Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

We crowd together and are crushed. There wasn’t space for a single hair to pass between one abaya and the other. There was even less room in our lungs for breath.

The door parts and spills us out. We take no notice of anything.

You didn’t know where your abaya ended and your friend’s headscarf began. You were carried between the two doors: the academy and the bus. Whatever part of you popped out in the bus would be your claim to infamy in the line-up the next morning.

When we reach the bus, you need to be a gymnast and up at the front of the crowd, if you want to score a seat.

Breathing was forbidden. Speaking was forbidden. There was no laughing. Girls’ Schools Transport. Most of us stood.

When you sat down, there was the chance that bodies would be pressed up in front of you where your feet should go. The chassis groaned and the bus was transformed into an utter blackness but for a single whiteness: the driver’s robes.

And a redness: the chaperone’s pen, writing down a list of any girl whose body parts were exposed or were made to be exposed.

I don’t remember ever being exposed. In the morning line-up my name was only ever mentioned under the section: “jostling”and “talking”.

I have no idea how the chaperone was able to tell whether we’d sneaked a peek at the opposite sex or not. And apparently with no difficulty at all.

The free transportation wiped Mecca’s streets, and the female students, clean.

Then when we reached the Lane of Many Heads the black mass dissipated.

You don’t know what the neighborhood boys are like. They never got bored. Every afternoon they waited at the top of the lane for our bus to arrive.

Look: this scar on my nose is from a stone hurled indiscriminately at a group of us by a young boy.

He wasn’t hoping to land himself a beautiful angel or anything, but perhaps only to touch one of those faces out of the mass of all those girls’ faces. Even if only with a rock.

Aisha

P. S. Just imagine how far I’ve come: from four layers and a headscarf to a Bonn hospital gown.

P. P. S. Have you noted that I’m most like Ursula? Well in that case what the hell are Gudrun’s socks doing on my legs?

Confidential Attachment: A photo of the black triangles, i.e. Imam Dawoud’s daughters, crowding behind the door, trying to steal a glance at the television in the cafe.

Attachment 2: The song of a turtledove (singing alone because the other birds were suddenly alarmed by the sudden light).

The joy of that turtledove spread all the way through to my pillow and I cried.

After dawn prayers, I leave the birds to make supplications on my body.

It is the sound of healing and penetrates deeply into one’s mind.

The idea of death as a rebirth, which came up in that section of Women in Love , caught Nasser’s attention. Nasser was paying special attention to the death extracts that Aisha selected for her letters, and to the severed stumps that piled up in Yusuf’s diary, wondering to himself just what kind of deviancy he was dealing with. Nasser thought back to a particular expression from Yusuf’s diary entries that occurred over and over again like a cry for help:

December 12, 2005

I know women from books. And women know me in dreams. There they bring me to climaxes my waking body has never known. Because I’m a coward. And because I’m desperate to stay white, never to stray, never to mix with the darkness.

Every morning I wake up terrified by those female visions. I’m a deviant. I can’t enjoy a woman unless I write her. I can’t enjoy myself unless I write myself. Not even Mecca pleases me unless it comes in a window written for a newspaper that is destroyed day after day.

That day it felt to Nasser that Yusuf was using the darkness that ran through the heads of women like Azza and Aisha to get the better of him. The heads of these women, wrapped in abayas even darker, were primed, one way or another, for tragedy.

A Henna Half-Moon

I WOULD NEVER PRETEND — ME, THE LANE OF MANY HEADS, DESERT LEECH THAT I am — that I wasn’t used to the 45-degree Celsius heat. The scorching middle-of-the-day heat is my favorite kind of high. Who would believe that my legendary senses have begun playing tricks on me lately? I lapped up the stink and the sweat and closed my eyes tightly to try to sleep, but the buzzing of Nasser’s curiosity kept me awake. He was standing by the side of the road chatting, and Halima was looking down on all my hustle and bustle from the rooftop. She made me feel self-conscious. Through the doorway she handed him the Arabic coffeepot and a tulip-shaped demitasse, and pressed a handful of dates into his palm.

“Lord, I haven’t tasted coffee like this since my aunt Etra left us …” Her smiling eyes brightened. All that precise measuring and tireless preparation was so she could hear a stranger sigh like that when they tasted her coffee. Halima’s face stuck out from her headscarf, which was wrapped around her face, accentuating her smiling eyes, and leaving the part in her hair uncovered, the ends resting against her chest. Hers was a youthful face that had made peace with the world, and her preoccupying worry of late — that Sheikh Muzahim would turn up to evict her any day now — hadn’t caused any wrinkles. The half-moon colored in henna on her palm appeared and disappeared with her every gesticulation as she spoke. Nasser began to suspect that she might have been meeting Yusuf secretly. Absorbed in the motherliness of her face, Nasser stood there by the side of the road listening to her and trying to follow any thread that would lead to Yusuf.

“My father came from Jawa in the Qasim Oases originally, but he became a city-dweller. He used to sit out in the alley, dressed in a striped sarong like the people of Jawa who come to live in Mecca. He even started to speak with a Meccan accent.” She bit off half a date with her tiny teeth and squeezed the other half into her palm. The stone she threw at a crow perching on the lip of a water vat; it flew off and landed on the shoulder of the one of the stone soldiers, its eyes trained on her. She polished her samovar with clay dust, which made all my coverings shine as well. Stories trickled out from her giggles:

“This house used to belong to my father. He sold it to Muzahim when the drought wiped out our orchards in the Fatima Valley. He sold the soil for mere cents and used it to prop up the men who came to see him who’d been wiped out. He took in a Yemeni man who came on pilgrimage from Aden and gave him a job selling the dates he used to harvest from the orchards in Fatima Valley. He rewarded him by giving me to him as a wife just like Jacob did with Moses. My father wasn’t impressed by his trustworthy character so much as the story he told: he claimed to be related to a Meccan family.” She pointed toward the sky. “They kept the name a secret, though, until they could prove it.”

From his eternal spot in his shop, Sheikh Muzahim listened in on their conversation. He would interject, but then pull back, not wanting to expose his opposition to the story. “He wasn’t a Meccan, her husband,” he cut in. “Not on your life, God help us. He was a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He was raised in the happy land of Yemen by their genie servants. He was cursed because he dared to alight in Mecca and pretend he was related to its servants.”

Halima didn’t pay any attention to his sarcasm. She was in the thrall of her own tale:

“I fell madly in love with the handsome Yemeni. I didn’t care who he was related to! Every time I looked at him it was electric, my heart trembled. But we weren’t allowed to enjoy it. The old men in the Lane of Many Heads used to make fun of him for the claims he made. They said that throughout Mecca’s history there were always Jews and Christians and infidels pretending to be Muslims so they could spy on the House of the Lord. But God cursed them and wiped them out for their insolence.”