Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Color: red gloss

License: Florida 946248, 01/06143234

Owner name: Mushabbab Ateeq Al Nayib

Order name: al-Sheikh Khalid al-Sibaykhan

Notes: With thanks for your assistance in organizing private events.

Mushabbab was as happy as a child, saying that at last he could cross the whole city now and get out of the Lane of Many Heads.

Nasser couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw al-Sibaykhan’s name. He circled it in red several times before carrying on reading.

That Mushabbab is a rocket launcher. He’s thrust me out of the manual age and into the petroleum age with this motorbike of his.

“Life’s like gas, you burn it or you get burnt!” My hands respond to Mushabbab’s motto, pumping another shot of gas into the motorcycle, and I shoot like a screeching arrow along the Mecca ring road on my way back from Ajyad to Sittin, heading for the masses of people in the crowded neighborhoods where I drive around displaying the Starbucks logo on my T-shirt. Don’t laugh, Azza. I can’t be deformed, not even by a dubious logo on the back of my green shirt. I was hired by the advertising company on the condition I provided my own motorbike, so I’m using Mushabbab’s.

I fling off the logo behind my back. We won’t waste gas by stopping to look behind us; you’re here with me, the speedometer is showing “Azza,” you’re the point I was naively aiming for in my history studies.

Yes, this motorbike is the real me.

Speeding through tunnel after tunnel that cuts through Mecca,

I start with the glass and steel towers that surround me. They’re solid but I find my way in; all it takes is a firm foot on the gas and they start unraveling and peeling off the city’s skin to reveal the hidden kernel underneath.

Azza, burn all your patience and come race me in this speed,

Can’t you feel that I’m light, for the first time in my life? All I need now is to touch you in the rushing air and be blown away with you.

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 24

Dear ^,

Did you really paint me from memory???

Even my mirror doesn’t greet me with a face like this! And the lips, my God … What a scandal! And that nose, sticking itself up in the air to scorn me.

You shouldn’t make my face so open; otherwise my features won’t have anywhere to hide from you.

I can read even your faintest trembles in the photos you send me. I can even read the scent of your mood now.

You smell like me now.

You’re like Birkin, who doesn’t need to admit his excessive sensuality, his darkness. For him, that deep, piercing gaze is enough to terrify Ursula, for me to know, with a new sense in my body, what he’ll say and how he’ll wreck the scene.

I think your challenge is the same as Birkin’s — not to fall in love with an Ursula but to test your ability to be subsumedin another person, someone who will understand you not through words but through touch, to move slowly, to keep sex from burning her — sex devours handfuls of one’s innermost core, it ignores those places that long most to be heard, it fails to give them expression or to allow them to express themselves, but soft touches are like butterflies fluttering at the edges of edges where it wouldn’t even occur to you that there were any nerves.

Birkin might submit to desire, Birkin himself might even act out that desire and sweep away, but that non-desire, that hunger to reach oneness that went beyond sensuality, remains like a delicate butterfly fluttering at the edge of his soul, unconsciously, without a backward glance to spoil it, swiftly rubbing its wings and leaving behind a colored stain of wing-dust on the soul.

Attachment 1: Jameela covered head to toe in a red wrap, with a man on either side: her father to the left, the registrar to the right.

Mu’az took this shot for me. I didn’t show it to Azza. I was too scared.

Attachment 2: After some hesitation I’m sending this picture of Matuqa, Yabis the sewage cleaner’s mother.

As you can see, her bed is like Noah’s Ark, carrying Matuqa’s whole existence: there are rags and scraps laid out lengthwise which take up half the bed — so many that she’s lying twisted to make space for them — and scraps of dry bread hidden in readiness for the famines that are to come, you can see bits of them here and there, and there’s a plastic bag holding her eyebrow pencil and her silver engraved kohl container and applicator, incubating bacteria from Noah’s times; at her feet are the leftover clothes of a dead husband, reeking of lamb fat, and under her stiff, neck-breaking pillow there’s a copper plate that was one of her wedding gifts, a camel-leather shoe with broken straps, and a string of sandalwood prayer beads that Yabis brought back from Medina; at her left is a packet of stiff, moldy strawberry bubble gum to bribe passing children, and underneath that a half-eaten tube of cheese’n’chili flavor Pringles. Goodness knows what else is in there, but the main thing is she’s ready to set sail as soon as Israfel blows his horn.

Mu’az, Imam Dawoud’s son, managed to snap this picture of her spontaneously. He wanted to capture the flowers on her Shalky label dress, with the enormous fuchsia-colored flower across her chest and an orange and red one splashed across her pelvis.

I wonder: what does this ninety-something woman dream about? What are dreams like when we’re about to step over the threshold at the end of life? Do they care about us? Do they show us any bonus footage? Does life change position so that it always moves forward, not backward or toward the present? Do we think our beauty will still be there, waiting for us, on the other side of that threshold? At what age do our bodies retreat and stop dreaming, and our eyes begin to look ahead to what’s beyond the threshold?

Matuqa’s part gets wider and wider but not a single white hair invades it. A woman’s will to live resides in her hair, and a woman who shines her hair with coconut oil every morning and braids it around her head like a crown will surely never die.

Aisha

P.S. When I woke up after the accident, my whole life seemed like just a moment, like it had passed me by, because my limbs weren’t responding and no mirror would face me.

For days I avoided looking them in the eye, certain I was somewhere else and that another life, which wouldn’t die, was waiting for me.

When the nurse exposed whatever part of me to wash it with a warm flannel and antiseptic soap, I didn’t care enough to cover it up, because the body that feels ashamed was somewhere up there, hovering in some spot above everyone’s heads, and focusing on some other point that was even further away. No matter how much I craned my neck I couldn’t quite see that point which comes after death. Who said I didn’t die? Even now, whenever I close my eyes, they look toward that point beyond pain, beyond humanity.

Who said they all died?

They made me undergo psychiatric treatment with the doctor with the Egyptian accent who was going to help me come to terms with my orphanhood.

He assured me that the anti-depressants were enough to bring my soul out of that emptiness and make it swallow their death, one in the morning and one at bedtime, like a glass of sugarcane juice.

My eyes bothered him. In between us were the lenses of his glasses and their heavy green frames, which framed and contained his every look.

I gave up nothing from the inside of my head but the bubble of fake everything’s-okay. He soaked it and starched it and ironed it and folded it to see if it was still crumpled, to repolish it with his tranquilizers.