Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

With its rasping voice, it caught me at the door to my cubbyhole, where any resistance I possessed left me, and I froze like a bare tree stump. The Veil Monster was bearing down on me; it wanted to drinkmy blood. Then my auntie Halima appeared, pretending she’d come to protect me, but she let it grab my leg, here, then my hand. Something hot and wet made my leg slippery, and the Veil Monster couldn’t manage to drag me away; I’d peed myself.

I was woken by your index finger on my spine.

The leg that the Veil Monster had taken hold of stayed numb for a whole week. The parts in that play had been masterfully shared out between my mother, grandmother, and Aunt Halima. In the course of it, they left behind fragments of our hearts broken off by the Veil Monster so they could be certain we’d be tamed. Having watched the Veil Monster being created didn’t lessen the terror he provoked in us in any way: he had only to make the slightest movement for a satanic spirit to rear its head within me, more frightening than my mother and grandmother could have calculated.

I think it’s the Lane of Many Heads transforming himself into a fearsome creature to keep us under control, and I don’t think we’ll ever be strong enough to tear off his masks.

The Veil Monster is the embodiment of a repressive urge hidden inside the women of the Lane of Many Heads, a chain of docility passed on from mother to daughter.

Do you think that’s what sharpens and guides Azza’s charcoal when she draws? Or is it her passion?

Azza has never taken fear seriously. Even love is just a flickering flame for her. “Why would you expect love to last forever? It’s just a feeling like any other feeling. Do you expect fear or upset or anger or sadness to last? They’re all temporary. They only come so they can go away again.”

For Azza, love has always been more like flu than cancer, so she flutters from heart to heart, reveling in the fever of constantly falling in love and always emerging from it lighter in heart and soul, ready to take on another, more highly evolved virus. She doesn’t face life or men with grim seriousness.

If only you knew how much fun it was to be around Azza! It’s like being in a patch of sunshine that never dries up,like being in an endless painting.

Still, I pity those consumed by cancerous love for her, like Yusuf!

Nasser was choked up with anger at Aisha. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason, but he felt a malicious satisfaction that she’d nicknamed the Lane of Many Heads “the Veil Monster.”

When Nasser finally permitted Khalil to enter, the fortysomething threw himself nonchalantly onto a chair and relaxed into it, leaving Nasser to read his body language. His shiny black leather shoes clashed loudly with his bright white leper’s socks. His features were elongated; his eyes and mouth were rectangular and uniform, and his cropped-looking ears stuck out like airplane wings. Khalil didn’t let Nasser finish looking him over, but began abruptly:

“My father continued to cover our expenses for years, even after I graduated from the Aviation Academy in Miami. He only cut us off after that Egyptian wife of his had a baby.” Suddenly Nasser’s suspicions about Khalil being the Veil Monster who’d escaped down Aisha’s corridor fell apart.

“And the fire that burnt down your house in the Lane of Many Heads — was it really caused by faulty wiring?”

“Oh yeah, thanks again for your efforts,” he drawled. “You and the firemen whose truck got stuck at the entrance to the alley and didn’t get anywhere near the fire at all.” The same devil goaded him to go further still: “You’re in the middle of an ocean of drug dealers and illegal migrants, fires that happen over and over, sewage floods, overcrowded, crumbling buildings that collapse here and there. The police and the fire department are a joke. Your emergency vehicles can’t even get down the Lane of Many Heads because there’s no suitable road, and now all you want to know about is a body? This neighborhood desperately needs an enema to be followed by several microsurgeries.”

Nasser met his insolence with a question. “Do you realize that you’ve made a lot of people in the neighborhood feel very uneasy recently?”

“That’s to be expected. This place is in one time zone and I’m in another,” he said, gesturing upward.

“So then what’s keeping you here in an alleyway in the underbelly of the world?”

“It’s temporary …” A drop of sweat formed on Khalil’s temple. If the detective had asked him “How long is temporary?” he wouldn’t have known what to say.

Nasser didn’t think Khalil was giving away his real age. There wasn’t a single gray hair spoiling his youthful appearance. “I hear Saudi Airlines decided they could do get by without your services. Something to do with you hitting a female flight attendant?” The sweat on Khalil’s temples trembled, and he could feel the heroin, which had destroyed his dreams and ambitions and driven his life to the brink, flowing through his veins. He’d put too much faith in the brakes and in the autopilot inside himself. That day was the first time he’d flown without waiting for two days to let his system clear itself after a fix; he was still strung out six hours before takeoff. Everybody who looked at his eyes and dilated pupils during that flight could see that he’d crossed the red line.

“You can’t mess around with the chain of command onboard a plane. A plane is like a kingdom in the air. The pilot is the king, and everyone else is a subject who must obey him blindly from the moment the plane doors are shut until they’re reopened after landing. If anyone has any kind of objection, they have to present it in writing to the authorities after the flight because arguing with a pilot while airborne is a capital offense …” He didn’t want to mention what it was that had made him lose his better judgment on that flight just yet. Was it that the Turkish flight attendant had rebuffed him or that she’d upgraded that passenger to first-class without first checking with her supervisor? How was he supposed to know that that cursed Turkish woman with the faded eyes was one of Satan’s demons herself? With a single swipe of her paw, she knocked twenty years of service off his personnel file.

Nasser seized the opportunity presented by the glimmer of arrogant lunacy in Khalil’s eyes to catch him off guard: “And Yusuf, what’s your connection to him?”

Khalil exhaled derisively. “Yusuf comes from the time before Abbas ibn Firnas and the Wright Brothers. In the century he’s from they haven’t even discovered flight yet …” A note of malicious satisfaction in his voice left question marks in the air.

“Do you think he has anything to do with the body?”

“Don’t implicate me in other people’s accusations; I fear God …”

Nasser wanted to be reckless, to give in to the rumors and search the trunk of Khalil’s taxi for the disguises the whole neighborhood was gossiping about.

“What about Mushabbab?”

“Myth.”

“A myth?”

“This whole web of tiny alleyways is built on myths.”

Nasser was still waiting for an answer. He was well aware that Khalil was trying to distract him with that generalization.

“So you’re married to Yabis the sewage cleaner’s daughter, and yet they say you proposed to Azza recently but were refused?”

“Have you got a problem with that?”

At that moment, Nasser caught sight of the madness that the neighborhood folks whispered about. Khalil retreated in the face of the detective’s attack, guarding himself with sarcasm. “The old man’s lost it. He believes in myths too. He told me not to ask for Azza’s hand during times of bad omen: I’m not allowed to propose to her in the month of Muharram, when bloodshed is forbidden, or in Safar, when it’s said that provisions are scarce, or in First or Second Jumada, during which our fortunes are fixed and unchanging, or in Ramadan because, as you know …” He winked at the detective. “Threads of piety and threads of desire woven together to make a web. I’m also supposed to refrain from asking for her hand in the months of Shawwal and Rajab, and abstain in Dhu’l-Qada, and then the old man goes on Hajj in Dhu’l-Hijja … What about you, Mr. Detective? You married? Or are you just planning to fast for eternity? Your breakfast’s on me: dates, halva, Turkish delight, Egyptian bonbons …”