Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“God help us. Why are they trying to make the holiest city into George W. Bush Land? Turn here.”

Khalil veered right toward al-Misfala and Abraham the Friend of God Avenue, in the direction of the royal palace. “That’s globalization for you,” he said sarcastically. “I’ve got a pilot’s license from America, Auntie. But I married into a sewage cleaner’s family, I’m tied down to a convent full of old women and I drive around all day in a taxi. My only hope is in the private airlines, Sama, Ama, and Nas. But they’re not hiring. May God let us die believers!” Khalil sped up as he veered left toward the tunnel that led to Ajyad.

Mu’az thought that if he took a shot of Khalil the pilot’s head it would come out all blown up. Khalil still felt he was too big for the neighborhood. He’d decided that the skill required to switch on a commercial airplane’s computer system was greater than all the locals’ brainpower put together. Khalil was weighed down by his frighteningly heavy technical know-how in a neighborhood of illiterates who had no interest in books and no idea about the power of neutrons and atoms. And they all called Khalil “The Cabbie.” You can pound the earth and pierce the sky, but you’re still a cabbie .

“So who’s singing at the wedding tonight? Discovery? Or Qamari al-Hafayir?”

His question took Halima by surprise. He was trying to drive the phantoms from his mind.

“Tonight’s the crème de la crème! It’s at the Scepter Hotel, at the top of the towers. It’s the wedding of Sheikh al-Sibaykhan’s secretary.”

“That Sheikh al-Sibaykhan is chairman of the board of Elaf Holdings, which owns three-quarters of Mecca. It has investments everywhere, like an octopus, and the right to requisition private property within belts one and two in the perimeter of the Holy Mosque in the name of development.” When Mu’az heard the name Sheikh al-Sibaykhan, he knew his decision to come was the right one.

“They’ve brought the singer Ahlam and her band all the way from Bahrain for the occasion!”

“And why do you think they requested an old-fashioned tea-lady like you, Auntie?”

“Nothing looks prettier than when you mix the local and the exotic! Your Auntie Halima ties it all together, boys. Among all those chefs and waiters from the eight-star hotel, I’ll be the local color.”

Khalil pulled up in front of the entrance to the hotel at the Baraka Tower. Halima stepped out of the cab and walked toward the entrance, her abaya open over the peacock-like outfit they’d had made for her. Mu’az followed her. She breathed in before stepping into the elevator, to allow the attendant in his red and white uniform who pressed the button to share the confined space as they ascended. Mu’az noticed how little attention the attendant actually paid them. The golden walls inside the elevator stripped Khalil’s bitterness off his face, and the golden glow of life returned to his dark cheeks. He was keenly aware that they were on their way to a place that people like him never got to see, not even in the afterlife. Suite after suite overlooking the masses praying in the courtyard of the Haram Mosque. The prices ranged from fifteen million to fifty to a hundred.

They reached the ballroom near the top of the building.

Halima crossed to the other side of the partition that separated the hall, shooting Mu’az a look that warned him not to follow. On the other side lay a forbidden world. It occurred to him that he could get his hands on one of his sister’s abayas and cross over to the other side — like those gatecrashers who came to weddings firmly wrapped up in abayas and veils so no one could see who they were — if only he wasn’t afraid of Halima’s wrath. He stood there as if standing outside heaven’s gates. Dancing and music and makeup and beauties.

His heart wouldn’t obey his commands to leave. The female guests were walking through to the other side and Mu’az was dawdling by the entrance, ignoring the abaya-clad female bouncer standing nearby. He retreated slightly to a spot where he could still watch the women as they entered. You could see their hair was piled elegantly on the top of their heads underneath their headscarves, and they shone like crystal dolls.

He checked them all out. He wasn’t looking for a face so much as he was looking for a body whose language he knew. The language that permits a man to read a woman’s body beneath her abaya. He could’ve picked Sa’diya out of a crowd of a thousand abayas, and he knew Azza’s fleeting black form, though he’d never told anyone about her little nighttime outings. He simply memorized how her pinky stuck out while she was drawing, guarding the surrounding area like a scorpion’s tail. He often crossed her flitting nighttime path, and followed her form, which emerged more often than not out of his imagination rather than Sheikh Muzahim’s house. Her disappearance would forever be a rupture in the ties that bound the neighborhood together. From within that rupture, he tried to guess where she might have gone. There were a billion stopping points between the morgue and the wide world. He thought back on the dawn the body was found. The black Cadillac that belonged to the social insurance employee. How much blackness on wheels had stopped at the entrance to the alley that day?

Mu’az was mesmerized by the drums and the colored glass and the jewels all around him. Where did luxury like this even come from? Even Mushabbab’s orchard, the neighborhood’s pride and joy, would feel embarrassed by these riches. Where did Mecca hide all these nude-clothed women? They were unreal. They were woven from cyber-fantasies and science fiction and grandmothers’ fairytales: “Beauty sculpted by hand or by God Himself?” Even the old legends were dumbstruck by the beauty of these women.

Mu’az had no idea where this particular woman had appeared from. She came from behind the partition, rushing against the tide of the other women, lifting the hem of her headscarf to cover her mouth as she went. She turned around and in that sudden movement her hair came loose and cascaded over her cheek. She reminded him of a dove laying its neck against its mate’s. The woman was gone again suddenly. She hid herself away in the image she kindled in his mind so she could disappear. Another bouncer, who was standing beside the elevator, nudged him, so he turned toward the elevator to make his escape — and that was when he spotted a slender foot disappearing behind a narrow door at the end of the hallway. He headed straight for the door without thinking. Every part of him was being pulled toward that crystal-studded shoe. When he opened the door, there was nothing to greet him but silence. He walked down the short corridor to another door, opened it, and walked through. This time he was met by the hush of an empty ballroom. He walked toward the faint light in the direction of the red-satin padded elevator; there was that alluring scent he couldn’t name. When he stepped forward, his footsteps sunk into the shiny redness and it enveloped him entirely. When the elevator launched him upward, his breath caught in his throat. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples. His blood was rushing as if it were about to burst out. When the elevator doors opened, he was hit by the scent of an orchid in the center of the hall. An icy draft leeched the energy from his body and the sluggish pulse of everything around him made him feel as if he were walking not through a room, but through the inside of that woman, who’d lured him here into this suite. Pale and trembling, he proceeded down the corridor, which led to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the rows upon rows of worshippers making their rounds in the courtyard of the Haram. The door he’d thought was a side exit opened up onto a large study. He instantly zeroed in on the table where a silver amulet lay beside several ornate antique perfume bottles — as if it had been waiting for him all along. It was hollow, in the shape of a half-moon, engraved with tiny diamond shapes. He recognized that amulet instantly. Mushabbab had once asked him to store it in locker number twenty-seven in the cloakroom next to the Holy Mosque.