Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Even contracts can be nullified: marriage contracts, ownership contracts, sale contracts, rental contracts, The Unique Necklace (or Contract), your contract.

Yusuf.

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 27

It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.

( Women in Love )

Isn’t it a strange thought that I could fail to develop and be replaced by my siblings!

The Chinese write the character for crisis by combining two characters: danger and opportunity. It’s as if crisis equals danger with the possibility of resisting it, like a vaccine to induce the antibodies of change inside a body. This current is you.

^, I write to you with two words, with a hug that crushes my left rib as happened on that rainy day when my ribs were crushed by your embrace — you, the healer — and I don’t show the slightest sign of pain.

An energy that prepares me for everything, anything, even death itself.

Now even my voice has changed because of the painkillers, my face is swollen, even the breaths I take don’t taste like my breaths.

Aisha

P.S. Just now the loudspeakers of the mosque across the street announced the beginning of the eclipseprayer. They pray until the moon reappears. “It was He who created the heavens and the earth … so that He might determine who among you does most good,” Imam Dawoud recited. They believe that our sins blacken the surface of the moon and that prayers for repentance clear it.

Which prayer can clear my face?

P.P.S. You’ve helped fix my computer more than once through remote desktop access. Yesterday you simply said: “Click OK to give me access to your files, your heart, your soul. Let me see who you are, where you’ve come from, your wallpaper, the people who make you who you are.”

I was trembling. Clicking OK seemed like tearing the veil off the Lane of Many Heads …

Yusuf has lost his mind because of Azza, and attacked the people praying in the Lane of Many Heads Mosque. They beat him savagely and he was taken to Shihar hospital in Ta’if. For two weeks the Lane of Many Heads was as silent as a tomb, incredulous that they’d sent the only voice that wrote their dreams — Yusuf — to a psychiatric hospital.

In the end it was al-Ashi who took the initiative to go to Shihar to get him released. We rarely see Yusuf now, though. Can you hear him limping about on the roof?

He tore up all his papers; the alley outside my window is covered in his shredded words, his anger, his identity. Every dawn, the Lane of Many Heads awakes to find a new pile of his possessions on the ground: articles, diaries, personal pictures taken by Mu’az, his ID card, his emblazoned bachelor’s degree from Umm al-Qura University.

Finally there was nothing left for him to tear up,

And then he came out into the Lane of Many Heads, and flitted about collecting blackened bread from houses, trash dumps, the heaps outside bakeries, and cooking yards, taking them back to the roof to build a horrifying sculpture that smelled like fire. Even the pigeons stayed away from it. The people in the alley joked: that’s the Many Heads, being consumed in the fire of our sins, with the overflowing fountains of minds. And they named him “he who is not eaten, nor burned.”

The name made me curious. I spied from the roof. Seeing it there in the sun gave me gooseflesh, like a glimpse at death leaking the yellow essence of a life that had once been.

Mu’az was convinced that this was actually the unholy devil himself and that Yusuf had erected him on the roof so he could watch everyone coming and going.

There was an emptiness inside Yusuf. I felt like it was himself he’d erected up there. He’d reassembled whichever pieces of his brain had survived the shock therapy they’d put him through, and then one day he’d ground them up like dust and left the result out for the hot sandstorm winds to blow in our faces.

What’s he going to tear up next?

He’s tearing Azza to shreds, he’s cut her off completely. He didn’t write a single word to her even after she was returned, defeated, to Sheikh Muzahim’s house. No one had any idea how they’d forced Mushabbab to divorce her. Yusuf kept to the Eunuchs’ Goat’s empty room above al-Ashi’s kitchen; God only knows what he’s doing in there. The Lane of Many Heads has gone topsy-turvy. Without Yusuf’s words, Azza can’t find her way.

The handwriting in Yusuf’s journal began to alternate, and Nasser struggled to work out if someone else was planting entries in Yusuf’s journal. There was something that had him worried: some of the pages were written in splendid naskh script, of the kind often used in old manuscripts, and decorated with gold pointing and marbling. For a moment, he thought it was excerpts from the Quran, written in Mu’az’s handwriting, but Mu’az swore it wasn’t him: “Yusuf plays the part of the storyteller. He adopts our personalities so as to expose us to ourselves.”

Could Nasser believe, alternatively, that an alleyway like me could have its own handwriting? The thing is, although I took Yusuf’s madness with good humor, it’s not like he managed to pull the wool over my eyes. His madness hit me like a stroke, a gray patch that spread instantly over each of my different heads, and if it hadn’t been for al-Ashi, savior of freaks, I’d have left him to rot in the loony bin at Shihar. That’s why, ever since he got back, I’ve spent my time following his every move. Look at that deep trench between his eyebrows; he spoils my nonchalance and sense of humor. Maybe I’m slowly losing my lust for life, but my foolproof cunning still has the power to outwit. I’m not going to let him trick me.

The moonlight penetrated through the ripped-out window in the Eunuchs’ Goat’s bedroom, which overlooked the cooking yard. A patch of milky moonlight deepened even further the shadow over the faces of the heavenly maidens who gazed longingly at the dark body on the bed that occupied the narrow space along the wall behind the door. Yusuf hadn’t slept a wink for several nights on end. Like a worshipper he strained his eyes to read something in their pensive looks. He was fasting, surviving only on water from Zamzam and five dates per day, which Mu’az got him by sneaking a little money out of the mosque’s charity box. The whole time he spent lying there, Yusuf could feel Mu’az’s idolizing gaze keeping vigil over him through the slightly-open door, though he was careful not to open the door and go in. They spent several nights sitting on the narrow doorstep, leaning on the door. They looked like a photo and its negative, a young man on the inside and his dark shadow on the outside, leaning against the same door, each feeling the heat of the other’s body through the crumbling wood, one watching as the other performed a postmodern play for his audience of girls. Yusuf and Mu’az shared their hunger; they were both thin. They told themselves that the early believers had fought great battles and won, with only dates to keep them going.