Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“Do you agree with me that this is all just a rotten plot, timed suspiciously to coincide with the recent news about changes in the stock market and the reports of Iran’s nuclear reactors?”

In the Lane of Many Heads, people joke that the Eunuchs’ Goat has fallen victim to the vagina of the woman who took him in, Umm al-Sa’d. Surely you noticed the fire. When al-Ashi heard the news, he burned all his records, and Umm al-Sa’d left without her loud red lipstick. She had a nervous breakdown and bailed. She hailed a taxi on the main road and abandoned the neighborhood.

The sun overhead was exactly perpendicular, not unlike his doubts, when Nasser left the police deportation center in Umm al-Joud. He’d actually taken note of these sleights of naming that were considered a form of municipal beautification: The Lane of Many Heads became Alley of Light; Umm al-Doud, Mother of Worms, they changed to Umm al-Joud, Mother of Munificence. He knew that if he spent any more time there — in that den of forgery, deportation, passports, and nationalities — the worms of the massacre that was taking place there would begin penetrating his bones.

He drove off with uncharacteristic calm as images of sweaty-faced men in khaki uniforms holding endless lists of deportees — none of which contained the name Salih, the Eunuchs’ Goat — floated through his mind. Unless he’d used a pseudonym, this meant that the Eunuchs’ Goat had escaped after his arrest. Either he paid a bribe, or seduced a soldier with his good humor and good looks, or maybe fate just gave him a lucky break. He was stuck with that nickname, the Eunuchs’ Goat. Could you really tell an officer or government official that that was your name?

What were the official documents that were being processed by the Interior Ministry? The ones that al-Ashi and his wife had drawn up and gotten notarized. The ones they’d paid bribes for so that their middleman, Ahmad, the sewage cleaner’s oldest son and Aisha’s husband, would make sure they got through? No matter how many favors he called in at Civil Affairs, or the Passport Authority, or the Interior Ministry itself, Nasser could find no trace of anyone who’d been naturalized with the name “the Eunuchs’ Goat” or “Turk” or “Salih” or “Defiler” or “Marbleskin.” Those were all nicknames by which the handsome Turkish boy was known in the Lane of Many Heads. He was the one, people said, who’d be getting all the girls in the lane pregnant on account of his good looks and fair complexion!

Nasser made a note: Questions remain re: Eunuchs’ Goat. Still a potential suspect.

Nasser drove to the Lane of Many Heads. He snuck through the window at the back of al-Ashi’s courtyard kitchen into the firewood store and then into the chilly courtyard. The walls were covered in foul-smelling grease, cooking pots lay silently on their stoves, cats inhabited the pits in which the lamb was roasted for mandi. It was as though the kitchen had been in disuse for ages, not just since Umm al-Sa’d’s recent trouble. Her nervous breakdown, which everyone in the neighborhood made allowances for. “Who could cope with three shocks like that? The arrest of the Eunuchs’ Goat, the stock market crash, and losing the share in the Arab League Building she’d inherited?”

“Umm al-Sa’d had survived the clutches of death but the boy she raised was her downfall.”

There was nothing of interest in the yard except for the buried remains of newspaper in the pits, which served as a pen for the cats and whatever overflowed from the sewers. He picked up a pile of ashes that bore the headline “Mile Tower”; it looked like a spear or a pen stuck into the sands on the Red Sea coast. It towered in the sky over Jeddah at a height of sixteen-hundred meters and had been built at a cost of fifty billion riyals in cooperation with Bechtel Corp. The wind blew pieces of other headlines around him in the yard:

Rattles Saber

Market Crash

World Silent Despite Rising Death

Women Driving: External Pressure, Interior Funda—

Food Inflation 30–50 %, Affects Milk, Sugar, Rice

Barrel of Crude Breaks $100 Mark

3 Billion to Expand the Haram Mosque Complex Toward

These were just meaningless scraps, which the wind would use to supplement its own historical archive. Nasser suddenly noticed something at the bottom of the cooking pits. He reached down into the nearest pit to examine the base. It felt strange. It didn’t feel like soil, it felt like something thick. Nasser touched something prickly; it was like plastic covered with real hair, as if the bottom of the pit had been coated with a half-plastic, half-animal skin layer. He had no idea what could have made for a substance like that.

Nasser hadn’t come to rifle through al-Ashi’s memory. He’d wanted to make sure that no one, especially the Eunuchs’ Goat, would be able to come hide out here in the yard. He could have spent hours there, and still not made head or tail of those sooty memories.

Detective Nasser carried on upstairs to where, according to Yusuf’s diary, the Eunuchs’ Goat’s room should have been. The door was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder, knocking it out of place and tumbling into the room, where he landed on a heap of women’s bodies. They were all in pieces and rigor mortis had long since set in, but they were still wrapped in evening dresses of lace and tulle and satin, embroidered with beads and crystals, girded in velvet and silk. What kind of a sicko had dreamt up this cocktail party massacre? Nasser was still half-blinded by the searing pain in his head, but when he regained his composure, he realized that he was surrounded by a phalanx of life-sized cork dummies, mannequins. Nasser sat there, staring at those amazing imitations of women. It had simply never occurred to him. What could these mannequins add to the case? What could the Lane of Many Heads know about the fetishes of a man with no identity who’d disappeared without a trace as if he’d never existed.

That evening, Nasser found something Yusuf had written about the mannequins in his diary.

March 2, 2004

After Mushabbab had liberated him from the terror of being deported, the Eunuchs’ Goat underwent a complete transformation. He started following his whims through Mecca. He stopped making furtive escapes, stopped always keeping an eye out for the deportation vans. His body tasted freedom for the first time: it was like biting into a peppercorn, or a cinnamon stick, or a clove; the sweet aroma stung.

I receded. It was like I was just recording the life of the Eunuchs’ Goat, who now had a feel for Mecca that I never had. The thing that most made him want to take his body outside the neighborhood and into the world of the markets outside was his love for the traffic and the way it pulsed. He discovered that he wanted nothing more than to surrender his body to the crush, to bump into and be carried along by the masses, never raising his eyes to look anyone in the face. He understood that parts of his body became parts of other bodies. Don’t laugh, Azza. He works in a kitchen. He enjoys slaughtering animals and butchering them, preparing them for the oven, slicing them up into pots. All his senses have been trained to slice, and to relish the act of taking bodies apart and cutting them up. When he sees someone’s leg or their rear or even their back, he feels like his leg is being summoned, that his own rear end wants to join all the others, that his back is unconsciously falling in line with all the backs of man. To him, these are just separate parts ready to join whatever body calls on them.

As night fell, Nasser’s body surrendered to the putrid smell giving form to the mannequins around him and I, the Lane of Many Heads, found it a perfect opportunity to perch on the threshold and whisper to him in Yusuf’s voice, “I am the Eunuchs’ Goat, one of the many heads opening up for you so that you may walk across the stage …”