Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“Did you see her leave?” asked the detective.

“Aisha?” Mu’az snorted. “She might be the only person who could never leave. Detective, Aisha lives behind her computer screen in a world of images like me. When I worked for her I got used to hearing that same sound from my spot in the corridor. I’d stop sweeping when I heard her tapping the keys on that old computer of hers. Actually, to be honest, I got addicted to that sound. It sounded like it was coming from some incomprehensible faraway world. Often, the clicking would come thick and fast with no intervals whatsoever, so I’d hold my breath and try to move gingerly and quietly so I wouldn’t disturb her reverie. Her fingers would chase one another to a world where she’d withdraw into nothingness, so much so that I’d risk creeping up the stairs and even sneaking a look at that unearthly creature with her back turned to the door of her cubbyhole. Her hair shone with an ethereal blue light. It was twisted into a bun, always messy and listing to the right, toward the door, with a pencil stuck through it to stop it coming undone. I never felt uncomfortable nor did I restrain myself; I just stared at God’s exquisite creation, draped atop that neck. I’d follow the nape of her neck, which was craned forward, looking for some weakness in the curvature the crash had left her with. But there’s nothing weak about it, in fact it’s more like a miracle. I envy her; I wish I could run my finger over my lens shutter at that speed. I wish I could photograph worlds like the one I could hear in her fingers tapping on the keyboard.”

The hound began to salivate, but Nasser’s mouth went dry at the cipher. “There you go,” Mu’az continued. “I’ve laid out everything I know for you, like a film that burns up when exposed to light.”

Nasser felt vindicated in his decision to lure Mu’az out of the Lane of Many Heads; he felt like that trickster of an alleyway was urging them all to mislead him. Mu’az continued, revealing yet more: “You should charge me, or understand how weak I was in the face of that being —I don’t want to call her a woman. She’s a feminine miracle just in herself … I could never do harm to such a symbol … Can you imagine? She — out of all the women in the Lane of Many Heads — saved herself and made it out. I try to figure out what’s stored in her memory. The worlds she must have seen to set her fingers loose on the keyboard with such—” He paused, searching for the right description: “lust.” His mind offered nothing but the image of one of the springs in Paradise. “Aisha’s fingers are the spring of Salsabil, flowing over the keys, setting her apart from the rest of the lane’s lifeless living. Do you know the Verse of Light? That verse, from the Chapter of the Cow, lives in my heart. Aisha was lucky enough to be cast from the energy of pure light. I line my little sisters up, one after the other, with their skinny bodies and their wrapped hair, like links in a chain. Try to understand me … Understand what my life’s been like. I’m a self-made man. I taught myself photography. I memorized the Quran. I earn the money I need to support the children of the imam, who doesn’t believe in birth control.”

The detective stood up suddenly, and as though he’d been sleepwalking, he saw the world Mu’az inhabited, took note, and left. He wouldn’t be returning to him as a potential suspect.

Nasser went back to some of Yusuf’s articles, which spanned two years. He read an article by Yusuf on the unprecedented and simultaneous rises in expenditure in three sectors (real estate, psychiatry and cosmetic surgery, and livestock, specifically camels and goats) in which he tried to uncover the links between them. He noted how Yusuf compared — in red ink — the disparity between the value of his friend the Eunuchs’ Goat and the market price for goats, which averaged as much as 160,000 riyals for a billy goat.

The detective rifled through, looking for mention of the kid Salih, known to all as the Eunuchs’ Goat. At Imam Daoud’s Quran memorization classes, the children had sat in a circle bisected by a blue curtain, the girls on one side and the boys on the other. The sweet little boy had fallen in love with the round protrusion in the curtain where the girl Sa’diya’s elbow poked through. He’d spent many evenings breathing in the smoke of his father’s cooking and the smoke of their ridicule for being head over heels for a girl’s elbow. Salih was tied to an invisible rope that ran between al-Ashi’s kitchen and the mosque to keep him from going out to the main road and falling into the hands of the immigration police.

A Window for Azza

August 16, 2005

It’s summer, you see, when everything around us dies. The Lane of Many Heads flops limply like a salted fish laid out in the sun to dry, and our burning hearts, desperate to escape the putrid stagnation, eat away at us.

Every summer I spend with you, Azza, brings such a conflict. The days stretch and my patience shrinks; I can’t stand you being hidden away from me, I can’t stand all these Meccan windows shutting in my face. When night comes, I happily tear off my clothes, knowing that I’m peeling away the barriers between us. That is, if you too shed your layers.

Our constant complaints had driven Mushabbab crazy so he decided to test us: “What are your greatest fears?” he asked. “Lay them out on the rug in front of me and I’ll squash them for you like bugs.”

“The immigration police,” said the Eunuchs’ Goat, retching with sour fear at the thought. “The deportation truck with the bars over the windows … It paralyzes me. I’m trapped in the alley, and if I do leave, I’m blinded by visions of plainclothes immigration police. At every bend in the road I expect them to pounce and drag me away. Where would they send me? Me, the one whose umbilical cord they cut in the dirt in the yard outside the kitchen, nameless, voiceless; I only learned to speak as an adolescent. Will I live and die without ever leaving the Lane of Many Heads?”

When it was my turn, the trump card I’d hoped for didn’t materialize. When I posed that prying question to myself, I realized that I, Yusuf, am the source of my own fear. My thin body is possessed by Awaj ibn Anaq, the giant of legend from the time of Noah. I am chained to the distant past, but I move around on a spaceship. Everything around me is automated, but my mind belongs to legends and the time before.

Maybe my fossilized body needs a quick renovation.

It occurred to me to surprise him by turning the question back on him: “So, Mushabbab, what’s your greatest fear?” But I chickened out. I knew Mushabbab was our axis: if he weakened or slipped, our entire circle would collapse.

It made perfect sense to us: no fear was so great that a woman’s abaya couldn’t fix it.

Mushabbab wrapped the Eunuchs’ Goat up in it carefully and we all bundled into Khalil the Pilot’s taxi. When we approached the checkpoint, Mushabbab instructed him to slump limply in the abaya. The indifference in the soldier’s gesture as he waved us through sent tingles down the Goat’s spine.

It was as if he’d turned feverish when he realized we’d crossed the sanctuary boundaries and were headed toward Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast. Tales of the mermaids there had burned holes in the imaginations of the young men in the Lane of Many Heads.

“The chicks in Jeddah, sweet lord…” We weren’t going there to check out God’s gifts, though. Mushabbab directed us along the ring road toward the old Jeddah airport.

The sun had risen by the time we got there. Stretching before us was an expanse half a kilometer wide, carpeted with men and women of all colors and races. The image of people assembled for the Day of Judgment came to mind.