed to the ground. Do you understand, Azza? You’re hanging in the air with a rope around your neck. You shouldn’t be on that side. It’s too dangerous. Jump to me, Azza.”

“Don’t talk to me about jumping!” she replied. “The only time I ever dared to open the window my father nailed shut, I saw my death, because her death was our collective death. What I saw made me jump right out of the alley, forever. Don’t you know me best, Yusuf? I can never jump, except to the wrong side.”

“We can change things, Azza. Help me expose all this!”

“You want exposure? More than this?”

“Help us get you out of this first, Azza of the Lane of Many Heads. Then we’ll expose what’s going on. Al-Sibaykhan is the reptile that will swipe its tail and cause the ground to swallow us all up.”

“Yusuf, please, make contact with the real world around you. Come out of your bubble of history and Doomsday. Who’s going to listen to all this?”

She steeled her heart and led Yusuf next door, into Khalid’s office. Adrenaline was pumping in her veins, and she tried to separate her mind from her shaking body. His maid or his coffee boy or his assistant could come in at any moment and see what she was doing, but she couldn’t back out now. They hurried to the desk, where they saw a safe underneath the drawers; when they knelt to open it, they found it unlocked.

Inside, the first thing they saw was the amulet, lying in the lower compartment. Yusuf’s hand shook as he picked it up and checked that the parchment was still folded carefully inside.

“I didn’t want to scare you,” he began. “But I’ve just escaped an ambush. There’s no doubt it was Khalid’s men. That’s when they took the amulet. I spent the night wandering around, hiding, looking for a way to get to you.” He spread the family tree in front of her, and quickly took her through it, skipping most of the lines, but the blood was pumping in her ears and a sudden thought occurred to her. She looked again in the safe, and there was the copy of the El Greco painting. She froze; how had it gotten there? And what had happened to Rafi? Was he one of them — or another of their victims? Had they used her as bait to get this drawing? She pushed the thoughts aside and opened the sketch for Yusuf, drawing his attention to the key held in the hand of the celestial creature reaching toward Mary’s lap. They stood motionless as he looked at the key; holding his breath, he took out the key hanging around his neck.

“It’s the same key,” breathed Nora, then told him about the man who had spent a quarter-century of his life in the peaks of Toledo, obsessively looking for that key, and left a copy of it fixed to his gravestone.

“Maybe you’re related to that guy — maybe he’s your lost father! Your mom Halima always talked about how Andalusia had kidnapped her husband …”

Nora went back to the safe and took out the drawing Khalid al-Sibaykhan had showed her one morning in Madrid, to compare it with the copied key stolen from the grave.

“All these are copies of that,” she said, pointing to the key around his neck. “It must be the key.” She emphasized the words the key . She looked around them, struck by the deafening, blinding discovery. Her ears were ringing and her saliva tasted like blood. Her mind was racing against time to create a bomb as big as this explosion Yusuf had caused in her blood.

“What do you think this is all about?”

An obscure instinct was honing in on that threat hung around Yusuf’s neck.

“You’re a Shaybi, Yusuf.”

They stood either side of the key, looking at the two interlinked mihrabs on the bow, and the third, bearing the verses of the Surah of Fidelity, in engraved gold, which watched over their embrace from above.