Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Nasser carried on reading.

March 11, 2004

That Friday evening, he was meandering through the Gaza Market when he was blinded by a cacophony of lights in a store window he’d walked past dozens of time before. He’d never seen it like this before: it was like a planet with human life! Then came his epiphany: for twenty-eight whole years, his life had been nothing but a massive encyclopedia of black, from cover to cover, entitled Women: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Every time he opened it looking for page X, he found a smear of black, or a photo of Y: also black, or — God forbid! — Z: black, again. His entire adolescence, his every waking dream about a woman’s arm or leg or shoulder: black. He used to try to conjure up some tender image, but the encyclopedia would always blot it out with blackness before he could.

Then as Soviet expansion brought on more and more Jihadist groups, the blackness veritably poured out from the pages of the encyclopedia, layers of black were pasted over other layers of black, shrouds sewn onto other shrouds, till the whole world was covered over. The only female reference the Eunuchs’ Goat knew was the woman who raised him, Umm al-Sa’d — broad-shouldered, flat-chested, with narrow hips — and if he tried really hard, he could add to that Sa’diya’s delicate wrist from behind the curtain.

Then suddenly, and without any prior notice, those women fell out of the sky to land before him: garish travelers preserved behind glass. He stood there for hours, in a daze. His encyclopedia absorbed the woman in the apple-colored muslin top with the lace décolletage and the embroidered leaves, which wound their way up from her left breast to her shoulder, leaving the top of her right breast and shoulder bare. Her flat belly was wrapped in pomegranate-colored silk, and chiffon hung from her waist — like a waterfall — down between her thighs and over her rear. The pain of desire pressed on his kidneys as he stood there like a taut string planted in the sin of that nearly transparent layer that ran from her navel to the top of her breasts. And those drops of bead falling over to touch her delicate toes and forming a long train followed him all the way into his dreams. A cart full of bolts of cloth swung past, knocking him unceremoniously to the ground and out of his own body. He didn’t bother to get up. He just stared up at the soft chest, twisting every last drop out of his body as it was rocked by wave after wave. He understood then that the female body is the secret we never dare expose. It is the intention that precedes movement. He knew that if he stayed there looking at it his body would pass through any solid barrier and that his desire would carry him over any distance, no matter how far. This was the secret behind the black covers of his encyclopedia.

An Afghan boy selling bundles of jasmine walked by, trailing the flowers across the Eunuchs’ Goat’s nose and giving him a knowing look as he followed the Eunuchs’ Goat’s gaze toward the shop window. The Afghan boy’s smile spread across his red cheeks before he walked off down one of the brightly lit market’s many aisles, followed only by a faint trace of jasmine. The sadness of the flowers revived the Goat’s desperate need to be touched.

The next day, when the Eunuchs’ Goat had mustered up the courage to go into the clothing store, he started having seizures. He could’ve sworn that he’d died and been resurrected in heaven, surrounded by all those beauties. Their bodies with the tiny exposed gaps and the mere suggestion of slight curves. He put up with the kicking from the Pakistani security guard in the blue uniform who threw him out onto the street. He disappeared from his father’s kitchen and scrubbed himself clean of the layer of rot that had settled on his skin. He didn’t eat for days as he wandered from clothing store to clothing store: paradises like al-Ceyloni, al-Bajiri, and Bin Siddiq. He knew that he would grow senile but that these women of his harem would never suffer the touch of old age or headscarves. Clothing stores became his entire focus. He derived more pleasure from going into a clothes store than from all the victories over all the devils that haunted his dreams. There among those silks was the greenery that would cover the entire peninsula, the rivers, the freely grazing ostriches alongside the night, and the beauties, whom he’d fight to liberate from their hell. You see when we, children of the lane, dream, we don’t dream about fairy godmothers, we dream about the war of the Hidden Imam who will come to earth and transform the Arabian Peninsula into heaven. We dream of death so that we can give life to the beauties in the peninsula’s rivers.

The only thing the Eunuchs’ Goat wanted was for the entire world to forget about him and leave him there with that woman. He fought off all Yusuf’s attempts to get him to go back to the yard. And his usual academic attempts to give them a date and time. He tried to tie it to modern history for him, calling it a flavor that had abandoned the city during the long, lonely years of religious sermons, which mirrored the jihadi campaigns in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Yusuf drew him a diagram in words of how the spiritual and financial capital reserves of the Arab World were depleted in the eighties and nineties, just before the incursion of satellite hegemony, which arrived in the period between the First and Second Gulf Wars, when the illustrated and sensory encyclopedias of real life were being rooted out and banished. During that time, the guardians of the encyclopedias turned their attention to denuding. At the portals to land, sea, and brains, they planted censors who pored over all printed materials, blotting out any form that resembled a woman, whether in advertisements or even in dress patterns drawn in Chinese ink. Mannequins suddenly disappeared from all the shops — except for in the lawless cities of Khobar and Jeddah — and were burned in secret. Yusuf summed up his theory in a single sentence:

“After centuries, women want their revenge. This is what the harem of today looks like.” He pursued the economic liberalization plan that had been sketched out in bold. “At the dawn of the third millennium of democracy, promoted violently by the West, we found ourselves cresting a wave that would lay the encyclopedia of women bare: women in chamber of commerce elections, women in the arts, women in advertisements, in the journalists’ syndicate and in official delegations, women in politics and ministries, women educators and humanitarians, a woman leading the organization for human rights. The mannequins were attacking and they were about to overrun all our biggest cities.”

As he went from clothing store to clothing store, the Eunuchs’ Goat was flabbergasted by the attention paid to a certain inconsequential Lebanese man who looked like a designer of cheap knock-off fashions. All the biggest clothing boutiques in the Gaza Market, in Street 60, in al-Awali would hire the man at a rate of three hundred dollars an hour to come and give life to their limbs of cork. All he had to do was play around with the fabrics to arouse the devils of temptation.

For days, the Eunuchs’ Goat kept watch. He learned that the Lebanese man only ever turned up at closing time, and was astonished by the warm welcome all the boutique owners gave him. They would hand over the keys to their supply rooms, pile all the beauties around him, shut the door to their shops and walk off! Standing on the other side of those locked doors was true hell for the Eunuchs’ Goat, and he spent nights on end standing there, prey to his own wild imagination, wondering what that Lebanese jerk and those beauties were up to on the other side. Jealousy blinded him and left a bitter taste in his throat. He began stalking the Lebanese window designer, following his every move, recording, to the second, how long he spent on his own in the biggest boutiques, the ones with the most exquisite, most captivating, beauties. A desire for vengeance burned inside him. He spent night after night calling the office for the enforcement of public morals, begging them to come and break up these rendezvous.