Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

As you can see, there’s no room in the cubbyhole for a lover. Nevertheless I keep you crammed in here, in the empty space in my head. I stuff you under my fingernails, so I can slip you past them and smell you from time to time, like the body’s first, strongest scent.

Aisha

When Nasser reached Aisha’s signature, he picked up a pen and paper and wrote down the name Ahmad. He repeated it in a long line and underlined it twice. “Another man in Aisha’s life. Let’s see where he fits into the puzzle of the Lane of Many Heads.” He ignored Birkin’s belief that there was “a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence” in taking the love of a woman to its furthest end. The sentiment irritated him. It set off warning signals in his head. It condemned his existence, which was beyond just “old.” It was the threadbare existence of someone who’d never experienced the kind of stormy exchange with another person that Aisha searched for in books and in real life, across an ocean, from Germany to a forgotten alley like the Lane of Many Heads. He put off facing up to that thought for some other time.

X-Rays

T HE SHOPS THE LENGTH OF GATE LANE WERE OPENING UP, AND THE MUNICIPALITY workers were sweeping the gutters, making the most of the relative quiet to gather up the plastic bags and empty soda bottles littering the road. Nasser stood watching. Their fortitude seemed like a provocation. Faced with those mountains of trash, he would have lost his mind a long time ago, but they just carried on, earning only the meagerest salaries, shielding their heads from the Meccan sun that turned their uniforms to dust. They were there at their positions every morning, their patience solidifying with each movement until it became a layer that protected them from anything that might happen.

Nasser laughed at the sight of the one worker who was using gloves and a gigantic claw grabber to pick up the trash while his colleagues worked with their bare hands. He turned and stepped into the tiny Studio Modern, surprising Mu’az, who had just opened the place and was polishing the front window. Mu’az tucked the cloth away and drew down the wooden counter, placing a barrier between himself and the detective.

“You and I need to sit and talk a few things over,” said Nasser. Being a photographer had landed the young man firmly within the circle of suspicion. The detective had stumbled across a crumpled photo of the dead woman: a high-angle shot, taken from a rooftop through the lens of the imam’s son, whose photographic talents aroused whispers in the Lane of Many Heads (they were careful, however, never to let these whispers get back to his father the imam, so as not to endanger the boy’s chances in that profession in the future).

“I didn’t want to call you in to the precinct this time. I just want to have a friendly chat.” Alarm flashed in Mu’az’s eyes. He led Nasser into the studio, where a backcloth painted as a forest scene covered an entire wall, and showed him to a seat directly beneath a waterfall. He left the door open so he could keep an eye on the shop entrance.

“You’re a bright young guy—” At that opening, Mu’az folded his arms in front of him and hugged his body. Nasser clocked the defensive reaction but pressed on. “The people in the neighborhood say that you take sneaky pictures of the alley from a window halfway up the stairs of the minaret. Am I right in thinking that you’re the only one who has access to a view of the alley from above?”

Mu’az hurried to correct the detective. “I don’t take pictures from above, I take pictures from within. The Lane of Many Heads has never taken me seriously enough to hide its secrets from me. Do you know what memorizing the Quran did to me? It’s like I swallowed a powerful flash that never goes off. It lights up everything I look at. I had this internal camera long before I knew anything about photography. And by the way, if my father knew what we were talking about, he’d throw me off the top of the minaret and you’d have another crime on your hands.”

Nasser replied with a short, forced laugh, giving Mu’az a little room to relax so he could study his features more closely. His body was bunched up like a ball. He wore threadbare trousers and his hair was tucked into his scarf. He was a photomontage of modernity and ancient misery. Nasser glanced down at Mu’az’s feet and his huge Chinese-made imitation Nike sneakers, then raised his eyes once again to Mu’az’s dark face pierced only by the glimmer of his eyes. Mu’az was visibly uncomfortable under Nasser’s gaze. Nasser aimed his next question.

“What do you know about Azza?” Nasser could see he’d hit his target: he was well acquainted with that involuntary twitch of the eyelashes that meant the person being questioned was hiding something. Mu’az stared at Nasser’s face: it was predatory, like the face of one of those falcons trained to hunt bustards. The unexpected response exploded in Nasser’s face:

“Azza was like a time bomb in the Lane of Many Heads.” The exchange of fire eased the tensions between them. Mu’az spread his palms on his knees, and silence fell. The sounds of that morning were still streaming through Mu’az’s head. He had dozed off, sitting by the window on the stairs inside the minaret, and was awoken by a loud thud, which he was now certain was the sound of the body hitting the ground. He didn’t open his eyes for a little while, however, not until he heard the sound of hurrying, frightened footsteps, almost inaudible, because the alley was sucking them up like a sponge. He thought they were part of a dream at first — yet his keen hearing, even from that height, could sense their fear. By the time he opened his eyes, it was too late: he only just glimpsed the black Cadillac at the head of the alley, a small foot poking out from a hem before it disappeared into the back seat, the head of the black driver covered with a spotted scarf, as he leaned down, closing the door behind her, before the car sped away and the noise of the engine receded into the distance. Whose foot was it? He didn’t know.

The hound sensed these images whirling around in Mu’az’s head and broke in, “You think she’s the victim?” No sooner had he asked the question than Nasser sensed the pungent smell of denial radiating from Mu’az’s body.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Her face was totally smashed up. My lens had never captured anything so hideous. Beneath her veil, Azza had a golden face that dazzled anyone who saw it; you know the sweet scent of paradise that they say the true believers can smell? Azza went places they didn’t want her to go to.”

Detective Nasser was really no different from the street cleaners outside; he had to rake through all these layers of rotten deceit, tossing bones to his hound to chew on, until he arrived at the truth.

“So you’re sure you didn’t see anything suspicious? A strange person hanging around? A thief that could have snuck into one of the two houses?” A chill emanated from the studio walls.

“All I heard was a loud noise,” said Mu’az. “But I didn’t look. It never occurred to me that someone could strip a person naked and throw them down into the street like that.”

“You said you’ve memorized the Quran …”

Mu’az nodded. The threat implicit in the detective’s question hadn’t escaped him.

“You’re not doing anyone any good by hiding information, you know. You might be helping a murderer walk free when that girl’s lying dead in the morgue,” Nasser warned. “I’m told you also work for Aisha the schoolteacher? Is there anything you want to tell me about that?”

Mu’az was terrified that the finger of suspicion might suddenly turn to point at him. “No, no, don’t accuse me of covering something up. I’m a hard worker, Detective. My father sent me to help the schoolteacher out after she came back from Germany. I used to run errands for her once a week and sweep the hallway. A week before the body, she told me to stop coming because she was leaving the Lane of Many Heads to move in with one of her relatives.”