Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Do you think I’m cursed now? No, you don’t think that. You believed what I said about giving myself up to life. But I was really just giving myself up to your taste. The taste that now poisons me even in my humblest prayers. I feel like I’ve lost something. Not my dedication, but rather the emptiness from life. Now, I’ve got indigestion from life. Indigestion from you. Can you call that a distraction?

I owe you. I owe you for the joyful lightheartedness you brought to our brief connection. How long did it last? Three, four months?

Every time my feelings ground me down, you made me fly. You massaged my sluggish conscience so that it could fly unencumbered.

Did you say that my demon is the story of the fall from grace? Why do you deny the fact that there was one thing that caused us to fall from grace? When the body discovered its taste, and its secrets, it became too heavyfor the heavens to support and its plunge to earth was inevitable. So that we could spend our lives looking for the self-respect we lost back in paradise. Now, ^^^, you made me wonder: can life be boiled down to regret? Regret over what? The apple? The fall? The loss of face?

But you just laughed smugly and said, “Life’s all about avoiding abstraction!” Do you think this life of mine is an abstraction?

Do you actually agree with me when I say that our fates are pre-determined? We determined them. When God lifted us up in his palm like specks from Adam’s back, he made an oath. That was the day each of us had our fate determined and it was granted that we could plunge forward into it to reach the truth. We’re here on earth as an experiment to see if we can reach that truth.

God, what a weird writer of fate I must be for choosing this storyline as my experiment: Being torn between Mecca’s Lane of Many Heads and Bonn, Germany.

I’m starting to think this plot’s more than I can handle.

I spent the entire day today going about dumbfounded by the absurdity of our intercontinental relationship. The laughter and the bursts of affection. What is this cyber-relationship compared with real life on a city morning where you wake up to a woman of real flesh and blood? I am a woman made of thin air, amusing herself — unwisely — with a man made of solid stuff, surrounded by solid bodies and a concrete life. How long can ether and a solid hold together? Does eternity have a chance when it’s only made of thin air?

Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole with the bed in the middle. I put the lavendercoverlet on the bed, spread it out and try to reincarnate the dolphin you encouraged me to visualize in my spine.

Nasser’s body tensed with those “fingers of silence upon silence” upon it. He stopped reading abruptly and got up, and like a sleepwalker drove magnetically to the morgue at the Zahir Hospital, where he was met by a chill silence lying over the refrigerators in the purplish light. His vision was filled with that purple and his fingers trembled — not out of fear, no, but out of the longing as huge as the fog that had accompanied him along the roads and down the hospital corridors to this place, to this drawer that the morgue supervisor opened for him, to this silent, swaddled body. He didn’t dare uncover her face but he was desperate to touch her fingertips, he was certain that those fingertips held a message for him. He sighed deep inside— I’m exhausted —he wanted her to reach into the depths of his exhaustion and erase it, to stamp her fingerprints onto his lips. As soon as he’d pulled the cover down off the shoulder an indescribable scent rose up. A torrent of sadness spread through the morgue, blinding him. A pearly cloud enveloped him and he could feel his hair crackling and turning gray. The cloud dissipated, slipping through the doors to the corridor outside the morgue, leaving Nasser empty, hollowed out. Finally, and with effort, Nasser was able to get a hold of himself, his eyes having gone as rigid as the sculpture laid out before him. He entered into the perfection of death: “Death is the body of a woman.” He knew it for certain now. His clouded eyes floated over her chest, over the two dark peaks and back down to the triangle of darkness, and to … His eyes froze, his throat went dry, it felt like he was grinding glass between his teeth; he stood for a long while in that silence, searching for an equal silence inside himself (in all the silences that had swallowed his feelings, all the female bodies he’d silenced since his adolescence, wrapped in blackness of abayas), and for a moment he was one with her absolute silence, he penetrated as deep as the wound that killed her, to the floor of her abyss.

It wasn’t he who moved to leave; his body simply slipped out the door in a frozen sadness born of silence.

He didn’t know where he could go to escape this Meccan heat that swirled around him as if to melt her silence, which still enveloped him. The heat taunted him:

“You poor bastard. It’s like you take pride in deceiving yourself. All you had to do was turn her over to look for scars from the surgery, or order an autopsy to find the metal in her pelvis. But no — it’s just another example of what a coward you are.”

He stopped in his tracks. Am I really a coward or just greedy? You want to dissolve the truth of her into every woman so that nothing can break the bond of love you’ve clung to for the past quarter century, during which you’ve played the part of a man in the void that surrounds you.

He returned to find the chill of death had beaten him back to his own bedroom. Was it death or some legendary sadness that was released when he uncovered that body? What was certain was that it had a woman’s voice, which took form in the night to whisper into his ear:

Aisha

P.S. Are you serious when you say you want to love a woman like me?

Do you know how many men you’ve got to be? As many as the number of times a girl like me has fallen in love since puberty, as many as the number of teenagers who didn’t chase after me, whose eyes didn’t lust after me, as many as the number of men who weren’t kept awake at night by the thought of me, those who weren’t widowed by me or whom I didn’t cause to take their own lives, as many as … Can you love like that? As many as the nights my heart spent in agony, desperate to know why, and the nights I was supposed to spend sleepless in love that I spent sleeping beside my brothers instead. As many as the heartbeats my heart was supposed to beat if only I’d met the someone who could make it. As many as all those love scenes in books and movies and songs that I knew with all my heart were about me. Do you know how to love me with that kind of love? A love like a book of coupons I’m spending all at once to make up for the love I missed out on in the years I spent trundling back and forth between school and this cubbyhole in that yellow box of a school bus, blindfolded like a falcon so it doesn’t panic when it sees too much.

Maybe it would be easier for you to love a woman who’d already cashed in all her coupons one by one by the time you came along, so she didn’t expect you to settle the debts of those who’d come before and those who hadn’t …

Don’t laugh at me. I know I’m old-fashioned. I missed out on the era when people used to kill themselves for love.

An era of hearts whence love would not sprout.

P.P.S. Jameela the Yemeni girl’s mother left a gift for me. I found it on my bed: a set of lingerie woven out of fresh white jasmine flowers.

The people of Jazan weave their underwear out of jasmine …

I slipped out of all my clothes to try it on. I pranced around my room caressed by the jasmine petals as they were crushed against my petals. The perfume seeped down into my veins.