Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Mu’az was dumbfounded that the amulet had found its way to this tower; perhaps — as Mushabbab had suspected all along — the centerpiece of a great conspiracy. Perhaps it was just a copy of the original, and yet Mu’az was completely mesmerized by it just as he’d been the first time he saw it. It was a suicidal idea, but he grabbed the amulet and ran. He crashed through doors and hallways until he made it into the elevator and began slowly descending the many floors. When the doors opened, he walked out into the lobby, which was silent and frozen by the central air conditioning, squeezing the half-moon in his hand.

Loss of Sadness

T HAT NIGHT — IN THE HUSHED AL–LABABIDI HOUSE — YUSUF STOOD FOR A LONG while in front of a picture of Bull Cave. He could see his life in that photo: the day he turned eighteen, the time he took a visit to that cave where the Prophet had hidden from the polytheists of Mecca on his escape to Medina. Yusuf went to Bull Cave to subject his lineage to the oldest test in Mecca: to go up to the cave and try to squeeze himself past its narrow opening, for if it was too narrow, you were a bastard, and if you made it through to the cave, your lineage was legitimate. It wasn’t Khalil’s repeated taunts and aspersions about his lineage that made him go; he was motivated by something inside himself — he needed Mecca to accept him. He needed to be able to present his true self to this city, as if he were presenting his credentials, to put himself on the table without any character witnesses, save the Eunuchs’ Goat, who went with him everywhere, like his shadow.

The moon came out as they were climbing up Bull Mountain. When they got to Bull Cave, the Eunuchs’ Goat held back and let Yusuf go ahead on his own to submit to the test. Yusuf felt like he was facing death head-on. The crevice looked too narrow for a human body to pass through. Yusuf held his breath; leading with his skull, he plunged himself into the heart of the mountain. His animality, his femininity emerged in the pains of that labor. The moon surrounded his body thickly, kneading it into the whorls of the crevice, and as he shut his eyes and mustered all his animal strength to push himself deeper, his body was sucked in, as if by a whirlpool that he was powerless to resist, and came out into that animal womb. When the Eunuchs’ Goat came in through the cave’s wide main entrance, he saw Yusuf naked before him, his clothes having been torn off in the ordeal. He looked like a leech born backward and returned to the womb. Yusuf had not only been proven to be his father’s son but also son of this mountain, and this sanctuary, and the prophecy it had hosted, and of God, who was incarnate in the weakest of his creatures so there was no room left for weakness, aggression, or sadness. The Eunuchs’ Goat turned around and walked out silently.

After a while, Yusuf began to sense the movement of the plants behind him. Sensing earthy fragrance, he got up to leave; he came to stand beside the Eunuchs’ Goat, shoulder to shoulder with the mountain rock; its body was wet and dripped on them. A strange-tasting bliss settled heavily over Yusuf’s limbs, a weighty feeling of belonging. He realized that proving his lineage meant he’d proved his responsibilities as well. Below them, Mecca spread out from the foot of their mountain, and in the center, a single ray comprising all human existence streamed up toward the heavens from the Kaaba.

As Yusuf retraced his steps back toward Mecca’s giant glass monsters, he felt restless. He remembered when his mother had told him that anyone who entered Bull Cave would be relieved of all sadness forever. A tremor passed through the mountain’s stones and the moon blinked coolly, revealing Mecca naked before Yusuf’s eyes. She had discarded her eternal sadness, surrounded by grand mountains, preparing to cast off, without a shred of sadness, the old features that stood in the way of the new architects of her present.

Bodily Reality

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 26

With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation.

And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him, and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.

…

He gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.

( Women in Love )

Dear ^,

Would you translate this load for me?

This sinful rendezvous with physical ambiguity.

This unbearable morning knowledge.

I won’t come back to re-read this passage unless, by some miracle, you and I should meet again.

Unless the unknown should answer my pleas and put you back in my path once more, for another moment, if only for …

Do you remember that night in Bonn? The night I left you and walked back on my own in the dark? I’ll admit I was frightened for the first few paces. Do you know what it means for a woman like me to walk somewhere by herself for the first time, on an unfamiliar street — or on any street? With every step forward I was expecting to drop dead, or to be attacked and have my head split open and my brains spilled everywhere. The Lane of Many Heads was walking with me in my head, watching and ready to poke around in there and tell all the locals what it had found.

At one point, I was taken aback by the shadow limping beside me as I walked along the river. Then, instead of one shadow, there were five shadows pouring out of my body as I limped along. For a moment, I thought it was something inside of me coming out to attack me. To punish me for the strange scent that still clung to me, and for the desire that was renewed with every step I took away from you. But then suddenly, I could see those five shadows for what they actually were: happy ecstatics dancing around me. Those shadows knew something I could never even dream of knowing, sated to the point of yet more hunger. Some fear had snapped and released this multiple me. But still there’s more to this me that hasn’t been discovered yet. Every one of your looks releases another me that I had no idea about. I walked on — no, the five I’swalked on, with a sinful delight, back to the hospital. Somehow, though, I — and my other I’s too — hated you for leaving me to face this fear by myself, leaving me to bear this sin alone. Because sin’s not in your make-up, whereas for me, every charge of pleasure I experience releases an equal charge of guilt. Guilt about what sometimes gives pleasure so intense I can’t bear it. With every breath of love I took, I hated you, while you just kept asking me, “Are you okay? Is your conscience okay with this? Feeling any regrets?” And I just kept repeating, “I’m giving myself to this moment, no further. I’m floating along with the present, with life, with the deal we made.”

I was too scared to say I was giving myself to God. I didn’t dare utter God’s name after what …