Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, AD INFINITUM, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness.

Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his life — it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack.

Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white. She had FELT it turning white so often, under the intolerable burden of her thoughts, and her sensations. Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health.

Perhaps it was only her unabateable health that left her so exposed to the truth. If she were sickly she would have her illusions, imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She must always see and know and never escape.

( Women in Love )

Gudrun puts me in this disturbed mood. I can’t stand this emptiness that Gudrun opens up for her men, opens up inside her men.

How I laughed at your naïveté in secret! If only you knew what girls’ bodies were made of in the Lane of Many Heads. The dough of little liars, digging with lies, daily digging to get through the layers upon layers of warnings, restrictions on movement and restrictions on existence, to penetrate into life lightly …

Aisha

P.S. “I’m hanging on one,” meaning her husband has said the divorce formula once.

“I’m hanging on two.”

“I’m on three.” The third time means the irrevocable end of the marriage.

“I’m on four, but looking for a fatwa to erase two.”

“I’m on five, and we’ve exhausted our options with sheikhs and fatwas. Now we’re looking for a third party who’ll marry and divorce me without touching me so my counter will be reset to zero.”

“How about you, Aisha, what are you on?”

“I’m an outcast, I don’t fit in anywhere in this musical scaleof divorce…”

Correction: Azza’s in a state. There’s a rumor that Mushabbab was arrested for dealing hashish to the daughter of someone important.

P.P.S. Here’s the story as Mushabbab told it to Azza:

Mushabbab went up to the gate of a palatial house, looking with awe at the sky-high walls, more than eight meters high. From a window in his post adjoining the gate the guard watched him, knowing that the young miss had been expecting the man and had left orders at the gate for them to receive the parcel. Seeing the name on the parcel, the guard took it without questioning, and immediately, from the evasive look on the poor man’s face, Mushabbab realized it was a trap, even before the gate slid open and the police car appeared, and a circle of policemen closed in on him. They shoved him up against the car, and from there he watched, as if in slow motion, the parcel being transferred from hand to hand. No one even bothered to look inside. They kicked him unconscious on the spot, and by the time he regained consciousness he found himself lying by the side of the Mecca-Jeddah highway. He struggled back home and hid out in his orchard for more than a month, but his attackers saw no need to pursue him afterward. Apparently the broken ribs had simply been a warning to Mushabbab to forget whatever he’d seen in that palace.

“But how?” asked Azza, touching the makeshift bandage wrapped around his broken ribs. “How could you be so reckless?”

“If only you could’ve seen the poor girl … She can’t be older than twenty-four, and she has no life. She lives in harsher conditions than the prisoners in Guantanamo. Her father’s an international business tycoon, but she’s not even allowed access to a cellphone — even the maids are allowed that much. She’s under round-the-clock supervision and all she can do is sit there and watch while her life slips between her fingers.”

Azza couldn’t bring herself to ask whether a cellphone was the only thing he’d smuggled in that parcel. Instead she ventured, “May I ask how you got mixed up with this girl and this action movie plotline?”

“Her father’s one of my clients. I supply him with a traditional dance troupe whenever he wants to organize a showcase evening for his foreign guests.”

Azza regarded him sardonically. “Did you provide his daughter with the same service?”

Mushabbab was pleased to hear the jealousy in Azza’s voice.

“The whole thing started last month. The father asked me to go over there and he told me that his daughter was suffering from acute depression and that she’d tried to kill herself several times over the last ten years. She’d been taken to see the best psychiatrists but nothing worked, and since they’d heard that I practice healing through the Quran they wanted me to give it a shot. I’m always careful not to get involved with powerful people, but they wouldn’t accept any of my excuses; they just made an appointment for me to go see the girl.”

There was no sign of life at all anywhere around the sky-high walls, only the opening to the right of the gate from which the guard peered out. When Mushabbab presented the permission slip he’d been given, the red-checked headscarf vanished for a few minutes and then a door beside the gate opened and swallowed Mushabbab up. Amazed, he submitted himself to the secretary who’d come to receive him. He was shown to a car and driven through gateway after gateway until they reached a cluster of modern villas set amidst scattered palm trees. The place was an artificial tableau of lurid green. Nothing moved other than him and the palace secretary, two crows disturbing the plastic lushness of the scene as they headed toward what the secretary referred to as “the girls’ villa.”

He left Mushabbab alone in the reception room, some three hundred meters squared — another perfect tableau of luxuriant nothingness. A Filipina maid in a blue- and white-striped uniform appeared and asked him, “Anything to drink, sir?”

“Just water, please.” His voice came out muffled in the void. A tray bearing fresh orchids and a crystal tumbler of water was set before him and sat untouched as minutes stretched into an eternity. For nearly an hour he was left there, sitting by a coffee table weighed down with a variety of the finest dates, glazed nuts, and rich sweets. He was expecting somebody to pop up at any moment to inform him that the girl didn’t want to see him, and to show him the door. The furniture was exquisite — everything upholstered in pure silk — even the walls were covered in golden brocade. The entire space was freeze-dried by the powerful central air conditioning into a mummified tableau of grandeur.

Finally, a golden door at the end of the room opened with a faint sound, and a young woman appeared and padded barefoot toward him across the silk flowers of the Persian carpet. For the sake of her modesty, Mushabbab didn’t look up but the girl came so close that her feet came into view, and he could see the patterns of the carpet reflected on her pale crystalline skin, a sheen of blue and crimson.

“So you’re one of them? A charlatan who hasn’t got a shred of professionalism left?”

Mu’az didn’t say a word. She stamped on his foot, hard. “Apparently you’re a magician. You think I’m a child who likes magic tricks? Life’s just a broken toy.”

“There’s no magic involved, just your inner strength enhanced by my recitation. You could even try reading the Quran on your own to find inner peace.” Some sixth sense felt a tremor in the air. The call to prayer rang out in the silent emptiness around them, but it wasn’t that; Mushabbab felt like he was being watched. He ignored his apprehension.