Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

The neighborhood deceitfully hid the night that had replenished the charge of Yusuf’s mind from Nasser. That night, Yusuf’s sleep had been interrupted by those fleeting footsteps crossing the alley like a dove flying low to the ground. From his spot on the roof, he saw a young woman in an abaya running toward him. Although Yusuf wasn’t in the habit of looking in any detail at female bodies that suddenly appeared before him — out of loyalty to Sheikh Muzahim’s daughter, Azza — something about this girl’s abaya caught his eye. He thought he knew her, but she didn’t give him the chance to work out who she was: by the time Imam Dawoud al-Habashi had called the dawn prayers in a hoarse, deeply pious voice, turning the alley into a lining of embroidered cotton, she’d disappeared. Yusuf tossed the papers upon which he was milking the dawn into a poem for Azza aside. In the blink of an eye, he’d crossed the flight of steps leading down past Azza’s bedroom door and followed in the girl’s footprints, moving in the opposite direction to the people heading to their prayers, led by those flying steps whose tiptoes skimmed the ground toward Mushabbab’s venerable old garden. What a devil that Mushabbab was, he thought to himself, tempting the girls of the neighborhood with his curiosities so early in the morning.

The Lane of Many Heads remembers that the gate to the garden was always open, as an invitation to passersby; just then, though, it had been closed. Yusuf pushed it open and went in, to find himself staring Mushabbab in the face. Mushabbab’s eyes glimmered in the darkness as he rinsed his mouth out with mastic-scented water from the Well of Zamzam. He then carried on what he was doing, averting his eyes from Yusuf’s searching, accusing gaze. Something in the air made Yusuf long for Azza, though he hid his love for her even from himself. He was seized by an urge to shock Mushabbab by telling him about her. But which words would he stun him with? Would he say that he was born to adore Azza, that she had bewitched him in a previous life? That she had propagated inside him like a vaccine? When Azza’s mother had died, and Sheikh Muzahim buried her in the darkness from which she’d never emerged after giving birth to Azza, Halima took her under her wing, and twinned her with Yusuf. Yusuf didn’t bottle-feed Azza out of joy so much as he did it out of a fine, insistent sadness, like the dull hum of a toothache. None of the epidemics that featured during the pilgrimage season — influenza, cholera, meningitis — had succeeded in raising Yusuf’s temperature for so long and without interruption, even though he’d caught them all and had barely made it through alive. Mecca’s epidemics were nature’s own beneficial vaccines: they killed thousands, but those who survived gained total immunity. Not even Mecca’s fabled bad knee, which crippled every woman and man it struck, could impair Yusuf’s joints, which, far from becoming eroded, were like iron. In Mecca, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is why the people of the city have always sent their children out into the pilgrim-thronged backstreets to crawl around, stumble over, and generally fraternize with all kinds of diseases and nationalities, or to peddle goods or work in the Sanctuary pushing aged pilgrims around for their obligatory circumambulations. That’s why death was forced to find more modern means of infiltrating the Lane of Many Heads — like the one that smashed Yusuf’s knee, for example, or the new habit Meccan youths had of going after their livelihoods on the backs of shaytan arawat —“Satan’s devices”—which is what the aged Bukharan woman in the neighborhood called motorbikes.

“As children of the Sanctuary, Azza and Yusuf are twins, born from an egg that split in two,” Halima would say, laughing. “And if the day ever comes that eggs cease to split apart, Mecca will fall into the hands of demons …”

The One

D ETECTIVE NASSER AL-QAHTANI FLICKED THROUGH THE PHOTOS OF DEATH piled up around his bed. He could almost feel the tingling sensation as it waited for him to doze off, ready to take over his hands from Yusuf’s memoirs and those emails of Aisha’s that overflowed with an urge for dissipation. He was confused, perturbed, desperate to smell her depravity. He picked up one of the emails.

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 5

I turn on the webcam for Skype and throw myself onto the bed.

On the screen, movements envelop me like a wave, taking me to places I’d never dreamed of going.

I reach climaxes I never even got close to with Ahmad, the husband I paralyzed.

David, I’ll use this symbol to address you: ˆ. You need to be concealed in case someone discovers my messages.

And someone will. So please delete this message. It’s the only one that contains the key to your identity.

Your messages are beams of light, and soon there won’t even be a single word of them left in my veins.

I store your messages in a folder in my email called “The One.”

ˆ is like the smell of cigarettes on my breath that I cover up with lemon scent as the tar rattles in my lungs. You can hear me coughing all the time when I’m alone at night.

My auntie Halima asks me, “Is it a dry cough or is it wet?” and makes me swallow a spoonful of sesame oil.

How dare we leave our hearts at the end of the world and just return home, instead of dropping dead on the spot?

ˆ, I watch the firefly circle the lamp in my hand, I close my eyes and it grasps my hand and dances and spins me around, as you and I did in the physiotherapy room that morning.

I’ll pick out certain words that point to the things I love and write them in bold so that you trip over them like rocks in your path. Sometimes they’ll cause you to bleed. (I swear to you, I’ll leave rocks here and there and a scrape of what delights me). Am I talking too much? I used to always be so silent. I’d never let anyone get into my head. But then where’s my heart? Inside my chest, where it should be, there’s just a void.

Me and the sun — which I can’t actually see — have a lot to talk about. Can you imagine, ^, I’m a radiant woman in a country that they mark on maps with a sticker of a laughing sun.

Meanwhile, I know nothing about the sun except for that sentence that’s in all the grammar books, the sentence that’s supposed to explain the concept of subject and predicate adjective: “The sun is resplendent; the moon is radiant.” Inside my room, bits of it come at me from behind the veil: in dots and dashes so I can punctuate the sentences of the world outside. In my country, where the sun is ever-present, I treat my frailty with Vitamin D and Osteocare — manufactured in Britain and the U.S. from calcium extracted from seashells from the shores of the Far East.

So don’t tell me things like “Your sun brightens my room,” because active sentences are beyond my experience.

The droplets of sweat on my upper lip are spreading, and even your face is damp, exactly as it was on the morning you said goodbye to me at the hospital door before the embassy car took me to the airport so I could return to my country.

“Her health has recovered,” said my hospital discharge papers, but to tell the truth it wasn’t just pain that I was smuggling back with me but a man, too: you were in my head and under my skin as I swept, without flinching, through the scanners at customs in the Jeddah airport.

The scent of your shaving soap still arouses my senses, tickling me awake each morning.

I turn to look at my back in the mirror and examine the long scar. It’s made red by the many stitches that look like a dove’s footprints. You continue to massage it with Vaseline, and I wonder to myself: how on earth are you able to touch a wound so gently? You apply yourself with nothing but tenderness to something so hideous, so disgusting, that even I’m revolted. You told me the tissue and muscles needed time to rebuild, fuse together and fill the cavity — but it took you no time at all to fuse together with me.