Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Veil Monster versus Siren Man

N ASSER LAY IN BED, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS. THE LANE of Many Heads’ unending, day-and-night torrent of odors and chaos assaulted his every sense, getting back at him for taking Aisha’s side and accusing The Lane of Many Heads of being The Veil Monster.

Whenever Detective Nasser appeared, they shouted: “The siren man is here!”

Naked, barefoot, and with dusty snotty faces, the children flocked around his official Land Rover. The rotating, flashing light on the roof was still on. Nasser left it on deliberately so that it would point its accusatory red finger all across the entrance to the alley. The ice-seller came running after him, begging him to move the vehicle just a little so that the indictment wouldn’t completely hide his fridge from the cars passing by in the fast lane. The children, meanwhile, ignored him and clambered up to the roof to turn their faces blood-red in the light, or sat on the hood tickling their cheeks with the windscreen wipers, leaving scratches across the Land Rover’s brilliant shine.

Half asleep, Nasser could hear the voice mocking him: “Officer, you’re up to your eyeballs in pages and pages of the Lane’s faked memories. They’re luring you into that memory, and then they shut their eyes and stop up their ears to trap you inside the nightmare nesting in their heads. They aren’t even memories; they’re a counterattack against a disappointing reality …”

Some of Yusuf’s phrases that he’d read that morning floated around in his mind:

March 3, 1995

Do you think we’ve sinned against the revelation that made its home in Mecca, the revelation whose battlefields and great men we’re reducing to mere legend by erasing every physical trace leading back to them?

Hulagu Khan drowned the works of generations of scholars and thinkers in the Tigris so as to destroy the legacy of the Abbasid Dynasty and before them the Umayyads.

And here, nothing remains of the Well of Zamzam now but a row of pipes and taps — who knows where the water actually comes from. A mere quarter-century ago, the froth of longevity and blessings used to drip directly from the bucket of the well into the hands of the nation of Muhammad. These days God’s gift, the water of Zamzam, is being sold. There’s no froth left any more. We’re up against risk factors like high cholesterol and premature death and we take anti-depressants to treat our delusions.

Delusion 1: We used to think of the nation of Muhammad in a vague sort of way as something like a tall, alluring servant girl who lived in the desert and suckled all of humanity’s children from her vast breasts. She could never die because everyone we knew prayed to God every day for her longevity.

Nasser buried his head fast under his pillow, rubbing it against the sleeve of the robe he’d found and promptly hidden as if it were the limb of some woman he’d murdered. He didn’t want to return to her, but her scent filled the air. The robe with the missing sleeve appeared before him, called out to him to come. Detective Nasser al-Qahtani was trembling as he followed the scent, which pushed him toward the sleeve between the lines of Aisha’s writings. Lately his sleep had become fitful and troubled. He’d wake up and immediately begin recording every suspicious item in Aisha’s letters, marking a red X at every explosive spot and copying out some of the phrases that particularly took his fancy so he could carry them around with him and reread her secrets wherever he was. He felt like every word concealed some transgression or temptation, the silhouette of a man. By her own account, “getting caught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook.” Nasser searched for that man’s face, wondering if it resembled his own and wondering: how many men had she hidden so they could enjoy that scent in solitude?

As soon as he’d woken from a night of troubled sleep, he picked up another of Aisha’s letters, and once he’d drunk its scent he added it to the pile of letters he’d read through next to his bed. He leapt out of bed — the damp morning air free to view his naked body, the air conditioner free to attack it. He was aware, for the first time, of his own body as he strutted about before the world in lazy arrogance. He liked the way it felt when his legs rubbed against the stove as he made himself a cup of instant coffee. Then he got back into bed, his mind preoccupied, and reread the same letter for the tenth time. He picked up a red pen, and after a moment’s hesitation, scribbled a title across the top of Aisha’s letter:

Women in Love

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 6

There are things that guide me to discover them.

That book I’d forgotten about … When? Since my first year at the Teachers’ College. Stuffed in a nook under the stairs for years.

My friend Leila had curves like creamy condensed milk. She stuck out her lips like a bird’s beak when she spoke; her voice was hoarse, but tinged with laughter, and she loved stealing glances. She’d smuggled the book out. She said she’d found it waiting for her in the corridor where it had fallen out of one of her uncle’s moving boxes. He was the director of Mecca’s famous Falah schools, and ordinarily his office was out of bounds to all. He was planning to bequeath it to his male offspring once his long life was over.

“Do you want it or should we bury it?” she said. That was how the book’s destiny became tied to my own.

Leila and I both risked expulsion: getting caught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook. I tucked it beneath my buxom chest, where the gray expanse of my school pinafore concealed it easily, and I yanked my abaya down slightly. That was a signal agreed on between the girls that meant your clothes were stained with period blood.

Leila and I were like two bats. We spent the day in the bathroom reading the first lines. I came across the words “Lawrence ran away to Germany with his female tutor.” The words pricked me somewhere deep in my insides, and we both averted our eyes. A single word more would’ve stopped our hearts and given us away.

Of all the books she’d smuggled out, this one seemed most like a sinful time bomb.

Returning home with the book would have been suicide. I crept in, and without even looking at it I stuffed it into that hole under the stairs to the right of the door. It’s been there all these years. It was only tonight that the rain brought it out, wet around the edges, pages yellowed, binding falling apart. It still had the same sting of fear and awe, though …

Leila and I didn’t even read the title. I just imprinted the cover image onto my memory: those long red stockings and the woman wearing them, a bundle of sketchbooks tucked under her arm.

That’s how you saw me, ^: leaving the hospital wearing your long red socks and thereby fulfilling my legs’ oldest dream …

Women in Love… Can you believe they were lying stuffed under the stairs — right under the nose of my mother, father, and Ahmad — and in love, too? Of all the books I managed to get my hands on and dared to read, this book (which I’d have preferred to call Women in Love in the Arabic translation rather than Lady Lovers ) terrified me: from the moment I set eyes on those red stockings I knew that I was risking a lot — perhaps even my life. Do you understand why? One woman becomes two becomes three. Like rain. Drops of women in a downpour of love, like the battery acid that jealous men hurl at the women they love in the short items in the newspaper.

Today, I’m grateful for the innate prudence that made me understand, even at that young age, that I needed to bury Women in Love in that nook under the stairs.